Editors note: The following is a transcript of a lecture given by professor Neelika Jayawardane (SUNY-Oswego) and a Response by Sabelo Mlangeni, which was part of the "Producing Knowledge In and Of Africa" research workshop series at Stanford Humanities Center. This conversation originally took place on October 4, 2023. 

Neelika Jayawardane: Thank you all for coming here on a Thursday afternoon. What a great group. It's so nice to have a conversation … Who doesn't want to have a workshop like that? And also my thanks to Professor Cabrita and to Karishma Bhagani for inviting me to this Stanford Humanities workshop. I never know that anybody would have been reading anything I've written, so I have no idea how she heard about any of my work because I keep it low-key as much as possible. I'm always grateful when somebody reads anything I've written. I know there are a lot of logistics to planning a workshop like this, and I know you have people coming and it must be a lot. So I'm very, very much appreciative that you've made me feel so welcome. It's a pleasure to also just meet some friends that I haven't seen in a long while and a person who I've just met at Cornell just a couple of weeks ago, whose work I've been following for a long time. 

I'll start with a story because I'm primarily a writer who went into scholarship because it earns me a living. But also, I like it. During the winter of 1998, I was spending Christmas in a rural corner of the Netherlands close to the German border. In the village newspaper, I saw a tiny square image of an unusual looking building. It's a photograph of a Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa by David Goldblatt, said the caption. I had no idea who he was. And the paragraph accompanying the image explained that there would be an exhibition in Rotterdam exploring the ways in which architecture and the white supremacist project of apartheid were intrinsically tied to one another. Even though the image in the newspaper reduced the photograph's clarity, I could see details of interlaced bricks rising and turning into the curvature of the steeple. The left side of the structure which swept upwards in one continuous line was in the shadow and the curve that met it on the right faced the sun. The ascent of the bricks into the steeple created a clear demarcation between dark and light. And then there's this ragged and very subtle kind of triangle of lighter gray running between these two sections. That spoke to Goldblatt's skill as a photographer and as a darkroom technician who was a master of grayscale and Ansel Adams's own system. I knew this because I'd been photographing at the time and learning. 

Any scene before a photographer is a vista of luminance, sections of the scene, and points of interest, exposed to varying amounts of light. What we think of as exposure in a photograph as a result is an arrangement of many different exposures. Although the shutter exposure on each section of film is for the same amount of time, the illuminance of each element revealed on printed paper is evidence of varying levels of luminance at the moment the shutter is closed. This is a more recent color photograph of that church on the church's website and you can tell that is not a David Goldblatt, although this is the way that they want to present themselves. The Dutch family that I was staying with—my then boyfriend's parents—thought this building looked like a rondavel designed to look like what they recognized as a traditional circular African home with its conical thatched roof. It was so remarkably different from their own village's eleventh-century church, which they only attended at Easter and Christmas Mass each year. To me, the structure seemed to reimagine the great prow of a ship, sailing on the Transvaal high plains. I couldn't imagine then that the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa would want anything they commissioned in the 1980s to look particularly African. I knew that it would take some diplomacy to explain it. That discrepancy between my Dutch host's European ways of seeing Africa and how much that vision was shattered by ethnographic images and skewed by news footage at the time—as I learned to do in white ideological spaces, I just let that matter go. 

The exhibition in which Goldblatt's work was included was organized by the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. Its goal was to scrutinize the manner in which architecture, city planning, and the political were intertwined. It was an extensive collaboration with South African photographers, writers, scholars, editors, with the aim of providing insight into the structures that had supported the creation of South Africa's lopsided social landscape. At the entrance to the institute, it introduced the visitor to the exhibit via Goldblatt's images—small and unobtrusive. I stood before the photographs and found myself weeping. I couldn't tell you why, or for what loss. 

At the time, I had not returned to southern Africa for many years, though I had grown up in this very small mining town in Zambia. I learned about living in the precarity of being "other" before I was ten. I sought for most of my adult life to create spaces of belonging. But it remained elusive, even with that firmly situated Dutch boyfriend who came from a village with a church built in the eleventh century. They used to make fun of the next village where the uncles lived because it was a thirteenth-century church and it was a "new" church. I could not imagine then how I could ever find a space of acceptance in returning to my childhood spaces or in this body that had felt for most of my conscious life out of place. It was David Goldblatt's photographs that made me think about the possibility. I knew that the U.S., where I was completing a master's program in literary studies and writing, had made me even more acutely aware of my un-belonging. All I can say is that it was the first moment in which after over a decade of leaving my own childhood home, with only the understanding that it was a location that had no place for me, I realized that it might be possible to renegotiate a relationship with places that had little patience for the nuances of difference. The images before me showed that it was possible to begin a conversation with one's history, as impossible and displacing as it might be at times. 

This beauty contest happens in a supermarket. I thought, if this man could be so embedded in a place that closes itself off so effectively, among those who constructed an entire system of governance to secure borders around them, and if he could hold himself upright, and even point a camera at those who clearly did not extend a welcome, I might be able to do something for myself too, something other than closing it off from my life and running and running and running. After the winter holidays spent in the Netherlands I returned to my classes at the university in the U.S. I forgot that I had wept before some photographs. Maybe I didn't know how to explain it to myself, why I had been so moved, and it was easier to leave it behind and to think of it as just an embarrassing moment of maudlin affect. At the time, I had no idea that this small image in the front of the rural Dutch newspaper would exercise such a holy hold over my imagination. That first encounter led to an unexpected journey, writing about photography, and more specifically working on South African photographers. It took more than a decade before I became better positioned as a scholar to think more critically about David's photographs and to question the way Black people as well as the rural Afrikaner subjects were positioned in them. 

Photography became an ongoing conversation in my life, a passageway to transformative and productive directions in my career, my emotional and psychological development, and my intellectual growth. Today, while I'm very wary of adding to a well-established hagiography of Goldblatt, I recognize that memorable encounter with his work and the conversations I had with him over the last ten years of his life, or maybe about twelve to fifteen, back when I was a very young student without a clue and very poor direction. Those conversations were catalysts. Despite all the critical acumen I may have acquired since then, it remains my lodestar, a past event that propels me forward. I found that photographs suited me and my internal and interior self. This is how a lapsed literary scholar returned to writing, to a life of photographs and artistic worded things that could not be spoken using image, shadow, and the dark spaces that would not allow themselves to be seen. So that is the story of how I came to tell this story. 

And now I have another story. It's a story of documentary photography, or a particular section of documentary photography in South Africa during the eighties, and the role that Afrapix, the photographers' collective that I'm writing about, played in imaging the nation, only for the future to reshape their work in ways they didn't recognize and do not like, often, sometimes. It's a story of dispossession, deep and abiding feelings of woundedness and contentious remembering. In April 2014, I saw a review written by Matthew Partridge. He reported on an extraordinarily tense scene that unfolded at the Turbine Hall of Museum Africa in Johannesburg immediately after the opening of the exhibition, the "Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life," in Joburg. 

This historic exhibition, co-curated by Nigerian megastar Okwui Enwezor and South African art historian and curator Rory Bester, had finally arrived in Joburg after being shown at the International Center of Photography in New York, which is where I first saw it. Then it moved to Haus der Kunst Munich in Germany, where Enwezor became based and had a big falling out with the museum about five years later, and also in Milan, in Italy, in 2013. So it had traveled to quite a number of important spaces. It had proven to be that rare photographic mega-exhibition able to bring in blockbuster numbers through the doors, gushing reviews by art journalists in each city. So the premise of "Rise and Fall," according to the International Center of Photography in New York, was to examine the legacy of the apartheid system and how it penetrated even the most mundane aspects of social existence in South Africa, from housing, public amenities, transportation, education, tourism, religion, business, you name it, in toilets, to public seating, it was there. 

As Enwezor explained, he was principally interested in the ways in which apartheid gave us an image of political doctrine that transformed from a juridical instrument to a normative reality that just became everyday life. This expansive vision was evident in two curatorial choices. First, its decision to span the entire forty-year period under the rule of the racist national policy and eruptions of violence resulting from successive segregationist policies that were recorded by a surfeit of documentary photography. In any place that you think of as "contested," first of all, you know, whatever we call contested, including the current, it's hardly a contest when one side has far more. I qualify any time you call something contested terrain or contested ideas, because a dominant culture and one that can't hardly make its voice heard—they're not really in a contest. So second, in that exhibition, he included over 800 photographs by a range of photographers, some of them who are already household names like David Goldblatt and Guy Tillimas well as those who remained virtually unknown at the time and even now, and highlighted the exhibition's overarching ambition. And this is where I first saw some Afrapix photographers' work, for the very first time. I was fascinated by Gisele Wulfsohn's photographs of maids with their madams. That's what got me, because there were all these maids who are looking after children or looking after pets or walking with the pet behind the madam on the beach. And the madam would be walking much ahead, in Cape Town. This is a very ordinary sight even now. And then walking with ducks or something behind them, and picking up the poo, things like that, and she's in a uniform often. It's very clear who—the demarcation of class and race and all of that. And I thought, who is this? And then I looked her name up, and there wasn't much about her at the time. And I thought, what's this Afrapix business? And then there were a couple of others who were also connected with Afrapix at this time. 

And so, when this arrived, this big show arrived in Joburg, the excitement of having this exhibition returned home, as it were, cannot be overerstated. Photography enthusiasts in the country, as well as for the general public, with decades of being sensitized to photography, showed up to view the works that were "actually about us and our history," as reviewer Partridge wrote in the Daily Maverick, which is an independent newspaper which had just started around that time, around 2010 or 2012. But, as he added, the exhibition's celebratory opening was also an opportunity to scuttle for position, "for egos to flare up and for claims to be made about who could say what about the dead horse that is South Africa, which South Africa can't seem to stop flogging: apartheid?" This is him. After the press review, as drinks were being served and people were getting boozy and friendly, and also stating their positions, Enwezor reportedly faced off with one of the photographers included in the exhibition, Omar Badsha, one of the co-founders of Afrapix. What followed was a shouting match, with Badsha shouting, "You're not Black, you're just like the whites in the '70s and '80s who exploited us." Enwezor was refusing to back down even as his "handlers" tried to talk him down and tried to restrain him from shouting back. He shouted back, "Fuck you, you piece of shit. You're sick and you're not Black either." Whilst downing an Amstel beer he'd grabbed out of the art critic's hand, he was like, "I'm taking your beer," he needed to wet his throat so as to shout a bit better. 

The following day, in a telephone interview with Partridge, [Omar] Badsha explained that his position was that [Okwui] Enwezor had not respected their right as photographers to participate in the discourse of photography. He further lamented that because there had been "no space for dialogue with the curator," "our photographers' voice had been written out of history." It was not clear which photographers' allegedly subsumed voices that Badsha was speaking up for, or the reasons he believed so passionately that Edwezor, though Nigerian born with this solid reputation for bringing contemporary African art and photography into the world stage, had simply repeated that extractive behavior and erasure enacted by exploitative "whites." Perhaps these final points did not matter. Though "Rise and Fall" was intended to visually narrate the traumatic history of apartheid in South Africa, as Partridge surmised, "Overarching narratives become problematic when these different experiences of the past converge and meet in an exhibition." And, moreover, questions around ownership and "who has the right to tell history and to narrate our history" are especially contentious in a country like South Africa. People get touchy, he said, when it comes to history, we like to think we're special, that our history is different. Badsha's outburst appears to be the result of feeling aggrieved over decades over who gets to own, direct, and narrate the correct story of photography in South Africa. However, it would be a mistake to reduce his concerns to be solely about who gets to profit financially and professionally, although those are parts of it. His grievances also seem to focus on whose subjectivity is furthered, who is the curator, other photographers who are included, and their legitimate concerns and whose position in photography is centered by the narrative being told, and by whom. And we all know if you're a storyteller, if you're a writer, if you're an image person, you curate which versions, you know? Historians do this. Every time you write by yourself, you're also curating out parts that cannot belong in the narrative you want to shape. 

So that happened. That story to me, whilst I was writing it during the fellowship this year that I was on, I realized, this is how I want to open it, because in a way, even though it's a funny story, and I can do some dramatic writing, it does kind of frame how things went for this collective, though they were so idealistic and so full of love for each other. There are times when a curator and printmaking person came to South Africa sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation. And Margaret Santo and her partner, they published two books together with the photographers from South Africa. The way they described the two co-founders of this collective was like they were in love with each other. And she wasn't being silly about it, that they were in the back of the car, they were driving around clandestinely taking photographs and stuff, they shouldn't have been taking photographs of, and they had these, you know, working with other photographers, bringing them into the project. And in the back, the two of them were talking like they were brothers who were united in their vision for something. So how could these two brothers who loved each other, like Cain and Abel, you wonder what happened in between. 

Now that I know them, and the way that Margaret described it as an American who went there to do the image curation … so to say that a contentious remembering permeates every aspect of narrating the story of Afrapix photographers' collective and agency is a polite euphemism. As I tried to situate the collective within the social and political moment of its inception and early years, I realized quickly that Afrapix and its former members disagreed not only about its origins, or how it started, who wrote the first letter, who made the first meeting, whose idea was it, but also about their goals, focus, politics of the organization, if there was ever a unifying politics. Some of them say, "We were an anti-apartheid organization," like a full-on political organization that made images. Others were like, "Well, we also needed to make a living," and these fancy photographers with equipment and connections to Reuters, to AP, were flying in at this moment, because people fly to conflict zones to make money and fame and make names for themselves. They needed to situate themselves. A collective was about creating possibilities for them. And others were like, No, it's about us band of brothers, mostly, and some sisters. And so, the earliest informal discussions to bring these photographers together and create some form of photographic library took place in 1981 with the collective formally being registered as a closed corporation company, so they actually did create a corporate body, mainly for very practical reasons like any organization does, with its two founders, Omar Badsha and Paul Weinberg, becoming legally recognized as its directors in 1982. 

As with many collectives focused on anti-apartheid activities, Afrapix imploded and was officially dissolved in 1991. They had to go through legal battles because Omar did not agree with the situation. This was mostly—really, the implosion was mostly due to economic and political shifts. Many of them agreed with this, that, at the time, far more foreign news agencies were sending their own photographers with fancy equipment and with connections. And with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, a lot of those publications, including the country's main anti-apartheid newspaper, our Mail & Guardian, they're funded through other organizations. The reason that newspaper really survived was because they had funding sources. But funding went away. It was not the sexy struggle anymore. It was like, oh, you're free now, go. And then they didn't have money for things. So photographers made money through publications that would take their stuff or publish their photos. 

Since the demise of the collective the struggle has been over how the collective, its members' contributions, and particularly its co-founders', and its work has been remembered. Some actors have attempted to stabilize the shifts and differences by wresting control and presenting a singular narrative. It's complicated. Still others have been directing me on the sidelines. For a person who went into photography to be interior … I think in a way it's taught me to navigate difficult emotions in ways that I don't really know how to. And I'm learning how to analyze not just images, but other difficult things. The chapter I sent you was the draft that I'm trying to write, but all the sections that I have, that should go into sort of an introductory chapter. I was telling Joel, everybody tells you never to write an introduction first or anyway. But I'm doing it anyway, because I got all these archival materials that another photographer, one of the women, gave, but she kept the meeting minutes, correspondences, little notes they sent to each other. When I said 1981, you were like, oh, last century. They were connecting with agencies abroad. And those agencies were sometimes writing them back. And they were written, literally, on those blue tissue paper aerogrammes, because that was a paper that people used to write on because it was expensive to send a letter, this very thin paper. 

So this woman had this photographer. She thinks of herself as an activist first, and then photography is a tool for her. Her name is Jo Ractliffe, and she was part of a women's anti-apartheid organization called the Black Sash, a very polite group who just stood on corners holding signs saying, "We do not agree with forced removals." Literally, signs like this, and they just stood on corners and nobody would arrest them because they were nice aunties and grannies and they were white women. And the policemen are like, "Very bad, but you're auntie. This is not what we want. But we're not going to arrest you." They would have legal services for prisoners and detention and advise people who had run afoul of the law, all sorts of things like that. So they were very subversive, but at the same time, sort of staid. And she was part of this group, and Paul Weinberg knew her. And they used to go to places where people, Black South Africans, were being forcibly removed. And Jo was part of this anti-apartheid organization that knew where the people were, and then she would go, and Paul would go to take photographs. And then she started taking photographs too. But she's the one who kept these records. It was the women who kept the records. It was like the office assistant person, Diane Stewart. And when I went to see her—she has a degenerative illness— that woman sat me down and talked for half the day. Then I went back again. And she talked to me the whole time, and she was, like, when are you going to come back? And you know, what made her talk was because I made chutney, and I took her a bottle of it. I did, you know, I make pickles. And they were like, Yeah, so we're going to sing now. So I had so much fun with them. All these records were there. 

And that's where the introduction came because I wanted their voices to come through. I don't write like an academic, and I don't speak like one. I can't write like that. I admire it, and I wish I could, but I really can't. And this is how the story is going to be. It's a narrative. But of course, it's got all the kinds of support systems around it. But I love that there was so much of them in that introduction. And then a lot of the photographs that I'm writing about right now. And these are the two co-founders, Omar Badsha and Paul Weinberg, back when they were very, very young. They're curating pictures on the floor in their first offices. And this was like their annual general meeting, AGM, literally. And this is Rafs Mayet, the person whose other chapter I was writing, and here they are. She's the one who was the secretary and who had all the offices in person. And this is Rafs (Rafique Mayet), he was a DJ. Very cute, very cute. And he has a memory, like, I can't tell you, like that man remembers everybody's name. You show him a photograph from forty years ago, and he's like, this person, this person, and this is what he did. Did you know about this? And then he led me into all sorts of places where I would have never imagined that I could get this kind of information from. So he was actually producing Treasure Tshabalala's program at Capital Radio, it was one of the first independent radio stations in a country which controls what the news was. So it was like a remarkable thing to happen. And he was the person who produced the show. They would hold workshops for factory workers, and this is Omar Badsha's darkroom in Durban. And what they did was invite people who worked in factories, because they read about how German factory workers believed in taking photographs. The ethos was that it was important for the working class to (a) have creative practices, (b) that the camera was a really important technology that would allow them to harness technology for themselves rather than be part of the machinery that produced it. And then I think they read, there are so few things to read and available materials. 

But somebody found this magazine, like a photography journal. A couple of people have talked about it because they would share what little printed works they had on photography. This was a really formative article, nobody remembers who it was or what it was. This was his darkroom. Look at it, it's rubbishy and full of junk. And it's very typical of a darkroom. But there is something really interesting here: there's an image of Mandela—not a real image, because that looks very different from him. But at the time, having any image of Mandela was illegal, and you would be arrested for it. And they said that often they got away when they went to protest by writing his name, because technically not arrestable. Basically, they lived very communally. And they still do because I think sharing money, being very poor, and being out of resources, every time somebody gets sick or something, and you know, if there's some kind of way to collectively fund and help them. These are photographs that Rafs took. And I think that often, they're dismissed as "fists and banners" photography of South Africa, as we might call other protests and things, but I'm to find a way of speaking and the aesthetics of this. It's not about just people standing with a banner. There was an entire performance of selfhood in these protests, you know? It isn't fists and banners. 

Joel, we were talking earlier about being dismissive about photography that isn't like a gold/black kind of fantastical skill level. Or also the protest action photographs that—why was anybody photographing just the same things again and again? Part of my argument in that chapter about Rafs's work, and about the Durban photographers, many of them of Indian descent, but they were very multiracial, because that was part of the way that they really politically went against the regime, which worked so hard to separate you racially and to also create animosity between specifically those who were indentured Indians who were brought to Durban to work in sugarcane fields. Or in East Africa, this case, it's railway. In South Africa's case, 1860s, Indian people were brought, because (a) slavery ended and they were like, Oh, well, shit. Now, how do we have free labor? And there's actual newspaper writing where plantation owners write—I'm serious, I think I've quoted it somewhere here—that they actually write letters to the editor saying, "The Zulus are not good workers. They're so lazy, they keep running away. And then also, their chiefs are too powerful because they keep negotiating for better labor conditions and higher pay." And so they're like, what's the solution? What's the solution? Oh, my God, what should we do? The natives are just lazy and too powerful and mouthy. Oh, goody, let's, you know, destitute people who are now overtaxed in their own country, let's transport them across oceans so they've got absolutely no ties, and they can't negotiate. There's no powerful person to negotiate for them. 

And then indenture happened. And then there was just a literally, I mean, seriously, a concentrated effort to ensure that Zulus and indentured Indians hated the shit out of each other and competed with each other for each position. Although the newspapers are full of really derogatory stuff about Indian people. Like they're comical, they're shifty, but they're also very clever. And they're stupid. They're very not sexy, but they're also very virile. Have you seen their children? Contradictory narratives that—these are the things that used to make me just want to run the fuck away from this kind of landscape. But I think that it's helped me a lot to be able to laugh about it, because it is so funny that racism can be so stupidly self-contradictory. And you can see the purpose behind it too. And so then, it made me really love to read the newspapers. Like wow, you work so hard. Could you not work hard on your own plantation? Oh, no, that's too much to ask. 

So I do think that when South African photographers got together in the Durban cohort, specifically who in South African racial nomenclature, you know, colored, Indian, Black and white, women. There was a woman who is from a Tamil family who were merchant class. And she was a spoiled, beloved daughter of a wealthy, quite wealthy, merchant. And she was like, I wanted to study photography and my parents were worried, but they didn't stop me. They just have watched over me. So she teaches now, and she's still teaching. Her name literally means merchant, and she didn't know that. We were talking and I said to her, "You know, that means merchant." She said, "Really?" There was really a vast section from society or sections of society that were part of this group. And all of them came together in Omar Badsha's tiny darkroom to practice because they didn't have any formal training. There was only one person who did have formal training, and that's a whole other story. He got in, he had to petition, for he was the first Black person to attend the Durban University of Technology for photography training. His name was Peter McKenzie. And because of that, other people joke that they didn't know that he was Black. He's passed on now, but his wife says, no, no, they're lying. Of course they knew he was Black. He had to go to Johannesburg and get this special permission to go, which he did. But they might have been confused by his very Scottish-sounding name. So they taught each other a lot. 

And I think something did go into the producing of the aesthetics, and a lot of it, I think, is a history record. It's a record of we did this, because a lot of the story is, why did you not rise up and do something? Why didn't you overthrow this 13 percent of scraggly whites? I had a conversation with David Goldblatt during that big exhibition where there was a fight, but it was afterwards. It's actually recorded, so you can see this. He said, "Why did Black people not rise up?" I was very much younger then, and I was very intimidated by crossing him and questioning him. But I saw a young man sitting in the audience and just shaking his head. And I remembered myself in that person, just not knowing how to put your voice into somebody on stage, who has the stage and who has the platform. So I looked at him and I said, "I see you shaking your head, and I know I've been there. I want you to ask the question that's making you shake your head." And so that opened up the conversation that was about the erroneous position. David was not happy with me afterwards, so our relationship changed a lot. But it's okay. I think that's what subjectivity formation is about. If the photographers I admire and want to dedicate my now, you know, probably going to be decades of working with that. Their purpose was to do that, then I think I should have at least some courage to do that too, to oppose—I'm not opposing a political regime, but I am opposing an ideological regime. 

[JOEL CABRITA INTRODUCTION TO SABELO MLANGENI] 

Sabelo Mlangeni: We've never really met properly. But I remember this one evening in Johannesburg. I was introduced to you, because I've heard a lot about you, but it was just a greeting, and then we sort of moved on. But over the years, we've been following each other and I've been really like, you know, working … Recently you were in South Africa with  Lindokuhle Sobekwa. Just someone that I really admire, but someone that have observed working together and I'm like, the photography and the legacy is in good hands. Talking about Afrapix, I totally agree with you, starting as a photographer, with the collective, the brotherhood, so after seeing that kind of photograph, this communal photograph, now, it gave me a sense why they really want to see each other, they embrace each other as brothers and even after. And also the fact that you've been following Rafs in Durban, we've been missing each other in Durban. Because I've been between Johannesburg and Durban, back and forth. And also the South African History Online by Omar Badsha. When was the foundation? Just after apartheid? After 1994? 

Neelika: He's always been a historian. I think of his particular photography as like a historian. He's recording, recording, recording. Always with the camera. But he is. And I think the fact that we have to get funding, and he knew that he wanted to democratize access to history, and to also tell us corners of history that wasn't …

Sabelo: … that wasn't told. All those photographers, even Omar Badsha, I respect so much. And when you … gave the story of the "Rise and Fall of Apartheid," I was there in that evening, I had to walk out because I couldn't understand—I understood at the same time—what Omar Badsha was talking about, but also there was something that didn't make sense in the sense that we're in this open space. And then I had to walk out, I think I was with Nadine at that time. There's something that thinking about collectivity, and also in the South African context, but not just in the African context. 

I've seen a lot, recently, a lot of artists, it's not a new thing for sure, like coming up with a collective, but also the sense of one thing that I've sort of noticed that there's always a sense of agency, whenever photographers or artists come together and decide to make a collective, like recently we, I mean, maybe you work with Andrew Tshabangu a lot, but maybe you've heard about the collective that we recently started in Johannesburg. When we sit together, we talk about what it means to close this gap between the gallery and the off-site spaces. The galleries, they have so much power, but at the same time, I feel like all the artists want to be in a gallery. How can we as an artist come together and form a space or a community of photographers where they can just show their work? And it's amazing. Even after apartheid, it was difficult, we did have to cut funding. I've noticed that with our space, right now working together, and sometimes it's sort of liberating to have a self-funded space where no one is controlling how you tell the stories, which I find very interesting. I want to talk about a different generation, we are a different generation, but also this one thing that I've mentioned is that agency in it, and then sort of coming back and forth in Johannesburg. I don't know whether you've seen or visited our space in Johannesburg.

Neelika: I think the photographic exhibition is just now on, right? It happened right after I left. But I'm really interested in that space that you created between the gallery and a practice of your own, because you want the work to be seen and to have a conversation. It is an internal conversation, but it's also in a conversation with others. And if the gallery is controlling it, you know, galleries are businesses, and then in spaces like South Africa, there isn't anything like state funding. That kind of funding isn't available. So in the absence of state support or independent support, it has to be you. But it's also really difficult, because then where do you even get to rent that space? Or to even just produce the photographs? And to get people into those conversations? 

Sabelo: In our case, at the moment, we kind of put together whatever photographer is, we really don't have much of, but also to those photographers that they can afford for them, for them to produce the work for themselves, we've got the space. And we were lucky that we accepted it, because where we are, it was the old Market Photo Workshop. So the space existed, and it was already set. Then when we went to JBA, and the space was empty, and then they give us the space for free, because what they told us they gave us project for sure permission to use the space, but they were like, no, we also don't pay rent, we don't pay electricity. So we are able to just focus on the program. And then just making sure that photographers, and young photographers especially, have access to the space. And we also have another collective inside our collective that we work with. When you look at the formation of Afrapix, and then I think, in South Africa, post-apartheid, that was the first group. But also, what is really a collective? If you've been to Durban and you go to the beach, there is an association of photographers. Even those associations are collectives in a way, as much as they are not really how we think and formulate and think about what is a collective, but the fact that they work together, and then they have this association. They are a collective. I don't want to say that we are the first collective that focuses on photographs because I think they are associates. And I think, given where I come from, when I was introduced to photography with Mrs. Mavuso, it was a small community, but they were working together in a way so that you think really collectiveness is not how sometimes we think of it. It is an open-ended way of thinking of collectiveness. So I'm just interested in this generation. So have you really thought about like, from Afrapix, maybe into your research, to move in this kind of different forms of collectiveness?

Neelika: The young photographer, this kid is twenty-eight years old. I met him when he was maybe about fifteen or sixteen and have just been following his work since then, and all the photographers that he came up with. It is externally funded, a small photography teaching program, like an after-school program that operates out of secondary school now. They've got some cameras and people who are very skilled and amazing. They invite people because they've got enough connections with each other. I've gotten to talk to them about how to thread together the story that they want to tell, narrate that story and what's happening in the images. There's a nine-year-old kid in that little photography collective now, and it is like a training program. 

And one thing I noticed is there are very few girls, and there are lots of reasons for why few girls go. They are often burdened with, of course, doing housework and parental expectations and gender expectations and also fears about, "Will this earn my daughter any money, and is she running around, and is she not safe?" What I would love to do is set up a scholarship for young girls. Maybe that will draw somebody in instead of other things may draw them in. The outside writing projects I have that bringing small amounts of money in American amounts, but in another country, it's a lot of money. And so I think that's where, what I want to try to do, those are the collectives where I see really something happening. And this is in a township called Thokoza, this particular group of young kids who are practicing photography right now. This is a kid who's doing collages. And it's a story of his childhood growing up very isolated and worrying because his mother was at work. The only work that many can get, unless they have either economic resources or education, is as domestic workers, as maids, or working in some factory or a fast food joint or something like that. He was often isolated, and he didn't have a male figure in his home. So he cut out pictures of himself when he was a baby, very few of them, because there weren't many photographs. And he places them in conversation with others who are walking away from him, and not engaging with him. And essentially, it's his isolation. So we sat and talked about it, because, to be honest, I can see that narrative, and he can see it inside, but he was not necessarily—you know what I mean? We're just talking two different languages of visuality. And I was so moved by this work. So currently, what he's doing is producing prints. But I said, I think if you make actual collages, this thing will be amazing. Because it's a different kind of materiality, like it's layered. I mean that we're talking about collectives, but this is what a collective can do. This thing was not recognized by a gallery, you know. And he invented this. Nobody said, "Why don't you make cutouts and draw?" He knew how to draw with crayons, and he had feelings he didn't know what to do with. 

Sabelo: I remember when it started with this kind of outreach project. I had issues with that, because we go to communities and we give them cameras. And then one month later, we are all gone. And then they know there's nothing after that. So this kind of continuity… Who is the funder, I’ve forgotten. A gas company. Problematic in a way. Eazygas. I think this is kind of like going back to Thokoza. And we see I know his first body of work. But it was more self-portraiture. And he moved from self-portraiture, to this body of work, and just seeing that kind of shift. Also, looking at how people like Tembinkosi Hlatshwayo and others, where they started and where they are now. And with Jabulani Dhlamininow being like someone who's in charge, in a way, in South Africa, and instead of worrying all the time, like now when I got invitation I think they did last year. And so first they were part of the class. And then we were sort of the one with mentoring the students. I think, now the photographers that are working right now is the next generation, but also from one body of work and then seeing a work like this collage and others, it’s amazing.

Neelika: I felt so moved. And so I liked seeing that work. And I thought, this has to have space. And also because Thokoza was a township where it was over-photographed in the eighties, as a place where burning, killing between factions. And that was how Thokoza was pictured in the world and in South Africa, and if anybody says, in fact, like, the taxi driver who took me to Thokoza, was like, "Oh, I don't know, why are you going there?" I was like, it's okay. It's a school. Yeah, it's fine. It's okay. And he was like, "Maybe I drop you off." 

Karishma Bhagani: We wanted to save some time for questions. And really thank you. It's so insightful to hear you both speak about your work and your experience from multiple perspectives. So really, really, thank you for this conversation. I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to continue this, but I just wanted to open up the floor. And if we don't mind, I'd love to start off with the first question. I was really struck in your presentation, when you were speaking about sort of the histories and the division of the indentured laborers with native communities, as you know, part of what was happening during that time. And I'm curious if you can speak a little bit more about how photography then as a medium became a space for protest, or to engage both of these communities in some kind of intimate encounters. I ask this question because my work is focused on Brown-Black intimacy across the African continent, and particularly politics of indentured laborers in East and sub-Saharan Africa. So I'd love to hear more about your insights on these intimacies within photography and the curation of the work. 

Neelika: I wanted to show you, let the subtleties in, just speak to your question. In every single one of these photos, when Rafs was showing me these, he would point at somebody and be like, see that? That's an Indian. And then there's some white kid, you know, and he was trying to say, look, this is how things really were. This is a very famous jazz club where everybody … it was like last year's Rainbow Room outside of Durban, and really amazing musicians would come through there. It was segregated, but at the time, you could sneak in to jazz clubs, like jazz clubs in New York in the 1920s. Rafs was photographing these conga lines that would happen every time. It was a thing that towards the middle of the evening, there would be a conga line, and it would straggle out, and anybody could go. And he said that he used to go, first of all, to these union meetings that happened to be next door. And then he had a few frames left in his film roll, and film is expensive, and he doesn't have money. He noticed that the last few frames of many of his rolls were afterwards at the jazz club next door, because it was next door to the union meeting. He always said we were poor, whether you were Black, or Indian, we were poor and in factories. And our concerns were the same, which was safer living conditions. He himself was a factory worker in Sasol oil and gas company. Well, it does something very weird, which I don't understand the science of it yet. It used to convert coal into petroleum because the apartheid government knew that embargoes were going to happen. And they are not an oil-producing country. 

They imported this technology from Germany and started making oil out of coal. It was a very dangerous process. And Rafs started working in a Sasol factory. He was not doing photography yet. He saw somebody die very painfully from an accident, and another person be very injured. And he walked out and never came back. Actually, he took the bus to Johannesburg and he was so traumatized from it. And then Omar Badsha invited him to his darkroom, because this is the only way he knew how to recover a brother. And he just sat in the darkroom, and he learned photography that way. And that's the kind of brotherhood you know, understanding that I don't know how to, there is no healing after that. Anyway, how do I help you carry this? It's not a distraction. I think for many, between whether they were Black, whoever they were, it was a brotherhood that was creating recovery, and very much a sisterhood. He kept showing me these photographs where people in every one of these images, there are people who work across those very much engineered divides, that, first of all, colonial governments and then apartheid worked very hard to maintain those. There was one very skinny Indian woman who was working in Checkers, it's a grocery store chain, and they're trying to get a fair wage. And she said, you know, we were the people working in the checkout counters and our concerns are the same. So I think it was about uniting across class and understanding classes very much. But to overcome the rhetoric of 150 years is not a joke. It's still around. And even within the collective, within the brotherhood, it's not that they just overcame and they were special. You co-exist with your prejudices. It makes sense, right? We all know this. We know this because we also live with that. You're working across the divides and some of us—all of us—are still harboring (prejudices) and some of it comes out nakedly at times.

Audience member Jodie Yuzhou Sun: Thanks for your presentation and I read your introduction chapter with a lot of interest. And I noticed, very interesting, you left a lot of notes, by one of your informants and the people you're writing about. So I'm curious into intention of leaving those notes and how you're going to deal with that. I'm Jodie, I'm a new visiting scholar in the School of African Studies and I work on Zambia. So I'm going to ask my second question about where you're going in this. You're from a mining town? 

Neelika: Yeah, Kitwe. So the first president of the country (Kennith Kaunda) was kind of a benign dictatorship. And we used to call it one-party participatory democracy. Whenever we asked the question, my father was like, "Do you see what's happening in Mozambique? Do you see what's happening in Zaire? Do you see what's happening in Angola? You know what's happening in South Africa! Stay with your one-party participatory democracy."

Jodie: Related to that, you wrote how some of the claim of authority of this association is somehow related to the exiled ANC office in Lusaka. I'm curious about that, in terms of how to communicate with the exiled officers there and how that added up.

Neelika: Nobody in the group actually believed that Omar Badsha was communicating directly with the headquarters, because he would say every once in a while, to get authority, headquarters has communicated with me, "X." Now, it may be so. And again, I want to keep prefacing that I really respect this person, and the work he did and the work he continues to do. At the same time, there's so much traumatic stuff that's happened. And some of it may not even be recognized as trauma as much as like, "We lived through this history. And it's important for me to wrest control of the story." Referencing the ANC in exile, "Lusaka has given me this message" is a way to reference an authority that he wasn't being given by others in the collective. That makes sense, right? 

Jodie: Did you keep the records to be checked out about that? 

Neelika: Other people are saying, Oh, it's like, it's like a comical reference. Like, he used to throw this out every once in a while. And of course, no, that can't be. It was dismissed as comical. It wasn't an authority that they respected, although he thought it would bring him an authority. That, to me, is incredibly tragic, like somebody's trying to reference an authority figure that's in exile far away. That's also not possible to check up on because, in fact, they're far away in Lusaka. 

Audience member: I'd read about a book by Hugh MacMillan about the ANC in exile. So there was one point he was trying to make, as the days were closed, that I thought I was going to end, those people notice the new cycle, actually having a feeling that they probably won't maintain their status, it will suck a lot coming back. So I guess for the association people, you mentioned also about the dying of the funding, the external funding. So I guess that's the complex feeling to them that one time they're trying to claim their authority as associated with the exiled government. On the other hand, they also see their possibilities opening right in the center not coming back. And there is a change of where does the new authority arise? And that was the kind of question that I mean.

Neelika: Yeah, transition. Not everybody welcomed the exiles back. They were worried about resources. How will you fund these people coming back now that don't have … they've already been eating funds. Because you know, many of them are very poor and not living the high life, although many people thought they were living some high life up in exile. But the notes … what I've done right now is that every time somebody gives me some comments, which I value, and this is why I've shared sections, because I do want to be corrected, I don't want to write a book, that is errors that people are like immediately going to be like, "That's not what happened." That happens all the time. But at the same time, what I see from those comments are like, it's not factually misrepresenting anything. Those comments show that the mood is what they don't like. Like it wasn't contentious. It was Paul Weinberg's constant comments that "I have to take issue with the way that you are writing about it like this, I was not creating contention." And he wasn't naming who it was. But he wanted to make sure that this wasn't the mood at the time. And that I think is true. And so those notes I'd kept to remind myself, as I'm revising, that I need to show this as a conversation that is not with people in agreement. I was telling … I don't know if I got to the story. Oh, yeah, I did. I was at an opening this year in July, I think right before I came back. And one of the photographers who were part of this group who's now a very famous person took issue with a very short piece that I'd written for a photography magazine that is published in Belgium. That was the first thing I put out publicly. It was very much like a summary because it's an art magazine, it's not going to be like an academic thing. So it's like five pages. In fact, they gave me double the number of words that they agreed to, because I'd written so much. It's such a summary, you can't include everything. 

He was first of all angry that I hadn't included some of the interview with him, because he's quite a famous person, and he expected to be included. But the other part was that he was upset that I had written that another photographer, Cedric Nunn, had said that the resources were so different for Black people and white photographers, and that he knew, for instance, I didn't have a car. So how do I get to a job? Whereas a white photographer, it's just reality. There were other things, too. Yes, they had connections to agencies that we didn't. And the person who's now very famous came up and said, "Well, how could you say this? Because it's not … Paul put 30,000 rand of his own money into this agency. So how can you say that? How can you print what Cedric said?" And I said, "Because he said it. This is how he views it." And they just didn't give me space … they took out some of the parts, so part of it is just an editorial issue that I didn't get to write a book in an art magazine. But what the photographer was upset with was that he felt Cedric was, he used the words, that was pure emotion. There's nothing rational about it, while being in fact, emotional himself. And I thought that was not a comfortable situation to be in at the time, but I thought, oh, that also captures something, that what he was saying was not the story that he wished to further. 

Audience member: I'm a PhD candidate in the History Department. I have a question about the chapter on Mayet. So you've seen a lot of the photography, I guess. The photography was kind of a response to demanding specific images of South Africa, like poverty, like the only thing that's most of what you're trying to show is also like everyday lives and stuff like that. And I was just curious, was there another audience for South African photography at that time that was like African? Or was it just purely, it was just like, this is not commercial?

Neelika: It was not purposeful, it came to be by accident in that he loves music. He would go after a union meeting or whatever that were, they were doing political work, which was to record the meeting of the union. And then he went next door to have a fun time, listen to some music that he loved. And he said, "What drove me was the music." And then he just started taking photographs of musicians. Then people started to buy photographs from him. That probably is, essentially, because of the love he has for music. And he became the person who captures performances, which I love too, and I'm trying to find ways of speaking about his photography and all these performances. Because he's himself a performer of narrative. He's lovely to talk to, and I don't think that he intended to, it wasn't necessarily like, in his mind, look at these rubbish photos that people are producing, I'm going to do something counter to that, I'm going to produce a counter-narrative because they didn't, there wouldn't be those conga lines, or those factory workers or the Checkers worker who was that one Indian, skinny woman who's saying, "Damn it, give me a fair wage." The way that apartheid portrayed Indian women is docile and at home, doing their docile stuff and not protesting. And if there wasn't a record like that, I would have no such … to think about … The work that was being produced and part of it. There's just too much in here. But, there's always more stuff like, for instance, this amazing photograph of the teacher. This is in Phoenix settlement, which was founded by Gandhi. His great-granddaughter now runs it. It's an amazing place. But this was during the eighties. This is one schoolteacher teaching all these kids. And this photograph is like a repeat of a kid sitting on the floor, and sweat pouring down his face, because it's hot and there was no air coming through. This trope keeps coming up in multiple photographers, photographs, and Rafs, also, because no school photographs were even available, it was banned. I actually talked to him about it and said, was there kind of a conversation with Ernest Cole and he said that you didn't even know that, you know, we knew of him existing. And we knew his story, but it's not like we saw his photographs, necessarily. It would have been a great privilege to have had access to some of his work. And so, images like this never got anymore. This is just in this collection. And you know, every time I buy him some equipment and take it he gives me a photograph, I think I'm the winner here compared to whatever thing I've brought. I think there's other images which I can't think of right now that were strictly not things he sold. Not at all, and there was no publication taking it all. I think that in some ways, sometimes, the photographs that did sell, that say Paul Weinberg took them, they were very ugly. I feel like they reproduce that white supremacist idea of the native as a savage who's uncontrolled and out there burning shit down. There's smoke and fire and chaos. And those images are real things that happened. But you can see that same trope happening with Palestine right now. They will never show photographs of organized protests, because that would show the native had brains to organize. It's not going to be like that. 

Sabelo: And so the newspaper controls exactly what they show. 

Neelika: They wanted images. And one of the amazing things that happened this year was that somebody said, "Why don't you interview the editors from the Mail & Guardian." That's like asking me to call up the founding editors of the New York Times. I never even thought to do that. They sent an email, literally two hours later, that one of the editors wrote back saying, oh, yeah, I can come by and we can talk. And one of the things was, Afrapix people were taking these artsy images with all that grayscale. And we couldn't publish them because we had a rubbish laser printer, the first of its kind in South Africa. But it's so bad, that this kind of artsy image just looked like a soup. He used the word "muddy." It wouldn't even come up because the equipment wouldn't produce it. So they couldn't publish a fancy, skilled, beautifully developed photograph. They wanted a stock story, a black and white story, like literally a Black and white story, but also Black and white police, beatings, protesters, and chaos. This is what went on the front page. The editor knew some of my writing. So he was saying, "I know, I know. It's true. But this is what sells a newspaper, I'm trying to keep my newspaper alive." And they were an amazing newspaper at the time. So I also think images like this, like that one, and this one versus this one, which is organized. It's not that organization means everything. But to give agency and control and a plan to the native is antithetical to white supremacy. And so this photograph is not necessarily going to sell. And he was kind of dismissive. 

Audience member: I'm an assistant professor in the arts. Is Afrapix still exhibiting together? And what is the reason for dissolution? And other questions for Sabelo: you said that you've recently formed a collective. And, as you said that I was thinking about how in South Africa usually, well, historically, the reason for collectivizing has been the antagonism of apartheid, right? Like it's a form of resistance against this big state force of violence. And I'm wondering about what is the need or what are the reasons for collectivizing in post-apartheid South Africa right now? During freedom time?

Sabelo: If you're looking at the South African landscape, I think you've studied the art landscape and then there's the galleries and understand there's a few people, a few galleries that have so much power, and somehow they control the narrative of what is shown and what is not shown. Over the years that our students that comes out from Market Photo Workshop, for example, and other institutions and there are no spaces where they are able to show and share their work. I think this was when we came together. I think it was also during the time we were together in Lesotho during the mentorship, so the idea has been there since 2014, but just talking about it because there was a need for it. And not only young photographers, but we also have photographers that are working in the townships and then that we talked about maybe CS Mavuso who introduced me to photography, but also other photographers, and the way now the archives are being destroyed. And so we felt that this space is really needed, where we can go out in these spaces and try to carry out this works because, for example, when you look at a village like Driefontein which Mrs. (Cynthia) Mavuso has been photographing for over thirty years. But when you're looking at the history of photography in South Africa, she doesn't show up. There's this kind of archive that recorded the village of Driefontein where I grew up so people would come in, I think most of the question of whether we should offer the photographer, like, you move into this space, let's talk about street photography, according to us and understanding that the guy that moves in Alexandra with a camera, he's a street photographer—what happened to their work? And then especially those that worked during the time of apartheid because they were photographers that were documenting life in the townships, people just living in those times. And if you don't see that work showing up, the idea of a collective came to life because we need the space.

Audience member: I just wanted to clarify my initial set of comments. Perhaps, could it be that the movements, I mean, it is just a set of photographs that we see here that might be like a wide variety, mainly Black people perhaps standing and not moving. But I'm just thinking, could it be that these movements, this difference between them moving and this hurried or running or this activity of clashing with the police? Could it be that Black people in those frames are able to express the urgency of the protest in ways that perhaps they can't in a multiracial sort of setting?

Neelika: You're so right, I think that's true. And part of it is the urgency of it, but also when I look at news footage there are these images of South Africans protesting and then it's also a pride about it like we do not just walk, this is how we do it. If there's an aesthetic to it, there's a power to it, there's an association that is also racist with it. And so I find it troubling, and I find it powerful, I find it beautiful. All of these things that … both can exist together very much so because, again, anything to do with the body has to do with being native and being associated with the savage, because the European was very intellectual and devoid of any bodily concerns. And so, anything to do with embodying your body, saying, "This affects me and I'm going to express it in an outward manner this way, and I'm very powerful in doing so." That's intimidating, but then it has to be then converted to the language of, oh, this is like uncivilized behavior. You made me think about it, because you're the first to kind of actually verbalize it in this way. That is true that it's not the multiracial groups that are in movement.

You will see that in other countries where whoever can be any shade of Brown and Black. If it's in your own country, then it is, but it's not a multiracial group. There's two people who I know who are from Sri Lanka, who just started school here, they're young activists. I mean, every photograph that I saw in last year when people took to the streets, it's a country where my parents were born and I was born but didn't get raised there. But it is just amazing energy.

And beautiful. It's just beautiful to see that, because I think we always have been stereotyped as like a very complacent set of islanders who eat, have fun, play music, drink, smoke—good time islanders. We don't protest our conditions—but we do, and in fact, there's a long history of it. It's just that you are suppressed so violently, so horrifically, including this time. But in between, there's this, it's like seeing the ocean come back to you. And that was amazing to see that. So I do see that amazing kind of energy, embodied kind of protest, but it isn't necessarily in the photographs where it isn't. Now I have to keep looking, because I'm wondering about that. 

Audience member: A lot of the conversations have been around collective and protest or agency and manifestation, but also about how forming collectives, and you were talking about collectives coming together, and I'm curious about whether you see the photography as first and foremost an art form that people are drawn to and are using to manifest or to protest or to record, or do you think they're really coming together more for the purpose of using the art in an activism form? And I asked that primarily because I think it also does have some geographic elements to it. But I don't think it's unique, even though I think it may be more relevant in what you've been exploring. I think you see different manifestations and uses of photography around the world. You mentioned the conflict that has just erupted in the Middle East. Those are clearly curated images by any platform or anyone that's putting them out. And so it gets to this question of where is it art? Where is its agency? And what triggers that is what drew you, seeing that image of the church.

Neelika: I think sometimes some of us are technical heads, and you're like, oh, I love this machine. I love learning the machine. I had an engineer father who had a camera and loved the camera, and he'd always photographed and taught me, and I thought, I love this. I love learning the machine. But then these things came out of the machine that were beyond my love of the machine. It wasn't about learning the technical. Sabelo, what do you think? I think we're drawn to different parts of what that machine produces, including the machine itself. But we all come to photography for a different reason for visuals and narrative because I think visuals are another narrative. But I think mainly we're trying to tell the story to ourselves. And sometimes I think that part of why I was drawn to that machine was because I didn't know how to speak very well before. I had to teach myself how to do it and this machine spoke in a way that I couldn't. But I don't know that other people do the same. I think like, Jill, she was an activist, she's still like … photography was just, for me, a way to make a record.

Sabelo: In a way it's a different way of protesting. Oh, I totally agree that there is a sense of protest in how we decided to form the collective, the way we make decisions. But also I think, in thinking about how that, in that sense, also, like photographers, they work differently. And I was just thinking how then to bring the other photographers that are working differently in the sense that, what is the space that we created in a form of protesting of what is on the other side? But it's not right up in your face. What I mean is, we're now thinking about our meetings, our first meetings throughout the years, until the space was actually there. We want to close the gap. And closing the gap means that we are speaking against what is happening on the other side.