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Review: VISUAL AFRICA: A REVIEW ARTICLE Author(s): PATRICIA HAYES Review by: PATRICIA HAYES Source: Kronos, No. 27, Visual History (November 2001), pp. 227-243Published by: University of Western CapeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41056676Accessed: 03-03-2015 11:00 UTC

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REVIEW ARTICLES AND DEBATES VISUAL AFRICA: A REVIEW ARTICLE

PATRICIA HAYES University of the Western Cape

Images and Empires. Edited by PAUL LANDAU and DEBORAH KASPIN. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 forthcoming. ISBN 0520229487 hardcover, 0520229495 paperback.

The Ones That Are Wanted. By CORINNE A.KRATZ. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 forthcoming. ISBN 0520222814 hardcover, 0520222822 paperback.

The impression one gains from looking through these two new books from the University of California Press is that here - at last - we have key questions about visual cultures and African history being tackled at a more profound level than before. Scholars have criticized those who make pictures for their inability to analyse them in words, or more frequently, ignored them for this reason. Those who make and take pictures have equally accused scholars and intellectuals, who base their knowledge on words, of being unable to read and apprehend what is visual. The different skills seldom come together. And here, in these two publications, there are sustained attempts to bring the two literacies into dialogue with each other.

My own reading of these publications is heavily inflected with current teaching concerns in a South African context. In this review article I tend to fore- ground questions which have emerged in the running of a Visual History course at postgraduate level at the University of the Western Cape. Most of the students taking the course come from homes in the Eastern Cape, predominantly rural or small town-based, and Xhosa-speaking. A smaller proportion of the class come from Cape Town itself, often with family histories of urban forced removals under apartheid, and longer memories (and often photographs) of social mobility and racial segregation before 1948. A few students from other African countries have brought their diverse histories to the reading of images.1 The curriculum of the Visual History course sets out to deal with the history of photography in Africa and southern Africa in particular.2 Different kinds of what we have called 'colonial' photographies are engaged with, in broad terms the representation of 'natives' and the representation of 'nature', where the central concern is with

1 This postgraduate module began in 1998 and has been reshaped every year in the light of student responses and a growing historiography in the field. Other colleagues in the History Department at UWC who co-teach the course are CMinkley and N.Becker. We have always included (and been influenced by) one or two photographers in the class - G.Goddard of the UWC Robben Island Mayibuye Archive has participated since the founding of the course J.Gordon, formerly of the Market Theatre Photography Workshop in Johannesburg, recently joined the teaching group and runs the practical workshops.

2 Resources have been limited which is why the visual matter on the course is mostly confined to photography, and not for example film, except when opportunity allows. M.Nair, for example, gave a class in 1999 explaining the relationship between still images and film-making.

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how visual genericisation and physical dispossession work together in a kind of historical synergy. We then look at the emergence of African photographies: how people on the continent have made use of the medium for their own purposes, especially to present their own histories and lives. Considerable discussion arises from the gender and racial dynamics of visuality in history. But the climax of the course is always the batch of work we do on documentary or 'struggle' photography dating especially from the 1970s through to the early 1990s in South Africa, which coincides with student and other militants' struggles against apartheid. This is photography with a history that most students relate to as 'theirs', as so many of them participated in student boycotts and campaigns, and are now keen to link their political pasts with debates about representation.

The Landau and Kaspin edited volume, Images and Empires, addresses large sections of such a curriculum, because of its concerted attempt to address in equal measure both 'colonial' and 'African' modes of visual expression and representation. Paul Landau's deeply-layered historical and critical introduction provides a longue durée of the stereotyping of Africans for European purposes from ancient times and the mercantile era onwards. Then, the twelve chapters in Images and Empires variously explore the long history of absorption of photography into the daily life of Dakarois women (Mustafa); the near-global migra- tion, appropriation and translation of the iconic figure of Marni Wata from Asia to Hamburg to West Africa to the Americas (Drewal); the deliberate efforts to fabricate capitalist desire and reshape African masculinities and femininities through visual images in advertising in southern Rhodesia (Burke); the exchange of landscape metaphors through British and Gcaika (Xhosa) gravestones in the Eastern Cape (Bunn); modes of colonial and postcolonial cartoon production (Hunt) and nationalist political expression in cartoons (Olaniyan); colonial homogenization of Africans into 'tribes' through photographs and film (Landau); the glance versus the gaze of colonial film (Gordon); ethnographic performance by African professionals at the Paris Exposition of 1931 (Hodeir); subversive subaltern sculpture at the royal court in Benin (Girshick); cultural borrowings between Manjaco and Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau (Gable); the problematics of the exposure and curation of museum and archive holdings on bushmen through the Miscast exhibition in Cape Town at a time of democratization (Skotnes). Finally, Deborah Kaspin concludes with an essay which positions visual images within Roland Barthes' notion of 'mythologies', and provides a series of succinct qualifying remarks about the contributions.

At first sight, what Cory Kratz does in her book The Ones That Are Wanted would seem unusual and even risky to certain southern African audiences emerging from a legacy of enforced racism and ethnic designation. The exhibition at the core of the book involved a white American female scholar and photographer representing Africans - that is one way of looking at it. And as she herself asks: 'What is the place of the ethnographic photography exhibition?' This question has been posed in very critical terms in the local context by Sam Raditlhalo at the 'Encounters with Photography' conference in Cape Town in 1999, where Peter Magubane's recent coffee-table projects on South Africa's 'vanishing cultures' came under fire (see Raditlhalo this issue). The key question

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there seemed to be, what is the difference between colonial depictions of African subjects in the ethnographic genre, and what Magubane is doing in the post- apartheid context? In terms of emphasizing the signs of material culture and sheer 'colourfulness' of different groups in so-called traditional dress, as well as editing out the signifiers of westernization and predicting the immanent disap- pearance of such 'cultures', it could be argued that there is little difference between Magubane and older paradigms of ethnographic representation and aestheticisation.

Kratz 's book soon reveals how it is possible to be far more complex than this. It is true that her exhibition of photographs, taken in the course of many years' fieldwork amongst Okiek communities and entitled Okiek Portraits: A Kenyan People Look at Themselves, happened in a Kenya which is completely different from the South Africa to which Magubane 's critics refer. It remains an intriguing question how such a project might have unfolded here, or whether it would have been conceived at all. But what becomes apparent in Kratz's production of photographs and responding texts is that her subjects have a sophisticated awareness of how representation of people such as themselves, Okiek, can work both positively and negatively in a much bigger world. They have knowledge about how images become selected and interpreted. 'These are indeed secluded initiates! It's dark. It's not clear who it is. Chumpeek (Americans and Europeans) like this kind of picture!' said one man when looking at a photograph of a secluded initiate (Plate 18) whom Kratz was permitted to photograph.3 People appear very knowing of what it is Europeans want, of what the image market is in Kenya, and how the visual economy is constructed in the broader sense.

Kratz is an anthropologist who studied initiation and marriage amongst Okiek, who are considered very marginal in Kenyan and East African terms. In a sense they are brother-of-the-more-famous Maasai, the tourist pin-up group of choice in postcolonial Kenya. But they distinguish themselves from Maasai not only in history and language, details of apparel and cultural practice, but through their hunting and gathering activities in the forested Western Mau escarpment (Narok District), specifically honey-collecting. They in turn have been and continue to be stereotyped because of this history of interaction with these less culti- vated landscapes. Okiek appear to know this only too well. As Laato, mother-in- law to Tinkili commented when she viewed Kratz's exhibition photograph of initiates in 1989 (Plate 12): 'Don't you think those people looking at the pictures were astonished by this? They must have said "These people eat people!'" She then added, 'And then you told them "They don't eat people.'"4

An important aspect of exhibition conceptualization for Kratz was to present the Okiek as contemporaneous, as coeval.5 They are located in the present. In trying to judge audience responses, the agenda was to challenge stereotypes of

3 C. A .Kratz, The Ones That Are Wanted (Berkeley, 2001), 46. In this review article I provide page references for quota- tions from Kratz's forthcoming publication, which was at final proof stage at the time of writing. I was unable to give page references for Images and Empires given that this manuscript was read before final proof stage, and chapter authors or titles have been indicated instead.

4 Kratz, The Ones That Are Wanted, 44. 5 Ibid., 112.

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the Okiek. Kratz however acknowledges she underestimated the 'cognitive tenacity' that gives stereotypes their enduring power, including 'the interplay between difference and similarity, creating room for both positive and negative stereotypes and shifts in ranking'.6 Photograph selections were made both in and against the grain of long-standing stereotypes and tropes. Ethnographic photography has a long and deep history of objectifying, glamorising, primiti vising, problematising - where as Landau says, tribeswoman for example comes to replace 'woman'. But by carefully negotiating the encounters, and feeding back images and soliciting viewpoints on the occasions and persons represented, Kratz found that the subjects were both close and distant in the process. They saw what the world would think of them, cannibals and monsters possibly, but at the same time they had their own personal readings which were intimate and coherent.

The exhibition was located in a long history of representing the Other in Kenya. But Kratz explores what exhibitions do, and how communication works through the exhibitionary format. She undertakes to gauge audience responses and theorise them, and attempts to identify the multiple factors which impinge on readings. Kratz thinks through the processes by which images come into the public domain, and how they are juxtaposed and contextualised, in an exemplary manner. At some points though these are unavoidably incomplete, especially where audience feedback was not easily collated. Despite this, she suggests how much research can actually be done, with what seems like very little material.

Kratz discusses exhibition as event, object and field of power relations. She disaggregates the processes and politics at work in an exhibition, insisting that it should be understood both as communication, and as involving the politics of representation.7 There are diverse localisms at work in any exhibition, the latter essentially playing a series of mediating roles, which provide both the occasions and the means through which people produce social relations, social action, and particular positioned understandings. At the crux of all this is what Kratz calls the 'twin condition': on the one hand the impulse to exoticise, and on the other hand the impulse to assimilate. The exoticising/assimilating tension or dynamic, Kratz argues, informs exhibitions.8

These frameworks of analysis are then deployed very suggestively through the phases of exhibition preparation and opening in different and transnational venues, with attempts made to elicit and examine the different (and sometimes sparse and enigmatic) feedbacks. The exhibition was to open in Kenya, at the National Museum in Nairobi. Preparatory consultations revealed a vanity on the part of some Nairobi government officials that they were familiar with the stereotypes favoured by foreign whites, and who were prepared to be cynically market-driven towards the 'exotic'. This emerged in discussion over a previous exhibition, Images of Kenya. Kratz sought to distance her particular exhibition from any such paradigm. Her efforts included fund-raising so that people from Kaplelach and Kipchornwonek, where the photographs were taken,

6 Ibid., 108. 7 Ibid.,9l-92. 8 Ibid.,94.

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could attend the exhibition opening. Interestingly they never turned up in the capital for the occasion - for complicated reasons - which meant that they did not participate in the viewing audience at the gallery, but instead saw the photographic and textual material later in situ and commented inter alia on what people in Nairobi must have made of it.

The gallery exhibition in Nairobi elicited a range of responses from visi- tors. It was for this audience that comments on the photographs by Okiek had been translated into Swahili; English, of course, widened non-Kenyan access to the texts, especially later American audiences. The multilingual element to this exhibition is already an indicator of the complexity and perhaps mutual intelligi- bility (or unintelligibility) of its cross-cultural audiences. After Nairobi the exhibition traveled to a series of North American venues, including Washington, East Lansing, Fairbanks, Austin, Philadelphia and Atlanta, eliciting a wide variety of responses, reviews and silences which Kratz then analyses. The variables in installation and presentation were considerable, but a very striking feature to emerge is the fractured and unpredictable responses from audiences, which ranged between identification and distancing.

One is struck in several places in this exhibitionary process how much speculation happens about the ways other people respond to a spectacle or a specular field, especially when an exhibition travels.9 Kratz's very book title speaks to the Self's prediction of desire in the Other. Generally, there is implicit- ly a .vast assumption of knowledge about others that is based on past experience and disembodied hearsay, on whole genealogies of viewing. And in Images and Empires of course, Landau analyses visual genealogies on the continent as the 'Image-Africa' which he proposes for the continent as the equivalent of the Orientalist discourse that Said has so famously critiqued. To return to the origi- nal point however, in general a scholarly problem with speculations concerning how pictures were, are and will be received (their 'effects') is that they are rarely matched by any concerted study of actual viewer responses - genealogies of reception, if you like. Clearly, analyzing past receptions of images in bygone centuries is a difficult challenge. It is partly for this reason, perhaps, that some of the chapters in Images and Empires tend to put their analytical weight on the production and 'intentionality' of images. But it is plain that even for present- day audiences, assessing response and reception is a difficult business. This is why Kratz's later chapters, which make reception and 'reading' of pictures by diverse audiences her central concern, are so ground-breaking and fascinating.

In Images and Empires, Burke 's chapter on advertising images in Zimbabwe dives straight into this interesting problem of one group of people reading others' reactions to images. Here the focus is on film, 'terrifyingly mimetic', and which in its early days in Zimbabwe offered an unaccustomed visual grammar. Burke points to recent scholarly interest in the transactions and misrecognitions which occurred through writing and literacy in Africa, and now places visual literacy at the center of enquiry. He deals with early colonial

9 Kratz partly addresses such speculation later in terms of 'preinterpretation' and the politics of representation when the exhibition was in the United States. See below.

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cinema and advertising in Zimbabwe. Anxiety about African interpretations of advertising images were based partly on Europeans' own anxiety in interpreting these images, argues Burke, and the 'fractured' discussion between Africans and Europeans was a 'shared reaction to modern visual genres and forms'.

While Burke 's sources do not always seem deeply substantial, his analysis is sharp and provocative. Objections to change in the quality of an image in an advertisement showed that such images stuck. A welcome point made here is that whites had their own anxieties about rapid social change which advertising keyed into and promoted: Europeans did not have a prerogative over the 'civiliz- ing' forces of capitalism and technologies of vision. There was no control over how images would be read, and as Burke points out, 'Cultural hegemony rests on fragile underpinnings'. The chapter evokes that sense of independence Yvonne Vera suggests in Thatha Camera, where Zimbabwean cities are 'a freed climate', and people's participation in visual culture enable new 'narratives of becoming.'10 For Rhodesian whites, however, it seems there were considerable anxieties about the collapsing of boundaries. Burke is critical of the way stock racist narratives depict African reactions to visual technologies. His conclusion is that if whites laughed at African responses, 'it was rather a nervous sort of laughter.'

Hunt engages with laughter, but of a different kind: laughter at colonial modernity. In one of several polysémie readings across time, Hunt suggests that the cartoon figure Tintín is what Congolese parents could show their children, to explain how Belgian whites saw black people. It showed children a colonized world their parents inhabited, and how Europeans imagined African subjects. Hunt argues that Tintín offers a metaphor for the naïve urban intellectual, and for the latest boy scout figures without borders (who could now be refugee workers, doctors and journalists), who get airlifted out of Africa when their stories end. Even the veteran European scholar of central Africa, Johannes Fabian, was likened to the mobile Tintín by the artist Tshibumba - 'not a gentle jibe', as he himself puts it. Hunt reminds us that Congolese visual culture has thrived on very popular and local levels, not just through increasingly famous iconic works.

Attention is given to the cartoon as a form that amplifies through simpli- fication. Text becomes action through the ballooning speech attached to sequen- tial figures. Hunt also points to the leakages between media, in this case, paint- ings to comics. She historicises comics from the colonial to postcolonial, and argues that in later comics, there is less possibility for intertextual readings, more 'singular coerced reading', and a new positioning of laughter, at (Mbulu the postcolonial figure) not at and with (Tintín).

Hunt makes some penetrating points about different femininities and masculinities that emerge through comics over time, and in the larger debates over culture. These include the sexualized woman; the pompous (at times effem- inate) male urban aspirant; the 'hyperbolic' male such as Lumumba who criti- cizes the Belgians for equating Africans with monkeys in his independence speech.

10 Y.Vera, Thatha Camera: The Pursuit For Reality (Bulawayo, 1999).

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Compared with Congolese cartoons and their 'historiography' inflected with irony, nationalist political cartoons from Nigeria are presented as rather heavy- handed in the chapter by Olaniyan about anti-colonial cartooning. Olaniyan places prolific cartoonist Akinola Lasekan deep in the 'mirror stage of nationalism'. He argues that the visual codes here were borrowed, that the colonized used the tools of the colonizer and this unfortunately consolidated imperialism. This seems a somewhat iron-fisted statement, for surely there is more one can say about mimesis of methods? Olaniyan does not explicitly state here what the visual codes are* but one gains a sense of their workings as he proceeds through his analysis of important cartoons.

My own reading of these cartoons made me wonder if all the signposts contributed to a sense of linear momentum of nationalism. Crossroads appear where the imperial highway is pitted against the nationalist highway. It is intriguing to ask what this has to do with the social, economic and political mobility of Nigerian citizenry at this moment and the choices confronting them. West Africa is going somewhere in these cartoons. It is again heavy-handed of the cartoonist to resurrect the old trope of the African-as-monkey to depict negative party politics in Nigeria after independence. But these cartoons also seem to be introduc- ing new codes which are international, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist - what today might be called globalising codes, inserted into a West African circuit.

Olaniyan emphasises the unity, not multiplicity, in Lasekan's work. Realism was the latter's solution: he never trusted image to fully render what he wanted to say, as it was open to wider interpretation and from his point of view misinterpretation. Thus the text is always very explicit and inseparable from drawings, so the audience would not go wrong. At times his cartoons conflate colonialism with the unnatural, and suggest the denaturing of African manhood. Females play no part in the cartoons shown, though the figure of Nigeria itself is feminised, with men fighting over a putative female body. Olaniyan argues that Lasekan turned human figures into distilled political positions; the popular rival cartoons of the United Africa Company, by contrast, worked from political abstractions to depict humans with ambitions and desires.

Landau's chapter on photography and colonial administration elaborates earlier seminal work, and connects violence, guns and camera-work in the new imperialism in Africa from the late nineteenth century. This is an excellent chapter with rich veins of material and rigorous, challenging interpretations of the 'undetected scripts' that visuality offers historians of Africa. As he points out, historians have hardly begun to consider what he calls 'the practical involvement of visual images' in the structures of power that made up imperialism. His conclusion, if I may cut to the chase, is that 'images and actions impinged upon one another, drove one another for- ward, but never quite meshed. Modern imperialism in Africa,' he ends with a flourish, 'inhabited their chronic misalignment' . This is certainly one way of putting the diffuse relationship between seeing and acting, which the editors of The Colonising Camera}1

1 1 W.Hartmann, J.Silvester and P.Hayes, eds., The Colonising Camera: Photographs in The Making ofNamibian History (Cape Town, Windhoek and Athens OH, 1998), 4.

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put slightly differently by saying there was no necessarily direct and instrumental relationship between (for example) photographs of empty land and the arrival of white settlers in southern Africa.

Among the intriguing points of this essay is the parallel drawn between the way taxidermy conceals its restorative work on animal bodies, and the way trophy photographs hide the black labour that went into preparing the scene. Landau remarks that such obscuring tells us a great deal about the forms of agency underwriting colonial rule. He also revisits and extends his earlier work on the gun and the camera, suggesting that both hunting and photography saw 'consumers' stalking and stopping elements of the world, and that a wide capaci- ty to signify was granted to pictures and trophies. He also makes a powerful point specifically about colonialism itself, in that the reduction of difference to the level of variations in genera was not simply a taxonomic expedient, but a function of distance. His argument is that this was useful to 'the remote com- mand structure of metropolitan overrule.' This is a serious contribution to the debates around photography in Africa and its functions and slippages during colonialism.

Mustafa's article will be sought after, given that it provides close insights into popular photography in Dakar, whose great studio exemplars have received considerable attention in recent exhibitions and catalogues of African photography. It has been a struggle in South African universities to gain critical material which might help to historicise and situate these remarkable traditions of photographing women in particular. This chapter states outright that Dakarois photography broke a history of colonial representation. According to Mustafa, the colonial male gaze was subverted through locally derived techniques which reframed the African female body. What I found so intriguing here is the way this reframing happens through local indices of distinction - representing new selves through heightened and cultured fashions which grace the body in ways that are different from fashions adopted in 1950s to 1970s southern Africa (as seen perhaps in Drum magazine and the Thatha Camera exhibition in Bulawayo), where women at times adopted what Heike Schmidt terms 'a harsh body regime', revealing the body, whitening the skin, putting on wigs or straight- ening the hair (see Schmidt review, this volume).

Mustafa approaches what is going on through an ethnography and history of photographic practice in Dakar. Photography did not turn Africans into Europeans, instead it seemed to reinvigorate local practices and contests for prestige and respectability. Most 'ordinary women' did not have access to the French education and language that proved the highest marker of so-called civ- ilization, but engaged in the popular practices independent of this. As Mustafa argues, their images spoke not to French interlocutors but to local competitors, a lexicon which is acknowledged to be partly wrought through the colonial experience. A current crisis in marriage practice, where women found themselves in increasing competition for eligible men, has helped to promote such photographic practices. There is also a negative view, however, in local circu- lation: that such photographic display is cultural narcissism and represents moral decay.

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The chapter is subtle and suggestive. Mustafa notes how the photographic image as an object is acknowledged as stimulating and channeling remembrance. The projection of elitism through the photographs is not, I would argue, the same as the status of being elite which Kaspin argues for these women who become photographic subjects in their own interest. Mustafa cites her interlocutors as bemoaning the expense and indeed bodily fatigue involved in such performances for the camera.

Drewal's chapter on 'Imagining Selves and Others in Africa and the Americas' focuses on a very well-travelled image, that of Marni Wata, and how the icon becomes repeatedly plastered with new meanings as it moves. From Hamburg where the image of the snake-charmer was produced, probably Maladamajante, it circulated to West Africa, coming to denote a free unencum- bered spirit of nature detached from social bonds and which brought wealth to those who paid homage. It also crossed the Atlantic to become the Black Santa Marta figure that even made it to New York via the illegal traffic in narcotics in the 1970s. Drewal suggest that the image escaped the fixity of the white gaze that produced it, and traveled on to enjoy 'global interdependencies'.

Gordon's chapter on film and performative primitives is insightful and clever, opening with flair on the subject of filming bushman dance in Namibia. In effect there are two forms of visualization which appear to be happening. There is dance performance in its colonial context of recording 'what is most visual and effective when reproduced'. There is also, in a very useful pithy overview, film and cinema, in which the author draws out some differences between photography and film, such as the former's ability to elicit a depth of gaze, in contrast with the 'glance' that film produces. Photography evokes a past, according to Gordon, while cinema evokes a present. These are tantalizing state- ments, though their application to an analysis of the material here is not always fully explored, one feels.

Gordon here concentrates on visual images which 'create pseudo-contexts and give fragmented and irrelevant information an automatic utility.' At different points in the essay Gordon conjures up the different ways bushmen pristine-ness was promoted: through the conjuring up (and to some extent con- flation) of a visible present through images of the past, and through the government research controls effective in Namibia under South African colonial rule for example, which kept critics out. This is nicely derailed by the evidence of knowing participation for gain, by groups such as the /Khomani of the southern Kalahari led by the redoubtable figure /Khanako who insisted on the terms of their performance contract.

The chapter makes a lively introduction to film in Africa which is in many ways ideal for students because a number of key points are made concerning the particularities of film over other forms of visual representation (which Burke's chapter also does to some extent). But as a piece of scholarship it is somewhat torn between its different agendas: covering the issue of bushmen on film as opposed to other media about which Gordon has published much; presenting the specific issues of film and cinema in African history; and the attempt to historicise the censored viewing of cinema by black audiences in southern

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Africa. The chapter, in short, tries to cover both the production and consumption of film. Possibly the sources on the latter are patchy and difficult, because Gordon moves from Lord Hailey's trenchant comments on the inadvisability of film for Africans to a Johannesburg film showing and then to viewing practices in Windhoek, the latter being the one area for which he has audience data. The result is epigrammatic and dislocated rather than a sustained study of any one southern African black audience in relation to cinema production. There is no match or follow-through between film production and consumption here, possibly because the film production focus is on bushmen as ethnographic subjects, and the attempt to look at consumption and/or reception moves into different and seemingly disarticulated archives on urban African audiences looking at Hollywood feature films.

Hodeir's chapter on French colonial exhibitions follows some very illu- minating trails through the visual portrayal of African cultures in the medium of the metropolitan exhibition in the twentieth century. A fascinating reference is made to the way media bleed into each other - it is not only genres that exist in tension - and how cinema techniques have a way of seeping through the one ostensible form to influence another form, the exhibition. New elements of colonialism enter into the display as distinct from nineteenth century expositions: for example the diorama on education, and the focus on French imperial themes such as hygiene. While Tunisians seemed to be excluded from an African cate- gorization, those participants who were categorized as African tended to become specialized, professional performers of culture moving on from show to show. These are the solid central aspects of the chapter.

This chapter however raises a few questions at its edges. In its historici- sation of exhibitions and expositions where humans are put on display, while helpfully opening up francophone research to anglophone readers, the chapter remains metropolitan and European in its focus. No nineteenth century North or South American expositions are listed; neither are any of the colonial expositions which happened in different parts of Africa and the colonial world long after the supposed heyday of international fairs and expositions (except for the Empire Exhibition in 1936 in Johannesburg). Surely enough research has emerged to broaden this restricted view of the viewing globe? It is also odd at this stage of the debate to read about the 'Enlightenment gaze' of the West. This collection often shows contributors have spoken to each other, but here we have an unqual- ified and monolithic concept - incorporating 'the West' and its putative gaze - which elsewhere has been broken down and rendered problematic because it closes off so many other possibilities. If one considers Kratz 's book here, we notice specific ways of avoiding such traps: indeed, the unpredicted, fractured perceptions that she picks up on and tries to understand cross-culturally are among the stongest features of The Ones That Are Wanted.

There is another insight from The Ones That Are Wanted which might apply to the chapter by Pippa Skotnes entitled 'The Politics of Bushman Representation.' Kratz points out, after one poorly contextualised display of her Kenyan Okiek photographs in Texas, that a heavy, pre-interpretive focus on the 'politics of representation' often assigns bad intentions to curators who use

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certain representational forms and techniques. This tends to stress the exoticising tendencies inherent (to a greater or lesser degree) in all exhibitions, and sidelines the potential for an exoticising/assimilating dynamic. As Kratz argues, this interpretive grid disregards viewers' own interpretive abilities and responsibilities while projecting a determining power onto curators. It also tends to ignore 'the very subjects and objects on display'. Kratz maintains that political debates over representation, which conflate representation with interpretive effects, set up a socially and historically impoverished model of communication.12

These points resonate deeply with certain contours of the Miscast debates. It is thus very welcome to have the curator Skotnes speak clearly about her intentions behind the South African exhibition Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Khoisan. These intentions were by no means obvious to most, and some of the troubled public reactions to Miscast have tended to obscure everything else - especially in Cape Town where the exhibition was given National Gallery space. Thus here, a few striking cases of 'the subjects and objects of display' were seen and interpreted, and certain negative responses to the linoleum flooring and body casts for example then tended to reduce engage- ment with other aspects of the exhibition. Editor Deborah Kaspin's closing remark in Images and Empires that sections of the public were more radical than Skotnes does not sound quite right however, unless she is prepared to define some of the emergent ethnic/racial identity politics as left-wing. Post-apartheid public culture in South Africa, it would seem, cannot be contained within a left- versus right-wing dichotomy. Audiences are far more splintered than Kaspin's remark implies - which comes out clearly from Skotnes' own exposition here, as she lists the divergent kinds of feedback and indeed blame she received - the latter expressed in a somewhat injured tone. One is certainly struck by how an emergent audience is still very much coming into being after the dismantling of the old regime in South Africa.

The artist and curator Skotnes was at a stage in her career where she sought, and could take on, the huge task of bringing into visibility those museum and archive collections relating to bushmen. As she says, 'I did not hear any con- vincing arguments regarding why academics and scholars [only] should enjoy such privilege.' She mentions elegantly that her intention in the exhibition was to 'deconstruct' the material and collections. This term in Skotnes' parlance seems to imply 'criticise' or 'show the workings of. Perhaps the difficulty was that sections of the emergent public audience in Cape Town, many of whom knew the bitter aftertaste of racist measures in their lives and some of whom claimed genealogical descent from the very people on display, saw the exhibition less as a deconstruction than a reconstruction of - who can tell? And why was this so? It would take systematic research and widespread public and private reflection and articulation to know the answers to these questions. Skotnes as curator was not in a position to predict all the outcomes, especially the more visceral impact of representing the many indexical (literal bodily) traces of bushmen that she so con- scientiously unearthed in the years of preparation for this exhibition. The event

1 2 Kratz, The Ones That Are Wanted, 1 76.

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will continue to have a tremendous amount to teach and trouble students of the visual.

Girshick's enlivening chapter on the marginal, playful and often subversive art of ornada (young pages) in the Benin royal court at the 'Crossroads of Colonialisms' explores the internal differences in the court and its artistic traditions. She provides historical and social context to the non-guild artworks produced by the ornada, who were a heterogeneous group taken from their kin net- works and placed at court. Girshick discusses how the carvings (which are vivid- ly present through reproductions alongside the text) often touched on the taboo and the critical, and that by contrast the guild art, because royally commissioned, tended to glorify the status quo in Benin prior to colonization. Her study touches on a time when as she says, the kingdom was becoming flooded with foreign objects and the predominant signs of power were now imported. The fin-de- siécle ambivalence is most apparent in the ornada works.

It is fascinating to notice the depiction of subjects in profile - in this Benin art, Portuguese and Europeans are consistently shown in profile while African royalty appears full face. It is almost as if anthropométrie fashion was being played back with the Europeans as Other. At the end, and even as I enjoyed the way Girshick challenged the hierarchy of the art (and art history) establishment which has foregrounded the canonical guild art of Benin, one question haunted me: how did these artworks end up in the museum where Girshick the academic studied them? This is because we have attempted to teach South African undergraduates nineteenth century West African history through the medium of the photograph which decks the cover of Annie Coombes' book, Reinventing Africa, where Benin's art is British plunder.13 It is probably the subject of another paper, but ties in with what Skotnes tried to do - show collecting. And the putting together of a body of knowledge, an archive.

Eric Gable's complex chapter on Guinea discusses the representational use of each other's bodies by Manjaco and Portuguese in the 1950s. Portuguese figures began to appear in Manjaco chiefs' carved posts, the putative ancestors of a new, mediating elite. At the same time, with anthro- pology central to Portuguese administration, masses of photographs of tattoos and scarification on Manjaco bodies were taken in order to monitor 'the culture' and subsequently its decline. In fact the tables of scarification com- piled by Meireles constituted a map, Gable argues, of the territory being codified. Though half the samples were men, cultural decline was charted through decrease in body tattoos in women. While Gable makes the central point that the gap between words and pictures raises crucial issues for any study of empire, the material here begs the question of how the visualization of specifically women's bodies (and the relative absence of their words in the archives) makes visibility in Africa such a gendered issue. But the step into sexualisation is perhaps too easily taken when Gable states the Portuguese photographs constitute an archive equivalent to that shown in

13 A. E .Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven and London, 1996).

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The Colonial Harem.14 In addition, photographing largely naked women's bodies to show scarification does not necessarily indicate sexual proximity and erotic agendas specific to the Portuguese, as Belgians also took large numbers of pictures of body scarification in the Congo15 and no doubt there are other examples. Perhaps the gender questions do not necessarily come down to sex - but rather sexual difference is heightened by the cultural monitoring and visualisa- tion and through this African women are increasingly constituted as a category under colonial rule.

One of Gable's most penetrating points is about the horror of bad copies in both African and European viewpoints, and the growing colonial preoccupa- tion with authentic and inauthentic Africans. He uses the philosopher Paulin Hountondji to argue that no African culture is authentic. The depiction of Portuguese colonialism as weak and founded on prestige, however, struck me as needing some qualification as well - it was almost stereotypical in places.

One of the most dramatic forms of visualization analysed in Images and Empires is the gravestone erected in the landscape. David Bunn historicises the 1820 English settlers in the Eastern Cape landscape of South Africa and their mortuary rituals, grave sites and tombstone inscriptions. He does this in tension with an account of the initially divergent (less visible) but increasingly conver- gent (and visible) burial practices of local Xhosa notables on a frontier of violence, producing a remarkable essay about the entry of an African group into a new visual economy in their old landscapes. This in the light of Bunn's argument that the grave functions as a 'specular field'. He speaks of how the change in Xhosa burial practices, which now placed less emphasis on invisibility and secret knowledge, spoke back to the 'abstract disciplinary systems of cartography and colonial land division'. Historians of this region will hopefully be drawn to engage with Bunn's reading of the evidence of the landscape; his interpretive and theoretical propositions are amongst the most nuanced, stimulating and provocative in this edited collection.

When Bunn asks how autonomous the colonial representational field is, and shows persuasively that it is not, he offers a welcome path out of potentially cast-iron categories. There has been the danger in the emergence of recent publications that a dichotomy is set up between colonial and African, western and native, traditional and modern. The move to deplore 'colonial' photography and celebrate West African photographers in particular (such as Seydou Keita) recalls the triumph in African historiography decades ago when it discovered the African voice.16 One notices that critical discussion is often notably lacking in such laudatory volumes, besides the western art market having completely altered the status of such 'authentically African' photographic works from their relatively humble, everyday studio origins. There is a certain irony about Mama

14 M.Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, 1986). Alloula's book explores photography and postcards of North African (specifically Algerian) women that were circulated amongst Frenchmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of the women photographed were not ordinary civilians, who tended to be veiled, but inhabitants of the main city's female prison who were paid to partially undress and to pose in suggestive and erotic ways for the camera.

15 Personal communication, Nancy Rose Hunt, Johannesburg, July 1998. 16 On some of the problematics of 'the African voice', see inter alia Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumour and

History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, 2000), Chapter 2.

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Casset, amongst the most magnificent of portrait photographers in Dakar, who first trained as an aerial photographer in the French Air Force and spent considerable periods in a French city noted for its film star studio portraiture.17 He is of course one of the icons in a newly-recognised, pure, high-priced, authentically African photographer's gallery.

One does not have to look far to find mutual influences and mediations going on between the poles of western/colonial/modern and African/native/traditional - if such poles were ever entirely autonomous. While the European art world is obsessed with the purity of the 'origins' of its African artworks, what we probably need to acknowledge instead is how the flows of influence take place as a hierarchy of appropriations. The world is surely a series of traffick- ings, negotiations and mediations. Portuguese soldiers became depictions in Benin sculptural art, and on wooden poles on Manjaco graves; Congolese showed Tintín comics to children to give an idea how the Belgians perceived their parents; vulnerable white settlers who had fallen behind metropolitan time in southern Rhodesia had anxieties of being overtaken by African consumers in the modernity stakes; Mama Wata travelled and was transformed from India through Hamburg to West Africa to the Americas; /Khanako of the southern Kalahari complained to a magistrate about her bushman group not receiving their pay in return for being on display; cartoonist Akinola Lasekan 'borrowed' visual codes from 'the West'.

Kratz explicitly states that she sought to avoid any dichotomy between 'tradition' and 'modernity'. Raditlhalo's critique of Peter Magubane's recent work in South Africa (this issue) centers on the latter 's photographic shoring up of demarcated ethnic entities in 'traditional' dress, and the ambiguities this evokes for critical black youth in the present. Such ambiguities are also expressed by postgraduate students taking the Visual History course at the University of the Western Cape: the examples of photographically constructed contrasts between tradition and modernity raise the most dramatic historical, personal, political, cultural and epistemological questions every year. We continue our search for ways to navigate these historically polarized waters.

It is the complex positionalities that emerge in such a postgraduate class that cause me to mark a certain unease with both Landau and Kaspin in their sep- arate editorial essays. Landau acknowledges his authorial voice as 'western', but also mentions in a footnote that 'For what it's worth, I will be referring to the international business elite, to the intersection of the northern and western hemi- spheres in the so-called First World, and to the likely position of most readers, as "the West", for the sake of simplicity.' He seems to use the unifying term 'we' accordingly. He also holds on to his founding metaphor of the introductory essay - the 'amazing distance' between Europeans encountering Africa in earlier centuries, which then seems to transpose into Africa being at an 'amazing distance' for his present-day readers in North America to contemplate. And fellow-editor Kaspin remarks in her concluding essay that if there is a flow of influence, we

17 Thanks to P.Sanner of the journal Revue Noire for his critical guided tour of the Eye Africa exhibition which he curated in Cape Town in late 1998 and early 1999, where these details emerged.

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should acknowledge that it is almost always in the direction of all other cultures becoming westernized and not the other way round.

While one must praise Landau in particular for his bluntness in making no false claims, and for his scholarly sophistication and erudition more broadly, it feels like a door is being closed here. Kaspin's point also forecloses. One might acknowledge the 'reality' that the nations with hard currencies drive the African art market, tend to publish and buy and therefore read books such as Images and Empires, and have a huge say in globalization flows. But as long as there is a chance that even one soul on the continent of Africa will read this book (such as a lowly UWC student), or one soul on the north American continent who identifies with Africa, then it is my contention that the possibility of their existence should be catered for in the way an audience is spoken to: that is, inclusively. Who knows what dialogue might come of it? It is possible for 'amazing distance' and amazing proximity to co-exist. The stronger chapters in Images and Empires suggest this repeatedly on an interpretive level.

Besides the question of inclusion, on an intellectual level the positing of 'western' as a stable, bounded category in the ways mentioned above - which might seem petty - could lead to other problems. Kratz points out that such cate- gorization always leads to hierarchical evaluation.18 There is also the danger of lapsing into a universalist voice, for which art history in particular has been attacked. Advocates of the 'visual cultures' approach, which has no single disciplinary legacy, have maintained that by focusing on audiences, they have been able to bypass the problematic universalist claims with which art history has endowed the producers of art, and the universalist gaze of the discipline itself.19 Gender, class, race, location and many other factors enter the picture when looking for divergences in viewing practices, patterns and effects.

To a large extent several chapters in Images and Empires do trace such divergent paths in the reception of visual materials. But it is interesting that no explicit discussion is held concerning the way different disciplines, or discrete clusters of inter-disciplinarities (such as Visual Cultures), deal with the visual. Things remain rather eclectic and case-based, except for Landau's sweeping 'Introduction' which covers a vast canvas of visual production and indeed consumption in and on Africa. Outside this, the discussion of terms in the collection is sometimes inconsistent - the central concept of 'genre' being a case in point. Both Burke and Hunt use it, but in seemingly different ways, and Hunt applies it to woodcuts when the term medium is possibly more appropriate. Semiotics raises its head, but only makes sporadic and somewhat theatrical appearances across the book, with the exception of Hunt's chapter with its rich seams of Congolese cultural and visual material woven through with subtle theoretical analysis.

Kratz's book may not have the range of stunning visual material to work with that Images and Empires unfolds, but in certain ways it offers more coher- ence. It is about the long process of exhibition. Unlike the diverse and necessarily short chapters in the Landau and Kaspin edited volume, it has the luxury of

1 8 Kratz, The Ones That Are Wanted, 108 . 19 L.Bloom, ed., With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (Minneapolis, 1999), 4-5; see also

Rogoff, 'Studying Visual Culture' in N.Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader (London, 1998).

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being able to analyse the problematics of photography, exhibition-making and audience responses around one single specific set of images. It is in a sense a journey through a series of cross-cultural interactions. An intriguing subtext throughout the book, explicitly stated at some points, are the two central ambiguities at play in the exhibition: photography, which makes boundary questions alive, and ethnography, whose boundary between Self/Other has been problema- tised intensively.20 Kratz explores the pre-terrain and post-terrain of displaying images of one community, with whom the researcher-photographer-curator- author had a long-standing relationship, and which traveled into other communities and spaces with whom she had different, little or no connections. Kratz never set out amongst Okiek with the prior intention of producing a photography exhibition. The idea seems to have come from reviewing photographs taken as a matter of course, and which were given to local people, at the end of a series of lengthy and repeated research sojourns. It must also be said that Kratz had become a skilled photographer. Readers are able to judge for themselves from the 32 sumptuous colour plates in the opening section of the book.

As stated, the chapters in Images and Empires too have their accompany- ing visuals, which almost single-handedly justifies acquisition of the book. This is because of their magnificent potential as teaching sources. Perhaps my colleagues elsewhere may not have noticed, but the students who turn up in the lec- ture halls at UWC have been frankly starved of images of the past from elsewhere in Africa. And probably from South Africa as well. This indeed is why other current publications (all edited volumes) such as Revue Noire 's Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography, Yvonne Vera's Thatha Camera: The Pursuit for Reality, Tobias Wendl's and Heike Behrend's Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, the Guggenheim Museum's In/sight and Enwezor's The Short Century are so desirable to have.21 Both Revue Noire and Guggenheim include Santu Mofokeng's brief but very important essay (with reproductions) on late nineteenth century black South African family portrait photographs. This makes the very point raised above: that nothing had prepared Mofokeng for the discovery of private archives which showed that there were significant numbers of men and women of substance who had their photographs taken a hundred or more years ago. It was as if colonial segregation and apartheid obliterated most such traces in the public22 and black South Africans had their pasts visually shal- lowed out. They were officially pushed into relatively limited representational categories such as ethnicity and labour. Thus all these books which enclose local

20 Kratz , The Ones That Are Wanted, 96-97 . 21 Revue Noire, Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (Cape Town, 1999); Y.Vera, ed., Thatha Camera:

The Pursuit for Reality (Bulawayo, 1999); T.Wendl and H.Behrend, eds., Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika (Munich, 1998); Guggenheim Museum, In/sight (New York, 1996); O.Enwezor, ed., The Short Century. Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994 (Munich, 2001).

22 It is my suggestion that forced removals have a great influence on the disintegration of black family photographic archives and visual genealogies, which has affected communities in South Africa and Namibia under apartheid in particular. Efforts to tap into and reconstitute such dispersed and diffused visual archives have had considerable success in the case of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, and in the work of the History Department of the University of Namibia with ex-residents of the Old Location in Windhoek. See C.Rassool and T.Smith, 'History in Photographs at the District Six Museum', in C.Rassool and S.Proselendis, eds., Recalling Community in Cape Town. Creating and Curating the District Six Museum (Cape Town, 2001); see also P.Hayes, J.Silvester and W.Hartmann, '"Picturing the Past" in Namibia: The Visual Archive and its Energies' in C.Hamilton et al, eds., Refìguring the Archive (Cape Town, 2001 forthcoming).

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and continental examples of Africa's visual histories and cultures have the potential to open up what has been a very limited horizon, not only for historians, but across the social science and humanities disciplines. More specifically, both The Ones That Are Wanted and Images and Empires effect a mining and re-mining of the contexts in which we can understand the work of pictures, giving much- needed visual depth to our African pasts and African presents.

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Camera Africa

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