The blur of history: student protest and photographic clarity in South African universities, 2015-2016

Abstract

My first point concerns strong photos. In recent debates about photographic archives and the idea of nation, Elizabeth Edwards argued that certain nations have strong photographs that speak to their nation-ness, or the process through which they became a nation. They offer ‘strong history’.2 It is frequently pointed out how South Africa in particular has a rich and dense photographic archive of the anti-apartheid struggle, and that particular photographs took on iconic status during that time and have continued to shape the memory and meaning of how South Africa came into being. Thus, at the opening of the vast EyeAfrica exhibition at the Cape Town castle in 1998, curated by Revue Noire, the European ambassador who opened the exhibition stated in his speech that the entire world knew the South African struggle through its photographs, most notably Sam Nzima’s photograph of Hector Pieterson from 1976. As this exhibition was an attempt to launch a different kind of imagery from across the continent and more innovative recent South African work, this homogenising remark was not well received by everyone. Despite numerous critics and scholars who have sought to nuance or even reject the documentary decades leading up to South Africa’s transition to the post anti-apartheid,3 a number of strong tropes still operate for an older generation in relation to a global perception of South African history through photographs. Such tropes were efficacious in arousing widespread support and solidarity for different aspects of organisation, opposition, protest, fund raising, withdrawal of