Priya Ramrakha’s lost futures: a pan-African archive

Abstract

Kenyan photographer Priya Ramrakha (1935–1968) has come to recent attention with the recovery of his vast archive in Nairobi. Ramrakha was among the first generation of African photojournalists to cover the continent’s anti-colonial and independence movements, as well as photographing in the US and Europe. He depicted young Kenyans protesting colonial rule, an emerging iconography of leaders and activists in Kenya in the late 1950s, the civil rights era US in the early 1960s, and would go on to cover extensively the frontlines across the continent through the decade. This paper considers a stream of Ramrakha’s imagery from the mid-1950s, during Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion, and through the 1960s, as he covered anti-colonial conflicts and military takeovers post-independence that followed in Aden, the Congo, Rhodesia, Zanzibar and Biafra. Ramrakha focused relentlessly on everyday people caught up within larger patterns of political violence – portrayals of which may merit as calls to attention and urgency, but also raise questions for larger demand for such imagery by the international press. Within his pan-African account of the 1960s, there are striking images of international solidarities and points of optimism, but his larger record is strikingly ambivalent with his deepening coverage of Biafra. The scepticism of image and narration overshadows the earlier optimisms in Ramrakha’s frontline photography, particularly evident in his own contact sheets and photographic records in contrast to the editorial stance and selections, such as those published in Time and LIFE.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] Germane discussion of the relations between photography, statuses, and the colonial and decolonial past include Sontag (1977, 2003), Minh-Ha (1990), Azoulay (2012), Butler (2009), Hayes (1998, 2011), Broomberg and Chanarin (2008), Cole (2016), Stultien’s collaborations and books (2010 to the present, http://www.andreastultiens.nl/ebifananyi-books/), Enwezor (2001), Brown and Phu (2014).

[2] Film-maker Shravan Vidyarthi began to recuperate Priya Ramrakha’s archive in Nairobi in 2004. An account of Ramrakha’s life and work is discussed in Viyarthi’s documentary film African Lens: The Story of Priya Ramrakha (2007). Vidyarthi and the author curated the first travelling exhibition of extracts from this archive, Priya Ramrakha: A Pan-African Perspective 1950–1968 which opened at the University of Johannesburg in October 2017, see also the forthcoming volume Priya Ramrakha (Haney and Vidyarthi 2018).

[3] The Colonial Printing Press ran papers in English, Gujerati, Luo and Swahili. Editor Henry Muoria decried state-backed outlets like the East African Standard: ‘Some (papers) are given free…because they want the African to read just what they think that the African should know and no more…(but) Africans are wide awake’ (Mumenyereri, 14 July 1948). See Frederiksen (2011) and Gadsden (1980, 158). Pictorial weeklies like the Swahili Picha, created by the state, ‘provide reading material for the African without any danger of its becoming a vehicle for seditious propaganda, as is unfortunately so often the case with African newspapers at present’ (5 May 1947, Kenyan National Archives, 2/295). Demand for independent weeklies exceeded circulated print runs of 10 000 weekly (Gadsden 1980).

[4] ‘To earn money, Priya’s earliest assignments were for the British press, but he also photographed for his uncle’s rebellious newspapers. He sometimes covered the same story but for different publications, and you can clearly see the difference between the way the colonial government used photography to expand their agenda, and the way in which Priya’s pictures presented the injustice faced by the Africans’, Anil Vidyarthi (in Vidyarthi 2008).

[5] These photographs also appeared in the British press under quite different editorial contexts. His images would later appear in the Kenyan edition of Johannesburg-based Drum magazine, managed by South African Editor G.R. Naidoo after its precarious start in 1954 (Bailey and Cooper 1993). Tracing Ramrakha’s early photography in Kenyan outlets is difficult as many papers including the Colonial Times rarely credited photographers. Private family records and Ramrakha’s scrapbooks in the Priya Ramrakha Archive contain clips of his own photography published locally.

[6] G.L. Vidyarthi and Sohan’s sedition convictions in 1946 were seen as a significant blow to colonial Kenya’s freedom of the press, but the Colonial Times’ editorship persisted until the laws shut down non-European presses effectively in 1952, Haroon Ahmed, 22 September 1978 (interview in Seidenberg 1982, 107; Gadsden 1980).

[7] In the late 1940s Kikuyu people started to ally themselves in secret societies against the imperialists, their grievances focused on expropriated land, and they attacked the structures of colonial rule, including European settlers, and loyalist Kikuyu chiefs; so Mau Mau was both anti-colonial rebellion and civil war (Anderson 2005). See Berman and Lonsdale (1992) and Elkins (2005).

[8] See also http://www.britishpathe.com/video/mau-mau-lari-massacre-trial.

[9] ‘Progress report: information drive to the Kikuyu, Meru and Embu’, October 1953, The National Archives, CO 1027/40 (Osborne 2015, 82–83).

[10] Predominantly these were Kikuyu people; from there, 20 000 Kikuyu were moved to another camp at Langata, 30 000 women and children were forced onto remote and overcrowded reservations (Anderson 2005, 289–327).

[11] Coverage includes web-archived photography by Keystone, Stroud, Popperfoto, Central Press, Bert Hardy, Three Lions Picture Agency, George Pickow, Ullstein bild, Transafrica Press and Black Star agencies.

[12] Numbers are disputed given the deliberate destruction of so many colonial records: Mau Mau killed at least 2000 civilians and another 200 police and army; 32 white settlers were killed. The British hanged more than 1000 Kikuyu and killed possibly 20 000 in combat (Anderson 2005). Anderson (2012) and Elkins (2005) concur that at least 150 000 innocent Kikuyu were detained in camps, though it is not clear how many died from starvation, torture and hard labour; Elkins claims 100 000, but this based on contested numbers drawn from census data. See Porter (2005).

[13] Photo opportunities of white armed settlers and police pointing guns at ambushed African men, or scenes of a white woman learning how to use a handgun (Elkins 2005) have yet to be explored in relation to the settlers accounts and calls for mass extermination of Kikuyu people at the time, including their circulation; accounts are abundantly published and discussed in Anderson (2005). Photographic evidence of the rampant extrajudicial violence, as with Colonial Office orders and documents, were destroyed by order of the Colonial Office in bonfires as the British readied for independence. Jomo Kenyatta agreed to the destruction of documents, keen to provide unity and erase the past. Very few contemporary documents survive, though many contemporary accounts and books and oral histories circulated afterwards (Anderson 2005; Elkins 2005; Ogot 1995; Ogot 2003; Thiong’o 1997; Kariuki 1975; Cobain, Bowcott, and Norton-Taylor 2012).

[14] Bildad Kaggia, Kung’u Karumba, Jomo Kenyatta, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei and Achieng’ Oneko were tried in Kapenguria in 1952–1953.

[15] Bailey and Cooper (1993, 57); Editor G.R. Naidoo and the Drum staff in Kenya were very tightly controlled and threatened with exile, they were unable to publish much current information as it happened, and photographs of controversial topics were published only years later.

[16] Oginga Odinga, Daniel arap Moi, Ronald Ngala, Julius Kiano, J.M Nazareth, Arvind Jamidar, K.D. Travadi, Zafr-ud-Deen and Tom Mboya.

[17] Mboya organised the Airlift Africa project in 1959, which flew 81 Kenyan students to universities in the US. In the following years (1960–1963), the airlift was extended to hundreds of students in present-day Uganda, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. The Foundation defrayed costs for students including Barack Obama Sr and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai.

[18] ‘He knew very well that he was one of the few people that was going to be taken on that way, and hired by Life and by Time magazine. He knew (as an) Indian from Kenya (this) wasn’t what the corporate world back in the United States was hiring at the time.… He insisted on a good contract, saying ‘I know I’m good, I know I’ll deliver the goods for them’ (Arnold Amber interviewed in Vidyarthi 2008).

[19] Paul Theroux interviewed in Vidyarthi (2008). Fellow journalists including Morley Safer noted remarked that Ramrakha was the only one in their corps who was not only ‘local’ but could travel.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin Haney

Erin Haney is currently working on a book on Priya Ramrakha, and curated a travelling exhibition in Johannesburg with Shravan Vidyarthi in 2017. Recent projects include west African archive collaborations with Resolution (www.resolutionphoto.org), and curating Sailors and Daughters for the Smithsonian http://indian-ocean.africa.si.edu/. Erin teaches photo, film, art and new media histories in Washington, D.C., and she is Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg.