Jacob Dlamini: The Terrorist Album: Apartheid's Insurgents, Collaborators, and The Security Police, (review)

The instrumentalization and co-option of photographic headshots in the service of a cumbersome and often inefficient bureaucracy is the subject of Jacob Dlamini's important book The Terrorist Album: Apartheid's Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police. Having come across a compendium of seven thousand black-and-white mug shots "capturing" political exiles once hunted by the South African Security Forces—one of the few salvaged volumes, known as the "Terrorist Album," that survived the decreed purge of documents and incriminatory evidence of National Party rule in South Africa between 1948 and 1994—Dlamini sets out in this book to understand how apartheid governance functioned at a granular, quotidian level. Beneath the grand narratives and ideological posturing, he argues, was a shabby, amateurish infrastructure metering out its cruel punishments through petty and crude systems of control. For Dlamini, the Terrorist Album is a symptom, as well as a cypher, of a state apparatus that, though violent and coercive, depended on very crude and time-bound techniques of co-option, conscription, and surveillance.

Created cumulatively from the 1960s to the early 1990s, the album was conceived in a megalomaniacal fantasy of control as a medium through which every exiled South African, branded as an enemy of the State, could be classified and "captured" in print. Using passport photos, ID documents, the notorious dompas, newspaper cuttings, and police records, seven thousand images were collected, pasted, reproduced, and "curated" according to standard racialized schema.¹ Accompanying them was an index that arranged its subjects into a simple system: S1 stood for "white," S2 for "Indian," S3 for "Coloured," S4 for "African": an invented and naturalized organizational structure that mirrored apartheid's reduction of humans into imposed categories and types. The images were meant to signify according to these delimited identities. It is part of Dlamini's project to demonstrate how this operated both as a conceptual/practical project and as a flawed system of representation and reference.

Courtesy Harvard University Press

The photographs alone tell us little. Once used as prompts for interrogation and identification, most conform to the usual protocols used in police image banks. The faces appear devoid of life and liveliness, reduced to the tonal registering of shape, feature, and deadpan gaze, an accumulated register of resistance, both to the system that corralled these figures into its classificatory logic and to the mug shot's effectiveness as a technology of recognition and recall. The mug shots are singularly incapable of telling us

Mug shot of Odirile Meshack Maponya in the Terrorist Album. Courtesy National Archives and Records Service of South Africa

much about the material, physical, and emotional damage that the apartheid government's practice of identifying, torturing, and killing insurgents and political opponents entailed. Yet, the very existence of the album is revealing, despite its incapacity to relay the minutiae of individuated bravery or suffering, as well as its limitations as a reliable index of resemblance and record. In the pages of the album, faces are invariably reduced to schematic inscription and flattened conformity to type. It is often hard for people to recognize themselves and others in the shots that are said to represent them.

It is precisely the failure of the photographs to fulfill the mimetic promise of personalized portraiture (associated with the family album, the mantle-piece, or private scrapbook) that is instructive here, for this is a compendium of cutouts designed to signify and catalogue a surface identity that necessarily evacuates sentience, singularity, and depth. While ostensibly useful for identification purposes, where informers and collaborators, often complying under duress or torture, used the mug shots to name and define, it is what these people are seen to share that justifies their inclusion in the album. It is as figurations of the "terrorist" that their images were collected, classified, and put to use. Ironically, therefore, a volume designed to identify and differentiate ends...