Chapter Eighteen POWER, RACE AND AGENCY: ‘FACING THE TRUTH’ THROUGH VISUAL METHODOLOGY SHANNON WALSH INTRODUCTION One sunny day in March a group of five black youth (both male and female) from Khayelitsha township stand poised on the front steps of Rondebosch Boys’ school with notepads, a tripod, microphone, boom, and a video camera. Teachers and students passing by glance curiously in their direction. What could this group of young people be doing here? The predominantly white private school stands like a stone castle against the wind, its wide halls resounding with music, arts, and science. Just beyond the film crew, the closely groomed rugby field looms in the sun. Two young white boys, neatly clad in their school uniforms and knee socks, anxiously wait for the next question to be asked. The black female interviewer, 16 years old and a resident of the township of Khayelitsha asks, “Do you think AIDS is affecting black people more than white people? Why or why not?” Boy 2: I think it is affecting more of the black community… Boy 1: Unfortunately. Boy 2: Unfortunately… Because, uh… Boy 1: That we know of… Boy 2: That we know of, because that’s what we’ve been taught unfortunately. Because at this school, during the apartheid era, uh, um, we were educated on the results of having unsafe sex and education didn’t reach as far as Crossroads and District Six, so they, no fault of their own, but they had no idea about the consequences of unsafe sex so it spread like wild fire. Or, that’s what we know, it spread like wild fire [Boy 1 looking very pensive, deep in thought] and unfortunately it is a predominant threat in the black communities today. The young crew watches the white boys without blinking. The boys shift from foot to foot, navigating the space between all that is said and unsaid within this interaction. Two groups of strangers living in the same land, only a short drive apart from each other up the highway, meet here for the first time, foreigners to each other. Between them lie all the mythologies, stereotypes, anxieties, discomforts and curiosities brought through decades of separation forced by apartheid. This is Rondebosch, a wealthy English suburb at the south end of Cape Town. Declared a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act of the apartheid government, Rondebosch’s tree-lined streets and large homes retain a pristine, N. de Lange, C. Mitchell, & J. Stuart (eds.),Putting people in the picture: Visual methodologies for social change, 241–255. © 2007 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. WALSH colonial beauty. Sitting at the foot of Table Mountain, the suburb boasts the University of Cape Town and many top-class schools. It is also the location of Cecil Rhodes’ former home, now the presidential residence. This is where Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk signed the Groote Schuur Minute, an agreement to find a solution for the growing unrest and political violence of 1990s South Africa. Rondebosch Boys’ High School was founded in 1897. With a high academic standard, it is one of the most prestigious secondary schools, counting many international sports figures among its alumni. Just 30 km away from Rondebosch the sprawling township of Khayelitsha is a haunting reminder of apartheid. It is also an indicator of how contemporary neo- liberal policies have built upon the injustices of the apartheid era to further mar the South African landscape with poverty and inequality. In 1986, the apartheid regime built the first houses in Khayelitsha (a Xhosa word, meaning New Home) for the black African and ‘coloured’ communities barred from living in Cape Town proper, yet still needed close by as cheap labourers. This physical exclusion paired with economic inclusion in terms of labour was one of the fundamental methods of apartheid’s capitalist thrust (Wolpe, 1972). With the dawn of the African National Congress (ANC) government in 1994, the population of Khayelitsha surged as people from rural areas migrated towards the city in hope of finding work. Khayelitsha is now home to over a half a million people, 80 percent of whom live in shacks. A majority of residents live below the poverty line and a third of the population does not have access to water. Electricity and sanitation are major issues (Thom, 2006). Tuberculosis is rampant, and a majority of TB patients are also HIV positive. AIDS is the number one cause of death in Khayelitsha, and accounted for nearly a quarter of all deaths in 2004 (City of Cape Town, 2006). The South African national HIV prevalence rate hovers above 30%, with more than 800 people dying of AIDS related illnesses every day (Department of Health, 2005). This was the first encounter between these young people from Rondebosch and Khayelitsha, separated only by the thin shield of the video camera. Only kilometres away geographically, they lived worlds apart. Through the friction of this meeting spaces of resistance, privilege, agency, discomfort and possibility were revealed. I borrow from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s definition of friction as a state in which “heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power” (2005, p. 5) to describe more fully this meeting. This chapter traces a group of young activists from Khayelitsha who mobilised around a collaborative video project to explore the ‘truth’ about AIDS amongst young people in South Africa. I focus on two aspects of how visual methodology (in this case collaborative video) was used as both a research tool and means of political mobilising to unpack the social underpinnings of power. Central to this chapter is an investigation of how methodology itself can be used as part of a strategy for social change. First, I explore how visual methodologies open up spaces for representation and meaning-making that acknowledge difference, agency and power. The way in which meaning is formed through practices of representation is increasingly 242.