REVIEW ARTICLE

COLONIALISM, CONSCIOUSNESS
AND THE CAMERA
In recent work on the imperial 'othering' of subject peoples,
photography has taken pride of place. Nothing, it is argued, could

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better exemplify the intrusive colonial gaze in Africa than the
camera. A triumph of Euro-American technology; controlled by
whites; able to capture — and at the same time to rearrange —
the appearance of exotic environments and peoples: the camera
played many roles. It created 'landscapes'; it constructed the idea
of 'wildlife'; it produced stereotypical illustrations of 'tribe' and
'race'; it identified criminals in 'mugshots'; it gratified colonial
desire with soft pornographic postcards of naked African women.
Given its multiple powers, it was no wonder that the myth spread
among some African peoples that the camera stole one's soul.1
And indeed there are numerous examples of the physical as
well as the spiritual violence of photography. An example which
I have cited elsewhere is that of the German ethnographer, Kari
Weule, arrogant with the triumphs of German science, arriving
in German East Africa soon after the suppression of the Maji-
Maji rebellion of 1905, and determined to take photographs of
every 'tribal' type in the colony's South-West. Since all the
'rebels' of one particular grouping had fled into the forest, Weule
sent soldiers in to capture a 'specimen', and then put the man's
head in a wooden vice, designed to hold it still while the photo-
graph was taken.2
Needless to say, there are plenty of examples of this aggressive
use of photography in settler societies. A number of recent books
1
Among recent studies of these processes are Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Anthropology
and Photography, 1860-1920 (New Haven, 1991), James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire
Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago, 1997). Ryan is now
working on the colonial 'anti-colonial' use of photography: for example, in the
campaign against the Congo Free State, where much use was made of slides of Free
State atrocities In its own way, however, such photography was as intrusive and
manipulative as that produced by imperial power.
2
Terence Ranger, 'From Humanism to the Science of Man Colonialism in Africa
and the Understanding of African Societies', Trans Roy. Hist. Soc, 5th ser , xxvi
(1976).

© The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2001

204 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 170

have explored the history of what one of them calls 'the colonising
camera' in southern Africa.3 One of the most interesting is Robert
J. Gordon's study of the Denver African Expedition of 1925 and
its production of films and photographs of the Namibian 'bush-
men'.4 Its front cover reproduces one of the photographs: two
Americans in pith helmets, carrying rifles, pistols at their waists,
tower over a tiny old bushman, who leans on his stick with a
sack around his waist. Gordon remarks that 'the photographic
gaze is about power and domination and submission . . . The
dominators call the shots. They did and do still'.5 His book is 'an

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empirical study of the moulding of one particular other: the
bushmen'. It differentiates, however, between different forms of
'othering'. Many previous colonial photographers had produced
'decadently impoverished' images of the bushmen, or depicted
them in images 'of lifeless bodies [like] badly stuffed birds and
animals'. The Denver Expedition photographer, by contrast, took
pictures of 'stunning aesthetic merit', bringing out personality.
But these amounted to 'a systematically romanticised image of
bushmen', which required a great deal of deliberate selectivity
and exclusion. As Gordon writes:
Visitors were not expected to photograph brutal aspects of life in Namibia
. . . Photographs of 'wild', 'captured' bushmen were almost exclusively
the province of amateur police photographers; after all it was part of their
business . . . The expedition deliberately cut out the marginalised and
rural lumpen proletariat bushman majority.6
The expedition, setting out to depict bushmen as a 'missing
link' and to emphasize their difference from all other men and
women, chose very small people and ignored taller ones; chose
undressed rather than dressed; chose people with wild animals
rather than people with domesticated ones. Thus bushmen were
thoroughly 'othered'. Louise White is quoted on the back cover
to the effect the book is a 'chilling account of western culpability
for the manufacture of a vision of culture that has harmed those
trapped in its gaze'. As Gordon himself has demonstrated, 'bush-
men' have been allowed to reside in some of southern Africa's
national parks, provided that they live as 'bushmen' are supposed
3
Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Sylvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonising
Camera Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, 1998)
4
Robert J. Gordon, Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925 (Cape
Town and Athens, Ohio, 1997)
5
Ibid , 70, 138
"Ibid., 1 , 2 , 4 , 6 6
 COLONIALISM, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE CAMERA 205

to live, and do not to try to hunt with guns rather than with
bows, improve their housing, or achieve education.7
The Colonising Camera, a fascinating survey of photography in
Namibia, speaks about 'cultures of colonialism, in which photo-
graphy was implicated', and about photographs offering 'a new
form of imperial knowledge about colonial peoples'. The last
chapter in the book, however, by the anthropologist Rick Rhode,
deals with independent Namibia and celebrates a challenge to
colonial domination of the image. Distributing cheap colour cam-
eras to Namara people in Okombahe district, he reproduces the

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informal snaps that result. For the first time, he suggests, the
photographs reveal how people 'see each other', rather than being
used for imperial stereotyping. Rhode criticizes other scholars
for neglecting 'the theoretical issues surrounding the appropri-
ation of cheap visual media technology by recently "decolonised"
people'.8
It was at this point in my reading that I began to feel unhappy
with the dominant emphasis of so much work on photography in
Africa. It was partly because Rhode's 'recently "decolonised"
people' had not really 'appropriated' cheap modern cameras —
they had been given them in an experiment directed by the
anthropologist. But it was more that Rhode's colonial/post-
colonial dichotomy does not hold water. What scholars have
largely neglected until recently has been 'the appropriation of
cheap visual media technology' by colonized peoples. As Gordon
himself points out, citing Donald Home: 'the camera . . . is one
of the few cultural techniques in a modern industrial society in
which ordinary people, if in the most confined and attenuated
matter, have an active role in perpetuating in an art form some
features of their own culture'.9 Gordon does not give any
examples of bushmen photographers. Yet, as the editors of the
Namibian study admit, 'it is always possible to colonise the
colonising camera'.10

7
R J. Gordon, The Bushman Myth • The Making of a Namibian Underclass (Boulder,
1992). See also Jane Carruthers, 'Past and Future Landscape Ideology The Kalahari
Gemsbok National Park and Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Compared' (unpublished
paper at the African Environmental Conference, St Antony's College, Oxford, July
1999)
8
Rick Rhode, 'How We See Each Other Subjectivity, Photography and Ethno-
graphic Re/vision', in Hartmann, Sylvester and Hayes (eds.), Colonising Camera.
9
Donald Home, The Public Culture The Triumph of Industrialism (London, 1986), 5.
10
'Introduction', in Hartmann, Sylvester and Hayes (eds.)j Colonising Camera, 4
206 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 170

In different parts of Africa, indeed, colonized peoples have

been turning photography to their own use since before the end
of the nineteenth century. At first, photography was complicated
and expensive, and Africans did not take it up themselves.
Instead, some of them imposed upon white photographers by
taking up the poses which they themselves wished to project.
Later on, when photographic studios opened but photography
was still an expensive affair, African elites paid to have themselves
photographed in all the accoutrements of a gentleman. Later still,
as cameras became cheaper, African photographers began to take

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studio portraits themselves. Then street photographers roamed
the townships soliciting custom. Finally — though well before
the end of colonialism — African families themselves possessed
small portable cameras and were able to control the production
of their own images.
One can see some of these processes at work even in books
which primarily commemorate photography as colonial appropri-
ation, like Anthropology and Photography or The Colonising
Camera. The exceptional moments of African appropriation
which these books record, however, are the work of African
elites — of emperors, kings and gentry. The editors of The
Colonising Camera know about a more democratic photography
but cannot illustrate it or analyse it:
Families living in the black townships of Namibia have kept their own
photograph collections: studio portraits, townscapes, and informal family
shots . . . No such images have ever found their way into the National
Archives of Namibia, but from their unofficial sites they begin to challenge
the assumption of a colonial monopoly of photography.11
Yet two remarkable recent exhibitions have brought African
township photography into the gallery and into the archives, and
their catalogues have begun to analyse this 'democratic' seizure
of photography by colonized Africans. I propose first to examine
the elite appropriations, and then to discuss the process of
democratization.
The two examples of Africans using photography for their own
ends in Anthropology and Photography both concern African rulers.
Richard Pankhurst shows that 'photography was easily assimil-
ated into [Ethiopia's] traditional structures'. He writes of 'the
Ethiopian state's total assimilation of the medium', and shows
that the late nineteenth-century emperors used state photographs
11
Ibid, 9
 COLONIALISM, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE CAMERA 207

as important icons. At mourning ceremonies for Ethiopian nobil-

ity photos of the deceased were held high by mourners as they
recounted episodes of the deceased's life.12
Ethiopia was, of course, an independent state, and the
emperors' relationships with the Armenians who ran photo-
graphic studios in Addis Ababa was very different from the
relationships which chiefs and kings could establish with mission-
aries or colonial officials in imperial Africa. Yet Gwyn Prins
asserts that the Lozi rulers of the Barotseland kingdom in western
Zambia were able to win 'the battle for the control of the camera'.

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Prins argues that the dominant figure among the Paris Evangelical
Missionaries, Francois Coillard, used photography to show his
command over fractious colleagues, to produce images of pion-
eering, and to impress Africans with the supernatural powers of
whites. An early photograph shows the Lozi ruler, Lubosi
Lewanika, as a naked savage. But Lewanika learnt rapidly. 'It is
clear that control of photography was perceived by both sides to
be a valuable asset.' And, in the end, 'the Europeans lost and the
Lozi won'. Lewanika managed to achieve an invitation to the
coronation of Edward VII in London; there he presented the
image of a fellow king, wearing the most gentlemanly European
clothing but carrying the mahuta switch which symbolized tradi-
tional power. He was so photographed. 'The Lozi purpose was
to pre-empt uncontrolled probing . . . behind these strengthened
shutters, the Lozi preserved a private space in the intrusive
colonial world.'13
A similar argument is presented by Jan-Bart Gewald and
Wolfram Berger in The Colonising Camera, even for the Herero
chiefs who experienced the extremes of German colonial brutal-
ity. Gewald argues that those Herero chiefs in nineteenth-century
Namibia 'who could afford it had portraits made of themselves
and their families, preserving them as symbols of their mod-
ernised and elite status'. Chief Samuel Maherero had himself
photographed in the 'Kaiser pose', and in splendid uniform.
Freidrich Maherero's family carried photographs of themselves
as they fled from the German troops in 1904. Hartmann shows

12
Richard Pankhurst, 'The Political Image: The Impact of the Camera in an Ancient
Independent African State', in Edwards (ed ), Anthropology and Photography, 234,
236, 237.
13
Gwyn Prins, 'The Battle for the Control of the Camera in Late Nineteenth-
Century Western Zambia', ibid ,218, 223
208 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 170

that when Samuel Maherero's body was returned to Namibia

from his exile in Botswana, mourners held up the 'royal' photo-
graph of Maharero as Kaiser. 'The Herero', writes Gewald,
'consciously used photos to subvert and undermine the symbolic
capital of colonial domination'. At the funeral of Samuel
Maherero, writes Hartmann, 'the [white] photographer and the
[black] photographed negotiated the form these images took'.
These images showed the Herero as disciplined and modern.14
In West Africa it was professional rather than royal elites who
could afford to purchase themselves images. In the early twentieth

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century, West African lawyers, doctors and politicians had them-
selves pictured in frock coats, neat beards and moustaches, carry-
ing a silver-headed walking stick, or with a hand on a pile of
books. These were claims, not to royalty, but to gentility.15
The first of the two current exhibitions I wish to discuss is a
German show of African township photographers in West and
East Africa.16 This records a process of democratization. Whether
in Ghana, Kenya, Burkina Faso or Mali, the studio photographs
show people aspiring, not to gentility, but to consumption. Studio
backcloths create a three-dimensional effect with stereo systems,
and an open refrigerator into which the subject of the photo is
inserting a bottle of coke; a boy 'sits' on a painted sofa while his
brother points to a television cabinet. In the Likoni Ferry photo-
graphs from Mombasa, upcountry immigrants into town are pic-
tured with airliners taking off outside their windows and with
ships entering harbour. In bright, flat colours, these migrants
capture not only the commodities of the Western world but also
its festivals. Never was there such a tropical Christmas or New
Year!17

14
Jean-Bart Gewald, 'Mirror Images? Photographs of Herero Commemorations of
the 1920s and 1930s', in Hartmann, Sylvester and Hayes (eds ), Colonising Camera,
122, 123; Wolfram Hartmann, 'Funerary Photography The Funeral of a Chief, ibid ,
125, 129
15
Vera Viditz-Ward, 'Photography in Sierra Leone, 1850-1918', Africa, lvn (1957),
Tobias Wendl, 'La Photographie au Ghana', in Simon Njami and Jean-Loup Pivin
(eds.), L'Afnque par elle-meme. la photographie afncaine de 1840 a nos jours (Pans,
1998). Many of these West African images were shown m the 1998 exhibition, 'Africa
by Africa- A Photographic View', at the Barbican Centre, London
16
Tobias Wendl and Heike Behrend (eds.), Snap Me One' Sludiofotografen in Afnka
(Munich, 1998)
17
See also Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl, 'Social Aspects of Photography in
Africa', in John Middleton (ed.), Encyclopedia of Africa South of Sahara, 4 vols (New
York, 1997)
 COLONIALISM, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE CAMERA 209

The second exhibition took place in the National Gallery,

Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, from October 1999 to April 2000. It was
entitled 'Thatha Camera — The Pursuit for Reality: Township
Photos in Bulawayo to 1980': that is, precisely in the Rhodesian
colonial period. The director of the gallery is Yvonne Vera, a
prize-winning novelist.18 Her catalogue essay takes up all the
issues of this review:
At the turn of the century settlers were recording not only their journeys
through Africa . . . [but] alongside this are images of Africans as they
encountered European influences; the camera gaze, however, went in one

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direction . . . The camera has often been a dire instrument. In Africa, as
in most parts of the dispossessed world, the camera arrives as part of
colonial paraphernalia, together with the gun and the bible, diarising
events, the exotic and the profound, altering reality, introducing new
impulses and confessions, cataloguing the converted and the hanged . .
The photograph has often brought forth the most loaded fraction of tune,
a calcification of the most unequal, brutal, and undemocratic moment of
human encounter.
In the nineteenth century, she writes, 'photography was the
preserve of inventors and privileged experimenters'. Yet in its
twentieth-century form 'as popular mass technology', it is the
most modern and accessible of artistic expressions, in colonial
Africa as well as in colonizing Europe:
Africa's encounter with the photographic image coincides well with the
gradual exploration and maturity of this medium. We partake via this
coincidence, in uniquely formulating for our own circumstances and need
what is photography, what is to be photographed and how. We have had
the opportunity to decide which moment justifies being photographed,
stilled, preserved and circulated.
It has always been possible to colonize the colonizing camera, and
from the 1940s onwards Africans in Bulawayo did so.19
Bulawayo was the second city of colonial Rhodesia, and the
first in terms of industrial development. I am currently writing
its social history and have traced the development of photography
as popular mass technology there. At the end of the nineteenth
18
Yvonne Vera's latest novel, which is about Makokoba township, Bulawayo, in
the late 1940s, is Butterfly Burning (Harare, 1998)
19
Thatha Camera- The Pursuit for Reality, introd. Yvonne Vera (Bulawayo, 1999),
3. Two recent books on southern African urban history make use of photographs
taken of and by Africans in other cities. There is a splendid photographic section in
Paul Maylam and Iain Edwards (eds ), The People's City African Life in Twentieth-
Century Durban (Pietermaritzburg, 1996). Teresa Barnes mixes photos from the 1940s
and 1950s with photographs taken by herself of her female oral informants in 'We
Women Worked So Hard' Gender, Urbanization and Social Reproduction in Colonial
Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930-1956 (Oxford, 1999)
210 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 170

century, Bulawayo photographers were expert white men, who

lugged their cumbrous and heavy machinery around the battle-
fields of the 1896 Ndebele war, to the banks of the Victoria Falls,
to the funeral of Cecil Rhodes or to the monumental landscapes
of the Matopos mountains.20 Gradually, however, cameras became
lighter and photography simpler. 'Picture-making is so easy these
days', noted the Bulawayo Chronicle in 1930, 'when scarcely
anybody bothers about the technical side of photography'.
Advertisements for cameras in the Bulawayo press moved from
depicting strong white men to showing very feminine white

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women. In them, landscape photography began to be described
in sentimental rather than monumental terms:
Glorious Africa what subjects are here for your Kodak! Armed with a
Kodak and a few rolls of Kodak film, you may gather pictures of all that
is best in Africa as easily as a child gathers flowers.

Ladies' handbags were depicted containing secret camera com-

partments, ready for the intimate snap. A Chronicle advertisement
for a Portrait Brownie addressed a group of lightly sketched
'flappers':
You know what a 'close-up' does in the Cinema. It gives life, sparkle and
interest. It is the intimate picture; it enables you to study expression; it
is the picture that reveals character. The 'close-up' means exactly the
same in snapshot photography.

As the years passed and cameras and film became cheaper still,
the advertisers moved on from white women to black men.21

20
T r o o p e r Frank Sykes set off on an expedition in late 1896 to photograph the
battle sites of the Matopos Hills, south of Bulawayo H e travelled with two horses, a
pack-mule and a very large camera 'in search of photographic spoil'. Frank Sykes,
With Plumer in Matabekland An Account of the Operations of the Malabeleland Relief
Force during the Rebellion of 1896 (London, 1897), 279 A selection from early white
photographs showing captured prisoners, the funeral of Cecil Rhodes, etc , can be
found in Terence Ranger, Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the
Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (Oxford, 1999). The Matopos remained a favourite subject
of white landscape photographers. 'To the photographic enthusiast the Matopos have
special attractions', wrote Eric Nobbs in 1924. 'The mountains are not too large for
the ordinary camera ' E A. Nobbs, Guide to the Matopos (Cape Town, 1924), 3
21
Bulawayo Chronicle, 15 Feb 1930; 5 Jan 1929, 8 Mar 1930. European photo-
graphers also saw the potential of the African trade Mr and Mrs Turner, who owned
the African Photos Studio in Lobengula Street, specialized in African portraits. 'They
have seen during that tune how interested Africans were in taking pictures either as
a pastime or as a source for a living. Hundreds of Africans have approached them for
assistance and instructions in photography.' The Turners organized competitions 'to
improve [the African] standard of photographic production'. Bantu Mirror, 22 Nov
1958
 COLONIALISM, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE CAMERA 211

Soon black studio photographers emerged.22 A contest for Miss

Bulawayo, organized in October 1951, had African 'ladies wishing
to join in the competition' digging out 'photographs, some dating
as far back as from the early thirties'.23 The man who 'first
established a sound business as a photographer of the first order
in Bulawayo' was Jeremiah Sobantu. Sobantu gave his business
the nickname, Mahyavuza — 'money leaks through', or 'super-
abundance of money'.24
Before long street photography and the family snapshot
emerged too. In early 1950 the Bantu Mirror advertised the

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While-U- Wait Camera, which enabled the production of a picture
in five minutes, promising African street photographers that they
could 'earn £2 to £3 per day and what is more, you are your own
master'. A successful street photographer — i.e. one of those
who used Kodak film — is shown in strip cartoons dancing with
beautiful girls, who confided to each other, 'He is the best dressed
man here'. 'With the money made from Kodak pictures', he
thinks.25 Other advertisements urged young Africans to 'take
pictures of your friends with a Brownie camera'.26
Photographs were associated with modernity, smartness and
sexual attraction. The Mirror invited its readers to send in snaps,
carrying whole pages of these under headings like 'Do You Fancy
Him?',27 or 'Every young man's dream girl, a cracking beauty in
Makokoba township, Bulawayo, where such earth-treading stars
are in abundance'.28 These beauties were losing any fear of the
camera. Lovely Maina Mpofu, shown with her bicycle, told other
girls in January 1959 that 'there is no danger in having one take

22
There are some equivalents of the West African photographs of gentlemen from
this early period Thus, Revd Thompson Samkange and his family posed in a Bulawayo
studio around 1930, dressed in high Victorian style, with the backdrop of a Gothic
castle see the jacket of Terence Ranger, Are We Not Also Men} The Samkange Family
and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920-64 ( L o n d o n , 1995)
23
Bantu Mirror, 27 Oct. 1951.
"African Home News, 5 Mar 1960 The obituary dates Sobantu's photographic
business to 'over twenty years ago' Sobantu went on to gnnding-mills and hairdress-
mg shops, and became one of the richest men in African Bulawayo.
25
Bantu Mirror, 5 June 1954
26
Ibid., 28 Jan. 1950.
27
Ibid., 12 June 1954. The caption headed one of the most ambitious photographs
to be reproduced m the paper a very smartly dressed African hotel worker in a
double image reflected m a mirror Readers were informed that this paragon of
modernity was a migrant from the rural areas, who had been in Bulawayo only
six months.
28
Ibid, 25 June 1960
212 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 170

his or her picture'.29 The colonizing camera had been very thor-
oughly colonized in the Bulawayo of the 1950s. In September
1959 licensed African photographers, headed by David Banda,
owner of Flash Photos in Makokoba township, formed the
Matabeleland African Professional Photographers' Association.30
It is out of this context that the photographers shown in the
Bulawayo National Gallery have come. Yvonne Vera's introduc-
tion to the catalogue makes some telling points. She points out
that, unlike the European ladies of the 1920s, Africans disliked
the 'close-up', 'the cropped image, the head and shoulder portrait

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. . . It was something best left to bureaucracies, to the surveillance
of police files and colonial administrators'. For Africans in
Bulawayo, the photographic 'moment was whole, from head to
toe'. She also points out that Bulawayo township photographs
were different from those shown in the German exhibition. In
Bulawayo, there was no 'attempt to merge with the backdrop';
the most common background 'was a static meshed fence, with
no images in it, or a simple black cloth'. The whole burden of
representing modernity and expressing desire falls on the bodies
of the men and women pictured, and especially on their clothes:
The evocation of desire, the invention of the desirable object, is at the
basis of some of the most compelling photographs: a couple touching
intimately while looking straight at the camera: a single woman sitting
with legs clad in high heels; a mini skirt; an alluring look; fingers curling
delicately over a raised knee; the shoulder turned provocatively towards
the viewer; a hat held high on the edge of the forehead; a wig split m the
middle, invitingly; high cheek bone translucent, polished . . . Each of
these gestures celebrates a new found urban sensibility . . . It is a freed
climate. This is Bulawayo. This is the city. This is me.31
Vera's insight is a bold one. This is colonial Rhodesia, in which
Africans suffer from racial discrimination and from political
repression; in which a dreadful guerrilla war will soon be waged.
And yet it is 'a freed climate'. People are making themselves.
'The open pronouncement of love is a city thing, a camera thing
. . . so different from traditional expression and rituals of ten-
derness'. And people not only sought out the camera: it sought
out them. 'The street photographer became a predator',
appearing suddenly at the house door, sending the inmates into
a frenzy of gathering up their possessions for the photo to record.
29
Ibid, 3 Jan. 1959
30
Ibid., 19 Sept 1959
31
Thatha Camera, introd Vera, 4.
 COLONIALISM, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE CAMERA 213

Portable cameras, portable radios — and when 'the standard for

beauty became the slim figure; the woman you could carry in
your arms; the women too were referred to as "portables" \ 32
Here in the Bulawayo exhibition is the democratic African
appropriation of the photograph which is missing from The
Colonising Camera. Youth and style replaced age and rank as
the justification for representation. Newspaper photographers
pursued 'cracking beauties' in the streets of the townships.
Photographs of football stars appeared advertising cigarettes. The
comments-books in the Bulawayo National Galley are lavish with

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praise for 'the best exhibition yet'. Young Bulawayans of today
are astonished to see the poise and confidence of their colonial
forebears and equally astonished to see their grandmothers in
miniskirts. As someone wrote in the book, 'You have given us
back our culture'.
There are, however, two steps further still to take. First,
Thatha Camera by no means reflects the totality of colonial urban
culture. The democratization of the camera which had taken place
in the Bulawayo townships was incomplete. Photographs still
expressed social status and aspiration. Recent oral interviews
make it clear that only a minority of the township inhabitants
imagined that they might have themselves photographed.33 Thus
Rita Ndhlovu, who came to Bulawayo in 1958 when she was
thirteen, vividly recalls the images of the 'stiffs' (starched petti-
coats) and 'booms' (platform shoes) which were the height of
township fashion.34 'For photographs we used to go and queue
at the studio [in Stanley Square in Makokoba township]. Photos

32
Ibid , 5
33
The interviews were carried out in January and February 2000 by two third-
year history students at the University of Zimbabwe, Busani Mpofu and Hloniphoni
Ndlovu The remembered world of the interviews is very much that summed up by
Yvonne Vera. 'We showed them what dancmg means', says MaNcube of New
Magwegwe, 'me and my partner there with the rest of the people watching and
throwing in money to encourage and congratulate us . . . We would shake our bodies
to the tsabalsaba, Jive dance, having fun never experienced before. If I would stand
up now and dance for you, you would be amazed that a granny like me is still able
to shake her body . . . I was taken up with parties, the need to really feel town life'
Interview with MaNcube, New Magwegwe, Jan 2000.
34
Another woman informant stressed the importance of these clothes as a visual
statement 'One would walk confidently with one's head high, proud and confident.
With your "stiff" on and flared there just like a peacock what more would you want5
Those were good old days, so wonderful that if one was getting on a bus wearing a
"stiff" one was really seen! I mean seen1!' Interview with MaNcube, New Magwegwe,
Jan. 2000.
214 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 170

were special things for special people, so if one was seen by

neighbours at the studio in the queue one would feel proud and
civilized and the neighbours would be looking up to him or her
as one would have been seen doing something for civilized
people.'35 Other informants, less able to spend their money on
clothes, recall that they were never photographed, but merely
entertained themselves by watching the fashionably dressed men
and women queuing in Stanley Square.36 Yet others, illiterate and
low-paid, could not attempt display or seek to establish an image
and had to submit to one being imposed upon them. Diki

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Maphosa, who came to Bulawayo in 1928 when he was fifteen,
had no schooling and worked as a sweeper. 'I was never photo-
graphed during my stay in Bulawayo', he says. 'My first time to
be photographed was when I was in South Africa when the system
of passes was introduced. '3?
To be photographed, then, was to assert and achieve status. In
1959, for instance, a group of elite African women formed the
Bulawayo African Township Women's Association. These were
very much women with photographs on their walls. But they
recruited less-educated women, and one of the inducements they
held out to them was the opportunity to be photographed:
This week's general meeting seemed to the women to be extraordinarily
important [it was noted in March 1960] because last Tuesday a member
of the photographic section of the African Administration, Mr Memo
Kumalo, was good and kind enough to take a very nice photo of all the
women of the Association . . . The women are absolutely very delighted
with their having been photographed so splendidly.38

There is a second point to make. Yvonne Vera emphasizes that

what was being constructed in the Bulawayo township photo-
graphs was 'a city thing'. Maybe Rick Rhode is right after all in
thinking that the taking of snaps in rural Namibia is a post-
colonial phenomenon; right to suppose that the rural areas can
only now construct for themselves 'a free climate'. I doubt it. I
35
Interview with Ritah Ndlovu, Entumbane, Feb. 2000
36
Interview with Tanyanyiwa Kadungure, Makokoba, Feb 2000; interview with
Mrs L Mlotshwa, Makokoba, Feb. 2000 Mrs Mlotshwa came to Bulawayo in 1946
when she was nineteen and worked as a domestic; she did not wear 'stiffs', did not
attend concerts or dances, and 'never went for photographs, so I don't have any old
pictures'. She and informants like her never attended film shows either I have not
included here the fascinating debates about township film shows, because these
remained very much for Africans rather than by them.
37
Interview with Diki Maphosa, Makokoba, Jan 2000.
38
African Home News, 5 M a r 1960
 COLONIALISM, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE CAMERA 215

have come across no study of rural photography, and certainly

no exhibition of it other than the one organized by Rhode him-
self in what he calls 'the distanced, genteel and sterile . . . world
of [Windhoek's] urban art gallery'. (The National Galley in
Bulawayo does not seem to be distanced and sterile, nor very
genteel. Yvonne Vera writes that the township owners of photos
'came physically to the gallery, brought photographs wrapped in
milk bags and torn handkerchiefs . . . offered narratives to accom-
pany each image, shared secrets.') Yet everywhere in Zimbabwe's
rural areas I have seen photographs. Sometimes, admittedly, these

Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ at New York University on July 8, 2015

are urban images of snappy clothes and girlfriends, brought back,
almost furtively, by labour migrants, who keep them hidden away
from their wives. But often they are quite explicitly rural images:
the photographs of a prophetic founder of an independent church,
taken in the 1930s and now adorning the walls of the houses of
his grandsons; the photographs of ceremonial occasions hanging
in the house of a chief; the wedding photographs which are as
ubiquitous in the countryside as in the town. (Indeed, the majority
of photographs of what the Bantu Mirror always described as
'another pretty wedding' came from the rural areas.) Maybe in
the next ten years somewhere in Africa we shall have an exhibition
of rural photographs as revealing as the Bulawayo exhibition of
urban ones. Then we shall begin to understand how profoundly
the photograph was taken up by, and how much it shaped,
colonized Africans.

University of Zimbabwe Terence Ranger