Revolt at the source: the black radical tradition in the social documentary photography of Omar Badsha and Nadine Hutton

Abstract

The social documentary photography of Omar Badsha (b. 1945) and Nadine Hutton (b. 1977) upends ideas about who has been writing the history of South Africa and in what genres. Their cross-generational dialogue and commitment to sharing photography as a means of social commentary not only constitutes a historical tradition, but it also emerges out of and is an expression of the black radical tradition. By drawing on interviews with Badsha and Hutton as well as an analysis of their work, this essay demonstrates how the black radical tradition works as a radical philosophy of history in practice: defying post-raciality, depoliticization of art, and amplifying culture as a site of work and political mobilization. Theoretical insights from Cedric Robinson's scholarship on marronage, the origins of the black radical tradition and its cosmology, the renegade black intelligentsia, and the making of racial regimes place Badsha and Hutton in the black radical tradition.

Keywords:

• marronage
• black radical tradition
• renegade black intelligentsia
• racial regimes
• Omar Badsha
• Nadine Hutton
• social documentary photography

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the UCI Academic Senate Council on Research, Computing, and Libraries, the UCI School of Humanities Dean's Travel Grant Committee, Abebe Zegeye, Jon Soske, Edmond Keller, the UCLA International Institute, Jeffrey Stewart, Aida Hurtado, Deborah Nash, Chris Allen, the doctoral students from the University of California, Santa Barbara Black Studies Graduate Emphasis Course Spring 2011 term, as well as the doctoral students from the Chican@ Studies Department who generously attended my lecture. Sections of this paper have been presented both at the UCLA International Institute African Studies Seminar in 2011 and then at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Erika Chan and Andrea Slater were Research Assistants on the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability Project.

Notes

 1. These include the following selected list published in concert with others: Badsha et al. (1985); Badsha (1986); Badsha (2002); Badsha and Norgaard (2002); as well as images in several books, exhibition, catalogs, and essays including, but not limited to, Dhupelia-Mestrie (2000); in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Wien museumsquartier and City of Vienna (2006); Zegeye and Ahluwalia (2010).

 2. This sample includes: Letter to Farzanah, the founding of Afrascope and Afrapix, South Africa: The Cordoned Heart (1986); South African History Online (1999/2003); ‘Transforming the City’ (2010); Bonani Africa 2010 for Badsha and I have fallen (2009) and ‘Nora Leaves a Doll's House’ (2009) for Hutton.

 3. I have worked on this in some detail in my forthcoming manuscript.

 4. Hutton's ‘Interventions’ are performance pieces executed for public spaces. I am using intervention here in a related though distinct fashion. For Badsha, intervening in historiographical debates meant redirecting the agenda of powerful intellectuals and philanthropic organizations in a way that used their privilege and status to further the liberation agendas of black people.

 5. It is worth noting that Robinson was highly active in the expatriate community in black Britain at the time of Lauretta Ncgobo's active publishing. The edition of Black Marxism (University of North Carolina, 2000) that I cite here comes much later than Robinson's work on Third World cinema – especially Sembene's Xala (). Ncgobo also examined gendered resistance in her coverage of the Natal Women's Revolt protests by rural Zulu women in Sigageni, near Zeerust, and their rejection of state-mandated cattle-dipping that occurred at the same time as a massive numbers of cattle died (1962–1963). The women responded by dumping and even destroying the tanks of solution posted in their towns. South African History Online mentions Dorothy Nyembe as an activist who inherited the lessons of these campaigns (Bundy, 1987; Gasa, 2007; Ncgobo, 1999; Worsfold, 1991, p. 499; Zegeye & Ahluwalia, n.d.).

 6. Fanon's discussion of Case Number 5, Series A, ‘A European police inspector who tortured his wife and children’ provides much insight on the practices associated with the black radical tradition as having certainly as much if not more weight than the texts.

 7. Lest, we disregard the committed white power orientation of empire and nation-building in this period, Lake and Reynolds (2008) offer clarifying notes about the founding of ‘white men's countries’.

 8. The scholarly research on several high-profile cases including Ramphele Mamphele, William Makgoba, Mahmood Mamdani, and Zakes Mda provide stunning illustrations. Not only are these persons important because of the wide range of disciplinary trainings, differing political ideologies, different origins, and different management styles with which they engaged and entered South African academia and intellectual life, but they also continue to be highly regarded and abundantly productive in their various arenas of scholarly and professional endeavor outside the terrain of white liberalism in academia. The elaborations of these schemes of public humiliation and scholarly predation have been disgusting to witness. This obsession with plagiarism among the descendants of people who benefited explicitly from extraordinary and spectacular theft and dispossession is worth historicizing and theorizing. Bloggers and journalists perhaps unaware of the intellectual history (of segregationist philanthropy and suppression of the black radical intelligentsia) to which they have now been linked continue to defend this practice. As of this writing, no newspaper, print, or Internet has had to recant.

 9. Magubane cites a document from 1993.

10. See Frances Wilson's prefatory materials in South Africa: The cordoned heart.

11. Letter to Farzanah provides the byline for an important archive of journalism published in 1979 about the nature of apartheid for children.

12. See Spillers (1987) for greater discussion of the ontological nature of the kin relationship available under slavery between black men and their children.

13. If one were to tell the truth, much of white nationalisms conversation that shows up as comparative racial politics is animated by the desire to prove which ‘natives’ mounted the greatest challenge to white muscular masculinity and rationality.

14. Viewing the struggle against apartheid as something that pollutes and damages post-apartheid cultural life has been taken up by scholars with as widely diverging approaches to the social, political, and the cultural ranging from Norval (1998) and Ndebele (1998, 2004) to Nuttall (1998, 2004) and Horrell (2004).

15. For a sense of the genealogy of this discussion of class suicide among the renegade black intelligentsia, Robinson's Domination and Imitation is particularly helpful (1980b, p.149). Robinson traces this claim in the work of Fanon but more carefully in Amilcar Cabral and Sembene Ousmane.

16. Countless new books in the field of Black Politics have been published since 2009 about the Obama Presidency and what it means for the possibilities of US liberalism. This does not count the dozen or so others written by political operatives, fashion journalists, elected officials, and other interested parties. Not less than 50 talks and panels have been scheduled since 2009 at academic societies and professional associations across the globe to discuss all dimensions of the Obama Presidency and more recently the rise of the Tea Party in the USA.

17. Eze's deconstruction of Hegel's anthropology makes clear that the claim about black people being inherent examples of the inscrutable prehuman prehistorical epoch part are repeated as if fact (1997).