How We See Our Culture: Photographic Self-Representations from the Cape Flats, South Africa

Abstract

This article presents visual imaginations of culture on the periphery of Cape Town. Auto-photography was engaged to investigate popular understandings of culture and the processes, discourses and practices of negotiating culture in contemporary South Africa. Some township residents were provided with inexpensive cameras to represent visually what they see as their culture. This auto-photography was complemented with studies of visual culture in post-apartheid townships and with extended interviews with the research collaborators that explored life histories, everyday practices and their reflections on culture. A selection of the images was presented in an exhibition in a township cultural center.

Notes

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/gvan.

My research assistants Thokozani Norushe, Nomazizi Jamela, Nyameka Sonti, and Abdifatah Ismael Tahir played an indispensable role in the research. Special thanks are due also to Anele Ngoko and Emile Boonzaier, whose artistic and technical expertise made the exhibition possible. Comments and suggestions on earlier papers by conference, workshop and seminar participants in Saly, Cape Town, Basel and Kansas City are much appreciated. The Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB) granted permission to publish material that was first used for a BAB working paper [Becker 2008]. The copyright for all photographs published in this article rests with the author.

A note on the use of the racial categories “African,” “black” and “coloured” (hereafter without quotation marks) is necessary. These apartheid racial categories continue to be used commonly, and even resurge as actually existing groups. While I do not wish to support the apartheid-induced usage, this article uses the categories as they are commonly understood and used locally: “African” and “black” interchangeably denominate people who speak an African language as their first language. “Coloured” refers to people of mixed descent, who are being defined as a social group, or a “community” in common parlance, and mostly speak Afrikaans.

A detailed discussion of the methodology follows below.

In the context of this project I refer to the people we were working with during fieldwork as research collaborators, to indicate the collaborative nature of the research.

In such discursive contexts, “culture” becomes “ethnicity” and often indeed “race” in a dual sense. First, it essentializes the idea of culture as the property of an ethnic group or “race.” It thus reifies cultures as separate entities, as well as overemphasizing the internal homogeneity of cultures, with the danger of “potentially legitimiz[ing] repressive demands for communal conformity” [Turner 1993: 412]. Secondly, this reductive conception of culture is compounded by a conception of race and ethnic identities being purportedly based on cultural difference; thus, as Werbner and Modood following Paul Gilroy [1992] observed, “the terms culture and identity may function as surreptitious code words for ‘race' … [and] … a belief in the absolute nature of ethnic categories.” [Werbner and Modood 1997: 214].

As scholars have observed and theorized almost everywhere in the contemporary world [Appadurai 2006; Byron and Kockel 2006; Kuper 2006]. Globally culture, generally imagined as a “billiard ball” (to invoke its boundedness and coherence), and intimately linked with another buzzword, identity, “seems to explain everything at the moment … culture has become a great public issue” [Kuper 2006: 186].

But see Becker [2015], where I discuss an auto-photography project in northern Namibia to gain insight into local residents’ notions of liberation war memory.

M. Wilson and Mafeje [1963] provide a comprehensive history of Langa up to ca. 1960, which gives excellent insights into life and popular culture in the township in the late 1950s.

“Town” is the common South African dub for the formerly White parts of the city, including both commercial and administrative centers and residential suburbs.

Examples of this photographic genre include Telschow [2003] and Fraser [2002]. Representations of “typical township” culture also feature in the less-commercialized work of the Cape Town photographers Ledochowski [2003] and Lurie [2006].

Robins [2000] singles out an NGO formed by former ANC MK guerillas, initially known as Western Cape Action Tours, now the Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory, which has taken visitors to the Cape Flats on “journeys of memory” since the late 1990s.

The TAC-led civil disobedience campaign in April 2003, for instance, consciously called on memories of the anti-apartheid struggle, particularly the ANC's 1950s defiance campaign.

Just a few days after South Africa became only the fifth country worldwide to make legal provision for same-sex marriages as from 1 Dec. 2006, Isidingo broadcast a gay wedding into millions of South African homes at prime soapie-time.

Interviews with Thobeka Dlali and Zola Jamela, Gugulethu, July 2006.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heike Becker

HEIKE BECKER is Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape. Her recent research has focused on the aesthetics and politics of difference and citizenship in contemporary South Africa. Her work on gender, culture, politics and memory in Namibia has appeared in her book, Namibian Women's Movement 1980 to 1992: From Anti-colonial Resistance to Reconstruction [1995], and in numerous journal articles and book chapters.