BOOKS
THE TERRORIST ALBUM: APAR THEID INSURGENTS, COLL ABORATORS AND THE SECURIT Y POLICE BY JACOB DLAMINI HARVARD UNIVERSIT Y PRESS, 2020
JACOB DLAMINI
66 W I T S R E V I E W
Award-winning journalist, historian and author, Jacob Dlamini (BA 2002, BA Hons 2003) is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. His books Native Nostalgia (2009) and Askari (2014) were both best sellers and the latter won the 2015 Alan Paton Award. He was also a researcher at the University of Barcelona a Ruth First fellow at Wits and received a doctorate from Yale University. Dlamini had access to one of three surviving copies of a catalogue of photographs of apartheid’s enemies kept by South Africa’s security police and counterinsurgency units from 1960s until the early 1990s. This forms the basis for his The Terrorist Album: Apartheid Insurgents, Collaborators and the Security Police. Into its pages went anybody deemed a threat to apartheid, from novelists (such as Bessie Head), to trained combatants (such as Odirile Maponya), journalists (such as Eric Abraham) and academics (such as Ruth First BA 1946): disparate individuals united by their opposition to the regime. Once identified as a terrorist, their photographs were indexed by factors including apartheid’s system of
racial classification and placed in a 12 x 9-inch book, copies of which circulated covertly within corridors of the security police. Most who appeared in the album were targeted for surveillance, some were murdered. The book is an index of photographs and profiles which survived the purge of almost 7000 “albums” ordered when apartheid’s collapse began. Dlamini investigates the story behind these images – how they were used, the lives they changed. “Right up to the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, the album was constantly in production. It was ‘continually in the making’ as mug shots were added and subtracted, apartheid opponents arrested and killed.” He writes: “By using a small object to tell a big story about South Africa between 1960 and 1994, I intend to cut apartheid down to analytical, moral, and political size, thereby challenging the myths that continue to surround popular understandings of apartheid. We give the apartheid state too much credit, however, by assuming that it was efficient. It was not. This did not make it less brutal. But efficient it was not. It could not always tell its friends from its enemies, its Indians from
its whites. We only have to look at the album, feel its pages, and listen to its voices to know that.” One of these inefficiencies is demonstrated by the density of what Dlamini has produced. He asked a former brigadier why a decision was made to destroy the archive. There was much regret and anger in the response. “The greatest form of terrorism was to destroy our documents. Today we need these things, because so many guys come and say ‘I was a freedom fighter’. And he wasn’t!...Now we can’t prove it,” the brigadier
