African women photographers subvert cis-heterosexism, systemic erasure, and redefine identities authentic to their existence through visual activism and disobedience. Through the work of Zanele Muholi, LGBTQ+ communities are rightfully humanised. Through the work of Zubeida Vallie, a humanist perspective of the Anti-Apartheid struggle is documented; her work also creates visibility of the lives of women in Cape Town, South Africa, which demonstrate Black and women of colour as people, not as ‘othered' subjects. Thus, this chapter examines Muholi and Vallie's roles in 1) Actualising revolutionary political and social change, and 2) Rectifying the de-womanisation of African women. The study is a multimodal ethnography consisting of prerecorded interviews of Zanele Muholi, and an interrogation of Zubeida Vallie's work through her Master's Dissertation. Through their own testimonies and analysis, the socio-political uses of photography, the legacies of protest cultures, and the development of visual disobedience in Southern Africa are discussed.
TopIntroduction
In a poem dedicated to South African women, June Jordan (1980) wrote, “We are the ones we are waiting for,” poetry, like photography, is a memorisation of history, an archival instrument for the present and future. Like Jordan's assertion, African women have embodied resistance through consciousness-raising art, which amplifies social movements and societal change. Women photographers memorialised the active participation of Black women who fought against Apartheid; in continued tradition, African women use photography as a tool and a weapon against oppressive patriarchal regimes. Furthermore, generations of photographers in the 'global south' utilise visual activism to combat violence such as colonialism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, and misogynoir1. This chapter defines visual activism as a socio-cultural transformative project.
In addition, visual activism in this chapter is further defined as the use of visual mediums to resist oppression; it is the instrumentalisation of visual art as a mechanism to fight against the hierarchisation of society and the dichotomisation (inferior/superior) of people through capitalism, racism, and cis-heterosexist patriarchal violence (Petri-Spade, 2017). Visual disobedience, as a feminist/womanist activist corrective measure in the global south, is a means to resist cultured violence, misogyny, and the cultural expectation of subordination and compulsory heterosexuality (Muholi, 2012; Shefer, 2019; Makhubu, 2021). Within Southern African discourses, colonial scripts of femininity dictate so-called appropriate expressions of womanhood (Muholi, 2012; Muholi & Willis, 2015). Therefore, the intentional creations of imagery, visual stories, and documentaries subvert contrived notions of authentic African identities.
Visual activism coupled with disobedience dismantles white supremacist heterosexist patriarchy (see bell hooks, 20042) and revisionist history used to exclude, isolate, and erase African women's identities. Through so-called ethnographic photography and colonial visual anthropology, identities antithetical to reality were created and propagated; stereotypical images continue to exist across various media. Images become cultural symbolism, and meaning is created in those symbols (Roychoudhuri, 2017; Larry, 2020). Colonial photographs as symbols amplified the propagandistic nature of misogynoir and made it accessible to the masses. Conversely, decolonial photographs dismantle heterosexism, patriarchy, and the caricaturisation of marginalised groups (Petri-Spade, 2017). Moreover, photographs were colonial weapons; however, through globalisation and technological advancements, the creation of images is no longer exclusive to colonial propagandists.
Therefore, it is critical to study photography beyond the medium's aestheticism; photographs become sources of information and socialisation (Roychoudhuri, 2017; Larry, 2020), and exposure to colonial images constructed social realities, which feminist media practitioners have worked and continue to work toward rectifying. Hence, feminist photographers, media practitioners, and visual storytellers work to correct the misrepresentations of African women. “We are the ones we are waiting for” —African womxn are tasked with dismantling, disrupting, and rebuilding current scripts of womxnhood, belonging, and place.
The use of womxn in this study is to denote the intersectional lens of constructions of womxnhood that is inclusive and makes various gender identities visible; womxn “counters cis-genderism” (Makhubu, 2021, p. 223). Gender is critical in this study because I) Constructions of gender, as evidenced by Muholi, are issues of contention within Southern Africa where sex, sexuality, and gender are demarcated along colonial binaries of acceptability; II) the erasure of Black women in knowledge production — I argue that photography and other forms of media are a womanist mode of knowledge production; III) The erasure of African women's identities — the de-womanisation of African women.