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E-book Building a White Nation : Propaganda, Photography, and the Apartheid Regime Between the Late 1940s and the Mid-1970s

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Penilaian

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In a lively black-and-white photograph by Alf Kumalo (1930–2012), small children crowd around an elderly woman who is presenting a portrait of Nelson Mandela to one of the toddlers (Fig. 1). Mandela is dressed in a striped shirt and is frowning slightly, while his bearded face has a tired and sad expression. Engaged in an intense exchange of gazes, the woman, the child, and Mandela form an intimate trinity, so that the portrait turns into the focal point of Kumalo’s photograph. Kumalo pictured Nosekeni Fanny Mandela holding her son’s portrait after he had been sentenced to life im-prisonment in the Rivonia trial of 1964. Significantly, with Mandela’s con-viction Pretoria’s White minority regime decreed it illegal to publicly quote him or to publish pictures of him. This proscription epitomises how Pretoria tried to control, suppress, and censor the plurality of opinions throughout apartheid. Visual culture had become a crucial domain for the regime in which to establish its own self-legitimising perspective on apartheid, sugarcoating the system’s racist cruel-ties while at the same time propagating Afrikaner nationalism. Photographers who pictured the circumstances in the country from a critical stance, not re-producing the image of a prosperous land in the sun, feared prosecution by the security police. In some cases, these methods put an end to the photographers’ work in South Africa or to their careers in general.2 Okwui Enwezor points out that ‘[n]o form of media frightened the regime more than photography did, with its powerful testimony that could be used to expose and counteract the sanitized, propagandistic images working in the government’s favor ...’3Apart from being expressions of fear, the White supremacists’ measures against photography were a symptom of their awareness of the political im-pact images might have. This observation marks the starting point of my examination and raises the central research question: If the White minority regime was aware of the political dimensions which photographs are able to unfold, how did it in turn use photography to visually articulate its political messages, to bolster apartheid and to consolidate its power? My aim is to shed light on the interplay of the apartheid regime’s propaganda and pho-tography. At the core of South Africa’s wide-reaching propaganda apparatus were the various incarnations of the information service that was responsi-ble for creating a favourable image of the country and selling apartheid as a benevolent separate development. Part of this agenda was the production and distribution of photographs of which many originated from the infor-mation service’s photographic section and its specially established photo library. By scrutinising the iconographies, the trajectories, and the discur-sive framing of a selection of photographs, I explore how they correlated with the discourses and practices of exercising power and the supremacists’ endeavour of building a White nation.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

320.560968 JOR b

Penerbit

Leuven : Leuven University Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

369 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789461665263

Klasifikasi

320.560968

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Apartheid

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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