Ernest Cole: Photographer. Pioneer. Rebel. Exile.

Screen shot of New York Times’ slideshow of Ernest Cole’s photographs. © Ernest Cole Family Trust/Hasselblad Foundation Collection

Per the South African Journal of Photography Ernest Cole, South Africa’s first black photojournalist was born as Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole. He started out his photography career as a studio assistant to a Chinese photographer; it took off when he asked Jurgen Schadeberg for a job at Drum magazine. It was while taking a correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography that the staff there encouraged/helped him to start taking pictures of life under apartheid in South Africa. By tricking the government to reclassify him as a colored (enabled by the name change to “Cole”) he was able to get access to places other blacks would not have had. As a colored he was also able to sneak his images out of South Africa, that were made into the book “House of Bondage”. He never returned to South Africa, dying in exile and isolation in New York in 1990 a week after Nelson Mandela’s release.

RELATEDLY: BBC’s The Strand discusses the life and legacy of Ernest Cole [audio, 0:35 to 7:48] in the wake of the exhibition of his work in Johannesburg. Includes quotes from Cole himself as well as David Goldblatt who worked with the Hasselblad Foundation to get the photos finally shown in South Africa.

SEE ALSO: Click on the image below to view additional images that Cole took that are now part of the Hasselblad Foundation’s collection.

Screenshot of selection of Ernest Cole’s photographs in the Hasselblad Foundation’s collection.

year-end list.redux

herewith, in no particular order some observations on ideas, trends, programs, music, magazines of note for 2007 here at casa forota, organized as a randomly ordered year end list.

print: the new african literary renaissance. as heralded in the bono-edited “africa” issue of vanity fair. personal highlights:
chimamanda adichie wrote about Biafra in 60’s nigeria so vividly one would have thought she lived through the time.
ishmael beah described the crushingly depressing experience of being a child soldier in liberia (somehow he managed to survive and transcend it). dinaw mengestu intimately described the dream-crushing experience of being an african immigrant/expat in washington DC [video] in a way a lot of us can relate.

music: east african urban music arrives: although i have limited exposure to music from home, i was quite impressed with collections like urban africa club and nomadic wax’s nomadic mixtape vol. 2 east african hip hop beatdown where music from artists like necessary noize, professor jay, peter miles, xplastaz and others highlighted the fact that east african music has reached a creative watershed where hip hop/dancehall + sheng + bongo flava = globally aware music that distances itself from the pejorative term ‘local music” that has hung over the imitative music available until quite recently.

ideas: the term “afropolitan” enters my lexicon. as described by author taiye tuakli-wosornu a nigerian-ghanaian writer based in New York City, an afropolitan has a hard time answering the question “where are you from?” why? they have lived in multiple places outside africa (boston, brixton, berlin), claim some part of the continent as home (metaphorically) but inhabit a physical/mental space that encompasses all the places they have lived.

print/web: quality africa-related lifestyle/entertaiment magazines online and off: colures, kitu kizuri, jamati, mimi magazine and pan-african clutch magazine all published to highlight the doings of afropolitans in the worlds of art, music, film, fashion, business. trace (now a fashion mag) and clam were there before, but they still best capture the cutting edge of this quintessentially 21st century experience.

music: global album of the year. migration/globalization are annihilating all kinds of cultural/racial/whatever barriers. with “kala“, maya arulpragasm just dives into it all, equally embracing bhangra, dancehall, africa, australia, digeridoos, hip hop, punk, bollywood, politics, guns, violence, boys to create an album that is a hallmark of the dizzyingly disorienting cultural times we now live in. personal highlight: “hussel” a collaboration with ghanaian/brit afrikan boy sounds to me like the de facto soundtrack for new (illegal) immigrants from everywhere hustling and grinding to get a foothold in their new homes, all while trying to evade deportation.

film: ousmane sembene RIP. [ny times registration req'd] the father of african cinema, all other african directors will be measured against him. he was driven by the insight that film was the most powerful method to convey education/entertainment to africans without the formal education to read books. one of the tragedies of his passing must be that his films commenting on post-colonial african society/politics (xala, moolade, faat kine) were never seen widely outside art movie houses in cities like new york and paris during his lifetime. i managed to catch xala at a recent sembene retrospective here in NYC. if you missed it, some of his films are available on netflix.

race/television: pbs’ brazil in black and white. overt racism is receding everywhere (”it never existed in brazil”, as they like to say). however, social/economic exclusion of black folks in brazil and elsewhere is as plain as day. but how to redress this inequality using policy when there has been generations of racial mixing with african descendants and the identification with “blackness” is sometimes a personal/cultural choice, versus a genetic one? relatedly: the debate in the US on a certain presidential candidate’s blackness.

art/museums: “eternal ancestors, the art of central african reliquary“. brilliant exhibit at the metropolitan museum in NYC that displays sculptural pieces that fired the imaginations of the early 20th century art avant garde (among them picasso). inspired by these innovative, expressive religious artifacts from central africa, these artists found a way to break modern art from its representational (renaissance) roots. the exhibit runs until march 2nd, 2008 go. see it.

letter to president kibaki

open letter to president mwai kibaki on a recent assault on press independence in kenya.

Dear President Kibaki:

On March 2, 2006 government forces raided the headquarters and printing plant of the Standard Group. In addition to destroying equipment and newspapers, they shut down the KTN news station.

This latest attack follows the jailing of three journalists from Standard Newspaper, attacks on Citizen Weekly, and ongoing harassment of journalists by government-sponsored forces.

I urge you to condemn these attacks and to support freedom of the press.

[via kenyan pundit]

the politics of beauty

“It wasn’t so much Iman’s blackness that defied the fashion world of 1975; it was that she was African. She might as well have been from the moon. Not only did an African have no precedent in the business of good looks, but this one exuded an authenticity that made just about everyone else seem compromised in some way — including black Americans.”

from the book “I am Iman“, on her arrival in new york in 1975 and her effect on the fashion world in general, and the dynamics between africans and black americans in particular.

iman abdulmajid was a diplomat’s daughter and political science student at univ. of nairobi when she was “discovered” by peter beard; she must have had an inkling of how much her arrival on the fashion scene would have in upending long held views of africans, as the primitive, unsophisticated other, incapable of fitting into mainstream notions of beauty.

andrew dosunmu watch

picked up a new (to me) magazine called clam; andrew dosunmu is a primary image contributor with a number of fashion spreads throughout the magazine. there is a photo essay on cuba by another of my fav photographers marc baptiste. there is also a huge feature “kampala now” about the youth kulcha in uganda’s capital.

i am trying to find a photographic voice that at once reflects my roots while rooted in the world i live in today which is definitely not african. that is why i am fascinated by the work of dosunmu and magazines like clam (and trace and other transcultural publications) that seem to be navigating the same territory.

imperial reckoning

i just finished reading “Imperial Reckoning” by caroline elkins about the brutality that the british visited on the kikuyu (mostly) in response to the mau mau threat. the book paints the suffering of the kikuyu in the emergency (from 1952 to 1960) as “unspeakable”. many of the interviewees in elkins’ book talk of their inability to effectively use words to describe how horrible life was during that time. forced labor, random beatings, humiliation, torture, rape, summary executions, starvation, disease, family separation were all facts of daily life to the 1 million + people who were forced off their land or rounded up from nairobi and the rift valley and forced to live in overcrowded “reserves”.

i have recently been very curious about how the history of the mau mau has been written; attributing their negative image to the fact that the british were devastatingly effective in painted them as primitive savages in the press of the early/mid 1950’s. but the truth is more nuanced than that:

1. during the emergency one was either a mau mau, a mau mau suspect or a british loyalist. in the wake of independence, many of those who were loyalists inherited power and access to resources and were the real beneficiaries of wiyathi (independence). it would have been very difficult for former homeguards, now in positions of leadership, to reveal what they did during the emergency. the best strategy was to bury the memory of mau mau with the hope that they wouldn’t have to answer for the beatings, torture, rape, murder and land grabbing that they were party to during that time.

1a. related: kenyatta was no mau mau radical and was even shunned by his fellow detainees at lokitaung for his moderate views on how kenya could shake the colonial yoke. he was is no position to lionize the mau mau legacy; he was not one of them. he owed his hero status among kenyans partly to the british who so vigorously (and wrongly) painted him as the mastermind of the mau mau insurgency.

2. even within the kikuyu community, the mau mau phenomenon was very divisive. those who had embraced christianity couldn’t join mau mau as part of it involved invoking the traditional god ngai and participating in traditional rituals that they had already distanced themselves from culturally. there was also a class dimension; the mau mau oath attracted most those without land who felt this was their way to redress this problem (land is economic power in kikuyu culture). also, during that time the mau mau offered two choices; join us, or die as an enemy our cause. so, in my family’s case, i now understand the context within which both of my grandfathers were murdered; my paternal grandfather most likely for his christian faith (he was a lay preacher).

3. ithaka na wiyathi (land and freedom). that was the rallying cry of the mau mau. kenyatta and the former loyalists who formed the first kenyan government amassed huge tracts of former settler land after independence. very few, if any, former mau mau vets had the money or connections to buy this land. thus kenyatta, et al needed to “forget” the mau mau struggle. ostensibly it was to unite the country (”we all fought for independence”), and to keep settlers from bolting from the country (and undermining a fragile new economy). but it also allowed the government to shut down any talk of land reform, using the same administrative and law enforcement structure that the british had used on the mau mau. admittedly kenya may have avoided what is happening in zimbabwe today, but when i think about how much of the country is owned by a handful of people, and see an overcrowded nairobi full of young unemployed people from the countryside, i wonder if kenya is not still sitting on the same powder keg that exploded in 1952.

this book has whetted my appetite to understand more about kenya and its history. Imperial Reckoning has only scratched the surface of this, not so much because of any deficiency on the author’s part, but that so little is available anywhere. our parents’ generation talked about the emergency, reserves, detention, johnies. many homes have that painting of kenyatta being led away to jail on oct. 20th 1952. but that is about it. this is a critical part of our heritage, one i fear will go to the graves with the many survivors who are now growing old. where is our kenyan ken burns when we need one to bring this history to life and show how much more we can understand and be proud of our national heritage?

an ex-mas feast

an ex-mas feast: a short story in the current (6/13) issue of the new yorker is a fictional story about a family living on the edge on on the streets in nairobi. it is written from the perspective of jigana, a young boy on the edge of the precipice that is life as a street kid.

the writer is uwen akpan, a nigerian jesuit priest who is working on a series of stories about children in various parts of africa. he spent some time in nairobi in 2000 and actually spoke to some of the street kids around adams arcade when he lived there. he also received some technical help from binyanbvanga wainaina of kwani? fame who spiced up the story with a little nairobi slang.(new yorker interview here).

excerpt; jigana has just sniffed some glue to stave off hunger while waiting for his sister to come home with the x-mas feast.

I was floating. My bones were inflammable. My thoughts went out like electric currents into the night, its counter-currents running into each other, and, in a flash of sparks, I was hanging on the door of the city bus, going to school. I hid my uniform in my bag so that I could ride free like other street children. Numbers and letters of the alphabet jumped at me, scurrying across the page as if they had something to say. The flares came faster and faster, blackboards burned brighter and brighter. In the beams of sunlight leaking through the holes in the school roof, I saw the teacher writing around the cracks and patches on the blackboard like a skillful matatu driver threading his way through our pothole-ridden roads. Then I raced down our lopsided, bald field with an orange for a rugby ball, jumping the gullies and breaking tackles. I was already the oldest kid in my class.

travel: mozambique

nytimes travel essay: “mozambique: africa’s rising star” (subscription) includes neat slide show of images from around the country.

“After nearly two decades of civil war, the country, a former Portuguese colony – and home to over 1,500 miles of undeveloped Indian Ocean beachfront, some of the finest diving and deep sea marlin fishing in the world, and a unique Afro-Iberian-Brazilian culture – is rediscovering its place as one of Africa’s most alluring, and most relaxing, tourism destinations.”

land and freedom army story retold

the legacy of the mau mau is mixed at best. while the term mau mau is proxy for rebellion in some circles, the dominant image of the freedom fighters is of bloodthirsty natives who, unable to cope with modernity, reverted to their primitive nature. this is mostly because the story was told through the racist prism of settler hysteria at the height of the emergency in the 1950’s.

two recently published books have started to right that wrong. Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire by david anderson examines the record of those who were hanged by the colonial government to extract some facts about the time. carol elkin’s book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of the End of Empire in Kenya compiles the story from a series of oral interviews from detainees and survivors.

summary of economist review of the two books:

By calling for reconciliation in the early years of his presidency, Kenyatta understandably sacrificed the past for the future. But today young Kenyans know next to nothing about the Mau Mau uprising and how it led to independence. For them, these books are an incomparable record of what happened in, and to, their country. For others, parallels with American foreign policy today are apparent enough. The lack of real accountability, the rough justice, ignoring international conventions, maltreating prisoners, detention without trial; in Kenya the British used them all.

see also:
enough is enough a film on the mau mau struggle set to premier on madaraka day.
hot sun films produces “the oath” on the mau mau using the jua kali approach to storytelling but not to the production values.

next stop africa, redux

follow up to previous post on the fact that africa is the new source of inspiration for this spring’s fashion collections. new delhi born, UK educated ashish gupta was one of the favorites of the recent London Fashion Week using the prints, colors and patterns of africa, a look dubbed “Pop African with a sprinkling of Bollywood glitter. Then throw in a bit of vintage Americana…”

[via the fader magazine]