Transformative Images

Zanele Muholi’s Aperture book titled Somnyama Ngonyama (son-yama N-go-yama) or Hail the Dark Lioness in Zulu was selling briskly at the New York University Center for African Studies book launch. Muholi’s self-portraits turn her body into iconic art. Using only a few props in each portrait, her art delivers coded messages that challenge us to see and value Black human beings and their histories. Muholi’s conversation “Archive of the Self” with Renée Mussai addresses many of the artist’s themes and processes, “Somnyama is my response to a number of ongoing racisms and politics of exclusion. As a series, it also speaks about occupying public spaces to which we, as black communities, were previously denied access.” Muholi relates that the cover image, Ntozakhe II, Parktown Johannesburg, 2016,

is based on the Statue of Liberty, representing the idea of freedom – the freedom all women should have – as well as pride: pride in who we are as black, female-bodied beings. But what kind of freedom are we talking about? What is the color of the Statue of Liberty? What race is the figure monumentalized as Lady Liberty? I was thinking of black women who were civil and human rights activists and criminalized for their activism, and how today so many women are prisoners in their own lives, neither free in their domestic situations nor in society at large – especially women of color.

South Africa’s Apartheid or racial segregation from 1948 until 1994 punished homosexual behavior during this period with up to seven years in prison, castration, shock therapy, “conversions,” and other kinds of torture. Even during this period, some organizations and citizens supported gay rights. In November, 2006, following laws for equal housing and employment for queers, South Africa became the fifth country in the world and the only African country to legalize same sex marriage. This has not prevented opponents of homosexual rights from speaking or acting out. In Capetown, South Africa in January, 2018, a man killed a twenty-three-year old gay mother at a family gathering. Gay women have been the victims of murder, beating, or rape, reportedly in part because they pose a threat to traditional male authority. Broadly speaking, the vision of blacks having rights equal to the minority white population after Apartheid ended is far from being realized. The queer and trans populations have both found support and faced brutal discrimination.

Zanele Muholi told the NYU audience that she was photographing hate crimes in 2012 when a large body of her work was stolen in Johannesburg. Muholi didn’t say what other horrors she has faced. Among the many contributors of texts for this book, the essay “Heeding the Dark Lioness’s Call” by M. Neelika Jayawardane quotes Muholi’s goal for that series: to “create an archive of ‘visual, oral, and textual materials that include black lesbians and the role they have played in our communities.’” This may be the work that was stolen. At NYU, Muholi skipped over what happened to her work made before 2012 but said that after a period of intense suffering, her self-portraits emerged not just as a form of therapy but as art that she could control intimately and absolutely. Jayawardane reports that Muholi made some of the self-portraits in 2012 during an artist residency at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy and others in a 2015 residency at Light Work in Syracuse, New York.

The ninety-four tritone images are accompanied by over twenty deeply-felt commentaries, poems, and an interview. This beautifully-produced book is notable, above all, for the symbolic yet fluid composition of each self-portrait. Muholi uses a ten-second timer and re-shoots until she gets the composition she pictures. In some images, the depth of black of her skin seems surreal. She assured her NYU audience...