SEEDTIMES Omar Badsha
South African History Online
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First published in South Africa in 2017 by South African History Online info@sahistory.org.za www.sahistory.org.za This publication accompanies the exhibition Seedtimes © 2017 Omar Badsha © authors for the text All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored on or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-0-620-78109-1 Editing by Omar Badsha Design by Ian Africa, Omar Badsha Scans by Charles Dourando Printed by Everbest Printing Investment Company Ltd. Thanks to Farzanah, Ari, Imraan, Darrell, Ian, Tarquin, Mduduzi, Zola, Paul, Chris, Ravi, Mads, Simon, Charles Cover Photograph by Mads Norgaard Proceeds from the sale of this book and prints go towards South African History Online internship programmes
It is seedtime in Soweto What went round has come around This time the plants will grow and bear fruit to raise up more seed There’ll be a refreshing persistence of the wits Because this time There’ll be no more lullabies. “No more Lullabies” by Mafika Gwala, 1982
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To Nasima, Farzanah, Leila Growing up on the margins of the Apartheid Ghetto, I learned what it meant to be labelled a second-class citizen. I learned to control my rage by walking slowly, framing, arranging and rearranging images of my world. Each step of the way I was accompanied by family, friends and strangers who also became my subjects. Through them I learned to make sense of the many worlds that we live in and identities that we adopt. This collection of photographs begins with the autobiographical. A boy sitting in front of a closed door, lost in his world of play and make-believe. He knows he is not alone. He sees me and I him, and in that fraction of a second is written many stories and ways of seeing.
Boy in doorway, Milton Road, Durban, 1979
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Narratives of a Time of Revolution The photographs are a compilation from a number of documentary projects I started working on in 1977 and ends with a photograph of Nelson Mandela at the funeral of his close friend and comrade Walter Sisulu, taken in 2003. The photographs also trace my way of narrating stories about how people shaped their identities through their everyday rituals. Above all, it is a story of how people moved from the margins of a deeply divided racist and repressive society and defiantly took centre stage in the struggle to bring down Apartheid.
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Young woman repairing her home, Inanda, 1982
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Bible class, Nazareth Baptist Church, Inanda, Durban, 1983
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Children asleep after a whole night service, Nazareth Baptist Church, Inanda, Durban, 1982
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Easter pageant play, Pondoland, Transkei, 1986
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Farzanah and her great grandmother, Durban, 1978
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Woman with washing, Inanda, Durban, 1980
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Garment worker, Queen Street, Durban, 1986
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Mr Khan, Lorne Street, Durban, 1982
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Migrant worker, Dalton Road Hostel, Durban, 1986
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Induna Nkonyane, Inanda, Durban, 1983
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Man with hunting dog, Inanda, Durban, 1982
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Family gathering, Fordsburg, Johannesburg, 1978
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Street performance, Victoria Street, Durban, 1981
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Interior, home of pensioner, Inanda, 1982
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Interior of home of Mr Sikhakhane, Inanda, 1981
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People at prayer Nazareth Baptist Church, Inanda, 1983
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Funeral of Stembiso Nzuza and Moses Ramatlotlo,killed in an armed clash with police, KwaMashu, KwaZulu Natal, 1984
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Funeral of ANC activist Anton Fransch, Bonteheuwel, Cape Town, 1989
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Funeral, Brook Street Cemetery, Durban, 1981
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Badsha Pir birthday celebrations, Grey Street, Durban, 1980
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Pension payout day, Mamba Store, Inanda, 1980
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Pensioner being carried to collect her pension, Mamba Store, Inanda, 1980
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Launch of Apartheid Government backed Trade Union, Durban, 1986
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David Brown, at a protest organised by the member of Detainees Action Committee, Durban, 1982
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Trade union meeting, University of Cape Town, 1989
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Students protest against the massacre of ANC and Lesotho citizens, Lamontville, Durban, 1984
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Protesters against the assassination of United Democratic Front leader Victoria Mxenge, West Street, Durban, 1986
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Police arrest demonstrators protesting the assassination of Victoria Mxenge, West Street, Durban, 1986
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Helen Joseph defies her banning orders to protest against the imprisonment of political prisoners, Christmas Day, Johannesburg, 1981
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Dorothy Nyembe, celebrates her release from a 15 years prison sentence for her membership of the armed wing of the banned ANC, KwaMashu, Durban, 1984
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New elected leaders of the ANC at its first legal conference since the 1960s, Durban 1991
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Nelson Mandela at the funeral of his lifelong friend Walter Sisulu, Soweto, 2003
Road to Harar In 2001 I was commissioned to undertake a photographic project documenting the impact of war on young people in Africa. I travelled to Ethiopia while my colleague Guy Tillim, who had covered events in Africa for a number of years, focused on the impact of conflicts and ongoing wars in Sierra Leone, Angola, Mozambique and Burundi. The work was published in a book “Amulets and Dreams: War, Youth and Change in Africa,� which I also edited.
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Farmers on their way to the market, Harar, 2001
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Worshippers, Lalibela, 2001
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Woman carrying biscuits, Harar, Ethiopia, 2001
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Eid Day celebrations, Harar, Ethiopia, 2002
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Eid Day, Harar, Ethiopia, 2002
Images of Denmark In 1995 I was invited by a Danish cultural organisation to spend time in their country to see how an African photographer who was "parachuted" into the country would turn “the photographer’s gaze” on their own society. I was given 21 days to travel the country and produce a body of exhibition grade work as part of a cultural programme attached to the first bilateral meeting between Denmark and representatives of the first democratically elected South African Government.
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Christiania, Copenhagen, 1995
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Festival, Copenhagen, 1995
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Festival, Copenhagen, 1995
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Roof wetting ceremony, Christiania, Copenhagen, 1995
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Sunday Lunch, Copenhagen, 1995
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Retired Head Master, Copenhagen, 1995
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Family in churchyard, Copenhagen, 1995
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Museum, Copenhagen, 1995
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Cemetery, Copenhagen, 1995
Road to Tadkeshwar In 1996 I travelled to India for the first time. I took with me a photocopy of the 1936 edition of “The South African Indian Who’s Who and Commercial Directory” by Dhanee Bramdaw. I also took with me the stories that my grandmother had told us children about life in the village of Tadkeshwar and stories of the journey she undertook as a young woman with two children, to join my grandfather in South Africa. My original aim was to tell the story of migration through personal family photographs and my photographs of ten Indian South African families, from both Muslim and Hindu communities, who had migrated from the state of Gujarat in the 1890s. When I got to India I realised how little I knew about the country and its history. I did track down some families but realised that my project was hampered by time, distance and language, and so I decided to concentrate on my family’s ancestral town of Tadkeshwar, just over 30 kilometres outside the ancient port city of Surat. I made a number of trips to Tadkeshwar and witnessed the massive changes in the town and the country in general. I also sadly became aware of the great deal of fear and anxiety in the wake of the anti Muslim pogroms in Gujarat in 2002, as well as a new wave of migration by Muslim families from Tadkeshwar using the same routes established by my grandparents’ generation, in the early part of the twentieth century and after the 1948 partition of the Indian sub continent.
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Tadkeshwar, Gujarat, 1996
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Desai family, Tadkeshwar, Gujarat, 1998
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Ice lolly maker, Tadkeshwar, Gujarat, 1996
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Flower mill, Tadkeshwar, 1996
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Domestic worker, Tadkeshwar, Gujarat, 1996
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Domestic workers, Tadkeshwar, Gujarat, 1996
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Child, migrant worker camp, Tadkeshwar, 1996
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Tadkeshwar, Gujarat, 1996
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Wedding, Bodhan, Gujarat, 1996
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Shopping Mall, Christmas Day, Surat, Gujarat, 2010
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The Eye, the Document and Living Rights Ari Sitas Omar Badsha is a very fine photographer. Period. This is a fact often forgotten due to his political, cultural and educational activism. Such forgetfulness is further magnified by a lack of consistent engagement with the arts by local media outlets and the nonsense frequently written by certain commentators endowed with such platforms from which to write. Badsha was born in Durban in 1945. He was 4 years old when the Durban riots and their carnage pitted Africans against Indians in the streets of that harbor city. He was at his most impressionable age as the 1950s inaugurated new forms of defiance and resistance against the Apartheid regime. He was 15 when the Sharpeville massacre initiated the state’s mass clampdown against people’s organisations. This repressive climate did not end murmurings of resistance amongst Black communities. Badsha recalls that he was of an activist bent even from his first year at high school, challenging Apartheid-imposed statutes and practices. Later, between 19661972, he worked primarily as an artist, trying to follow in the
footsteps of his father and playing with abstracted sketches of humans and birds - always caught between constraint and selfexpression. The influence of his artist father; his own paintings and calligraphy; and the attempt of his generation to eke out creativity in the face of visceral injustices, left an indelible mark on Badsha. Being Indian and being Black brought about untold frustrations in Apartheid era South Africa: always treated as second-class citizens, with the threat of eviction perpetually hanging over their heads; the destruction of any semblance of non-racial encounters; the dearth of facilities in Black areas and absence of creative spaces to nurture their talent in the designated White areas; enforced segregation from the African townships and homelands – all these created a milieu that either broke the back of any revolutionary initiative or steeled it to become stronger. It must be obvious that Badsha’s response was of the second kind! So Sharpeville, despite the regime’s intentions, became a creative turning point in South Africa’s cultural history. Badsha and his
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Dumile Feni’s work between 1964-1968 (before his exile) was a deep reflection of such existential and aesthetic questions: his African Guernica, the Tree of Life, and Horses, were a genuine attempt to use such a vocabulary. Despite oppression, bannings and isolation, there were important non-formal networks in the Black communities that supported progressive artists in the 1960s. Political figures like the banned and house-arrested Communist intellectual Abdul Khalek Mohammed Docrat shared with Badsha and his friends the first cyclostated poems by Pablo Neruda; the New Statesman and its leftist analyses; and, of course, the work of John Berger. Docrat made his livelihood during those heady days by buying and selling books and boasted one of the most extensive private libraries of progressive writing in town. There were similar libraries and laboratories of new ideas scattered around the country. Badsha and a small cohort of creative people – artists, poets, and writers started the first Black ensembles and associations that spawned numerous nodes of defiance against White domination. As a friend of Mafika Gwala, one of the finest poets of his generation, Badsha was caught in the rising currents of Black Consciousness and the re-emergence of Congress networks – and before long a leader in the trade union movements of the early 1970s. Those were heady days indeed, which almost gave way to optimism when the Black worker strikes hit Durban from February 1973; a time when close to 100 000 disaffected workers burst out of factories, marking a new phase of movements and defiance.
friend Dumile Feni were steeped in debates and practices that crafted a new vocabulary based on serious forms of reflection and questioning: what was it to be a Black artist in Apartheid South Africa? What was the appropriate form of representation of blackness, the black body, the experience of oppression in everyday life? Furthermore, who was the appropriate audience? How did one escape from merely being a prancing native in White run galleries? What was the meaning of the popular? How could art reach the people – Black people?
There was also, of course, the magnetism of the Phoenix Settlement and the workshops run by Rick Turner, Badsha and others outside Durban where in 1970 Gandhi met Fanon, Marx, Sartre, Luthuli and Mao in the discussions and ruminations that animated each of its weekends. There was the students’ movement at the University of Durban Westville, a fine incubator for Black Liberation. This was more than mirrored at the University of Natal’s Medical School, the only campus that trained black doctors and through which charismatic thinkers and doers like Steve Biko emerged. There was the University of Zululand as well, where scores of Black Consciousness- and Congress-linked students started finding their voices. There were theatre groups and co-ops, and of course Gale street with its union offices where Garment workers were
all the “connected ones;” the ones who were there and could take sensational snapshots of the chaos. Yes, they could have, but they refused and as homage to their way of seeing, in retrospect, we have to celebrate such integrity. They knew when to stop taking pictures and they knew when to take them.
opening their doors to Black workers and White activists who were animated by the ideas of the philosopher Rick Turner. There were also the first groups to be released from Robben Island bringing with them debates and news. This melting-pot was a vital part of the emerging trope about a new representation of Africans, Blacks and Workers. Badsha was never alone. He was both seen and saw himself as part of a broader collective of photographers who defined their role as part of a movement for liberation. Much of the work of the 1980s involved co-operatives and ensembles of creative people and especially photographers working and crafting their output in tandem. They were to become some of the most notable photographers the country has produced: Cedric Nunn, Paul Weinberg, Santu Mofokeng, Jeeva Rajgopaul, Guy Tillim, Rafs Mayet and many more. Soon enough, such ensembles re-defined the spaces through which art ought to happen. There was an attempt to tap and nurture popular creativity through photographic workshops, exhibitions, and being in communities that provided the opportunity to bear witness and to document. People’s gatherings, prayers, the violence and the insurrection were what engulfed them. Their inalienable dignity was that they managed to cover the struggle in the streets and the hidden struggles of removals and the everyday life of people. These photographers were after
The most important thing though was that they were in conversation with each other’s craft and constantly challenged each other to avoid the cliché and the false applause. It was a remarkable movement but what I am no longer sure of is whether the words “documentary photography” capture their craft. Most certainly Badsha’s work was a critical conversation, a counterpoint to the work of two other photographers: David Goldblatt, whose book of portraits of Afrikaners gripped Badsha’s imagination in 1976; and Peter Magubane’s book on Soweto. Badsha’s political, trade union and community activism shaped his development of a new way of approaching the centrality of the subject as an agent of change and an emerging force at the heart of it. The prints that emerged from his eye’s restless range were remarkable: from the first collection in his Letters to Farzanah (1979) to his collection, Imperial Ghetto (2001), Badsha created a unique trope and a vocabulary through which he could find an “anti” and a “post” Apartheid imagery. Key here was the collection of photographs in Imijondolo (1985), the book that captures with precision the distance between Badsha’s craft and his documentary forebears. Working around the shacklands of Durban in the early 1980s, he is an activist and a photographer bearing witness to inhuman conditions but also photographing the unheroic lives of the hundreds of thousands of Black people who would be at the epicenter of the struggles of the 1980s. No less potent in range and power were the collective projects through the Afrapix collective that featured some of the “documentary” photographers mentioned above. The collections "Beyond the Barricades" and "The Condoned Heart" were seminal statements that defined the collective’s legacy. What I particularly cherished and cherish about the work in this collection is that it shows, once again, that even during the most horrid
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moments of the Apartheid period, he refused to show people as passive and avoided the self-projection of a Black artist endowed with a presence larger than the work itself. The truth was to be found in the interplay of shadow and light, print after print. Their defiance builds slowly, persistently, portrait after portrait. He is like the watchmaker, a mechanic of time (p, 306 ). The photographs are a summary of a vast archive that spans from 1978 to 2004. Half of them are about Durban, Grey Street and the
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streets around the Casbah in and through Victoria, Queen and Leopold streets all the way to Curry’s Fountain. This is the backdrop for the sensitive collection of children that was the image-scape of Letters to Farzanah and later, much later, the image-scape of the Imperial Ghetto. In all, the early sensibilities in Mafika Gwala’s, Dumile Feni’s and Badsha’s earlier work find a confident maturity: the bodies, the faces and arms, their posture and confidence defines the language of a new visual politics.
Look at the picture of Farzanah in the tentative arms of her great grandmother, sense the warmth and burden, the bed, the clatter of functional objects, look at it against the image of the child akimbo on the modest portico of his humble home down the road. Further down the road under the Highway (p, 74) which cuts its way through the ghetto is the space controlled by the street performer. He holds sway in spite of the police scrutinizing him as if he will burst into a heresy, a profanity and a deviance. The crowd at the back is keeping its distance and the Black gentleman with the briefcase tentatively bends as if he has to observe what is forbidden. Note the Muslim evangelist’s provocative challenge on the pillar. The photograph has all the makings of an urban conflagration. From the Imperial Ghetto collection Badsha’s gaze moves to Durban’s other margin. Inanda, Amaoti and the Phoenix Settlement come alive where the utopian dreams of Dube, Gandhi and Shembe had created an anti-colonial sensibility since the turn of the 20th Century. They thought they could build a redemptive politics there but, 80 years on, they became spaces of hope and misery for close to a million landless squatters trying to eke out an existence. On rare occasion Badsha pushes further into the city’s hinterlands: there is one foray south, to Balhasi near Flagstaff in Mpondoland, (p, 97) following a migrant’s trail from Durban, but otherwise the landscape is of Durban’s inner city; the heart of the shacklands in Inanda and KwaMashu constitute the visible world of his craft. Badsha’s collection consists of three further journeys: his own journey back to his ancestral village in Gujarat; his journey to the Ethiopian highlands as part of a project on War and Youth in Africa, and to Denmark where he was invited to document his impression of the country and exhibit his work over a period of three weeks. During such excursions, Badsha epitomises the African photographer parachuted into Europe, who relishes the reversal of roles: photographing instead of being photographed. In all these journeys his gaze has or follows similar impulses: a conversation with people’s agency and a sparse look at their everyday rituals. There is nothing objectified, reified or made exotic. Each photograph in its composition speaks of a larger story of everyday struggles over dignity.
Each photograph is a visual invitation to a story. They invite many readings and are a social, historical and aesthetic commentary at once. Take the photograph of the young woman (p,2) that animated the cover of his Imijondolo collection, feel the texture of the daub behind her, sense her haunted eyes and her arms as if she had just deposited a crown or a punishment of mud on her head and wonder: are we witnessing a story of a peculiar war? Sense the conversation between the patterns of her paltry dress, her headgear, the pattern on the wall that is to consume her and, all of a sudden, the drabness of the squatter camps is filled with agency, wonder and a story. Consider the photographs of the pension line. Note how the woman with the more intricate dress, whose head is not visible, cuts the image in two. On the left, the two women seem to be anticipating something but their eyes contain more bewilderment than comfort. They have baggage and shopping bags. On the right hand side lies an implicit critique of the whole rotten system: the woman in the wheelbarrow, in a fine dress. Was she pushed over great distances for this auspicious pension day? How do we fathom her disability? Is this freedom? Badsha’s work embodies what made post-1970s art and literature distinctive: a refusal to deal with the “human abstract” where his subjects become a representation of something outside themselves; the detail and the self-presentations refuse to create an amorphous mass, however heroic. Even if the focus is on the political funeral of his friend Stembiso Nzuza (p102), what you see is the weight of the coffin on the bearers’ shoulders, the grip of the hands that hold it, the faces in their distinctive moods. The photograph of the students’ tentative march into history (p,150), the metalworkers’ creative extroversion and the masks of their defiant performance (p78). It is not about a decontextualized abstraction like “human rights”, rather, it is about “living rights” and the rites to live. The “refusal to deal with the human abstract”, the “sense of living rights” are but proximate expressions that try to capture the art’s significance.
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he talks, he listens, he processes. The eye is embodied, spaced, constricted, enticed, welcomed. He is shown a drab or colourful world but colour turns through the brain as black, grey, white in constant conversation with a flow of interactions. It is about feeling, time and geometry. Then comes the click and the photographer captures both the “canvas” and its foreground. This is the action shot, the live experience, when the artist lets the street have its own beat.
I am convinced Omar Badsha paints rather than “clicks”. His eye it seems, constructs peculiar canvases that enhance the main story: there is a texture that defines each backdrop, the way impressionists played with landscape, and the way the pictures read when placed next to each other that proliferates more readings. If we return to the image of the Girl of Inanda above, look carefully at the texture of the mud wall, look across to the hessian bag woman, where the bags constitute the backdrop. Travel across to Ethiopia, look at the texture of the walls, the brick and mortar, the ornamentation of the rituals of the world around the imperial ghetto and this sense of a painted backdrop increases. When the landscape or the urban sprawl and its etchings are invisible, people and cloth are woven in as the defining scenery. Take the metalworkers performance – there are the banners, you can sense there is a breeze behind them but in front of them there is a huddle of people in conference, absorbed in their conversation and uncaring about the spectacle (p147). This immediately amplifies the cameo of the masked performers. This of course raises the obvious question of what the artist sees when he is wandering through streets, homes, gatherings and institutions? On the one hand, it is about a visceral experience as he is a body moving through intimate spaces – he smells, he feels,
Then there is the realization that half of the work is about making photography “the” catalyst. That is, getting the subject to respond to the fact that there is a photograph to be taken. The subjects are allowed to pose, enjoy, present themselves and become partners in the stylization. But unlike the studio photograph that had the subject pose in front of an enchanting backdrop, the backdrop is precisely their world, their walls, their everyday trinkets, objects, beds, icons, decorations. There is a third point: Badsha’s is both a black and a red eye: It looks for the small gestures that define Black dignity and the smaller ones still that constitute class being: the peasant, the villager, the worker. His Ethiopian, Gujarati and South African subjects carry loads, burdens, despair, anger and humour. If we take his work as an emotive timeline: the period of 1966-1973 was about the education of the senses in the shadow of Apartheid rule. Although primarily working on drawings, the schooling moves quickly from the emotional restrictions of high Apartheid to the Black working-class explosion in Durban’s factories. From there, we move to the next wave that ends with the violence of 1985, the civil war in KwaZulu-Natal and the torching – by the very people he was photographing in Inanda – of the Phoenix Settlement. Some of his most profound work emerges during these years. From there, we move to the cascading of violence everywhere and the transition of 1994. Most of Badsha’s activity is less about the camera eye and more about organizational work in Cape Town. The post1994 period brings back the work and leads to the travels and the challenging works of the Gujarat of his ancestry, the Ethiopia and the Denmark of his friends. And then there are the hints of people
who are the new immigrants of a global diaspora. This retrospective stops in 2004. I am sure it will be followed by an exhibition covering the work of the last decade or so. It will be challenging to see what of his compositional craft remains similar and what takes us to new depths and borders. There is no doubt that his subjects and the objects that define them: brooms, coffins, megaphones and tools get ample focus and appreciation. There is a Samuel Beckett and Athol Fugard like obstinacy in their search for meaning, presence and resilience. But whereas that sense may lead to a metaphysical reading of their presence and resilience, Badsha is more concrete about the reasons and the injustices that define their life. There, the photographer joins the work of John Berger, Jean Mohr and Sebastio Salgado in speaking about the politics of the everyday. At the same time, he hints at the exuberant cameos of the Drum generation, but refuses to celebrate the shebeen and the clowning classes, there the influence of Mahatma Gandhi, Yusuf Dadoo and Steve Biko takes over. I return to conclude on a personal note: Philosophy and theory taught me to feel, creativity and the world of stories helped me to theorise and think. But learning to see had to wait. My tutor was Omar Badsha, and when I met him in Durban in 1983 he was the most reluctant of tutors and I the most reluctant of pupils. In the 1970s I abhorred photography – it was reification, it was the freezing of process and life, a pseudo-hint at authenticity. It was a mechanical act of the finger, not the struggle on canvas to bring something into life. It was stuff for tourists and namby-pambies. OK, I was wrong. Badsha could do in one picture what a dozen History Workshop papers couldn’t in terms of the detail that captured the texture of life and the social history of a people. In the late Mafika Gwala’s words: “Poverty swoops its deathly wings. But tough/ Strong and witty are the children of Nonti.” This collection of photographs surrounded us with them.
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Omar Badsha A Democratic Gaze and the Art of the Everyday Imraan Coovadia Photography’s original sin is, of course, the objectifying gaze of the photographer. And the standard Christian remedy for original sin, of course, is grace. The transactions between subject and photographer in Omar Badsha’s selection of his work across four decades are marked with a democratic grace. The photographs do not confer dignity, complexity, individuality or inwardness on their subjects, but allow these qualities to bloom inside their frames. But what is blooming? What is growing there? What has grown out of two decades of democracy? For this book Badsha has chosen an epigraph from the nationalist poet Mafika Gwala: “It is seedtime in Soweto…this time/ There’s be no more lullabies.” The sentiment is a direct threat to the security of the middle-class reader and represents a shift in the mood of the country as much as of the collection. The book opens with a woman carrying mud on her head, discovered against a massive two-tone backdrop of clay and earth—opened the sequence. She is not heroic but rather practical, mucky, and complete in her own activity. Her hands are not warding off the photographer. Instead, they are about to refit her burden to
her head. You look again, and you put your hands up to your head in sympathy. This symbol of nineteenth century working class resilience, a body placed in a dress situated inextricably inside the mixed beauty and squalor of physical labour, has been displaced by a very young boy sitting on a balcony, under a repurposed Sparletta sign, confronting the photographer with a gaze that promises “no more lullabies.” What has happened to our ordinary life, our ordinary processes of reproduction and education, the ways in which we are supposed to raise our children and better our condition? How did we replace the promise of endless growth natural to a democracy with a threat directed as much at our society in 2017 as at the past broken in 1976? In 1984, Njabulo Ndebele defined the project of South African art as the “rediscovery of the ordinary”. In fact, Omar Badsha has been rediscovering the ordinary, and the extraordinary in the ordinary, ever since the 1960s. The great Russians, in particular Tolstoy and Chekhov, reveal glimpses of the ordinary which seem to be lit from inside, so indicating the existence of a Creator. They are glimpses of a world without alienation. So, too, are many of
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the photographs in this book, we might classify them not only as Christian but also, in a very genuine sense, as Marxist. But in this later incarnation the peril of Marxism is as evident as the optimism. It is not wholly the case that the sequence of photographs in Seedtimes relies on the human subjects for its power. In fact, the photographs demonstrate a stern control over the essential elements of photographic rhetoric: flat space, volume and the arrangement of objects in three dimensional space, and composition. Badsha’s walls, posters, robes, and boards are by turn flat and curvaceous. The blanket hung against the wall – if indeed it is a blanket (fig. 1) and not the skin of an enormous moth – binds volume and surface. On (p,97) the compositional organisation of the scene steps forwards in the contrast suggested by a man and a woman praying. The photograph offers a distinction between male and female orientation towards the divine which is every bit as effective as Milton’s summary of Protestant theology as “he for God only, she for God in him”. So we may call many of these photographs skeptical, humanist, and even atheistic in their effect. Yet they are – perhaps paradoxically – Christian, Marxist, skeptical, humanistic, and atheistic in intent. The photographs in Seedtimes are not above, and not below, unexpected flashes of wit. The black couple visiting the Durban art gallery fig stands in front of a portrait of T.S. Eliot (p,66). We are forced to ask about the woman at the ironing board on (p,47) has she pressed her own clothes? The most interesting South African study of a man wearing sunglasses (p,25) used to be Colonel Joll in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. But the image on (p, 6) now has an equal claim to this honour. William Wegman, the renowned comic photographer of dogs, should also be envious. The dog fixing on its master f vv could surely not be equalled as a portrait of doggish love which, reversing the typical terms of human love, forgives everything and expects nothing. Are there many other crowd scenes like the one at (p,60) where every face, and each child’s face, preserves its own particular character and mood. Each of the mourners on (p,104) in the procession is preserved in his or her utterly distinct universe, underlining the fact that death is simply the final stage of separation from other beings – and perhaps
not the most disagreeable phase, at that. So we may categorise these photographs as metaphysical in their concern for consciousness and its limits. Badsha’s subjects are largely Indian or Black, and sometimes, as at (p,68) and (p,69) indeterminately situated between Asia and Africa. At first, in Seedtime, their activities are secondary to their characters, environments, and immediate tasks, whether the latter be ironing or laying on hands. Later on, as the country’s political life gains momentum, they are often participants in a march or a funeral, or part of the audience at a commemoration or a harangue. Nobody who is affected by the joy of the protesting schoolgirls at (p,152), will think that the struggle for equality was conducted only in the circles of hell. In fact, as Badsha’s photographs imply, and if we accept Hannah Arendt’s argument that political freedom is the joyous collaboration of equals, the struggle of the 1980s was in many ways the highwater mark of political freedom in South Africa. It is perhaps difficult to recognise the ANC flag at fig without wanting to weep for the trust that we have lost. In the photograph of the 1991 ANC conference we cannot but read every face with the burden of retrospective knowledge – Cyril Ramaphosa is already turning away from others at the table. So we can say that the effect of Badsha’s photographs is resonantly political, historical, and critical. More than merely depicting activities, Badsha’s photographs reveal subjects inhabiting in a cosmos populated by objects, which are sometimes located in the background, on the wall, or on a table, and at other times occupy the foreground of the scene. There are mounds of fruit, radio/cassette players, bottles of Coca Cola and Sprite, squash rackets, comic books hanging from the ceiling, magazine pages glued to the wall, boxing gloves, breadboxes, religious paintings of Mary and Quranic verse, and even a pinball machine. Sometimes the objects commandeer the photograph entirely, like the broomsticks (p,85). The most rigorous principle in the arts is that of comparison, a mental act which, to be effective, must be completed in the mind of the reader or the viewer. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, for example, the reader is forced to compare Dorothea Brooke with her sister Celia; the amateur painter Ladislaw with the professional physician Ladislaw; Ladislaw with Dorothea; and so on, in an almost endless chain of contrasts and combinations. In Hamlet, again, Shakespeare juxtaposes six men in their early thirties (Hamlet, Fortinbras, Horatio, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern). Comparison and contrast are, likewise, structuring principles of this collection. Badsha arranges his photographs side by side and in series so that we are forced to compare individual with individual, family with family, occupation with occupation, one person-sized
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fraction of a race, a class, a gender, with another such person-sized fraction. See the board covered in photographs at (p,154), or the bust flanked by two men at (p,172), which seems more human than its companion. South African art cannot rest its argument for itself on a geographical expression or a claim to privileged marginality. Instead, its focus should be on the contrasts and combinations between rich and poor and black and white and all the infinite gradations between them – which is especially visible here, in this place. This book of photographs, which uses juxtaposition like a knife to cut the veil of illusion, makes the world more visible through the slit that is the shape of a single photograph. It forces us to consider comparisons across the continent. In Harar, in Ethiopia, Badsha finds a register that is simultaneously unromantic and ungrotesque: see, for example, the composed melancholy on the face of the woman with the tin at (p,180), or the angry boisterousness of the boys with calabashes at (p,184). Badsha’s Ethiopians verge on monumentality, in their capes and dresses, but at the last moment this impulse is resisted and contained by a sense that human beings are only part of the furniture of each scene. The bashful bourgeois mother and daughter at (p,192) is a particular delight. In Tadkeshwar, in India, Badsha notes the presence of animal life—birds and chickens, cows, peacock feathers and cages—as integral to the built landscape. His India is full of grass and rivers, mud and tin roofing, a place inseparably humanised and animalised, naturalised, and historicised. Almost at the end of this book, at (p,290), for the first time we see a subject with a camera of her own, a middle class Indian woman photographing her grandaugter in a park with people who may be, like Badsha and unlike him, foreign visitors. By the time we reach Denmark, Badsha has found an unlikely angel of redemption at (p,222) who happens to be smoking a cigarette. The menace of Mafika Gwala’s lines are here literally a world away. Who created this book? Was it the boy in the opening photograph, his limbs as perfect as Mowgli’s? Was it a boy like Kipling’s Kim? The confidence displayed in the photograph is, I think, a peculiarly Indian confidence and privilege, a conversational and spiritual openness to the world and oneself, which is distinct from other expressions of confidence and openness. It would, moreover,
be an omission not to mention that a peculiarly Muslim interest in achieving justice in this world, in this country, at this moment, informs every photograph in this uniquely Christian, Marxist book. And the threatening character that Badsha has chosen to give his book of photographs may have as much to do with the perils of seeking complete justice as with any part of the Muslim project for redeeming the world.
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Watch repair shop, Inanda, 1983