The Terrorist Album: apartheid's insurgents, collaborators, and the security police by Jacob Dlamini (review)

Some years ago in Cape Town, a young man smashed the passenger window of my car at a red traffic light and made off with my handbag after a brief tug of war. In due course I made my way into the Woodstock police station nearby to report the episode. A detective asked me to describe the person who lifted the bag. He then led me into a side room with a table and to my considerable astonishment, brought out a massive old-fashioned album filled with mug shots. There were about nine to twelve images per page. These were larger than ID photos and most had a certain consistency about them. The detective asked me if I could recognise the exact person among the pages of 'suspects'.

I found myself catapulted into a situation where you are under pressure to reconstruct the moment when you might have seen the face of the person in question. This attempted mental reconstruction then hovers over the faces on the page before you. The effect is to make you doubt yourself profoundly. Before the frozen and full-frontal photographic portraits in front of you, and as you move uncertainly from one to the other, the mental image seems to weaken. Worse, you realise you have been inserted directly into a historic discourse: the genealogy of police instrumentalisation of photographs that Allan Sekula writes about in his foundational article 'The Body and the Archive', drawing on the precedents laid down by Alphonse Bertillon for the police and Francis Galton for eugenics in the late nineteenth century (Sekula 1996). My colleagues and myself had started to critique aspects of this argument, mainly the clear binary it sets up between repressive and honorific uses of the portrait (Hayes and Minkley 2019, 12-13). But the effort to use the medium to fix criminal identification– and perhaps to criminalise–seemed alive and well in the Woodstock police station in post-apartheid Cape Town.

To my further astonishment the detective asked me if I needed more albums to look at, and called for others to be brought in. It was then that I grasped the racial organisation of the albums, for the first album was labelled 'Kleurling' ('Coloured') and the second was the 'Mixed' album of so-called suspects. The detective left me alone with these albums and I perused some pages of the latter. This included raw photographs of young middle-class people possibly students, who unlike the relatively closed facial expressions in the first album, appeared to be in complete shock at being photographed at all. There were a number of Rastafarians, some with dreadlocks at odd angles. The cumulative sense of indecency and discomfort in looking at these albums as a random viewer of the privacy of others in a disempowered moment of being photographed grew. I even recognised a few normally congenial countenances from my own nearby neighbourhood. The conviction grew upon me that the police station had its own photographer and possibly its own darkroom, or excellent access to both, as the mug shots were high quality in terms of lighting and had a certain dimensionality to them that we come to recognise from old-fashioned photo studios. In order to build such an image bank in these albums, it is likely that anyone who crossed the threshold of the station under arrest would have been routinely photographed and fingerprinted. It felt like I had entered the maw of a labyrinth. But what kind of labyrinth was this?

That is where Jacob Dlamini's brilliant book The Terrorist Album does much of its best work. Here the author's focus is on perceived political opponents rather than the criminal suspects I saw in the police station albums, but they co-exist in a much larger labyrinth that links photography and identification. In a graduated and painstaking manner, Dlamini builds up an institutional history of the Security Police within the larger police system...