Belonging and freedom in Ernest Cole’s The House of Bondage

Abstract

Ernest Cole’s seminal photo essay, House of Bondage (1966), locates freedom in the documentarian’s creative effort, which aims to bring forth the fullness of African lives under oppression. This essay explores the paradox of Cole’s experience of a loss of creative freedom in exile compared to his experience in South Africa. A wounded belonging inspires his perspective on space and context and his articulation of an African-centered ethical perspective. To convey the fullness of life, Cole exploits the tensions between text and image that characterize the photo essay form, setting up his images so that they exceed the conventional function of documentary. The result is a novelistic work that aims, in Georg Lukács’s terms “to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life.” Cole’s images of subjects reading convey their yearning for freedom by depicting them in a state of thought that indicates imaginative engagement with the world beyond their confinement. Images of persons reading, furthermore, belong to a pictorial convention strongly associated with the establishment of the novel as a popular literary form in the nineteenth century, when the novels similarly conveyed the space of interiority as freedom.

Keywords:

• Ernest Cole
• photo essay
• Apartheid photography
• Njabulo Ndebele
• South African novel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In his essay “Rediscovery of the Ordinary,” Ndebele announced a new imperative to rediscover the ordinary and turn away from spectacle, focusing the novel once more on private lives and the domestic and familial. Writing in 1986, Ndebele anticipates a new mode of writing that would make possible the imagination of a post-apartheid dispensation. A focus of his critique of spectacle is the fiction of Alex la Guma.

2 In her reworking of Amartya Sen’s “conceptual language for freedom,” Phyllis Taoua adds the category of “existential freedoms.” These address efforts to overcome a spiritual alienation through creative expression (Taoua 23-24).

3 Darren Newbury’s extensive examination of Cole’s work in the context of apartheid era photojournalism reflects this attitude that Cole “was of a generation of photographers who believed in the autonomy of the image” (187). The persistence of this view is evident in Sally Gaule’s description of Cole’s work as “mute testimony to the invisibility of Africans and apartheid,” despite the fact that he produced a first-person account (382). She considers Cole in the context of “political modernism,” which engages the real but exceeds description (382-383).

4 Many of these 60,000 negatives are work Cole did in the United States during the first decade of his exile and never shared with his funders, the Ford Foundation.

5 Although he names the genre “photo essay,” Mitchell is looking at photo books.

6 Mitchell’s analysis of Jacob Riis applies well to Cole: “the text ‘enables’ the images (and their subjects) to take on a kind of independence and humanity that would be unavailable under an economy of straightforward ‘exchange’ between photographer and writer” (286).

7 The stylistic continuity is apparent, for example, if we compare the autobiographical segments in House of Bondage to the manuscript note printed in the exhibition catalogue from the Hasselblad Foundation retrospective in 2010.

8 In his introduction, Lelyveld underscored Cartier-Bresson’s influence: “[Cole] realized that this was the form his story should take” (19). According to Newbury, Struan Robertson (with whom Cole shared a studio) showed Cole a copy of Cartier-Bresson’s book so that Cole could study it as a potential model (Newbury 215n81).

9 Robertson (31) and Ivor Powell (46), the contributors of essays to the Hasselblad Foundation exhibition catalog, both discuss Cole’s discontent with the aesthetics of the book.

10 The Hasselblad Foundation archive of the contact sheets for the book includes uncropped versions of the images published in the book and additional images from the same subjects that were not included. Thus, the archive gives a more comprehensive sense of the pool of material from which the images in the book were selected. The archive is digitized and accessible here https://www2.hasselbladfoundation.org/fmi/webd/bilddatabasen?homeurl=https://hasselbladfoundation.org.

11 The “polemic” is the liberal, humanist critique of racism addressed to non-South Africans. I address it more fully below.

12 The uncropped image is number 84 on the Hasselblad Foundation site referenced above.

13 In “Nightmare Rides” (the chapter on commuting), Cole depicts the interior of an overcrowded train. This is another example of how he responded to the cliché of mass representation and unindividuated Africans (68). Instead, in “Nightmare Rides,” “the photographer succeeds in confronting us with a serial individuality” (Powell 44).

14 Robertson gives a very detailed account of how Cole planned and executed the shooting of this photograph. At the mine, Cole had witnessed a medical examination and knew the way he wanted to take the photo. To bring this about (“to prevent too steep an angle on the line of men”) required a “medium telephoto lens,” which meant he had to carry additional equipment hidden in his bag under his lunch, have the focus and exposure already set, and wait for “the decisive moment and press the cable release” (Robertson 32).

15 Looking ahead to the discussion of the novelistic that follows, “dodging” evokes the “artful dodger” in Oliver Twist. The focus on poverty and street children, pickpockets, and beggars resonates with Dickens’s novel.

16 Lelyveld describes Cole as “a slight, nervous young African” who spoke “hurriedly in a whisper” (Lelyveld 16). Powell echoed the description: “A slight, small youngster” (46). Aubrey Nkomo, who knew him in New York, also commented “he was very tiny as compared to me” (qtd. in Knape 234). Cole’s feats in accessing forbidden spaces entailed considerable risks, even getting arrested on purpose to photograph children in jail clandestinely (Robertson 32).

17 Powell is comparing one of the hospital images (“Patients lie on stretchers, chairs, and felt mats,” Cole 117) to one of the police search photographs (“Sometimes check broadens into search of man’s person and belongings,” Cole 47) with its highly geometric composition (Powell 43).

18 The image shown below the one of Ganyile reading in House of Bondage also uses the star effect of a source of light. But here Cole is photographing persons sleeping: “at the end of the day there is nothing to do but sleep” (186-187). Cole contrasts the blinding rays of light to the oblivion of unconsciousness.

19 Hendrik Verwoerd, then prime minister, “instructed apartheid town planners and white admistrators of black areas to see to it that every township was segregated along tribal lines,” but this change postdated the grid of Katlehong township where Dlamini was raised (Dlamini 52). Faced with real life complexities of identity (for example, Dlamini had “no men in my family” from whom to reference a tribal identity, and his mother identified as Zulu although she spoke Sotho, and so on), the state overdetermined these (53).

20 The books are textbooks and prayer books. There is also an image of an open Bible, resting on the face of Chief Piet Mokoena, who is sleeping. Cole quotes an African saying in the caption: “‘When the Europeans came, they had the Bible and we had the land. Now we have the Bible and they have our land’” (191). The series of images suggests the appeal of reading but here the Bible is singled out as a book that has betrayed.

21 The Hasselblad Foundation exhibition catalog includes three images of figures reading in Frenchdale that are not in House of Bondage. I am discussing two of these. These images escape the book’s polemic and suggest a fuller visual imagination at work.

22 The production of the text involved multiple stakeholders. Ridge Press designed the book and then sold the rights to Random House Canada. Ridge Press was associated with a specific style. They had published the catalog of Edward Steichen’s exhibition “Family of Man,” a landmark in the history of photojournalism and a grounding oeuvre of liberal, universalist humanism (Newbury 186-187). Flaherty worked for Life, which also had a distinctive photojournalistic approach. Lelyveld, who was officially only the author of the introduction, was the source for many of the statistics cited in the book (Newbury 187). However, Lelyveld’s reporting in South Africa had relied heavily on Cole’s help, his knowledge of languages, and his ideas for stories (Newbury 180).

23 The title was changed back in 1995 when Longman reissued the novel as Between Two Worlds.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eleni Coundouriotis

Eleni Coundouriotis is Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at University of Connecticut. Her areas of research include realism, the history of the novel, postcolonial literature with an emphasis on Africa, literature and human rights, and the war novel. Her most recent book is Narrating Human Rights in Africa (2021).