Queering the nation, querying the history of Black portraiture: Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama as a healing ritual

Among South African artist and ‘visual activist’ Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits, the series titled Ntozakhe (Parktown) contains two main interwoven narratives, both of which have their foundations in South Africa’s racial capitalism, and its dependence on instrumentalised, disposable Black bodies for labour. One thread foregrounds the armies of maids or ‘domestic workers’ necessary for maintaining Parktown’s expansive homes; the second, the mining wealth that gave rise to the Randlords¹‘Randlord’ is a term used to white mining magnates in the Southern African region, who made millions through their investments in diamond and gold mining industries in South Africa, when these industries were in their boom years phases – from 1870s up to World War I. They monopolised the mining industry in the Witwatersrand (thus, ‘Rand’ lord) in Transvaal Province (now Gauteng); many built mansions and set up residence in Parktown. and their mansions in Parktown, Johannesburg – itself built by the steady stream of Black men from rural areas, consumed by the dangerous labour of deep mine work necessary for producing this city’s wealth. Together, they lay bare the country’s deeply unequal structures, and the violence necessary for constructing White wealth, exclusivity, and luxury.

The gold reef’s hunger for cheap workers was fed by the migrant labour system – a result of more than a century of systematic land dispossession created by a series of ‘Land Acts’ and ‘Group Areas Acts’. These legal edicts were the bulwarks supporting racially stratified access to land, initiated by Cecil Rhodes and British colonial rule, and expanded under apartheid. They gave successive sets of White rulers, both colonial and elected by a White minority, the power to force off rural Black communities from vast tracts of arable land – which, for generations, had been successfully farmed and used for raising livestock – in order to make way for white farmers. Some estimates place the number of those dispossessed of land, between 1960 and 1983 alone, at well over three and a half million.²Platzky and Walker, quoted in Cheryl Walker, ‘Redistributive land reform: for what and for whom?’, in Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ruth Hall (eds), The Land Question in South Africa: The Challenge of Transformation and Redistribution, HSRC Press, Cape Town, p. 136. Landlessness – and resultant rural poverty and hunger – fed the conduit from rural to urban, supplying the disposable labour needs of the apartheid city’s economy.

Ntozakhe (Parktown) I and II are part of the series, Somnyama Ngonyama – meaning ‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’ in isiZulu. In each, Muholi’s figure – their skin tone darkened to a caricatured version of blackness, head topped by a crown made of scouring pads – holds all of that history (and present) of South Africa. Each self-portrait in the series also incorporates Muholi’s personal trajectory – their formative years in Umlazi, in Natal Province (today, Kwa-Zulu Natal), where they were born in 1972, to parents whose lives reflected the limited options available to Black people under apartheid. Muholi’s father, Ashwell Tanji Banda – who died within a few months of Muholi’s birth – had been a tradesman who took on whatever secondary jobs were available. Bester, Muholi’s mother, was a domestic worker who cleaned homes for white families, and – owing to the distance between where she lived and the work available to her – had to leave her children to be taken care of by another family member.³Zanele Muholi, interview with M. Neelika Jayawardane, personal interview, Syracuse, 29 Aug. 2015.

Each detail in this photograph – the contours of Ntozake’s cheekbones and brow, the drawn worry-line between their nose and lip, the turn of the neck cascading towards an unveiled section of the upper body – narrates the difficult relationship between South Africa’s unjust system of labour, the role that photography has played in creating racialised and ‘othered’ subjectivities, and the limitations of photographic technologies when it comes to photographing darker skinned people. It is a narrative about the continued difficulty of imaging Black persons as three-dimensional, complex figures, given the problematic history between photography, photographers, and Black, colonised, and ‘othered’ people.

The way in which Ntozake is positioned and clothed also references (and defies) the ways in which networks of power, visuality, and art history – from far beyond South Africa’s borders – determined how beauty would be seen, and who would be commemorated through portraiture. Ntozake’s upper body – turned three-quarters – is draped in soft folds of fabric that remind of Grecian robes, alluding to ‘Classical’ tropes, and the dictates of the European canon of idealised beauty. Each element in the portrait – suggesting recognisable, Eurocentric art history tropes – challenges audiences to pause, and re-position those whose racialised ‘otherness’ historically excluded them from the continuum of idealised beauty. At the same time, Muholi’s careful framing of Ntozake lightly mocks those who are only able to see beauty through such rigid, and impoverished received notions.

Understanding South African labour history will leave audiences with little doubt that Ntozakhe – which, in Zulu, means ‘she who comes with her own things’ – must have learned to arm themselves with a fortitude and vision necessary for surviving the damage that apartheid’s racial geographies inflict on Black persons, and on Black women, in particular. Understanding the history of photography allows audiences further insights into the subtler ways in which Muholi works as a visual activist. The expression on Ntozakhe’s face – disengaged, and impenetrable to the camera’s inquiring gaze – extricates itself from requisite requirements for Black people: to be open for inspection. Though they may have been flattened by the lens of racism, and seen solely for their ability to fulfil their instrumentalised function, here, in this portrait, they reframe and reposition their subjectivity. In the presence of Muholi – a portraitist who is able to see their three dimensionality and depth – Ntozake is illuminated, making their powerful presence more visible, real, and beautiful.

Queering and querying photography

Muholi now uses the pronoun ‘they’ rather than ‘she’. Referring to oneself gender neutrally challenges the historical weight of hetero-patriarchal expectations and the limitations of seeing gender in solely binary terms. Unlike many colonial languages imposed on Southern African countries, isiZulu does not use gendered pronouns. But, as Muholi has pointed out, Zulu culture – or how ‘Zuluness’ has been amalgamated, in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries – did not move to encompass words for ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, or incorporate language to recognise ‘other’ sexualities or gender identities. Thus, when Muholi first came out ‘as a same-gender loving person’, they were identified as a ‘lesbian’, ‘because there was no Zulu name for it’.⁴Raquel Willis, ‘Zanele Muholi forever changed the image of Black queer South Africans’, 23 Apr. 2019, Out, www.out.com/art/2019/4/23/zanele-muholi-forever-changed-image-black-queer-south-africans, accessed 5 Jul. 2021. Now, in order to ‘avoid being confused by what the society expects out of us’, in recognising gender fluidity, and in making the decision to ‘move on, transpire, transgress, and transform’, Muholi simply identifies ‘as a human being’.⁵ibid.

As journalist Mark Gevisser notes, for Muholi, using the pronoun ‘they’ rather than ‘she’ also became a way to ‘decolonise’ the mind and body from ‘the strictures of both gender and racial identity’.⁶Mark Gevisser, ‘Zanele Muholi: dark lioness’, 5 Jun. 2018, The Economist, www.1843magazine.com/culture/zanele-muholi-dark-lioness, accessed 5 Jul. 2021. This choice was part of their reassessment of self, in relationship to the world. Being the visual chronicler of violently suppressed history, the bearer of a multitude’s painful experiences, the caretaker of emotional, psychological, and financial needs for a queer nation had, inevitably, enormous consequences on their health and well-being. Moreover, as Gevisser explains, ‘being called ‘ma’am’ or ‘mama’ or ‘girl’ and similar ‘[f]emale pronouns or honorifics’ can be wearing; it can have the effect, as Muholi wryly explained to him, ‘of either “saving you or disrespecting you”’. However, having to have to ‘“lose your femalehood”’ as part of the negotiation for creating respectful and necessary boundaries seemed like being asked to excise an essential part of the self.⁷ibid. Rather than amputate any part of one’s makeup, the pronoun ‘they’ – signifying a multitude – also offered a way to politically, socially, and spiritually resituate the self; it became a way to recognise the collective of fellow travellers accompanying Muholi on her journeys, and way of calling their ancestors into presence; it is to say, ‘ “I am not [just] one. I come with many forces” ’.⁸ibid.

From the beginning of their career, Muholi’s photographic projects have focused on ensuring that LGBTQI people – and ‘othered’ sexual and gender expressions – were proudly visible, as an army of companions, defying social expectations that they remain unseen. During the first decade of the 2000s, Zanele Muholi’s name had become synonymous with their remarkable, long-term cartographic project, Faces and Phases. Faces and Phases is a portrait series created between 2007 and 2014, ‘commemorate[ing] and celebrat[ting] the lives of the black queers’ Muholi met during their journeys throughout South Africa.⁹Zanele Muholi, ‘Faces and Phases’, Michael Stevenson Gallery, 2010, archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/facesphases.htm, accessed 5 Jul. 2021. This commemoration and celebration allowed Muholi to make a counter-record, making visible those that the camera, and the country’s visual history had made invisible. The project documents Muholi’s continuing conversations – as a ‘visual activist’ – with a whole extended family of South African Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex (LGBTQI) people they have interacted with over many years.¹⁰ibid. Faces and Phases became globally recognised for subverting ‘in subtle and knowing ways, many of the well-worn images of the colonial and apartheid representational archive’ that spectacularised and displayed Black persons for White consumption, often using ‘the thinnest veneer of scientific interest’ – while, at the same time, quoting from ‘tropes of photographic representation of African women’.¹¹Andrew van der Vlies, ‘Queer knowledge and the politics of the gaze in contemporary South African photography: Zanele Muholi and others’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 24, no. 2, 2012, p. 142. Several scholars have written about Muholi’s documentary portraits of Black LGBTQI South Africans, using queer theory to analyse Muholi’s ‘visual activism’ and LGBTQI political work as queer labour and nation-building work.¹²Pumla Dineo Gqola, ‘Through Zanele Muholi’s eyes: Re/imagining ways of seeing black lesbians’, in Sophie Perryer (ed.), Only Half the Picture, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 2006, pp. 82–9; van der Vlies, pp. 140–56; Z’étoile Imma, ‘(Re)visualizing Black lesbian lives, (trans)masculinity, and township space in the documentary work of Zanele Muholi’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 21, issue 2, 2017, p. 229, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10894160.2016.1172437; Aronson, 2012; Salley, 2012; among others. As Posel points out, ‘given [the] extremities’ of repression of any discussions about sex and sexuality during aparthied, changes in attitudes post-1994, wherein ‘sexuality has become the site of right in a number of ways’ were ‘nothing short of dramatic’.¹³Deborah Posel, ‘Sex, death and the fate of the nation: reflections on the politicization of sexuality in post apartheid South Africa’, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, 75, no. 2, 2005, p. 129. The fact that Muholi’s work, depicting same-sex intimacies, love, and even sexual desire, was being seen in public spaces during the early 2000s – despite the severity of pushback back by individuals and by representatives of the ruling African National Congress¹⁴In March 2010, Lulu Xingwana (then Minister for Women, Children and People with Disabilities) was invited to speak at the opening of a group show at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg; the exhibition showcased artworks by young Black women artists. Xingwana walked out of the gallery after viewing pictures of women engaged in intimate embraces. She stated that ‘Our mandate is to promote social cohesion and nation-building. I left the exhibition because it expressed the very opposite of this’; she added that the images were ‘immoral, offensive and going against nation-building’. (See: ‘Lulu Xingwana describes lesbian photos as immoral’, South African Mail & Guardian, mg.co.za/article/2010-03-03-lulu-xingwana-describes-lesbian-photos-as-immoral/, 3 Mar. 2010.) In 2012, Muholi’s Cape Town flat was broken into, and ‘more than 20 hard drives containing years of documentation: photography, video, interviews’ were stolen. Because nothing else was taken, Muholi maintains that this was a targeted hate crime. (See: Matt McCann, ‘Theft stalls, but does not stop, a project’, The New York Times, lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/theft-stalls-but-does-not-stop-a-project/, 23 May 2012.) – was extraordinary; it was illustrative of ‘the extent to which sexuality [was] thrust into public prominence, in ways which would have been absolutely unthinkable and intolerable during the apartheid.¹⁵Posel, p. 129.

In those years, Muholi’s work became an intrinsic part of nation-reconstruction, situated, as Munro writes, in idealised hopes for being part of a transnational, ‘post-racial’, ‘Rainbow Nation’ future.¹⁶Brenna Munro, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2012. As Muholi points out, though ‘black lesbian voices began to emerge’ after 1994, ‘the mainstream archive and the women’s canon lack[ed] visual, oral, and textual materials that include[ed] black lesbians and the role they have played in our communities’.¹⁷Zanele Muholi, ‘Faces and Phases’, Transition: An International Review, no. 107 (Oct.), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2011, p. 113. Moreover, as Muholi points out, few South Africans imagined the possibility of LGBTQI people having ‘contributed to the struggle for freedom’.¹⁸ibid. Today, it may seem impossible to deny the presence of LGBTQI people in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement; but these presences have not been established through research, as othered gender expressions and sexuality were not deemed acceptable in the underground movement, or in Umkhonto we Sizwe (the ANC’s clandestine military wing); even among ‘liberal’ anti-apartheid circles, LGBTQI people were rarely ‘out’, publicly. For these reasons, the presence of LGBTQI people and their contributions remain matters of speculation, one of the many silences in South African history. Muholi sought to counter that invisibility, marginality and systemic silence, and to include LGBTI people to the forefront of South Africa’s continuing liberation narrative – as it exists today – by creating this present-archive of ‘visual, oral and textual materials that include black lesbians and the role they have played in our communities’.¹⁹ibid. As part of Muholi’s portrait-making practice, which involves visiting ‘participants’ in the project again and again over many years to meticulously document their experiences, they also collected first-hand accounts that bear witness to the schizophrenic experience of living in a nation where LGBTI people are often the targets of violence – despite the fact that South Africa’s progressive constitution specifies that it protects the rights of LGBTI people. As they explained, in an artist statement for an exhibition in 2010, ‘Faces expresses the person, and Phases signifies the transition from one stage of sexuality or gender expression and experience to another’ and ‘articulates the collective pain we as a community experience due to the loss of friends and acquaintances through disease and hate crimes’.²⁰Muholi, 2010.

Yet, one always has to negotiate between the political and social power that visibility can give one, whilst being aware of one’s threatening, ‘othered’, and hyper-visible position. Writer Pumla Dineo Gqola argues that Muholi’s portraiture projects are less concerned with creating more visibility for queer, Black, and ‘othered’ racialised and gendered persons, ‘than [they are] about engaging with regimes that have used these [‘othered’ bodies’] hypervisibility as a way to violate them’.²¹Gqola, p. 84. Questioning the politics of creating visibility as the sole means of responding to discriminatory practices towards ‘othered’ groups is especially important, given the context of South Africa’s racialised history; simply making oneself visible – even on one’s own terms – when hypervisibility has been used as a punitive tool, is problematic. As Muholi clarifies, their difference as Black and LGBTQ people invited violence, and their ‘existence…[seemed to] interfere with so many people’.²²Raquel Willis, ‘Zanele Muholi forever changed the image of black queer South Africans’, Out, 23 Apr. 2019, www.out.com/art/2019/4/23/zanele-muholi-forever-changed-image-black-queer-south-africans. The ‘interference’ that Muholi speaks about signifies the ways in which queerness unsettles the social landscape of heteronormativity. Drawing attention to and creating hyper-visibility around that which was (and continues to be) regarded as ‘queer’ also invites policing, exclusion, and punitive corrections of expressions of gender and sexual difference.

If creating a sense of intimacy between the spectator-audience and the subject in a portrait is central to traditional notions of portraiture, Muholi’s documentary photography and video works trouble this premise. Their portraits of LGBTIQI South Africans boldly establishes that subjects in photographs also have the power to look – to return and hold the gaze – and to refuse audiences an easy entry into the lives of those they look at. Sizemore-Barber argues that in the video work EyeMe, 2012 – a work in which several rows of eyes stare back at the viewer, which has been included in exhibitions of Muholi’s documentary portraits of LGBTIQI South Africans – the ‘exchange of looking between the looker and the looked at, provides the illusion of intimacy, of contact between Muholi’s subjects and her audiences’.²³April Sizemore-Barber, ‘Prismatic performances: queer South African identity and the deconstruction of the rainbow nation’, PhD diss., University of California-Berkeley, 2013, p. 80. At the same time, ‘the longer the spectator stares’ at the rows of eyes that stare right back, the more they are ‘confronted with the realization that any sense of intimacy is, in fact, a projection of [their] own desires’.²⁴ibid.

In the second decade of the 2000s, as violence towards LGBTQI people in South Africa became more horrific and more prevalent – or was made more visible by activists – Muholi’s documentary project cataloguing LGBTQI individuals became an essential tool for exploring the complex possibilities queerness offered – beyond the platitudes of ‘Rainbowism’ – in debates about nationhood, belonging, and citizenship. Their work, and its ‘fate in certain public spaces…raise[d] questions not only about the judgement – and tolerance – of the new custodians of national cultural identities in South Africa’, and spoke ‘to tensions between the body politic and the biopolitics of the black body, the ethnos and the cosmopolitan, the autochthonous subject of tradition, and the queer agent of Utopian possibility in the postcolony’.²⁵van der Vlies, p. 141. Through ‘queering’ dominant narratives of ‘national identity or collectivity that are unquestioningly invested in the heteronormative’, as van der Vlies argues, Muholi’s portraits of Black LGBTQ family ‘become generative in spaces in which the bodies and presumed identities of subjects [have generally been] considered marginal, sub-cultural or other (whether in relation to ethnic or national narratives of community that have at their heart the idea of generation) are derided and brutalized’.²⁶ibid.

Muholi’s lifelong desire to transgress the strictures of heteropatriarchy and transform not only the world, but themselves is at the heart of Somnyama Ngonyama, their self-portraiture project. Harnessing ‘many forces’ – the energy and spiritual presence of ancestors, as well as a living community – has been imperative for working towards this goal. Initially, at its inception, Muholi’s goal was to make 365 portrait photographs, one for each day of the year, representing their own ‘faces and phases’.²⁷Faces and Phases is Muholi’s portrait series – which she began creating back in 2006 – commemorating and celebrating the lives of the Black lesbian, t gay, bisexual, queer, transgender, and intersex people she met on her journeys throughout her home country. But documenting this performative self continued beyond its original scope. Muholi began creating the self-portraits that became part of Somnyama Ngonyama in 2012, while they were in Civitella in Umbria, Italy, for an artist’s residency. It was in response, Muholi says, the virulent racism they encountered there, and how it affected them. They realised they needed to refocus, reflect on, and document the flows in their own physical, emotional, and psychological being.²⁸Muholi, 2015. Self-portraiture presented Muholi with the opportunity to consider the effects of having centuries of White supremacist ideology projected on to their person on a daily basis; it gave them a chance to acknowledge the ways in which hate had damaged their physical and mental health, and insidiously contributed to their own self-construction. If racism violates and attempts to erase othered people as individuals, the act of looking at oneself, and examining one’s own experiences ‘through portraiture is a reminder that you exist’ – a memento to love oneself, notes Muholi.²⁹Zanele Muholi, ‘How Zanele Muholi used photography to confront her trauma – Hail the Dark Lioness’ (text by Zanele Muholi, as told to Alex King), Huck Magazine, 30 Nov. 2017, www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/photography-2/zanele-muholi/.

The self-portraits appear, at first, to be a departure from Muholi’s documentary work, which engaged in marking, mapping, and preserving ‘mo(ve)ments through visual histories’.³⁰Muholi, p. 113. If Muholi’s documentary work was occupied with, as Imma argues, ‘writ[ing] an entirely new visual language’ that played ‘at the fecund and subversive juncture of colonialist and anti-apartheid documentary photography, postcolonial photographic self-fashioning, and queer/trans-portraiture’³¹Imma, p. 229. – I argue that their self-portraiture project, Somnyama Ngonyama, can be seen as a continuation of their documentary work, presenting another fertile site of inquiry. In choosing photography as their medium of expression and analytical tool, and in employing elements of racist caricatures to highlight Black women’s invisibilised labour, Muholi creates an uncomfortable public conversation about the ways in which White supremacist ideology and racial capitalism were – and continues to be – assisted by photography. It presents Muholi a methodology for interrogating the premises of photography, in ‘a radical act of protest and reclamation … to the colonizing and exoticizing’ effects of ‘all those cameras that arrived before [theirs]’.³²Andrea K. Scott, ‘The fever-dream urgency of Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits in ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’ ’, New Yorker, 20 Oct. 2017, www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-fever-dream-urgency-of-zanele-muholis-self-portraits-in-somnyama-ngonyama.

Second, Muholi explicitly challenges a fundamental premise of portraiture: that portrait-making is a methodology for revealing its subjects. Somnyama Ngonyama is not a project in which photography is used to ‘capture’ and ‘expose’ – for the pleasure of the interlocutor’s gaze – the ‘authentic’ subject. If the assumption is that Black and otherwise othered persons must make themselves available for interrogation, and open their private lives up for inspection, Muholi refocuses the position of power, centring it within the subject in the portrait. While Muholi’s figure is central to each portrait in the series, the presence of their own person in these works is not, solely, an act of self-reflexivity; it also presents a methodology for performing a multitude’s racialised and gendered experiences. Each portrait presents an opportunity for Muholi to continuously shift their identity, laying bare the problematic historical premises of photography, which sought to ‘fix’ those who are Black, Native, Other. The various props Muholi employs – from metal scouring pads to take-out Chinese chopsticks, swatches of face paint and wigs – reinforce the notion that these are masked performances, and that no single portrait has captured their purported ‘essence’.

Yet, self-portraiture – over many years of continuous practice – has given Muholi a way to engage intensely with their inner selves, unpacking the ways in which their racialised and gendered position in South Africa and the world beyond has left them with deep injuries. Somnyama Ngonyama is ‘therapy’, as Muholi often calls it, and a spiritual practice – a healing ritual that arms itself with humour, irony, and subversion as it seeks to cleanse received colonial narratives, and more recent heteropatriarchal narratives that violently excise ‘other’ gender expressions, using the same medium – photography – that contributed to ‘fixing’ Black, African persons in essentialised identities that served to buttress White supremacist ideology and heteropatriarchal constructs. Rather than present a simple documentary narrative of a static, ‘authentic’ Zanele Muholi, the ‘Dark Lionesses’ of Somnyama Ngonyama present manifestations of Muholi’s personas, voices, and unfolding experiences; they are a reflection of Muholi’s spiritual companions – the multitude that inhabits and accompanies them – giving them the fortitude to face a world that continuously reminds them that they are less than, other, should not be present in White spaces. They harken to Muholi’s inner voice, calling on them to be unashamedly present, insisting that they reveal, without reservation, their regal strength.

If Muholi’s documentary work ‘highlights … [the ways in which] photographs can serve as evidence of and to mourning, and the idea of queer futurity, which is connected both to issues of visibility and affiliation,³³van der Vlies, p. 141. Somnyama Ngonyama offers a similar location of inquiry that aids Muholi’s efforts at self-healing and self- reconstruction. The challenging labour of self-examination and self re-positioning in the world is buoyed by Muholi’s knowledge that their journey is connected to, and is in continuum with many others’ political work; they explain that ‘many of the images deal with important moments in South African history … [referencing and remembering] those who have shaped my life in many ways, and the lessons I’ve learned, as I look through myself to see them.’³⁴Muholi, 2017. Imagining Muholi’s obsessive portrait-making as a site of mourning – but also a generative space that points the way towards a interconnected, communal ‘queer futurity’ – allows us to consider Somnyama Ngonyama as a project that attempts – through queering the heteropatriarchal nation state and its established norms, and querying the historical position of photography in creating racialized and gendered identities – to heal nations, families, and self.

The trouble with photography: documenting Black, queer presences in South Africa

Each of Muholi’s photographic projects have been critically engaged with the history of photography in South Africa. A critical education in that history means that one becomes hyper-aware of the ways in which colonial and ethnographic photography not only objectified, but ‘refused subjectivity’ to those it recorded, and aided the ‘literal dissection of African – particularly female African – bodies’.³⁵Sizemore-Barber, p. 81. It means one remains vigilant for the ways in which the tropes of colonial photography ‘continues to haunt representational politics’.³⁶ibid. In Somnyama Ngonyama, Muholi’s performative selves continue the work of unsettling the traditional parameters for self-portraiture, challenging the historical functions of photography in South Africa, and questioning problematic expectations when it comes to photographing Black people.

Problematic photographic practices did not come to be solely through colonial-era or apartheid photographers’ acceptance of White supremacist ideologies. Though one may think of technology as inherently without prejudice, photographic technologies – created by technicians influenced by the same ideologies of White supremacy – have also had inherent biases, resulting in caricatured depictions of darker skin tones. This section of my paper details the insidious ways that racial biases influenced technological developments in photography, and traces the ways in which Muholi uses Somnyama Ngonyama to lay bare the spectre of those racial biases, imbedded into everything from photo paper and photo chemicals. I also trace how Muholi’s self-portraits engage audiences in critical conversations about apartheid South Africa’s use of twentieth century photographic technologies to enhance its ever-growing surveillance and mobility restriction laws.

Roth has documented the ways in which the development of photographic technologies was influenced by their developers’ racial biases, resulting in ‘skin-tone biases’ that were built into ‘the actual apparatuses of visual reproduction’.³⁷Lorna Roth, ‘Looking at Shirley, the ultimate norm: colour balance, image technologies, and cognitive equity’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 34, 2009, p. 114. It is now well-established that the Kodak company relied exclusively on White – mostly female – models to set colour standards on colour-balancing reference cards or ‘plotting sheets’, which developers and chemists could use as they worked out the proportions of chemicals to use. Because White women’s skin tone set the standard, the range of colour that the company’s technicians developed, and plotting sheets they subsequently created for gauging skin tone did not respond to the nuances of black and brown skin tones. (A photograph of a studio model – and employee of the Kodak company – named ‘Shirley Page’ remained the standard for decades; because of that, ‘plotting cards’ came to be known as ‘Shirley’ cards.)³⁸See: ‘How Kodak’s Shirley cards set photography’s skin-tone standard’, NPR, 13 Nov. 2014, www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard; and Rosie Cima, ‘How photography was optimized for White skin Color’, Pricenomics, 24 Apr. 2015, priceonomics.com/how-photography-was-optimized-for-white-skin/. Roth suggests that film developers ignored or simply did not bother to try to develop technologies that would be better suited for darker skin’s levels light absorption and ranges of colour, perhaps because Black people were not seen as their consumer base.³⁹Roth, p. 114. This meant that even after the advent of digital cameras, ‘the rendering of non-Caucasian skin tones [remained] highly deficient … due to a light-skin bias embedded in colour film stock emulsions and digital camera design’.⁴⁰Roth, p. 113. Those ‘deficiencies’ in tones meant that African-Americans’ facial features were often reproduced ‘without details … [wherein] ashen-looking facial skin colours contrasted strikingly with the whites of eyes and teeth’.⁴¹Roth, p. 114.

It is possible that – rather than this bias towards White skin being a result of overt racism or conscious White privileging – ‘technologists involved in the creation of a range of popular media and products have likely acquiesced to what Joyce E. King has called “dysconscious racism” ’, which – in the absence of critical consciousness about pervasive racial biases – tacitly complies with, and reproduces dominant White visual norms.⁴²Joyce E. King, in Roth, p. 126. Yet Kodak technicians’ seemingly benign dysconscious racism – resulting in plotting sheets or ‘Shirley cards’ that catered exclusively to the lighter skin tones of those of European descent – had long lasting effects. For decades, darker skin shades fared so poorly in photographic prints that they reinforced blackface caricatures. Less well known are the circumstances under which photography became instrumental to the daily implementation of apartheid policies, and for normalising the idea that portraits of Black persons will inevitably be flat, and devoid of grey zones and dimensionality – producing images that reflected apartheid’s caricatured vision of Black people. Under the apartheid National Party’s rule, systematically made, poor-quality portraits of Black people were attached to ‘passbooks’ that Black people were forced to carry. Passbooks were an important part of ‘influx control’: a series of laws that were designed to aid racial segregation, and intended to monitor, record, and severely restrict the movements of black South Africans. The goals behind the laws, commonly known as ‘Pass Laws’, were not wholly novel; they had historical precedents ‘as early as the eighteenth century in the Cape Colony,’ when laws intended to control the movement of slave labourers on Dutch settler farms were instituted; there were similar laws ‘under the British Union government established at the turn of the century as the Anglo-Boer War concluded’.⁴³Lily Saint, ‘Reading subjects: passbooks, literature and apartheid’, Social Dynamics, 38, no. 1, 2012, p. 118.

Pass Laws required all Black persons – male and female – over the age of sixteen to carry a ‘reference book’, or a ‘pass’, which acted like a birth certificate-cum-marriage certificate-curriculum vitae-cum-police record, detailing one’s origins, marriages, employment record, tax payments, and a record of any run-ins with police. They were to be carried on one’s person at all times, and produced immediately, should an administrator or police officer ask one to produce a ‘passbook’. The Pass Laws of the 1950s – developed under the aegis of the misleadingly named Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents Act No. 67 of 1952 – consolidated and standardised various provincial laws, facilitated unprecedented levels of state power, and effectively criminalised Black people’s movement.⁴⁴Cheryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa, David Philip Publishers, Cape Town, 1991, p. 126. They had severe implications on the day-to-day lives of South Africans, with ‘17.25 million black South Africans […] arrested for pass-law infringements’ between 1916 and 1981.⁴⁵Saint, p. 117. Pass laws helped formalise apartheid policies, forcibly removing the country’s majority Black population out of its urban centres and viable farmlands, permitting them to enter designated ‘White’ areas – including towns and cities – only when it suited the industries on which White wealth, privilege, and leisure depended: to do the dangerous, underground work in gold and diamond mines, menial labour in institutions, and to carry out farm and domestic work. Although ‘passbooks’ were mandatory for movement; in effect, they were designed to make movement as restrictive and prohibitive as possible. They came to signify the way in which the state obstructed passage on multiple fronts: geographic and racialised spaces, as well as through social and economic strata.

Passbooks’ mandatory ‘portrait’ – often the only photograph that a Black South African ever had made of them – is where population surveillance and mobility restriction legislation specific to South Africa, inherent White-privileging racial biases ‘coded into the invisible chemistry of the photographic medium’,⁴⁶Sean O’Toole, ‘Making, refusing, remaking: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s recent photography’, Safundi 15, nos 2–3, 2014, p. 369, 10.1080/17533171.2014.925648. and the Polaroid company became linked. The Polaroid company had long done business in South Africa, benefitting from producing easy-to-use photographic equipment that allowed South African state agencies to document Black South Africans, en masse, cheaply. Polaroid’s easy-to-use ID-2 system, ‘which could make identification cards nearly instantaneously through its patented photographic technology’ was also popular with South Africa’s Bureau of Mines, which employed thousands of migrant Black workers. Although Polaroid initially denied directly supplying its ID-2 system to the South African government, it omitted mention of using a South African company, Frank and Hirsch, as a middleman for carrying out distribution.⁴⁷Eric J. Morgan, ‘The world is watching: Polaroid and South Africa’, Enterprise & Society, 7, no. 3, 2006, p. 521, 10.1017/S1467222700004390.

But that relationship between apartheid government, the enforcement of ‘influx control’ – apartheid policies designed to curtail the mobility of Black people, for which the creation of Passbook photographs was crucial – and now-infamous Polaroid photographs used in Passbooks eventually became obvious. As artists and professors in photography Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have recently shown, Polaroid’s ID-2 camera, with its ‘boost’ button that increased the strength of the flash by 42 percent – allowing it better photograph dark skinned people, whose skin absorbs up to 42 percent more light⁴⁸Adam Broomberg, in David Smith, ‘ ‘Racism’ of early colour photography explored in art exhibition’, The Guardian, 25 Jan. 2013, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/25/racism-colour-photography-exhibition. – seems suspiciously suited for the purposes of photographing black South Africans for the ‘dompasses’⁴⁹Passbooks were derisively referred to as ‘dompasses’ (dumb passes). they were forced to carry.

However, the relationship between Polaroid and apartheid may have gone unnoticed, if it were not for an accidental discovery by one of its employees. In ‘early October 1970, Ken Williams, an African American photographer and Polaroid employee, stumbled on a sample identification badge for the South African Department of Mines in Polaroid’s main headquarters in Cambridge’.⁵⁰Morgan, p. 524. It was through the extensive efforts of Williams, his wife Caroline Hunter – a chemist at Polaroid – and the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers’ Movement, which was founded by several African American employees, that Polaroid was eventually persuaded to end its relationship with apartheid South Africa.⁵¹ibid, p. 521. The Revolutionary Workers Movement’s boycott,a id=”52″ href=”#52;”>⁵²‘Employees start boycott of Polaroid’, Baltimore Afro-American, 1 Dec. 1970, p. 14, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2205&dat=19701201&id=Zs8lAAAAIBAJ&sjid=2fQFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4260,3469741&hl=en. along with its firebrand slogan – that Polaroid ‘imprisons a black South African every 60 seconds’⁵³Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, ‘Polaroid colorpack III … imprisons a black South African every 60 seconds’, 1971, Boston, kora.matrix.msu.edu/files/50/304/32-130-362-84-african_activist_archive-a0b0s1-a_12419.pdf. – created terrible publicity. As a direct result, Edwin Land’s Polaroid company went on to ‘became the first major American company to condemn apartheid publicly and to initiate policies to combat it’⁵⁴Morgan, p. 521.

It is in these complex ways that photography, the camera itself, and photographic technologies’ compounded oversights during the twentieth century resulted in a surfeit of images that reflected ‘blackface’, augmenting European caricatures of Black people. Racist views, or at least racial biases, are thus undeniably tied to the history of photography, and even built into the modern technologies of photography. However, in spite of the fact that the medium created limitations for expressions of Black identity, digital tools of the twenty-first century gave Muholi – as analogue photography did for Black artists of the twentieth century – an avenue to defy the limitations of portraiture. If colonial and apartheid portraiture circumscribed and reduced colonised others into flat, stultified identities, attempted to penetrate, dissect and lay bare interior lives, and made them more available for constant social surveillance, Muholi’s self-performances defy the expectation that portraiture should yield tidy cartographies of Black persons. It allowed them to question the perception that portraiture is intended as a tool for revelation, and – instead – to use the medium to invent, reinvent, and re-present themselves as complex subjects who always hold back, and maintain a private sphere of dignity. And if photographic technologies developed in the mid twentieth century were harnessed to aid apartheid’s racial classification system, Muholi’s self-portraits offer an intellectual and conceptual counterweight, helping audiences confront, unpack, and analyse the purposes for which the architects of apartheid employed photography.

‘Untidy self-cartography’: an avenue for defying the historical limitations of portraiture

Muholi’s self-portraiture practice follows the work of many other Black artists around the world, who similarly take on powerful messages disseminated by influential colonial representations of Black people – reflected as they are in contemporary views. As artists, they use their work as a mode of critical inquiry, analysing the ways in which a multitude of caricatures – and the declarative statements that dominant culture continues to make about the limitations of Black subjectivity – have shaped them. They then signify a myriad of context-bound visual tropes, and reshape the ways in which others’ projections and requirements have shaped their own subjectivity.⁵⁵Here, my use of the term ‘signifyin’ is a reference to Henry Louis Gates’s theorising on the rhetorical tropes of Black vernacular – word play and riffing among African American communities, accessible only to those who share the cultural history(ies) and value systems of Black speech communities. Muholi similarly riffs on visual tropes in photographic portraiture.

In another example, US artist Glenn Ligon, in Untitled (I am an invisible man), 1991, references repurposed ‘textual fragments from seminal works on racial identity and socialization’ by writers ‘Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Genet’.⁵⁶Lauren DeLand, ‘Black skin, black masks: the citational self in the work of Glenn Ligon’, Criticism, 54, no. 4, 2012, p. 507, doi.org/10.1353/crt.2012.0035. The statements Ligon culls from literary texts evidences cultural pressures on Black individuals to conform to, and condense themselves into certain accepted ways of being. As the text on the ‘page’ of his self-definition continues, the typeset letters become increasingly blurry as a result of visual interference, making it impossible to know how Ligon’s ‘I’ is being defined. His ‘I’ ends up becoming an illegible scribble that becomes impossible to read, save one word – ‘not’: a negation of selfhood and individual subjectivity, and, possibly, a negation of others’ definitions of who he is.

Muholi’s works, like Ligon’s – through continuous references to others’ ‘declarative statements’ about Black subjectivity and fragments of narratives others have projected onto their person – likewise ‘captures the sensation of being continually transformed into an object’ that has been read, inscribed, and re-inscribed by racialised, gendered, and heteronormative readings of their persons.⁵⁷DeLand, p. 509.

Like Ligon, Muholi, too, shows the ways in which Black individuals’ personhood becomes largely invisible and illegible, save the negations – what one is ‘not’. As in Ligon’s Untitled (I am an invisible man), Muholi’s self-portraits show audiences that ‘identificatory declarations come from other lips, and the artist’s body represents not a unitary self, but a dialogic, citational, and wholly subjective being-for-others’.⁵⁸ibid. Muholi also illustrates the difficulties of escaping this legion of voices that inscribed their beliefs and views regarding racial, sexual, and gender particularities on their person. But while Ligon constructs his autobiography through text, appropriating ‘sources that comprise the “I”…[from] art and literature to suggest a series of racial, sexual, and gender particularities that resemble [his] own’,⁵⁹DeLand, p. 507. for Muholi, the project of self-portraiture – whist being the narrative of a multitude – is not gleaned from fiction, or literary works; rather, the cues are from all too real experiences of racism, othering, marginalisation, and the projected discomforts, aversions, and hate of interlocutors. And while Ligon uses text, Muholi relies on visual cues alone, heightening, reflecting back, and unashamedly bearing the caricatures and stereotypes they have had projected onto their person.

Each of their portraits, Muholi insists, is an autobiographical work, in which they are their ‘own participant’. Eschewing the term ‘subject’ for the figure in the portraits allows them to ‘declar[e] the importance of self-representation amid extreme levels of violence and racism in South Africa and beyond our borders’ and a way of teaching herself, and black people as a whole to see themselves ‘as worthy humans when we are told that we are nothing’.⁶⁰Muholi, 2017. At the same time, Muholi’s self-portraits are a complex expression of individual and intergenerational power, as well as the damage – physical, psychological and emotional – wrought by systems of oppression and individualised hate. How does one not absorb that hostility, as a Black person who is so visible in white spaces, and so much the target of animosity? How does one reflect on the effects of a lifetime of encountering both institutional and everyday racism – the difficult-to-identify structures that exclude and deny one’s rights, as well as the commentary, looks and attitudes of individuals? Instead of presenting powerful stereotypes as accepted ‘truths’, Muholi’s knowing performances reflect these distorted views back to audiences. Many – if not most audience members – will feel uneasy, knowing that they have been informed and influenced by these well-known racist caricatures.

For each Somnyama Ngonyama self-portrait, Muholi requires that the skin tone is darkened, not with make-up – as minstrel performers might have used blackface paint – but digitally, in post-production, by increasing the contrast to the maximum levels possible. Elsewhere, I have written that through adhering to this process, ‘Muholi achieves as high a glossy darkness to their skin as the silver gelatin technology will permit, without compromising three-dimensionality,’ leaving ‘an impenetrable wall of sheer blackness – almost akin to that of achieved by minstrel performers using blackface paints’.⁶¹M. Neelika Jayawardane, ‘Heeding the Dark Lioness’s Call’, in Renee Mussai (ed.), Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Aperture, New York, 2018. Muholi’s performances trace South Africa’s particular history of racial capitalism, referencing stereotypes that were historically cast upon, and continue to be imposed on Black and African persons – particularly on Black women. But in theatrically employing mock-props found in various places to which Muholi has travelled, they also engage with ‘colonial, post-colonial, and post-capitalist, neo-liberal cultures, all of which have positioned Black people as an unindividuated, labouring class’.⁶²ibid.

Many regions of the world into which European colonisers spread – where contact and colonisation lead to the near-devastation of indigenous people’s lives, cultural practices and livelihoods – are often reduced to kitschy representations. Kitschy ‘native’ paraphernalia has its origins in the colonial-era imperative to collect and display the material goods of those who were conquered; it was part of the colonisers’ booty, taken back to the home country as quaint, sometimes intricate displays of ‘native’ culture, contrasted with the inherent superiority of the European colonisers’ goods and technology. Kitsch that has come to represent ‘Africa’, in the global imaginary, has particular connotations that are connected to colonisers’ racist visions of Africans. In some Somnyama Ngonyama self-portraits, Muholi clowns around, poking fun at the global fascination with ‘Africa’ kitsch. Ensembles of cowrie shells, fly whisks, and various headdresses mask the fact that they are, in fact, laughing at the ways in which the world sees ‘Africa’ as a monolithic place, trapped in an idyllic, noble-savage past, clothed in the ‘native’ costumery in which Europeans and North Americans a, especially, are comfortable imagining Africans. The use of playfulness and irony is intrinsic to many of Muholi’s compositions may invite audiences to feel included in the ‘joke’. The resultant dynamics of the affective exchange between audience members and the (caricatured) person in the image before them may compel them to acknowledge the racist narratives they carry. Though audiences and the performative subject in the image before them part of the same ideological economy, and though both may feel trapped in this dynamic, it is also possible to shift the ugly narratives that binds us, and dissipate its power.

But though the humour in Muholi’s self-portraits is disarming, they do not attempt to remove the inherent tension. Few who are beneficiaries of dominant cultures can claim to carry the painful experiences that necessitate the development of the complex and layered humour that is in evidence in these self-portraits. In my previous writing about Muholi’s self-portraits, I note that the generosity of Muholi’s invitation is part of their methodology of productive deception. Being thusly ‘invited to laugh along with the figure in many of the portraits, and to feel as though we are part of [their] experiences permits us to let our guard down – so much so that we allow [them] to lead us into uncomfortable territory that we would otherwise carefully sidestep’.⁶³ibid.

In most Somnyama Ngonyama self-portraits, Muholi’s avatharé hold the inquiring, dissecting gaze of interlocutors, and returns that gaze, without flinching. That returned gaze upends traditional understandings of who is permitted to look, scrutinise, inquire, and penetrate private worlds. At times, Muholi’s gaze seems to be ‘calling out’, ridiculing, and questioning the validity of racist tropes – ‘throwing shade’ at those in the audience who may have imagined that they were superior. The forceful way in which spectators’ gaze is returned compels interlocutors to reflect on the relationship between their own historical, racial, gendered, and social class positionality, making them question how much colonial and apartheid baggage they continue to bring to the present when they look at portraits. It obligates interlocutors to question their presumptions about the act of looking: who they believe they can look at; whether they have the right to look without having been given permission; how much is being revealed to them, if anything at all, and how much remains obscured; and if the very act of looking is necessary – or counterproductive – for fostering inter-relationality and mutuality.

That powerful, returned gaze also forces audiences to reflect on the ways in which racist constructs stamp themselves on the psyches of Black people, so much so that many end up absorbing racist constructs, reflecting and reproducing their injurious messages, and, at times, following them as though they are instructions in a manual – all despite the obvious damage they do to physical and mental health, and to our relationships with each other. At the same time, the portraits are a meditation on methodologies for maintaining dignity, agency, and selfhood – the fortitude that surviving painful experiences necessitates. No easy caveats are offered; however, even if the (purposefully) caricatured figure in Muholi’s images may have survived encounters with racialised and gendered hate, there is no doubt that being on the receiving end of racialised and gendered violence has left deep scars on their body and psyche.

In Thulani II, Parktown, 2015, Muholi transfixes us through the material of the photographic print, burning a hole into our consciences. ‘Thulani’ is isiZulu for ‘silent’. They wear what appears to be protective goggles, strapped around a hardhat on top of their head. Their facial skin is darkened to resemble the effect of shoe polish on blackface performers; their skin is mottled by black dust, in the way coal miners’ skin appears in black and white portraits. Parktown happens to be the first suburb north of the inner-city of Johannesburg, with avenues lined by grandiose homes belonging to former ‘Randlords’ – descendants of colonials who made enormous fortunes on mining ventures, sending black men to dig out gold and diamonds from deep mines. Today, more than twenty years after the demise of the political system of apartheid, the nation’s economy still depends on mining. The same wealth goes to the directors and shareholders of mining companies, and the same horrific and dangerous labour conditions remain for the miners. The conditions are a different kind of hell for the wives and families of these men, who are damaged and sometimes killed in the mines; by including their bare breasts, and the outline of their iconic tattoo – an anatomical drawing of the female reproductive system, complete with womb, curling arms of fallopian tubes, and ovaries dangling like heavy fruit – on their shoulder, Muholi signals towards the hellish conditions of deep pit mining on the women who are also intimately dependent on this economy.
In several portraits in the series, Muholi channels their mother, Bester Muholi, who worked as a domestic worker for forty-two years, in the household of a White family. Muholi notes that they feel compelled to tell their mother’s story, and ‘to acknowledge all domestic workers around the globe who continue to labour with dignity, while often facing physical, financial, and emotional abuses in their place of work’.⁶⁴Zanele Muholi, ‘Mapping our histories: a visual history of Black lesbians in post-apartheid South Africa’, Master’s thesis, Ryerson University, 2009, p. 31. Rather than looking at us with an accusatory, wide-eyed stare, ‘Bester’ always seems to be looking inward, weary with the weight of their knowledge. Muholi explains, in an interview:

Domestic workers were viewed as these men and women who did not have any education or skills but in essence, they raised these families’ children at the expense of their own. They were mothers to some of the nation’s greatest people. They did work that should be done by four people, they were overworked and underpaid. All the while they did their work exceptionally and were proud of their occupations.⁶⁵ ‘Rewritten in black & white – interview with Zanele Muholi’, Soloconlamiatesta, Museo Pecci, 22 Oct. 2012, soloconlamiatesta.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/rewritten-in-blackwhite-interview-with-zanele-muholi/.

In Bester V, Mayotte, 2015, Muholi poses with two wreathes made of metal scouring pads positioned on their head: these pot-scouring pads are the laurels with which their employers have crowned them. In Bester I, Mayotte, 2015, they have secured their hair in a topknot, then pinned wooden washing pegs to their hair to form an elaborate, high headdress; they have also clipped pegs to their ears to create a pair of dangling earrings, and secured a homely rag rug around their shoulders with another peg. Their skin is nearly matte-black, and their lips are painted carefully in a thick, white paint, accentuated by the ridge along the Cupid’s bow on their upper lip. Together, the ensemble makes them appear regal: a royal with their crown, jewels, and cape draped around them.
In both ‘Bester’ images, the crowning glory atop their head is made of the accoutrements that signified their servitude: the metal scouring pads with which she left their mistress’ pots shining and spotless; the wooden pegs with which she hung their mistress’ family’s clothing on the line outside. Those tools that chained them to the household formed, for the White family she served, the most significant portion of their identity. They revered them for their servitude, crowned them with praise for their skill as a loyal servant: they were the queen of clothes pegs and pot scouring pads.

In a few of the self-portraits, Muholi’s gaze is turned elsewhere, suggesting a different conversation. It suggests that this is a participant who may only have choices that are so limited that they are not choices at all – and survival is not possible without subjecting themselves to daily indignities. Here, escape from scrutiny comes through maintaining an inaccessible interior that no person or their hate can touch. When all other avenues seem to be closed, there is transcendence through dreaming – through the knowledge that one can access liberation via imaginative routes. In Ntozakhe’s case, their face is tilted upwards, and their eyes are turned towards the left, as if they are looking to the heavens. It is a gaze that is turned inward, away from the present – giving nothing away to interlocutors: though they are present in body, they are not here to reveal themselves, nor to do difficult political and emotional labour of changing or challenging anyone. That labour – though, as an objectified person in a photograph that is being scrutinised, they may be expected to take on – is left for audiences to do.

*

As a whole, Somnyama Ngonyama exceeds the traditional mandates of self-portraiture. They are narratives of survival, survival-humour, and the ways in which those whose dignity and personhood have been injured by centuries of systematic racism are able – almost miraculously – to maintain formidable presences. The practice of self-portrait-making gives artists the time and space to make inward journeys. It allows them to consider how they wish to project, for the public, an avatharé, or an incarnation of the self, composed through meditating on their experiences. As a Black, queer person born under apartheid in Natal (now Kwa-Zulu Natal) – with a mother who worked as a ‘domestic worker’ for a White family for the duration of her adult life – one does not get the luxury to do ‘selfies’ as a project of vanity alone. Rather, these self-portraits present entryways to a deeply private inner self – exploratory journeys into personal history, though often purposefully obscured from audiences, revisitations to converse and build a richer relationship with the psyche and emotional being within.

At the same time – because inward journeys require a simultaneous look at the social, legal, economic and technological milieus in which we live, as well as our nations’ political histories and presents – Somnyama Ngonyama is, by necessity, a complex, performative conversation with colonial modernity, apartheid’s racist machinery, and the contemporary remnants of that history. If ‘modernity’ depended on a racist ideology and structures to frame Black people into instrumentalised bodies whose sole purpose is to labour, Muholi’s selves – though they seem to be flattened caricatures – question the premises of racial capitalism, and the technologies on which modernity itself was built. Somnyama Ngonyama’s self-portraits are avatharé that Muholi performs as they heal and re-assemble their selfhood; they are also reflections of the damaged worlds we have constructed, exposing the infinite ways in which racist expression continues to present itself and reiterate its message.

M. Neelika Jayawardane is Associate Professor, Department of English, State University of New York-Oswego, and Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg.

Notes