The Harsh Realities of Apartheid-Era South Africa Through a Black South

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 August 12, 2018  Vintage Everyday  1960s, event & history, life & culture, people, photography, South Africa  0 RECENT POSTS

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December 2019 This post was originally published on this site November 2019 2  Share  Tweet SHARES October 2019

In the mid-1960s, photojournalist Ernest Cole undertook a dangerous mission—to produce a volume of September 2019 photographs that would reveal to the world the excruciating realities of life under apartheid. The result August 2019 was the groundbreaking book House of Bondage, published in 1967. July 2019

“When I say that people can be red or arrested or abused or whipped or banished for tries, I June 2019 am not describing the exceptional case for the sake of being inammatory. What I say is true – May 2019 and most white South Africans would acknowledge it freely. They do not pretend these things are not happening. The essential cruelty of the situation is not that all blacks are virtuous and April 2019 all whites villainous, but that the whites are conditioned not to see anything wrong in the March 2019 injustices they impose on their black neighbors.” – Ernest Cole, House of Bondage, 1967. February 2019

January 2019 Ernest Cole was born in South Africa’s Transvaal in 1940. His early work chronicled the horrors of apartheid and in 1966 he ed the Republic of South Africa becoming a ‘banned person’. He was briey December 2018 associated with Magnum Photographers and received funding from the Ford Foundation and Time-Life. November 2018 In North America, he concentrated on street photography in primarily urban settings. October 2018 Between 1969 and 1971, Cole spent an extensive amount of time on regular visits to Sweden where he September 2018 became involved with the Tiofoto collective and exhibited his work. From 1972, Cole’s life fell into disarray and he ceased to work as a photographer, losing control of his archive and negatives in the August 2018 process. Having experienced periods of homelessness, Cole died aged forty-nine of pancreatic cancer in July 2018 New York City in 1990. June 2018 In 2017, more than 60,000 of Cole’s negatives missing for more than forty years were discovered in a May 2018 Stockholm bank vault. This work is now being examined and catalogued. April 2018

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City benches were for whites only and were so inscribed. There were no “blacks only” benches in Johannesburg; blacks sat on the curbstones.

Contract-expired miners are on the right, carrying their discharge papers and wearing “European” clothes while new recruits, many in tribal blankets, are on the left.

Handcuffed blacks were arrested for being in a white area illegally.

Earnest boy squats on haunches and strains to follow lesson in heat of packed classroom.

“Penny baas, please, baas, I hungry” This plaint is part of nightly scene in the Golden City, as black boys beg from whites. They may be thrown a coin, or… they may get slapped in the face.

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