Bang-Bang Has Been Good to Us - SAGE Journals

‘Bang-Bang Has Been Good to Us’ Photography and Violence in South Africa

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen

Abstract This article considers the changing perceptions, expressions and representations of violence in South Africa post-1994, with particular reference to photography. Following the evolution of the documentary tradition in its relationship to the political history of South Africa, I will suggest that since the release of Nelson Mandela and the first democratic elections in South Africa, photography has taken a new turn, particularly with regard to its representation of violence, which had been its primary iconography up to that watershed moment. I will follow three arguments (from Sartre, Ben jamin and Mbembe) in my explication of the ways in which violence has both altered South African society and assumed a different place in the collective mind of South Africans living in a country that is politically free but grappling with an ever-rising wave of violent crime. Key words Agamben j art

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postcolonial

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South Africa

This state of insecurity is not natural but constructed ^ a political condition produced by a power on whose favor we depend and which we can only petition. (Foster, 2009: 209)

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NE OF a number of possible histories of photography1 in Africa in general and in South Africa in particular is a history of violence, and this in two iterations. In the ¢rst iteration, photography contains

Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 27(7- 8): 214^238 DOI: 10.1177/0263276410383711

Law-Viljoen ^ ‘Bang-Bang Has Been Good to Us’

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within itself the seeds, presence and expression of violence in that it has been, since the 19th century, a medium of appropriation, of infringement of the right to privacy, of racist and colonial representation. In this sense, it has been a violent medium.2 In the second iteration, it might be regarded as an innocent medium, but one used to represent violence and, by extension, the history of violence. In other words, its ability (or its perceived ability) to show real events has meant that photography has been called upon to ‘record’African history, and since that history has been a frequently violent one, violence makes up a signi¢cant part of the vast archive of African (and South African) photography. Since photography, then, possesses the potential of violence through, on the one hand, its tendency to appropriate, violate or expose and, on the other, its natural attraction to actual violence in the world, this means that almost every South African photographer who came of age prior to 1994 was, by default, engaged in an intimate struggle with violence ^ the violence of simply looking, and the violence to be looked at in South African society. Photography in South Africa has, in other words, been trapped in a kind of damned if you do/damned if you don’t conundrum. Prior to and just after 1994, South African photographers engaged violence on the level of medium and of subject. There was very little room to manoeuvre outside of these parameters, and it in part explains the predominance of social documentary in the history of South African photography. In this article, I qualify this photographic ‘double bind’ with a cursory reference first to the early years of Drum magazine3 and the work of Ernest Cole. Thereafter I brie£y trace some of the strands of photography leading up to and just after the ¢rst democratic elections in 1994, from the Bang-Bang Club to David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim and Santu Mofokeng. My purpose is to situate this work within a broader discussion of the nature and representation of violence in general and in its peculiarly South African forms in particular. I do this with reference ¢rst to the classic de¢nitions of violence in Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre, and then to Achille Mbembe’s explication of postcolonial forms of violence. F|nally, I turn to some of the trends and tendencies in South African photography since 1994. Drum Magazine Although Drum was an entertainment and lifestyle magazine, it frequently investigated the oppressive apartheid regime through its writing and photography. It came to exemplify the ways in which violence permeated almost every aspect of life for black South Africans, which meant that any of its photographers might cover a political event on one day and, on another, a party or a jazz performance in Sophiatown.4 Drum magazine contained within its covers the everyday nature of violence in South Africa from the 1950s. In his article for In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, Okwui Enwezor (making reference to an essay by Charles

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Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

Merewether) points out that the signi¢cance of the photography of Drum lay in its going beyond the ‘realm of the visual’ to assume ‘an important ideological function, occupying a phantasmagoric space of the real, making concrete the manifold experiences captured by the camera’ (1996: 190). Enwezor’s observation that Drum had an ideological function is quali¢ed by his use of the term ‘phantasmagoric’ ^ the photography in the magazine, even when it was engaged in recording the ordinariness of a fashion shoot or a football match, was haunted by the spectre of violence. Ideology (both that of the state and of those who opposed the state), and the violence to which it was coupled, is represented in what is shown in the photographs of Drum magazine and how it is shown. Photography occupies both sides of a treacherous divide. After ‘phantasmagoric’, Enwezor’s second key phrase is ‘manifold experiences’, borne out by the range of subject matter in the work of one of Drum’s major photographers, Peter Magubane. In an image dated 1960, several people are engaged in a style of dancing known as Pata Pata, and the caption describes ‘pretty girls, hep boys and clown snazzy music’. In the same year, Magubane found himself at the Sharpeville Massacre and later at the funeral for some of those slain on that day by the South African Police.5 His images capture the horror and chaos of the event and the captions re£ect the terrible knowledge that ‘baasskap was here to stay’.6 Then in a powerful series from the same period (1959^62), Magubane captures the depredations of child labour on South African farms. (Ranjith Kally had done a similar series in 1957 on Indian children working on sugarcane plantations in Natal.) In a catalogue published in 1998 for an exhibition in Rome of the work of another Drum photographer, Alf Kumalo, the South African poet Mongane Wally Serote describes the images of Kumalo’s 40-year career as capturing: in still form, through light and shadows, a very troubled time of this extremely troubled country. The exhibition is dominated by court trials, violence, defiance, death, burials, as also, amid this human beings share in desperation, at times through the loss of words or tears, laughs, smiles and embraces. (Vivan, 1998: 24)

But the same people in Kumalo’s photographs who are harassed and oppressed: still make children. They go to jail. They fight. They commit sabotage. They walk. They sit. They are on horseback. They get married. They are, even in this abnormal space and time, engaged with life. (Vivan, 1998: 24)

Kumalo’s rigorous documentation of every aspect of the lives of black South Africans contains within it exactly this constant juxtaposition of life and death. He moved through the social and political life of the country,


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Figure 1 Ernest Cole: Y oung boy is stopped for his pass as white plainclothesman looks on Published in House of Bondage, 1967. ß 2010: Ernest Cole Family Trust

photographing boxing matches, weddings, funerals, demonstrations, riots, birthday parties, meetings between heads of state, shootings.7 Looking through Kumalo’s archive is a process characterized by movement between joy and despair, but violence, even when the subject matter is celebration, is always present in his work, as a constant threat to ordinary experience. The work of Magubane and Kumalo illustrates the haunting of the everyday by apartheid as well as the outright ^ no longer spectral ^ violence of riots, police action, funerals, arrests, detentions, poverty and exploitation. But something other than this way of representing life in South Africa emerges in House of Bondage (1967) by Ernest Cole, also an early Drum photographer, who emigrated first to Europe and then to the United States in 1966. However much House of Bondage has in common with themes in the work of Magubane and Kumalo, its political imperative is its point of departure, to the exclusion of anything approaching the mundane. Not for Cole the weddings and jazz clubs of Sophiatown. Rather, the title of the book, and the fact that some of the images were cropped to create maximum political effect, suggest a clear decision to eschew any visual element that would distract from the overriding aim of the book: to show the suffering of blacks under the apartheid regime. The methodology of this book suggests that, for Cole, as long as apartheid persisted, there was no life outside of its violence, no possibility of a photograph of normal life (since for him, there was no ‘normal’ life in South Africa). And therefore the very form

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and composition of his photographs reflect the overarching violence of the political order. Circa 1994: The Bang-Bang Club Cole, Kumalo and Magubane, as well as Kally, G.R. Naidoo, Bob Gosani and a number of other photographers who had been working since the 1950s and 1960s, continued their documentation of life in South Africa as the political situation became more and more dire and finally erupted into open warfare. (Gosani died in 1972, Naidoo in 1982 and Cole, who had left South Africa, died in 1990.) In the early 1990s, these veterans of photo reportage were joined by a number of young white photographers who frequently placed themselves on the frontlines in violent confrontations between demonstrators and the police, or between factions engaged in battle in the townships. The most famous of these are the four who became known collectively as the Bang-Bang Club: Kevin Carter, Joa‹ o Silva, Greg Marinovich and Ken Oosterbroek. But, unlike their black predecessors and peers, these and other white photographers working at one of the bloodiest times in South African history, in the run-up to the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners, were, in this period, drawn almost exclusively in their work into situations of conflict. In this sense, they were war photographers rather than reporters in the vein of Magubane, Kumalo, Gosani and Kally (though all of them photographed in exactly the same situations). The key difference is that most white photographers lived life in two different realms. There was life in the enclaves of white South Africa, and life in the townships where they went to catch the stories (no doubt armed with an array of motives both personal and professional). The black photographers never left the townships. This was the only life for most of them. Violence was not something they visited; it defined the world for them. In his telling of the events on the day in 1994 on which Ken Oosterbroek was fatally shot during factional clashes in Thokoza township, Greg Marinovich characterizes the nature of the relationship between the photographers and the violent conflict that they photographed: After four long years of observing the violence, the bullets had finally caught up with us. The bang-bang had been good to us, until now. Earlier that morning we had been working the back streets and alleys of Thokoza township’s devastated no-man’s-land that we ^ Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Joa‹ o and I ^ had become so familiar with over the years of chasing confrontations between police, soldiers, modern-day Zulu warriors and Kalashnikov-toting youngsters as apartheid came to its bloody end. (Marinovich and Silva, 2000: 3)

Marinovich’s language is that of the soldier ^ ‘working the back streets . . . no man’s land’ ^ seeking conflict in order to shoot it. Magubane had


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encountered conflict in many of the situations he photographed. He had no need to go out looking for it, it always came to him because he was a black man with a camera.8 This is not a value judgement (Marinovich and his compatriots had about as much choice in this matter as Magubane), but it does point to a number of important elements in photographic representations of violence. For example, there is always the question of agency, of what it is that one chooses to take pictures of. Magubane and Kumalo photographed their own lives, Marinovich and Carter photographed the lives of others. For the former, violence happened when one was attending a football match or going to a funeral ^ it grew out of life, it was an extension of the ordinary, woven into the fabric of every domestic and social event. For the latter, violence happened when one left one’s home and drove into someone else’s neighbourhood ^ it was the thing that one sought (one could even become addicted to it), it was outside of life. The critical question of agency points to the much broader socio-political issues at stake in South Africa at this juncture, and the extent to which the photographers who chose to comment on these were, at the same time, inscribed into the very systems they sought to explicate. This helps in part to explain the responses to a photograph taken by Kevin Carter when he travelled to the Sudan to photograph the famine there in 1993. Carter’s photograph of a small child huddled on the ground in exhaustion while a vulture hovers in the background won him the Pulitzer Prize but it brought a flood of attacks on Carter and his profession. One of Carter’s supporters since his death (he committed suicide in 1994) has been the artist Alfredo Jaar, who has himself made work about the obscenity of the photographic image in the face of human suffering. Jaar made Carter’s photograph of the girl ^ and the concomitant moral dilemma raised by the image ^ the subject of his 1995 film installation The Sound of Silence. Carter’s image focuses attention not only on a child dying of starvation, but also on the idea of the detached photographer observing, from a distance, the suffering of others. It is this that aroused such ire. (In Snap Judgements [2006], Okwui Enwezor described Carter’s image as an example of an exploitative and skewed ‘afro-pessimism’perpetuated in much photography depicting Africa.) That there were many assumptions made about Carter’s actions that really had nothing to do with the real situation is not important here, since we are talking about perceptions, about the reception of images of violence. Goldblatt, Tillim, Mofokeng: The Iconography of Violence In a quite different vein, but running parallel to these various approaches to the representation of both violence and life in South Africa, is the work of David Goldblatt. Goldblatt has never been a conflict photographer like Marinovich et al., but his work is steeped in the violence of apartheid as it affected the lives of people, white and black. In the minutiae of the everyday, Goldblatt has traced the slow unravelling of the apartheid state over

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time (though he may not have predicted this when he first began making images). Each body of work is a meditation on the various ways of being in South Africa under apartheid: the structures of apartheid architecture become, in his treatment of them, monuments to the perversions of national pride; the photographs of migrant labourers travelling through the darkness of pre-dawn to work in the cities is a searing indictment of a brutalizing force that has no regard for the rhythms and securities of family life; the images of small-town life on the East Rand is an attempt to convey how the geographical and cultural fragmentation of a society leaves no person unaffected. Even the quiet image of a man mowing his lawn is, in the context of a country heading towards implosion, a devastating comment on the possibility of a society in which some can mow their lawns while others are attending political funerals. Most of the photographers I have mentioned here have worked on both sides of the political watershed of Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990. Tellingly, some of the worst violence happened after that year (Oosterbroek was shot days before the first democratic elections in April 1994), but once a modicum of peace had taken hold in the country, these photographers (some of them addicted to the violence that had been their subject matter for years) had to direct their lenses elsewhere. Most of those who were journalists have remained in the profession; several, most notably Goldblatt, now find their images highly sought after by collectors of fine art, though

Figure 2 David Goldblatt: Zulu women salvaging bricks for a white contractor from Indians’ houses demolished under the Group Areas Act, Fietas, 1982


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Goldblatt has not changed his way of working nor his interest in the stories of ordinary South Africans. In an article published in the catalogue of the exhibition Then and Now: Eight South African Photographers, Michael Godby comments on change and continuity in the work of South African documentary photographers either side of 1990 . . . The achievement of political liberation, to which all of these photographers directed their energies for so long, has introduced an equivalent freedom into their work ^ with the lack of structure that all freedoms entail. Liberated from the standard events of political photography, such as protest meetings and funerals, they have been forced to find new subject matter that by definition has no established iconography. (in Weinberg, 2007: 13, emphasis mine)

Godby’s reference to an iconography is important, particularly in relation to the kind of work that these photographers had been engaged in for so many decades. It is an iconography of violence: of protest, of gathering crowds, of grief-stricken mothers. It is the iconography of South African photography to which all South African photographers are heir, whether they are photo-reporters or fine artists working in the medium of photography or, as in some cases, photographers who straddle the divide between reportage and fine art. It is a heavy burden for South African photographers to bear, since no other iconography is quite as strong, quite as compelling. Two other photographers bear mentioning in this regard, Guy Tillim and Santu Mofokeng. Tillim was born in 1962 and, like many of his peers, joined a photo collective called Afrapix. He worked for Reuters and Agence France Press in the run-up to the elections in South Africa. After that he covered a number of conflicts across the globe, working on assignment for various agencies. In the late 1990s, however, he became independent and has pursued his own projects, many of which have become books (Petros Village, Jo’burg, Leopold and Mobutu, Kunhinga). Working independently of agencies has given Tillim some of the freedoms described by Godby, but it has also significantly shaped the reception of his work, which, like Goldblatt’s, is frequently shown in galleries and museums and forms part of many international private and public art collections. In a way, this movement from the newspaper column to the gallery wall has cemented the iconography of violence. At the time he made the photographs, we did not think, for example, of framing Magubane’s pictures of funerals or protests. This has changed, however. Ken Oosterbroek’s extraordinarily powerful photograph of two children running across a road as a crowd gathers in the background armed with kieries9 has risen above the status of news and acquired the status of art. This shift in the reception and hence in the meaning of such photographs has presented photographers with something of a dilemma, since it raises questions about motives and the ethics of photographic representing, though of course these questions have always accompanied the

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profession, as witness the responses to Carter’s Sudan picture. But the questions have been complicated by the introduction of the idea that these images may hang in someone’s living room next to a painting. It is one thing to take a photograph in order to bring an injustice to the attention of the world in the hope that something might be done about it; it is another to make a photograph that one knows will be framed, shown in a gallery and bought by a collector. I don’t wish to debate the merits or drawbacks of either approach, but rather to refer to the tension between the two, which has had a profound influence on the development of photography in South Africa (and indeed on many other art forms here) since 1990. In the late 1990s, the photographer Santu Mofokeng, who had begun his career as a photo-reporter in the vein of Magubane and Kumalo, and, like Tillim, worked for Afrapix in the late 1980s, undertook a series of works in a number of countries, his images all linked by their preoccupation with the landscape (physical, psychological) of violence. This series signalled a profound shift in his outlook as a photographer and represented a way of coming to terms with the kind of photography to which he had been heir. In the 1990s, Mofokeng visited Ho Chi Minh City, and then, in Europe, Istanbul, Krakow, Lodz and Katowice, Auschwitz and Birkenau. In South Africa and Namibia, he photographed the sites of concentration camps. There is no evidence of violence in the silent, often beautiful, landscapes he records, but the names of these places reverberate with atrocity. In an interview with Patricia Hayes, Mofokeng lists the places that strike him as having been witness to the most horrendous of human atrocities: the Belgian Congo, Armenia, Hereroland in Namibia, Matabeleland in Zimbabwe (Rhizomes of Memory, 2000: 86). His words become a drumbeat of human depravity but, in contrast, many of the images are luminous, ¢lled with light and shadow, or with fog and strange ghostly re£ections. Not having witnessed the events that have given these place names their notoriety, Mofokeng cannot be what the philosopher Avishai Margalit (2002: 17) calls a ‘moral witness’. His endeavour is, by his own admission, an impossible one. In visits to places as far apart as Ho Chi Minh City and Luderitz, Mofokeng maintains, mostly, a silent distance, as though aware at every moment of the twin dangers of reducing atrocity to philosophical contemplation and of generalizing su¡ering. But Mofokeng’s photographs of these sites are less an attempt to understand their meaning than to situate himself and his own history in relation to them. He is, in a sense, placing them in the larger context of the stories of violence that have characterized life for many in the 20th century, but also in relation to his own experience of violence in South Africa. Shifting Perceptions: Ideology and Technology There are a number of reasons for the shifts in perceptions about photography as both an aesthetic and a documentary medium, which can be attributed both to ideology and to technology. Post-independence (for many


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countries in Africa, this is in the 1960s, but for South Africa, the equivalent moment does not come until the early 1990s) the pressure on photographers to record history for the purpose of changing it lessened so that they could turn their attention to other ways of representing the world through the camera. This is the ideological turn ^ the point at which, for many photographers in Africa, it became ideologically less expedient to document in quite the same ways as had been done before independence. In South Africa, of course, this ideological turn came with the end of apartheid at the start of the 1990s. Despite the easing of this pressure and the opening up of the parameters of photography, however, social documentary continues to dominate South African photography. Digital technology, on the other hand, has enabled, in unprecedented ways, the manipulation of the image both in the camera and on the computer screen. This has meant that the camera’s use-value has changed so that it is now less a recording eye than a tool much like a paintbrush or a hammer and chisel. In this observation by Helen Molesworth on Zoe Leonard’s 1998^2007 Analogue project, technology is represented as bringing about the death of (traditional) photography: Analogue is a requiem for traditional photography in the face of the advancements in digital technology . . . which transforms physical data into a binary system. Analogue is a dual testament to the increasing obsolescence of both locally owned shops and straight photography. (2008: 189)

At the same time, the technological turn brought about by digital photography has opened the medium to many more users. In an imagined conversation between Walt Whitman, George Eastman (the founder of Kodak) and Paul Virilio, David Levi Strauss has Whitman remark that Kodak has ‘brought about a new democracy of images . . . When everyone could make their own pictures, they could remake themselves in their own image, and produce a history from which there would be no appeal’ (2003: 167). At the end of his seminal book on this subject, The Reconfigured Eye, W.J.T. Mitchell observes that: The growing circulation of the new graphic currency that digital imaging technology mints is relentlessly destabilizing the old photographic orthodoxy, denaturing the established rules of graphic communication, and disrupting the familiar practices of image production and exchange. (1992: 223)

Of course, both the digitizing and the ‘democratizing’ of photography have made more complex the already complex question of the ethics of photographic representation and what I have described as the ‘intimate violence’ of the photograph. For example, the infamous photographs taken by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison have led to a number of discussions about the moral problem of ‘regarding the pain of others’.10 In her book The Civil

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Contract of Photography (2008), Ariella Azoulay pursues the debate in her discussion of the amateur photographs taken by Israeli soldiers during interrogations of Palestinian detainees. Azoulay calls this kind of photograph, quite bluntly, a ‘torture photograph’, not because it shows torture, but because it is itself a ‘mode of torture’ and our viewing of it ‘threatens to turn us, those who are viewing the occupation, into collaborators with the interrogator’ (2008: 423^4). We are, Azoulay insists, ‘called on to perform a violent and intentional erasure of what we know or what we are capable of knowing about the circumstances of this act of photography’ (2008: 424). This argument extends my own opening remarks about the inherent violence of the photographic medium. Perceptions of Violence in South Africa Post-1994 I would now like to situate photography’s representation of violence within the context of violence in general in South Africa since 1994. In seeking to understand South Africa’s ‘new’ (or different) relationship to violence, I enlist the help of Achille Mbembe’s work on the ‘postcolony’. I also locate my discussion in relation to two classical explications of violence in JeanPaul Sartre and Walter Benjamin. It might reasonably and broadly be argued that, prior to 1994, art in South Africa sought, in a multiplicity of ways, to address violence as a political tool or an expression of ideology, while art in South Africa since 1994 has sought to understand violence as endemically human. Our perception of violence has, like our perception of other instruments of repression (political and psychological), shifted from the public to the private, from the external and impersonal to the internal and domestic. We are able, since the demise of apartheid, to think about violence as peculiarly intimate, closer to home, not ideological but personal and criminal. I am not suggesting, of course, that the experience of violence, under the apartheid regime, was not, for most South Africans profoundly personal ^ families lost children, brothers and lovers disappeared, funerals became war zones. I am referring, rather, to various representations of violence, and to the way in which it is treated in public discourse. Ivor Powell, writing in an essay published in 2007, observed that the work of the artist Jane Alexander, long engaged with the violence of the apartheid regime: began gradually to metamorphose. The implicitly external violence that is registered in the earlier work gives way to a more internal process no longer carrying immediacies of violence, but instead are [sic] born out of a traumatized and tainted reality. (2007: 37)

And in response to some of the work on the 2007 Spier Contemporary exhibition, Deborah Posel argues that the drawings of Elizabeth Gunter, like others in the exhibition,


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form part of the post-apartheid oeuvre of works that have broken from the telos of struggle and liberation. But they have also gone beyond the confessional moment and its yearning for redemptive healing . . . there is a gesture towards another version of freedom, a different self-positioning in relation to the weight of the past and the challenging complexities of the present. (2007: 27)

This is not to say that the forms of violence that we experience now in South Africa did not exist before 1994, but only that we address such forms more openly. It is also not to say that we no longer concern ourselves with political forms of violence ^ indeed we do, and we also often acknowledge the relationship of the kinds of violence that now preoccupy us to their antecedents in the broadly political and social violence of the past regime. We also recognize the institutionalization of violence as a direct result of the state-sanctioned violence of the past. Indeed, speaking broadly of the postcolonial moment, Achille Mbembe identifies the ‘postcolony’ as comprising ‘societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves’. The postcolony is both ‘chaotically pluralistic’ but also possesses ‘an internal incoherence’. More importantly, however, the postcolony replaces or transforms the violence of the colonial relationship: it is ‘made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitutes a distinctive regime of violence’ (Mbembe, 2001: 102). Concurring with Mbembe, Colin Richards writes that: Certain European intellectuals . . . cannot come to terms with a reality familiar to most of the postcolonial world. They fail to grasp the omnipresence and intricately discursive dance of physical violence. They also seem to avoid full recognition of the relation between violence and the origins and perpetuation of democracy. (2008: 258)

Richards’ argument recognizes what I have termed here and elsewhere an intimacy of violence, locating it in a broader argument about the evolution of an African humanism ^ or humanisms: A dynamic, unstable, contingent form of humanism, one that faces violence in an aesthetic of an insistent materiality, has become an increasingly visible thread in contemporary South African art. Many works stage ‘humanness’ in a way that does not deny the violence that conditions such works, their production and reception, their modes of representation, and, importantly, the violence out of which such powerful desires for the human are born. (Richards, 2008: 265)

It also is not to say that what we count as political forms of violence, what Mark Sanders calls ‘extraordinary violence’ ^ torture, imprisonment, and death ^ were not accompanied by ‘the day-to-day violence of apartheid’ that, Sanders reminds us, ‘in some of its forms, survives the official

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demise of the system’ (2007: 75), and that were, as I have shown, illustrated in countless photographs. And finally, what one might consider a ‘domestic’ or ‘intimate’ form of violence does not preclude the political: witness the waves of xenophobic attacks that have beset South Africa in the last several years, or the devolution to violence of many workers’ and service-delivery strikes, though these are complicated by the influence of criminal actions, from which the trade unions and other organizing bodies routinely distance themselves. In point of fact, the repeated tainting of political action with criminal violence lends credence to the arguments of Mbembe and Richards. The steady escalation in violent crime in South Africa since 1994 ^ as seen in the alarming growth in the rates of murder, assault, armed robbery, hijacking, rape and child abuse ^ has given rise to an agonized search for its causes and the positing of a variety of theories that address such issues as HIV/AIDS, the continued economic disenfranchisement of most of the population, growing drop-out rates among high school children, teenage pregnancy, the relaxation of immigration controls on all of the country’s international borders and, ironically, the empowering of women. In seeking to understand this shift in the meaning and reception of violence, I would like to co-opt two seminal arguments on the structure and devolution of violence. The first is Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay ‘Critique of Violence’ and the second is Jean-Paul Sartre’s provocative and complex investigation of the subject in the posthumously published (and incomplete) Notebooks for an Ethics. The Notebooks appeared in French in 1983 and then in English nine years later, but Sartre wrote them in 1947 and 1948. This is a critical historical juncture for the understanding of Sartre’s thinking, given the devastation of the Second World War still fresh in the European collective consciousness and the relationship of France and other European powers to their colonial subjects in Africa. In addition to these influences was Sartre’s thinking about slavery and oppression in the United States and his reading of authors such as Richard Wright, who was living in Paris and had published Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth in 1945, which Sartre cites in the Notebooks in his essay on slavery. Both Benjamin and Sartre are concerned with violence in relation to its ends, but also in relation to law, justice and, in Sartre, rights and ethics. In his attempt to answer the question of whether violence is justified if it is in the service of just ends, Benjamin begins by distinguishing two kinds of law ^ natural law and positive law. In terms of the former: It perceives in the use of violent means to just ends no greater problem than a man sees in his ‘right’ to move his body in the direction of his desired goal. According to this view . . . violence is a product of nature, as it were a raw material, the use of which is in no way problematical unless force is misused for un just ends. (1997: 236^7)


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In terms of positive law, however, violence is viewed not as a ‘natural datum’ but a ‘product of history’ (Benjamin, 1997: 237). Both kinds of law, notwithstanding, ultimately come around to judging not so much the rightness or wrongness of violence but rather its relation to its ends. Natural law guarantees the rightness of violence if the ends are just; positive law seeks to ‘‘‘guarantee’’ the justness of the ends through the justi¢cation of the means’ (1997: 237). For Benjamin, then, it is a question not so much of meaning, but of emphasis. Benjamin goes on to explicate the difference between violence in the hands of the legal entity that is the state, and violence in the hands of individuals. Law regards the latter as a ‘danger undermining the legal system’, but dangerous not so much because it is a violence that cannot be controlled but rather dangerous by the very fact that it is outside of the law. In this sense, then, the law monopolizes violence, takes ownership and regards any violence outside of what it sanctions as perilous: the law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a' -vis individuals is explained not by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by the intention of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it might pursue but by its mere existence outside the law. (Ben jamin, 1997: 239, emphasis added)

This principle is beautifully illustrated in the South African writer Peter Harris’s remarkable recent book, In a Different Time, and is worth examining at some length. Harris was hired in 1987 to represent Jabu Masina, Ting Ting Masango, Neo Potsane and Joseph Makhura, known now to history as the Delmas Four. The men had been charged with a number of ‘crimes’ including murder, possession of weapons, sabotage, assassinations and, most damningly, high treason, which was punishable under the apartheid regime by death. The crux of Harris’s legal dilemma is that the men have decided, following his outlining of the various legal avenues open to them, to choose the ‘prisoner-of-war option’. In a meeting with Govan Mbeki, and then with Chris Hani, to seek advice on behalf of the prisoners, Harris explains that they: will reject the jurisdiction and authority of the court. This means that they will not participate at all in their own trial and will, in all likelihood, receive the death sentence. The accused hope that such a stand will bring a new dimension to the way the ANC approaches treason trials. They will also place into question the legitimacy of the entire judicial system. (2008: 70)

Their decision rests on the fact that they have admitted culpability, under interrogation, for all the charges brought against them. This means that the state regards them as criminals who have confessed to their crimes and therefore will have no alternative but to impose the harshest sentences.

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But the four men, Harris explains to Hani, ‘don’t believe they are criminals and they refuse to be tried as criminals, and while this is not a conventional way to handle a trial, these are not conventional times’ (2008: 80). Harris realizes, with dismay, since he understands the dire consequences of their decision, that he is handling the case of four men who do not recognize the law of the apartheid state and who will therefore, for all intents and purposes, be on trial but, at the same time, not be on trial, at least not in their own minds, since they will not recognize the legal system that tries them. The state has far more difficulty with their refusal to follow the course of the law than it does with their actual crimes. Even high treason, which implies a recognition and then a rejection of the state, is better and less dangerous than an utter failure to acknowledge the state. This operation ‘outside of the law’ has its equivalent in the policing system of the repressive state, in which ‘the separation of lawmaking and law-preserving violence is suspended’ (Benjamin, 1997: 243) and the power of the police becomes ‘formless, like its nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states’ (1997: 243). Lawmaking, Benjamin explains: pursues as its ends, with violence as the means, what is to be established as law, but at the moment of instatement does not dismiss violence; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking, it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under the title of power. Lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence. (1997: 248)

This is absolutely clear in the case of the trials of the Delmas Four and other South African political detainees from the 1960s on. As Harris points out to his clients, ‘your stand on non-participation will prevent you from doing anything other than making a statement, and I am not even sure a judge will allow that as he may think that you are making a mockery of his court and his authority’ (2008: 62). After his complex analysis, Benjamin concedes the problematic nature of all forms of ‘legal violence’, which seems, in the end, to be the very condition for the maintenance of anything like a modern democratic state. But if Benjamin helps us to understand violence in South Africa prior to the end of apartheid, what of the new relation to violence since then? Twenty-five years after Benjamin, Sartre extends this discussion of the relationship between means, ends and the law by considering the place of rights and ethics in the nexus of terms. Parts of his argument are particularly a' propos to what I have suggested vis-a-vis the shift in our experience of violence in South Africa, since what he argues has to do with who and how one has access to the right to property, shelter, etc. He points out that rights would not exist without the presence or a ‘situation of force’, because if we lived in a completely harmonious and egalitarian society, rights would


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not be necessary. They are only necessary at exactly the moment in which they have to be enforced. Or, put differently, rights ‘never appear except when they are contested, therefore in periods of injustice’ (Sartre, 1992: 141). But how may we consider this argument in relation to our current situation, which in principle, if not in reality, is a moment of justice, freedom and equality for all before the law? How do we respond to the continued presence of the kind of violence that we cannot justify either legally or politically? Sartre does not have an easy answer. Instead he points out that: Crime is defined negatively by the positive right. It is a form of violence against the material situation and, consequently, a refusal to limit oneself to the right. The right of property is universal. But if someone has no property this right is derisory. If this person wants to change something in this factual situation, he may use violence in relation to the property of others. At this moment, he attacks the right and treats a person as a means, not as an end. He has committed a crime. (1992: 142)

And if, to complicate things further, beyond the right to property is the right to freedom, since ‘man is by essence juridical, that is, he is not just a force but a freedom’, then that means that ‘what he brings about by force must also be considered as an expression of his freedom’ (1992: 143). Put differently, ‘all violence presents itself as the recuperation of a right and, reciprocally, every right inexorably contains within itself the embryo of violence’ (1992: 177). Both Sartre and Benjamin recognize an insoluble conundrum within all definitions of violence, revolving around the recognition of what it means to be human. Sartre demonstrates that the exercise of violence upon another human being is the assertion of a freedom. It also suggests that the one committing violence must, at some level, acknowledge the other as freedom: ‘Since I require something of him, I recognize him as free.’ But it does not end there, since to commit violence upon another is ‘to declare him purely determined. That is, to consider him both as essential and inessential.’ Ultimately, violence ‘founds itself and affirms itself in terms of the destruction of the Other, it denies him the right to judge’ (Sartre, 1992: 178). Let us return to Mbembe in the light of these two explications of violence, and also to bring us closer to the context we wish to understand. Mbembe deploys part of Sartre’s argument when he remarks on the history of Western civil society as being premised, even before the Enlightenment, upon the resolution of conflict through systems of civil law. In other words, the maintenance of order through violence (Mbembe, 2001: 36). But what Mbembe brings to the arguments of Benjamin and Sartre is not so much a disagreement about the forms of violence and control in the West. Rather he draws attention, as Benjamin and Sartre do not (because their interests lie in the understanding of the philosophical structure of violence in relation

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to rights), to the forms upon which civil society is founded, the institutions (and not necessarily state institutions) that maintain civil society. Mbembe points out, then, that even considering its complex evolution in the West, civil society cannot be conceived of without the ‘autonomous institutions, sites, and social coalitions capable of playing an intermediary role between state and society’ (2001: 38). Nor can it be understood without reference to ‘particular forms of constructing, legitimating, and resolving disputes in the public domain’ (2001: 38). Through the ages, these forms have been determined variously in the West by organizations such as the Church (though the history of the Church in the West is complex and often aligned with a history of the state), and eventually the ‘juridical sphere’ which ‘became demarcated and its originality, distinctive value, and autonomy from state absolutism asserted [sic]’ (Mbembe, 2001: 37). Mbembe adds to his assessment of the development of Western civil society the influence of what he calls ‘manners and vices’ ^ codes of public behaviour that determine the way in which civil society is defined and managed. These might comprise ‘respect for rules, censorship of feeling, and control of spontaneous impulses and drives’ (2001: 38), all of which lead to a society in which ‘self control and the exchange of good manners . . . replace raw physical violence . . . vulgar brute force’ (2001: 38). Mbembe’s argument, therefore, while it follows on from the classic assessments and descriptions of violence in relation to law such as may be found in Benjamin and Sartre, adds a vital dimension to the debate about violence and society, drawing attention to the forms ^ feelings, even ^ but certainly codes of conduct evolved over time, such codes as provide citizens with clear guidelines about the ways in which they may behave in public, codes encompassing etiquette, manners, ‘appropriate’ responses ^ underpinning such structures as the state and the judiciary. Clearly, when such an investigation is brought into the discussion about the formations of political and juridical power, we begin to see that to understand civil society in relation to Africa without understanding its social institutions and mediating sites is to misread the meaning of African society, especially in its response to the formation or the imposition of the state, and beyond this to the ‘indigenization of the state’ (Mbembe, 2001: 41). One must, in other words, consider: the indigenous categories used for thinking politically about conflictual and violent relations, the special vocabularies in which the political imaginary is expressed and the institutional forms into which that thought is translated, the anthropology that underlies both issues of representation and issues of unequal allocation of utilities, the negotiation of heterogeneity, and the refinement of passions. (2001: 39)

These indigenous categories, or ‘social bases’, upon which African state entities have come to be based are not monolithic. Instead they vary from region to region and country to country, and ultimately they determine the


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nature of the relationship of African states to international trade and capital (Mbembe, 2001: 40^1). Contemporary South African photography and violence At this point, I leave behind the trajectory of Mbembe’s argument since his analysis, after his laying of the groundwork of his argument, focuses on Cameroonian society and its particular forms of representation, expressions of power and deployments of violence to sustain its distinctive version of the postcolonial. Clearly, the history of South Africa has followed a somewhat different trajectory and it is perhaps too early in this history to provide anything like the comprehensive exploration of post-independence Cameroon that Mbembe offers. What, for example, are the particular and indigenous forms of the fetish (as it relates to power) in South Africa and how will these determine the future shape of the state and its watchdog, the judiciary? And how, in particular, are the kinds of violence that now seem to have left behind any political meaning to be understood and, more than this, eradicated from society? Does this kind of violence have the same self-sustaining nature as the violence that upheld the apartheid regime, or are we to understand it in completely different ways? Is it only through the application of state- and judicially-sanctioned violence that we will quell the waves of crime that threaten to overwhelm us? What indigenous codes of conduct will save us? Or will such codes replace one form of violence with another, one kind of violation with another, one set of constraints on our freedom with others? What, apart from pure, brutal, state power, will turn the river aside? I do not propose an answer to these questions since I do not have the advantage of hindsight, nor do I have the historical/anthropological expertise to address them in any comprehensive way. I do think, however, that clues to the ways in which we regard violence (if not to the ways in which we think we might change our violent society) are to be found in the work of a number of South African photographers working post-1994. I do not think that artists necessarily set out to provide answers to some of the questions that I have raised here but they do, through representation, description or translation, offer us if not a simulacrum of our society then at least a mirror in which we might see and understand our own impulses. An image that stands out, for this writer, as a key transitional image of the understanding of how art might now begin to reflect a new or changing society is Obie Oberholzer’s photograph of a Tutsi man in a church in Rwanda (we often forget that while Nelson Mandela was being made president of South Africa in 1994, Rwanda was exploding in a wave of genocide). The man, seated alone in the darkened interior of the church, gazing ahead and seen in profile, has lost everything except the few small items in a plastic bag at his feet. The photograph is, for such a generally optimistic photographer as Oberholzer, a terrifying reflection on loss, as though at the very moment of change, we are caught in a never-ending cycle of violence. As a

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Figure 3 Obie Oberholzer: Paul Gashumba, near Nyalikunga, Tanzania, 1994

photograph, it is as much about the situation in Rwanda as it is about Oberholzer’s (much-disputed) position in the canon of South African photography. There are a number of other iterations of the broad theme of violence being explored in new South African photography. The exploration of this work I will leave for further articles and discussions of the subject, and mention only a few themes and examples here. For some, the roots of the problem lie only indirectly in the political, but more properly in the patriarchal order, the structures of power that, while they certainly operate on the level of the broadly political, begin in homes and communities. Senzeni Marasela’s ‘Theodora Comes to Johannesburg’ series can be cited here. The series depicts a woman, dressed in the familiar garb of the domestic worker (floral dress, white cap and apron), in different urban locations. She seems lost, small in relation to the busy city scenes around her. Marasela suggests that Theodora (who comes to represent the many rural or small-town women who have sought employment as domestic workers in South African cities) is subject to the violent upheaval entailed in her move to the city. For others, violence is the concomitant to ongoing discrimination, racial, sexual and, latterly, on the basis of nationality. But the responses to prejudice take a variety of forms and are certainly not heterogeneous.


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We might, for example, cite Zanele Muholi’s images as an exploration of gay, black, female sexuality and identity. Hers is not so much a protest against discrimination as a decisive staking out of a terrain for her own identity. Similarly, Berni Searle and Minnette Va¤ ri inhabit worlds that blur boundaries between geography and psychology ^ they seek, in the case of Va¤ ri, to throw back upon the world their own internal musings or, in the case of Searle, to take the landscape into the body in an act of appropriation (but appropriation quite different to its political formations some years ago). Several photographers continue in what might broadly be described as a documentary genre, but here there are many distinctions to be made between different practitioners. Goldblatt has not significantly altered his methodology (except that he has introduced colour to his oeuvre), but what he has done (and this is part of what marks him as an artist, though he vigorously rejects this designation) is to allow his work to reflect on itself. So while he continues to make important new work, he has also revisited older work (or at least revisited places he documented in earlier work) as a way of examining the simultaneous transformations and stasis of South African life and landscape. Several younger photographers such as Mikhael Subotzky and Pieter Hugo are documentary in as far as the forms of their work are concerned, and both inherit the various iterations of the violence of documentary photography. They both owe a great deal to Goldblatt’s storytelling impulse (in the broad sense of wanting to reflect the stories of people and communities). But in a more narrowly focused way than Goldblatt ^ whose work has a strong sense of the itinerant, of a desire to seek out every corner of South Africa that might tell us something about ourselves and our history. Of course Goldblatt has been traversing this terrain since the 1950s and so his work carries within it the sense of its own as well as the country’s history. Where Goldblatt, for example, seeks to understand first by looking, the sense one has with Subotzky in particular is that he understands something about a place first and then seeks to express that understanding in a set of images. His ongoing ‘Ponte’ series (made in collaboration with the British photographer Patrick Waterhouse) is a case in point ^ a body of work that reflects the many debates about immigration and African identity in the context of the city of Johannesburg. The conceptual works of photographers like Brent Meistre, Sue Williamson, Dale Yudelman, Hentie van der Merwe, Hasan and Husain

Figure 4 Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick W aterhouse: Cleaning the core, Ponte City, Johannesburg, 2008

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Figure 5 Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick W aterhouse: Cleaning the core (360-degree panorama), Ponte City, Johannesburg, 2008

Essop, Abrie Fourie and Kathryn Smith employ a wide range of photographic languages and methods, some owing more to the documentary tradition with its roots (as I have shown) in violence than others. But they are linked by the same desire: to understand the present (whether it is the internal private present of the individual or the collective experience of a group) in relation to a violent past, and to represent that in a way that circumvents the double bind of South African photography as I described it in my opening paragraphs. Photography in South Africa can, in this sense, be said to be suffering from a kind of visual post-traumatic stress disorder, the trauma induced not only by the facts of South African history ^ its peculiar and particular relationship to violence ^ but also by the very medium that has most consistently explored that violence. Ariella Azoulay makes a similar point at the end of The Civil Contract of Photography:11 The fact that photography has become similar to the violent situations in which it is operated clarifies the urge to invent, restore, or maintain a civil contract of photography as a collection of escape routes from situations in which a stranglehold is tightening around the photographed people. This is


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the backyard of the democratic regimes in which photography is thus operated, and often, perhaps paradoxically, it is in the power of photography to trace the first line of flight when the water rises and the wave swells. (2008: 490)

Perhaps what may be hoped is that art (and particularly photographic art) in South Africa can, as Giorgio Agamben suggests, fulfil its architectonic potential and, in doing so, break ‘the continuum of linear time’ so that man can recover, ‘between past and future, his present space’ (1999: 102). Contemporary South African photographers are having to negotiate the two kinds of violence that they have inherited: the violence of South African society, now taking new and unprecedented forms, and the violence of the photographic medium. This article has sought to understand the backdrop against which contemporary photography in South Africa must work. Notes 1. There are a number of possible ‘histories’ of photography in Africa from the 19th century (and of course those histories begin to take different arcs in the aftermath of some of the major independence movements beginning in the 1950s and 1960s): an ethnographic history, which includes the recording of native dress and customs by European photographers for ‘scientific’ purposes; an aesthetic history, as evidenced in portrait and landscape photography that employs the conventions of similar genres in painting; a propaganda history, in which the photograph may be seen as a tool for the advancement of colonial agendas for the continent (see Stevenson and Graham-Stewart, 2001: 17^27). 2. Studies of the representational violence of photography include Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire (1997); David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes (2003); Pinney and Peterson, Photography’s Other Histories (2003). In the latter, Roslyn Poignant argues that in the case of the photographic records of the mummi¢ed body of the North Queensland Aborigine, Tambo, ‘Aboriginal lives were made captive, not only in the sense of loss of agency, but also within the late-nineteenth-century discourses that linked the colonial frontiers to the metropolitan centers of North America and Europe’ (2003: 56). W|thin these discourses, she argues, there emerged what she terms a ‘‘‘show-space’’ . . . in which historically speci¢c relations between colonizers and colonized are made visible’ (2003: 56). 3. Drum magazine was first published by Robert Crisp as The African Drum. When that publication failed, it was taken over by Jim Bailey and remade as Drum. Bailey hired African writers and photographers to document the lives of black South Africans. It became immensely successful and was eventually distributed in Nigeria and Ghana, and elsewhere in Africa. 4. Sophiatown was a suburb of the city of Johannesburg where blacks owned houses and property. It was the centre of a vibrant cultural life for black South Africans until its destruction in 1955 under the Group Areas Act and the removal of its inhabitants to settlements outside of the city, far from places of work and

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transport hubs. Sophiatown was recast as Triomf (triumph) and settled by working-class whites. In 2006 the name Sophiatown was restored. 5. For images and captions for Magubane’s photographs, see Baileys African History Archive, http://www.baha.co.za. 6. ‘Baasskap’ is an Afrikaans word derived from the word for ‘boss’ ^ ‘baas’. It was the form of address used by blacks when addressing white males (even boys). Baasskap refers in general to white rule. 7. It is significant that, over the years, Kumalo photographed often in the home of Nelson Mandela, capturing weddings, parties, meetings and, after the release of Mandela, visits by famous political figures. The Mandela household, therefore, in Kumalo’s work, serves as the exemplar of the strange marriage of tragedy and the everyday that photography, and especially the social documentary of the apartheid years, records. 8. Magubane was detained many times, and spent more than 600 days in solitary confinement. 9. ‘Kieries’ (Afrikaans) are sticks with clubbed heads ^ they can serve as walking sticks or fighting sticks. 10. The title of Susan Sontag’s book: Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). 11. Azoulay’s work is particularly apt for any analysis of South African photography because its focus is on a situation in which apartheid is still deeply entrenched. It is perhaps to be hoped that South African photography is where Palestinian photography might be a few years hence (though the situation there seems more intractable than South Africa’s was).

References Agamben, Giorgio (1999) The Man without Content. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Azoulay, Ariella (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books. Benjamin, Walter (1997) Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913^1926. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Cole, Ernest (1967) House of Bondage. New York: Random House. Enwezor, Okwui (1996) ‘A Critical Presence: Drum Magazine in Context’, In/ Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Enwezor, Okwui (2006) Snap Judgements: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography. New York: ICP. Foster, Hal (2009) ‘Precarious’, Artforum 48(4) (December): 207^9. Harris, Peter (2008) In a Different Time. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Levi Strauss, David (2003) Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics. New York: Aperture. Margalit, Avishai (2002) The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


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Marinovich, Greg and Joa‹ o Silva (2000) The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War. New York: Basic Books. Mbembe, Achille (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1992) The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Molesworth, Helen (2008) ‘Zoe Leonard, Analogue, 1998^2007’, in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee (eds) Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pinney, Christopher and Nicolas Peterson (eds) (2003) Photography’s Other Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Posel, Deborah (2007) ‘Vulnerabilities’, in Jay Pather (ed.) Spier Contemporary 2007. Cape Town: Africa Centre. Powell, Ivor (2007) ‘Inside and Outside of History’, Art South Africa 5(4): 32^8. Rhizomes of Memory: Three South African Photographers (2000) Oslo: Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. Richards, Colin (2008) ‘Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art’, pp. 250^89 in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee (eds) Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ryan, James R. (1997) Picturing Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sanders, Mark (2007) Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1992) Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stevenson, Michael and Michael Graham-Stewart (2001) Surviving the Lens: Photographic Studies of South and East African People, 1870^1920. Vlaeberg: Fernwood Press. Vivan, Itala (ed.) (1998) Alf Kumalo: Fotografo Sudafricano. Rome: Fondazione delle Stelline. Weinberg, Paul (ed.) (2007) Then and Now: Eight South African Photographers. Johannesburg: The Highveld Press.

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen is a former Fulbright scholar who completed her doctorate in literature at New York University. She is a Director of Fourthwall Books and the Editor of Art South Africa. In her capacity as Managing Editor of David Krut Publishing (2005^10), she edited a number of titles including Dis-Location/Re-Location: Exploring Alienation and Identity in South Africa; Art and Justice: The Art of the

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Constitutional Court of South Africa; Light on a Hill; TAXI-013 ^ Diane Victor; William Kentridge Nose: Thirty Etchings; and William Kentridge Flute. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. [email: [email protected]]