South Africa: Six Decades by Jurgen Schadeberg (review)

South Africa: Six Decades is a retrospective photographic documentary of South Africa. It is a unique and unusual visual journey, which underscores sociocultural and political events in South Africa from the 1950s to the present day. The photographs exhibit several aspects of the country’s early struggles for democracy and today’s human-rights events of the era of Nelson Mandela, who led multiracial South Africa as its first president.

South Africa: Six Decades is a collection of iconic photographic images, which provide a useful visual history of South Africa from its apartheid era to the present day, when the country is being ruled by elected black leaders. The photos exhibit the story of defiance in South Africa of the 1960s, as well as in Botswana, Lesotho, and other places in the same decade. Apart from the foreword (pp. vi–viii), written by Laura Serani, there is a preface by Albie Sachs (p. ix). The volume opens with “The Story of Defiance,” a section that shows a December 1951 photo of a young-looking Nelson Mandela, with a caption that explains that the future famous prisoner was at the African National Congress (ANC) conference that took place in Bloemfontein, at which the decision was made to start “a campaign of defiance against the unjust apartheid laws with the aim of repealing them” (p. 50). At the time, Mandela was styled as the ANC Youth League leader and the National Volunteer-in-Chief. Next to him in the opening photograph is Ruth First, a white activist and one of the defendants of the 1956–1961 treason trial, together with 156 other antiapartheid activists. As the first white woman detained under treason laws, she went into exile in London in 1964 but later moved to serve as director of the research-training program at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, Mozambique. On August 17, 1982, she opened a letter bomb that had been mailed to her at the university, which exploded and killed her. A year before that, her memoirs—with the title of 117 Days—were published, giving an account of her arrest, imprisonment, and interrogation by the South African Police Special Branch. Several other photos of the annual ANC conference are provided, showing stalwarts of the ANC struggle, including union leader Viola Hashe, Dr. Moroka, Walter Sisulu, and Jusuf Cachalia. There are historic photos of Manital Gandhi, son of India’s Mahatma Gandhi, and Patrick Duncan, son of the wartime South African Governor General, Sir Patrick Duncan, who marched with a group to defy Bloemfontein township permit laws.

A section introducing the San people (Bushmen) starts on page 146. Here, Schadeberg writes that the photographs depicted were taken in July 1959, when he “joined an expedition led by Professor Phillip Tobias, then Chairman of the Kalahari Research Committee of the University of Witwatersrand, to study the San people” (p. 146). The San are described as “the world’s oldest inhabitants, who once inhabited most of southern Africa and are highly intelligent and skilled hunters” (p. 146). Photos show the San’s healing dance, used in “exorcizing their evil spirits” (p. 156).

The sections showing evicted farm workers and the rainbow nation (pp. 203–39) are of social and cultural importance. The section titled “Robben Island: The Story” opens with a 1993 photograph of a smiling Mandela. Dated 1994, the inscription attached to the historic photograph begins, “For the last 400 years, Robben Island has been used as a dumping ground for social and political misfits with no hope of escape. The first people to be banished to this desolate island were the Khoikoi, who were accused of petty theft; they were followed by Xhosa chiefs, who opposed the British colonialists, British convicts, the mentally ill, and lepers” (p. 195). As the story unfolds, it was in 1960 that Robben Island housed the “Afrikaner National and Indian political prisoners who opposed the regime. In 1964, the Rivonia Trailists were sent there, and they, together with the concentration of other activists from the political...