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Abstract
In the mid 1880s a little-known photographer named Robert Harris produced a series of albumen prints showing the stages of body searching that black labourers in De Beers diamond mines were obliged to undergo by state ordinance enacted in 1883. The original photographs surfaced briefly in the saleroom in 2007 but have since disappeared. Two sets of copies survive. Bearing in mind the history of documentary photography in South Africa, this article examines the historical and textual significance of this series of photographs in the context of the history of mining and discusses the imperatives and ethics of locating, researching, and publishing controversial imagery in the Internet age.
Keywords:
Notes
1 Dernier Lavage, Mine de Mr Schubert à Lençoes (Brésil) (Final washing, M. Schubert’s mine, Brazil), heliograph after Dujardin, Henri Jacobs et Nicolas Chatrian, Le Diamant, Paris: L. G. Masson 1884. Examples from Rousselet and Jacobs and Chatrian are reproduced in my book: Marcia Pointon, Rocks, Ice and Dirty Stones: Diamond Histories, Chicago and London: Reaktion Books 2017, chapter 1.
2 Patricia Hayes, ‘Power, Secrecy, Proximity: A Short History of South African Photography’, Kronos, 33:1 (November 2007), 139 and 142.
3 According to rare book sale catalogues it was published in Port Elizabeth in 1888, although no evidence for this is provided and the volume is cited as of ‘no date’. See https://www.worldcat.org/title/photographic-album-of-south-african-scenery/oclc/86008932&referer=brief_results (accessed 8 January 2018).
4 See Dusan C. Stulik and Art Kaplan, Woodbury Type, Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute 2013.
5 Michael Godby, ‘Forward, Ever Forward: A Reading of Robert Harris, Photographic Album of South African Scenery, Port Elizabeth, c.1880–1886’, Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, 40:1 (2014), 85.
6 Ibid., 96.
7 Pointon, Rocks, Ice, and Dirty Stones, chapter 2, plate 21.
8 Hayes points out that Duggan-Cronin moved from extraordinary figural and ethnographic studies on the Kimberley diamond mines to field visits where he photographed historic sites from which arteries of migrant labour originated. Typical of his work is The Bantu Tribes of South Africa, reproductions of photographic studies by A.M. Duggan-Cronin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1928. Hayes, ‘Power, Secrecy, Proximity’, 142. See also Michael Godby, ‘Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin’s Photographs for The Bantu Tribes of South Africa (1928–1954): The Construction of an Ambiguous Idyll’, Kronos, 36:1 (November 2010), 54–83. Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool identify the roots of a South African documentary photography to the 1940s and 1950s and to the work of Cole, Levson and Peter Mugubane. See Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, ‘Photography with a Difference: Leon Levson’s Camera Studies and Photographic Exhibitions of Native Life in South Africa, 1947–1950’, Kronos, 31:1 (November 2005), 188. Other collections, like the photographs taken by Isaac Schapera and now held by the Royal Anthropological Institute (UK), were taken between 1929 and 1940. See Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera, ed. John L. Comaroff, Jean Comaroff, and Deborah James, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007. None of the photographs in this publication depict an industrial subject.
9 David Killingray and Andrew Roberts, ‘An Outline History of Photography in Africa to ca. 1940’, History in Africa, 16 (1989), 198n9.
10 Massimo Zaccaria, Photography and African Studies: A Bibliography, Pavia: University of Pavia Department of Political and Social Studies 2001.
11 Anne-Marie Eze, ‘Africa (Sub-Saharan)’, in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy, vol. 1, London: Routledge 2008, 18.
12 A. D. Bensusan, ‘19th Century Photographers in South Africa’, Africana Notes and News, 15:6 (June 1963), 236.
13 Bonham’s London auction 18061, 5 October 2010, lot 290 (accessed 10 March 2016).
14 A. E. Van der Merwe, M. Steyn, and E. N. L’Abbé, ‘Trauma and Amputations in 19th Century Miners from Kimberley, South Africa’, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 20:3 (May/June 2010), 304. When De Beers established their closed compound in 1885 they also built a hospital that ensured segregation extended to the treatment of effects of accidents, which were many given landslips in wet weather.
15 See https://soulsafari.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/miners-being-inspected-2.jpg (accessed 10 March 2016).
16 William H. Worger wrote the following to me (email 25 August 2017): ‘I did research at the De Beers company library and at their archives in 1978 and had access to most materials available (much of the paper archives were then being properly organized so were not available, but De Beers had microfilmed many of them for copies). I did not see these photos then. When I attempted to do further research in 1983 I was told by the Company archivist, Dr Moonyean Buys (now deceased), that the archives – beautifully organized by 1983, she showed me proudly the boxes and inventories – were embargoed and I could not have access. While some people have gained limited access for particular subjects (usually ones that do not get to the heart of De Beers’ business practices), I have never been allowed back. Separately either in 1983 or a couple of years later, the company librarian who I had worked with in 1978 (and who had left De Beers in the late ’70s or early ’80s) told me that all the “controversial” photos – I remember her speaking particularly of images of the men in the purge houses who had to wear “boxing gloves” on their hands – had been removed from the company’s library. She did not say what had been done with them once removed. My assumption when I learned after the fact of the 2007 auction was that De Beers had purchased the images. Though the Oppenheimer family has now acknowledged to some extent the harsh labor conditions of the mines, they are still very protective of their historical image internationally, especially now that they are such a large benefactor of African Studies at Harvard in particular as well as elsewhere’.
17 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin 2003, 72.
18 ‘[South Africa: circa 1880–1890]. 4to (9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches; 240 x 190mm). Nineteen albumen print photographs on fourteen leaves (ten photographs [each approx. 7 1/2 x 5 3/4 inches] mounted recto and verso of five card leaves, and nine photographs [each approximately 5 x 8 inches], of these with series title “Searching System. Kimberley” in the negative, six with the photographers’ initials “R.H.” in the negative]. All nineteen have manuscript titling beneath in a single hand, nine of these with additional text above many images). Bound in green half-morocco over contemporary pebble-grained cloth covered boards, spine gilt, contained within a modern green morocco-backed green cloth box, titled in gilt on “spine”. Condition: Most somewhat faded, two with small tears, most of the first ten photographs have rounded corners, mounts browned and chipped)’. See http://www.dreweatts.com/cms/pages/lot/NY002/188 (accessed 10 March 2016).
19 The eight Yale photographs can be seen online at http://images.library.yale.edu/madid/showThumb.aspx?qs=16&qm=15&q=ms+1556 (accessed 20 September 2017). They were acquired for the library by the former Africa collection librarian, John Moore Crossey, before his retirement in 1998. The library has no correspondence relating to the photographs and no further information on their origins.
20 Sontag discusses the picture taken by Eddie Adams in 1968 of the execution of a Vietcong suspect in the street. Sontag, Regarding the Pain, 54.
21 See note 19.
22 Aristotle, ‘De Poetica’, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. and trans. W. D. Ross, vol. XI, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1952, 1448b.
23 Patrick Harries describes the alienation of workers who came from agricultural work on sugar plantations in Natal to Kimberley and had to adjust to a machine-driven industry governed by washing machines, windlasses, buckets, and carts. Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press 1994, 50–51.
24 Few of the secondary sources I cite reproduce any photographic evidence, despite the fact that we know that photographers were at work in South Africa. Where images do appear their low status as evidence is reflected in inadequate or complete lack of captions. Harries reproduces a photograph of a team of black miners equipped with picks and shovels preparing to enter Kimberley mine. No date and no source for this image is given anywhere in the book. Ibid., 52.
25 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Houndmills: Macmillan 1988, 61.
26 John Tagg, ‘The Pencil of History’, in The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2009, 5.
27 For these ethical and historical questions, see Richard Kearney, ‘Evil, Monstrosity and the Sublime’, in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 57:3 (July–September 2001), 489, 490, and 494.
28 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2008 (original title Images malgré tout, 2003) 3, 20, and 32–33.
29 Historians have been largely interested in the ordinance that put into law body searches at the Kimberley Mine as a cause of labour unrest. See William Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867–1895, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1987, 128–29; and in particular Robert Vicat Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields 1871–1890, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987, 135–36. Harries mentions the body searching, but in an account of relations between capitalist employer and migrant worker. Harries states: ‘Degrading and humiliating body searches and tight controls over the worker’s movements, extending to those of his bowels, reduced the level of diamond theft. The terrifying degree of surveillance inherent in this system of control has led several historians to find the inspiration for the compound in the prison’. Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity, 68. No source is given.
30 The history of Kimberley is outlined and analysed in Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds.
31 Originally an Islamic term meaning unbeliever, ‘kaffir’ came to be used in South Africa to refer to any black person and is now regarded as a racial slur; on the diamond fields it was translated as boy. See Oxford English Dictionary.
32 Ernest Cole, House of Bondage by Ernest Cole, with Thomas Flaherty, New York: Random House 1967, 23, quoted in Stephen Kanfer, The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World, London: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 1993, 298–99.
33 V. L. Allen, The History of Black Mineworkers in South Africa, vol. 1 Techniques of Resistance 1871–1948, Keighley: Moor Press 1992, 109–29. Allen records his fruitless attempts to get access either to the mines or to crucial data during the course of his research and points to the influence of the mining houses on the availability of evidence for this aspect of South African history. Allen, History of Black Mineworkers, 21. See also Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds, 110–46.
34 Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity, 50.
35 Turrell also describes overseers as white. Turrell, Capital and Labour, 88.
36 See ibid., 146– Harries states that, by about 1882, there were nine thousand blacks living on the fields but not working for the mines; rather, they worked in service and entertainment sectors. Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity, 55.
37 According to Worger, the photograph of the compound is dated 1894. Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds, 143, plate 3.1.
38 Charles Van Onselen, ‘Black Workers in Central African Industry: A Critical Essay on the Historiography and Sociology of Rhodesia’, Journal of South African Studies, 1:2 (April 1975) 234–37.
39 John M. Smalberger, ‘I.D.B. [Illicit Diamond Buying] and the Mining Compound System in the 1880s’, South African Journal of Economics, 42:4 (December 1974), 398 and 399.
40 Turrell, Capital and Labour, 154.
41 Ibid., 136.
42 Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds, 139–40, quoting Proclamation 1, 1883.
43 George Beet and Thomas Laurent Terpend include an illustration of diamonds swallowed by and recovered from one worker. George Beet and Thomas Laurent Terpend, The Romance and Reality of the Vaal Diamond Diggings, Kimberley: Diamonds Fields Advertiser 1917, 87.
44 Smalberger, ‘I.D.B. and the Mining Compound System’, 413.
45 See John M. Smalberger, ‘The Role of the Diamond-Mining Industry in the Development of the Pass-Law System in South Africa’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 9:3 (1976), 419–34.
46 James Stafford Ransome, The Engineer in South Africa: A Review of the Industrial Situation in South Africa After the War, and a Forecast of the Possibilities of the Country, London: Constable 1903, 66–67, quoted in Smalberger, ‘I.D.B and the Mining Compound System’, 412–13.
47 Worger referring to reports in the Daily Independent. See Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds, 140.
48 Turrell, Capital and Labour, 135–36.
49 Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds, 140; and Turrell, Capital and Labour, 135–36.
50 Ibid.
51 Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity, 60.
52 Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October, 39 (Winter 1986), 3–64. For a discussion of Sekula in relation to South African photography, see Lauri Firstenberg, ‘Representing the Body Archivally in South African Photography’, Art Journal, 61:1 (Spring 2002), 58–67.
53 Charles Van Onselen, ‘Workers Consciousness in Black Miners: Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1920’, The Journal of African History, 14:2 (1973), 238.
54 Personal communication from Charles Van Onselen, August 2017 (see note 16).
55 On this see John L. and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: vol. 1 Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991; vol. 2 The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997; and Belinda Bozzoli, The Political Nature of a Ruling Class: Capital and Ideology in South Africa 1890–1933, London: Routledge 1981.
56 Sontag draws attention to the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain as also to the desire for bodies shown naked. Sontag, Regarding the Pain, 36.
57 See http://www.miningweekly.com/article/hi-tech-scanners-to-expose-diamond-theft-2015-01-23/rep_id:3650 (accessed 20 July 2017). Botswana mining company Debswana was reported in 2015 to be installing ten upright full-body Scannex X-ray machines at four of its mines. The machines, it was claimed, will identify theft of diamonds that at the time comprised: thirty-six per cent hidden in the anus; thirty per cent hidden between the buttocks; fourteen per cent hidden in socks and hair; five per cent concealed in the mouth; two per cent hidden under the scrotum; two per cent hidden in clothes; two per cent in underwear; and ten per cent by ‘other means’.
58 One of a number of copies is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; it was widely copied in the Renaissance and cast in bronze.
59 Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories, University Park: Penn State University Press 2006, 11.
60 Sontag, Regarding the Pain, 38.
61 Van der Merwe, Steyn, and L’Abbé, ‘Trauma and Amputations’, 294 and 302.
62 Van Onselen estimated that the majority of fatalities among Africans were due to inadequate housing and food. Van Onselen, ‘Worker Consciousness’, 240.
63 Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity, 65.
64 Cecil Beaton and Gail Buckland, The Magic Image: The Genius of Photography, London: Pavilion Books 1975, 126: ‘When he was in South Africa he took photographs of black diamond-miners stripped naked and subjected to humiliating searches for loot’.
65 I am extremely grateful to Darren Newbury of the University of Brighton for introducing me to Colin Harding who is researching Nicholls as part of an AHRC-funded project on Horace Nicholls, artist-photographer at war, with the Imperial War Museum.
66 Beaton and Buckland, Magic Image, 126.
67 It is possible that technical analysis by an expert of the plates attributed to Nicholls and the prints at Yale might produce further evidence.
68 See http://gizmodo.com/south-african-miners-used-to-be-inspected-by-x-ray-for-1597519629 (accessed 20 July 2017); and http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mine-worker-x-rayed-diamond-check-1954/ (accessed 20 July 2017).
69 Edwin E. Streeter, Precious Stones and Gems, London: n. p. 1898, 88.
70 Gareth Hoskins, ‘Geo-centric Histories of Diamond Mining in Kimberley South Africa’, paper presented at the Visuality, Materiality and Mining symposium, University of Brighton, 26 June 2015, downloaded from https://aber.academia.edu/GarethHoskins (n.p.). Parentheses added.
71 See https://www.debeersgroup.com/en/news/company-news/company-news/de-beers-completes-sale-of-kimberley-mines.html (accessed 20 July 2017).
72 See her installations at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in 2008: http://berlinfromwithin.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/alicja-kwade-at-hamburger-bahnhof.html (accessed 10 November 2016).