ERNEST COLE - INTELLECTUAL SKETCH

ERNEST COLE (KEDE): IN REMEMBRANCE.                          

              You photograph with all your ideology.
                         -Sabastiao Selgado.

               The event registered by the camera includes history in the
                form of death (or passage of time): photography is thus
                already a philosophically ‘existentialist’ medium, in which
                history is subject to confusion with finitude and with
                individual biological time; and whose costume dramas and
                historical records and therefore always close to the
                borderline between historicity and nostalgia.
                          -Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible.

Ernest Cole (Kede) born 21.3.1940 passed away on February 18, 1990 at the age of 50. A feature article in the New York Times memoralised him as a great photographer (1). He belonged to a generation of great South Africa photographers like Peter Magubane, Alfred Khumalo, Bob Gosani who clustered together on the pages of Drum magazine in the late 1950s and in the early 1960s. Ernest Cole was a member of the Sophiatown Renaissance school of brilliant artists, writers and intellectuals.

House of Bondage (Penguin Press, London, 1968) is an extraordinary photo-essay by Ernest Cole. The book is a combination of astonishing feats: on one plane it is social history; on another it is a cultural discourse; on yet another plane it is an intellectual conversation; and on a further plane it is an ideological dialogue on photography. What interweaves these planes together in mutual reciprocity is the documentary style that inhabits House of Bondage. The book would seem to confirm Walker Evan’s maxim that there are no documentary traditions in photography, only documentary styles. It is the historicity of form in photography which defines a historical problematic.

House of Bondage bristles with historical issues. The first series of photographs, which configure a unified formal structure in the text, are a dialectical representation of that unending struggle between capital and labour. Cole portrays the actual process of the transformation of the peasant class, having been forced by government policy to abandon the rural areas, into an industrial proletariat in the gold-mines of Johannesburg. The founding of the gold-mining industry in our country is what ushered South Africa into modernity through industrialization.

Cole in effect tells us that the becoming of our country into an industrial power is founded on exploitation of black labour by white capital (imperial and indigenious). This exploitation, which continues up to the present, is the fundamental underpinning of racial domination. Photographing the herrendous conditions of miners in their compounds, the hopelessness and confusion on their faces, and the process of their subsequent alienation. Cole makes palpable to us their experiencing of proleteriatenness as a lived experience. It is their objective conditioning which is central here, rather than their subjective apprehension of it individually. The early part of the House of Bondage is a photographic discourse on labour power.

The following series of photographs also follow this pattern of interfusing cultural history and social history, in order to establish an intellectual discourse. In the second formal structure, Cole traces the repressive state apparatuses which regulate the patterns of oppression. In a series of searing photographs, Cole shows police controlling the movement of Africans through the pass system (a document which black people had to carry with them all the time, which gives them the right to live where they live and work where the apartheid regime designates them to work).

In the remaining formal structures Cole (Kede) thematizes various consequences of exploitation and repression of black people: the abysmal educational system, homelessness among young children, the inadequate transport system, the tragedy of the shebeen culture, the poor health care system, the domestic servant system, and other forms of domination.

What makes the book salutary, is that it concludes with resistances on two different but interconnected political planes: within the African working class utilizing indigenous religious institutions and cosmological systems, and within the African middle-class through underground political organisations. Through his great historical imagination Kede was able to locate pockets of resistance, even at the height of South Africa’s fascism in the mid 1960s. For this, Ernest Kede will ever be present in the imagination of coming generations.

(1) Douglas Martin, “Apartheid Ends fo Him in Apartness”, New York Times, Saturday, March 3, 1990.