Reframe

Breaking through the White Gaze, Photographic Traditions in African Countries

1_Introduction In 2016, a photo of a woman from the Himba tribe in a Namibian supermarket circulated on social media. She was wearing the usual red-ochre-colored body protection and had her hair covered in a mixture of ochre and grease, resembling pictures in calendars and travel guides. Nevertheless, a media outcry followed. Lower-tier, sensation-seeking tabloid newspapers went as far as to suggest that the woman was looking at washing powder because of the mud on her skin [1] For many people in the West, it was unimaginable that a woman could follow such traditions and enter a modern supermarket at the same time. For them, it was an oxymoron whose elements were too far apart to exist together. This scene is seen/witnessed almost every day, even in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. A scene that almost everyone who lives in Namibia has seen and can imagine. This example epitomizes a larger problem in the Western perception and documentation of African countries, including Namibia. Apart from the pictures of the Himba people—an indigenous tribe in Namibia—travel guides and calendars rarely depict people. Spectacular savannahs, endless expanses, towering dunes, or the Etosha Pan—these are the images that a Western audience associates with Namibia. These are landscapes that can be romanticized. Anyone looking at the history of photography will not be surprised by the iconographic expectations of the Western public. The camera came to the African continent with the colonial rulers. And with it, the white gaze. Although almost everyone owns a camera today, there is comparatively little documentary photography in Namibia, especially practiced by Namibians, not visitors. Even two well-known photographers who documented the Namibian liberation war did not originally come from Namibia. John Liebenberg was a South African photojournalist who depicted Namibia’s bloody liberation struggle in Ovamboland and later went on to cover the civil war in Angola. Next, Tony Figueira was a photographer of Angolan-Portuguese descent based in Windhoek documenting the protests leading up to Namibia’s independence as well as Sam Nujoma’s, Namibia’s founding father, return from exile. There has always been a social hierarchy and intimacy involved in the relationship between a photographer and their subject. But there is a lack of Namibian photographers taking an active part in documenting Namibian everyday life. This means that narratives are strongly characterized by an outsider and often Eurocentric perspective. Parachute journalism, in which Western journalists are flown into countries to report on pressing…

Decolonization and In_Visibilities in Colonial Archives: The FCO 141 Series and the (Redemptive?) Power of Placement

April 2018. The National Archive’s Reading Room, Kew, England (TNA). Sitting in a Bentham-perfect panopticon, where visibility avails surveillance, I silently leaf through ‘FCO 141’ (Foreign and Commonwealth Office). Released to THE National Archives in 2012, this is a stolen series. Pinched by British colonial officers and their accomplices starting in the early 1960s, FCO 141 is comprised of records which “may embarrass Her Majesty’s Government” and were thus semi-covertly removed from over thirty-seven “former dependencies” as anticolonial struggle brought about constitutional independence from Britain’s empire. [2] The UK government ordered these records, in the thousands, to be locked away in steel cages in cooperation with the Public Record Office (TNA’s predecessor) outside the regular requirements of access laid out by the UK Public Records Act. To delay moral judgement of empire, these documents formed an archival limbo, wherein they were neither destroyed nor made available.   “It is assumed that, in order to claim specific needs, rights, and interests, subjects (or collectives) suffering from the experience of discrimination and marginalization need to ‘become visible.’” [3] I am at TNA to look at files that describe the processes of record removal in the land now known as Kenya. [4] Survivors of a brutal war, 1952–1960, took the UK government to court in a lawsuit against the use of torture in wartime. [5] Their efforts resulted in the release of FCO 141 starting in 2011, ending the fifty-year period of illegal archival concealment. Access to the removed documents corroborated individual testimonies of torture, which clarified the British design of structural violence in Kenya. FCO 141 made visible not only the plaintiff’s suffering but the official participation of the UK Colonial Office in creating the conditions for that suffering. In other words, plaintiffs made not only themselves visible to the court and reporting media through sharing their experience of abuse, corroborated by administrative documentation held by FCO 141, but in doing so also the actions of those who had carried out and condoned it. While those who had survived, participated in, and bore witness to the brutality of Britain’s war in Kenya were well aware of their own experiences, FCO 141 lent credibility to the assertation that this brutality was neither incidental nor ad-hoc, but the result of systematic authorization from the metropolitan government down to the colonial Governor’s office. FCO 141 transformed testimony of individual experience into evidence of structural violence…