People and Rituals in a South African Ghetto
- Omar Badsha
These photographs are about memory, racial spaces and life in a South African ghetto in the turbulent 1980’s, when the threat of prison, exile and death, stared our children in the face as they confronted the white ruling class and its black collaborators in our streets.
These photographs were taken in the so-called "Grey Street" area or "Coolie Town" as it was commonly referred to by many of my white compatriots in the privacy of their own ghettoes.
They started off as a visual diary. A tool to help me map my way through the racial maze, created over a century of colonialism, apartheid and my own "Indianness".
These photographs are about a ghetto whose history mirrored the colonial and apartheid heritage that shaped the identities and second class status of the African, Indian and coloured "communities".
The photographs are about moments that speak of history, spaces and the rituals that rulers, collaborators and subjects, play out in front of the camera and its biased gaze...
...They are part of numerous frames, returning the gaze and also serve as evidence. Evidence of the discourse about art and struggle and going beyond the frame and the "heroic gesture".
The photographs owe much to John Berger's and our struggle to find new "ways of seeing", of representing the self, about reinterpreting history, space and identity.
The pictures are about echoes of my own family and the ghetto which we called home. They are about growing up in the shadow of the 1949 race riots and the heroic efforts of the Dadoo's, Naickers, Naidoos, Meers, Asvats, Cachalias and Gools to overturn the legacy of Gandhi's narrow Indianess and to forge an inclusive Africanness.
A century has gone by since my grandparents left the shores of Gujarat to settle in this ghetto, where all the streets were named after Queen Victoria ("Empress of India"), her children and their retinue of imperial war mongers.
The ghetto grew as the poor and illiterate from the African and Indian countryside poured into the city and began to live cheek by jowl with Bombay merchants.
Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the city and its new ghettos lay awake, ill prepared and stubborn in its dealing with the newly arrived peasant, the economic and political refugees from the African countryside.
Each create their own narratives of their journeys, hopefully throwing up their own bards and foot solders to champion the cause of the underdogs and heal the fault lines of race, ignorance and poverty.
The spaces are pregnant with new beginnings.
This exhibition was published as part of a series of books by SISA. More...
