FAZ Article "Raised Fists in the Land of Slavery", 05.03.13

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Raised Fists in the Land of Slavery

Review of the exhibition Rise and Fall of Apartheid in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ) on March 5, 2013 At a superficial level the exhibition “Rise and Fall of Apartheid” in Munich’s Haus der Kunst, which includes more than 600 photographs, recounts the development of photojournalism in South Africa. In reality, however, it tells a story of repression and liberation. Those protesters who secretly chalked the words “God is black” on the base of a monument in front of the city hall in Johannesburg probably risked their lives doing so.

Jean Sinclair, founding member of the resistance organization “Black Sash”, which opposed the apartheid policy, 30. Mai 1985 © Gille de Vlieg Commissioned by “Life” magazine, the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White shot this 1949 occurrence, just a year after the unexpected election victory of the Afrikaans National Party, whose apartheid policies were responsible for South Africa’s darkest chapter.

Bourke-White was one of the first to document the shifting situation.

Alarmed by the racist laws of the new government and its draconian enforcement, South African photographers quickly set to work. The exhibition “Rise and Fall of Apartheid” aims to demonstrate how South Africa’s history of photography repositioned itself. The exhibition entirely succeeds in doing so.

Nonetheless, only hardened visitors or those intimately familiar with the period will be primarily interested in the national development of the images’ medium, as the nearly 600 images and the films hardly permit objective viewing. Because the appalling injustice of legal

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Supersized hope: a portrait of Nelson Mandela on the field of the Soweto soccer stadium, 1994 © Graeme Williams segregation in its details is familiar to only a select few, the initial goal of the exhibition in Munich’s Haus der Kunst is to present an impressive lesson in history and an encyclopedia of images of discrimination and resistance. Significantly, the show does not end with the triumphant election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first black and freely elected president, but rather with memories of the scars inflicted by more than four decades of segregation, the basis of which had long been laid by European colonial rule.

As a powerful accomplice in the antiapartheid movement, the photography of South Africa showed the world what went on between Cape Town and Pretoria for more than 40 years. It began in the 1950s as peaceful protests against inhumane government dictates, such as the infamous Pass law, which prohibited blacks from moving freely in the country outside of their designated reservations. These protests found support in the activities of the “Black Sashes”, white women clad in dresses, pumps, and black sashes. Members of this liberal resistance organization often staged their vigils in crowded places, aware of the photo opportunities these provided. These protests were followed by mass demonstrations against the Treason Trial, in which 156 leaders of the Congress Alliance were charged with high treason. On the first day of the trial, Eli Weinberg took an image that was to become an icon of the antiapartheid movement: A white boy standing in the middle of a group of black demonstrators carrying protest signs saying, “We stand by our leaders”.

A snapshot by Bob Gosanis shows Nelson Mandela boxing to relax during trial breaks. The raised fist still served sporting purposes, but later, when the mood shifted, it was replaced by the Black Power image of a raised thumb as the symbol of solidarity.

The shift toward armed resistance occurred on a specific date: March 21, 1960, when police shot dead 69 defenseless demonstrators in Sharpeville Township. Ian Berry was there and recorded the events. His images capture the panic, the fleeing, the injured, and the dead bodies on the ground. A few days after the massacre, the first assassination attempt was made on Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s life. Just minutes before, smiling and in front of running cameras, the architect of

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apartheid uttered atrocities that revealed his alliance with National Socialist attitudes. He propagated a “final solution”, because the orchestration of white superiority required a colored background from which it could stand out, and because the system needed people who worked for a pittance. Five thousand individuals attended the funeral of the Sharpeville victims.

Images of funerals run through the show like a leitmotif. Shared sorrow strengthened the sense of community, said Okwui Enwezor, who curated the exhibition with Rory Bester. The two found another leitmotif in signage. Here the demonstration posters in the fight for democracy; there the forest of signs serving the bureaucratic organization of daily life that divided every park bench, beach, and store entrance between black and white users. It is easy to imagine who got the better end of the deal. Those who did not obey the signs ended up in prison.

Long before the creation of the slogan “Black is beautiful”, the magazine “Drum” presented and prompted black self-confidence with its mixture of investigative journalism combined with dramatic documentary photography, as well as photo spreads dedicated to popular culture and daily life in the townships. Beautiful young women modeled the newest fashions, Miriam Makeba sang and played, and there was dancing that certainly astonished Verwoerd’s cronies and the white female warhorses at their sides. “Drum” was the incubator of a new “multicolored” photography scene in the country, and greats like Peter Magubane and Ernest Cole got their start there, as did Alf Kumalo, Ranjith Kall, and many others, including the German émigré Jurgen Schadeberg, who left the country when the government banned “Drum” in 1965.

Riots following the assassination of Chris Hani, general secretary of the South African Communist Party and member of the African National Congress, photographed by Jodi Bieber, 1993 © Goodman Gallery Johannesburg The same fate befell the book “House of Bondage”, the name the young black photographer Ernest Cole gave his famous monograph on the bitter life in his homeland; Cole went into exile. The situation escalated quickly and the camera lenses were fixed on the front lines: In Sowe-

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to, the police fired shots during a high-school student demonstration against the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of instruction.

The twelve-year-old Hector Pieterson died in a friend’s arms. Following the funeral of a three-year-old killed by security police, mourners threw stones at the armed officers. The civil rights activist Stephen Bantu died of head injuries inflicted upon him during an interrogation by security police. Dozens of protesting students walked into the prison. The world reacted to the images and reports of the increasingly violent crimes against humanity. The exclusion of the South African Olympic team from the 1964 Games, the rash withdrawal of many international firms from the country, and the UN’s call for the government to end apartheid and its subsequent embargoes accelerated the system’s demise. When, in 1990, President de Klerk declared an end to racial segregation and Nelson Mandela’s prison release after 30 years, he ultimately managed to reach out to the opposition in the country. Significantly, however, the government was also no longer in a position to sustain the immense cost of its ongoing and severe apartheid policy, the strikes and boycotts. Some things have changed for the better, but there is still a long way to go before true equality and coexistence is a reality. The excellent exhibition catalogue contains an entry in the Hector Pieterson Museum’s visitors’ book from 2012, which reads “I hate Whites”. Although the author no longer risks life and limb in writing such words, true reconciliation sounds different from this.

Brita Sachs © All rights reserved. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurt.

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