Durban Art Gallery, Johannesburg
10.12.2018 – 15.02.2019
Mapping the architecture of apartheid and its atrocities, ‘Proclamation 73’ is currently on show at the Durban Art Gallery, curated by Chandra Frank and Zara Julius. This exhibition, apt in its location, makes use of various archives — drawing from family photographs of the groups racialised as ‘coloured’ and ‘indian’ during apartheid’s Group Areas Act (GAA) of 1950, works from documentary photographers Rafs Mayet and Peter McKenzie, official documents such as newspaper clippings and identity cards issued during the act as well as lived experience in the form of interviews— to reflect on the sociopolitical consequences of these state- imposed racial categories specific to the city of Durban. Through utilisation of the personal as political, the homogenizing terms ‘coloured’ and ‘indian’ collapse when the complexity of identities existing within these confines are explored. The government managed to turn these hierarchical race groups into something far uglier: tools of anti-blackness.
‘Proclamation 73’ steals its title from the law issued on the 30th of March 1951 where ‘indians’ were further categorized from the supposed all-encompassing term of ‘coloured’. The photographs and excerpts on the wall show us that both categories cannot be trusted: they were always shifting depending on class and context. Furthermore, the categories wiped away any ancestral lineage these identities brought through mixing and trade routes. One was no longer part Khoi, San, Dutch, St. Helenen, Indonesian, Xhosa, Griqua, British, Zulu, Indian, but lumped into one overarching category. There were instances in Durban where black people would be categorized as coloured, coloureds as indian, indians as coloured and coloureds as white. Before 1902 coloureds were part of the European population and before 1951, indians fell under the category of coloured. The over-simplification of these racial dynamics were orchestrated to silence. More often than not, the race did not seem to fit the photograph.
The exhibition accounts for the erasure of identities through race and gender. The architects of apartheid were responsible for turning communities against each other, causing these groups to aspire to whiteness in order to gain access to its rewards, at the same time acting as an instrument towards anti- blackness. A testimony to this are the silences in the archive. Those who had Zulu, Xhosa, Indian or Khoi ancestry were closer to blackness and had sometimes purposefully not been photographed. Genes were diluted so that the descendants could be closer to so-called ‘racial purity’. On a wall next to some photographs, text from a conversation with Desiree Francis reads “mommy’s mother was Zulu— black —and her father was white. No, no we don’t have any photos. I don’t think anybody’s got a photo of her”. The unspoken heteronormativity of family albums comes to the fore: lgbtqia+ communities are not present and texts on the wall provoke the viewer into thinking how photographs can tell lies. There exists no documentation of them, invisibility forcibly removing black and queer bodies, leaving gaping holes in history.
Intentionally messy at times, the curation of the photographs and documents in a circular space speaks to the exhibition’s disruption of linear racial and gendered narratives. Family photographs were used as a site to speak about the sociopolitical context of the changing times: forced removals, environmental abuse towards people of colour and the tearing apart of families. Structural violence became more invasive and intimate. It transforms into an immersive experience by the use of a link where we are able to listen to recordings of the contributors speaking to some of the photographs. By looking at the photographs and listening to the voice, those who lived within them are made present in the space.
The ghosts of the past exist in the present. These spaces still are alive as old communities have grown through generations since then. The racialisation of space had one goal: to separate communities. Areas that are discussed in the exhibition existing today are still somewhat segregated, an aftermath of the GAA.
Coloured and indian communities that existed in Durban were, and still are, radically different to those that exist elsewhere. The standards for categorization of identities into groups rendered people and their cultures invisible. Histories are then brought to visibility through collection of these photographs from different families specific to locations that were allocated to coloured and indian racial groups during the act. They furnish the family archive into political territory and stories that these communities carry into existence and activation. Still we can ask the question, ‘who is not represented?’. Perhaps now we can use this exhibition to imagine the complexities of coloured and indian identity in Durban beyond (not limiting to) its violence.
Emerging from a past where absence meant erasure, what does it mean for the present where visibility is a threat?