Hlonipha Mokoena

Photography as Historical Fiction: A Photo Essay

For many decades, African Studies has been defined by the ‘orality’ versus ‘literacy’ debate. This underpinned the function and rationale of the discipline as being about defending the oral traditions of the African continent while showing that orality is historical evidence regardless of its mutability. What happens then when we add photography to the mix? What new insights into ‘Africa’ can we glean from images that were created in Africa by photographers, artists, cartographers, town planners, illustrators etc.? This talk will present photographs of African policemen from South Africa to make the argument that visual culture is the new ‘literacy’. The argument will be based on research on African policemen and the photographs that they posed for. The main argument will be that rather than offer us a ‘real’ picture of what it meant to be a policeman, images have actually created a ‘historical fiction’ in which the African policeman is seen as a traitor and turncoat. As an alternative, the talk will present the argument that policing was part of a generalised availability of ‘war work’ and that many African men used ‘war work’ as a career move towards chiefdom, status and an unstable autonomy.

Hlonipha Mokoena received her Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town in 2005. From 2006 to 2015 she taught in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University in the City of New York. She is currently an associate professor and researcher at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her articles have been published in: Journal of Natal and Zulu History; Journal of Religion in Africa; Journal of Southern African Studies; Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies; Journal of African History; Kronos: Southern African Histories; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Image & Text and Critical Arts. She has also written catalogue essays for Zanele Muholi, Mohau Modisakeng, Sabelo Mlangeni, Sam Nhlengethwa and Andrew Tshabangu. Her first book is on Magema M. Fuze, author of the Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona (1922) / The Black People and Whence They Came (1979). The book is titled Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual. The basic argument she presents in the book is that as an author and an aspirant historian Fuze represents a set of questions about the emergence and arrested development of a black intelligentsia and literati in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa. His life and writings reveal both his singular attempt to create, under adverse cultural, political and social conditions, a literary career and a body of knowledge while also participating in the constitution of a discourse community or a public sphere of Zulu-speaking intellectuals. She is currently working on a book about African men in military and police service in South Africa.

Photograph of Hlonipha Mokoena by Terra Dick