This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y of St ellenbosch] On: 19 August 2014, At : 02: 34 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ rsaf 20 Photography and the Future in Jansj e Wissema’ s Images of District Six Kylie Thomas Published online: 15 Aug 2014. To cite this article: Kylie Thomas (2014) Phot ography and t he Fut ure in Jansj e Wissema’ s Images of Dist rict Six, Saf undi: The Journal of Sout h Af rican and American St udies, 15: 2-3, 283-305, DOI: 10. 1080/ 17533171. 2014. 925650 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 17533171. 2014. 925650 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem ands, cost s, expenses, dam ages, and ot her liabilit ies what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h, in relat ion t o or arising out of t he use of t he Cont ent . This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 2014 Vol. 15, Nos. 2–3, 283–305, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2014.925650 Photography and the Future in Jansje Wissema’s Images of District Six Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Kylie Thomas Time passes and passes. It passes backward and it passes forward and it carries you along, and no one in the whole wide world knows more about time than this: it is carrying you through an element you do not understand into an element you will not remember. Yet something remembers—it can even be said that something avenges: the trap of our century, and the subject now before us. – James Baldwin1 The photograph above of a ruined house is one of approximately 500 photographs taken by South African photographer Jansje Wissema in Cape Town in the early 1970s of the inner-city neighborhood of District Six. The photograph presents us with a vision of ruin and of ruins. It is an image of a house destroyed during the course of the forced removals and demolition of District Six, a process that began in 1966 and ended in 1982. The destruction of the area was an act of ethnic cleansing by the apartheid state and the psychic and material effects of the forced removals continue into the present. Wissema’s photograph provides us with a window that frames a view onto a space that is both an interior and an exterior and neither of these. It offers a view into the rooms of a house that has no roof and as a result contains the sky and the mountain beyond. The stony mountainside extends the wall of the house that no longer has clearly defined borders and that, at the same time, is enclosed by the window frame and by the photograph itself, our means for gazing endlessly upon disaster. The image positions us as the angels of history, looking upon the ruins that mount up, but that we cannot reach and repair. The photograph shows us the ruins of the past and it shows us ruin in the future both because photographs, in their indexical relation to the real insist on the truism that what has occurred cannot be undone, and because the image opens a way to connect the events of the past with the history that at the time it was taken, was yet to come. Correspondence to: Kylie Thomas, Department of English, Stellenbosch University, Arts Building, Cnr Ryneveld and Merriman Street, Stellenbosch 7600, South Africa. Email: kyliethomas.south@gmail.com 1 Baldwin, No Name in the Street, 22. Ó 2014 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 284 K. Thomas Figure 1. Jansje Wissema (1920–1975). The Ruins of a house in District Six, Cape Town. c. 1970. Courtesy Cape Institute for Architecture and University of Cape Town: Visual Archives From the post-apartheid present, we read the loss of District Six with the knowledge of the years of violence and struggle that compounded the trauma and loss of forced removals. In this way, the photograph of the ruined house leads us to see what it does not portray, the aftermath of the history that the image represents: “It isn’t that the past casts its light on what is present or that what is present casts its light on what is past; rather, an image is that in which the Then and the Now come together; in a flash of lightning, into a constellation. In other words: an image is dialectics at a standstill.”2 To move from here, to move beyond the time of the image and the melancholic fixation on loss that the photograph conjures, demands a forward and backward facing gaze. To catalyze the political force of the photograph, it is necessary both to recall the events the image documents and to connect them with events in the present. This paper focuses on Jansje Wissema’s photographs and explores both the history of their making and how they might be deployed as tools for thinking the post-apartheid condition. The article begins with an account of Jansje Wissema’s trajectory as a photographer and reads some of her portrait studies in order to engage with questions of race and representation in her work. The second part of the paper focuses on Wissema’s District Six photographs and draws on theorist 2 Benjamin, Collected Writings, 578. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 285 Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), to argue for reading these images as acts of resistance to the myopia of apartheid. I engage with Azoulay’s concept of the civil contract of photography to think about how the photographic encounter produces a political relation outside of the dominant forms of power and insists on the possibility of an alternate social order. For Azoulay, photography can serve as a mode of democratic praxis under authoritarian conditions and her own work focuses on photographs that portray the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I draw on her ideas about the connections between photographic practices and citizenship to think about how photographs taken under apartheid can be understood as addressed to the future in at least two ways. In disrupting hegemonic modes of vision and forging relationships of solidarity, even if this is limited in many cases, such photographs insist on the possibility of seeing and living differently and form a civil space in which such relations are temporarily actualized. Photographs like those taken by Wissema of District Six during the time of forced removals can also be read as addressed to those who live in the aftermath of the apartheid regime and who will seek to reckon with the past in order to realize alternative futures. In the case of District Six, as in other places where terrible events have occurred that, in their aftermath have been effectively erased, photographs from the time before and during the catastrophe take on an additional significance.3 Photography is associated with preserving things before they are lost and in this way resisting the irrecoverability of experience and the passage of time. Photographs can be read as a kind of eternal return, and in their making and in our reception of them, as deeply melancholic in structure, form, and affect. Jansje Wissema’s images of District Six can be read in this vein, as records of a place and time on the brink of disappearance. However, if they are read simply as material signs of the lost past, as historical remainders, an engagement with Wissema’s photographs may serve no other end than fueling nostalgic longing for what cannot be replaced or restored. In order to avoid what Antonio Gramsci has described as “merely” writing “a chapter of past history,” this paper draws on Benjamin’s articulation of how photography works to disrupt linear conceptions of time and understands photographic images to be traversed by both the past and the present. My reading of 3 It is important to note here that while the apartheid state destroyed the physical site of District Six it remains present in multiple ways—through the memories of those who lived there; as a public site of recall, redress and memory production primarily through the work of the District Six Museum; and as one of the most highly visible and contested land claims in post-apartheid South Africa. There is also now a relatively large body of writings about the District, both in the form of fiction and autobiography as well as scholarly works, and there are several books of photographs of the area before and during its destruction. A useful select bibliography for researching the history of forced removals in the Western Cape that lists many of the key sources on District Six was compiled by Allegra Louw in 2010 and is available through the African Studies library, University of Cape Town (http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/asl/groupareas.pdf). Photographic books include George Hallett and Peter McKenzie’s 2007 District Six Revisited; Jan Greshoff’s The Last Days of District Six published by the District Six Museum in 1996; and People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited, Photographs by Brian Heseltine edited by Darren Newbury and published in 2013. Also significant is Paul Alberts Children of the Flats, which was published in 1980. 286 K. Thomas these images attempts to reveal how the effects of apartheid are not only behind us but also constitute the present. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the work of young South African artist Haroon Gunn-Salie and considers how contemporary art practices intervene in the ongoing scripting of the history and making of the future of District Six. I focus on Gunn-Salie’s multimedia installations produced in collaboration with former residents of District Six to argue for the importance of engaging with the past in order to reconfigure the future. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 THE WORLD OF JANSJE WISSEMA4 In 1975, an exhibition entitled “Jansje Wissema’s Cape Town” was held at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. This exhibition was the first photographic exhibition to be held there.5 While two books have been published that contain Wissema’s photographs, there is as yet no published scholarship on her work. This section of the paper provides a brief introduction to Wissema’s life and work and draws on the essay by journalist and writer Rykie Van Reenen included in the book Die Wêreld van Jansje Wissema (1976). Van Reenen’s moving tribute to her friend written immediately after Wissema’s death portrays the photographer as a creative free-thinker who lived her life on her own terms. Jansje Petronella Wissema was born on 2 August 1920 in Hengelo, the Netherlands. When she was six years old, her parents immigrated to South Africa. Her father first worked as a baker in Pretoria and then at the cement factory at De Hoek near Piketberg. It was through her father that Wissema was introduced to photography as her father had his own darkroom at De Hoek. When she was 13, her father died and Wissema left school for several months due to a nervous condition brought about by grief. Once she finished school, Wissema studied at the Paarl Opleidings Kollege (Paarl Teaching College) and became a kindergarten teacher. According to Van Reenen, Wissema chose this path as she loved children and arts and crafts and writes that her pleasure in making and her ability to enter the world of children was the key to her success as a photographer of children later on.6 She moved to Cape Town and began teaching in Parow. She made friends with artists Lippy Lipschitz, Dorothy Leeb, Harry Trevor, and Joyce Wallis, who all had studios in a house owned by potter Leslie Bayman in Prestwich Street in Cape Town.7 In 1947, Anne Fischer, the owner of a successful photography studio in the Colosseum Building in Adderley Street in Cape Town, advertised for an apprentice to work with her in her studio. Fischer was planning a lengthy trip to Europe and 4 The sub-heading, The World of Jansje Wissema, is a translation of the title of Rykie Van Reenen’s Die Wêreld van Jansje Wissema which was published in Afrikaans in Cape Town in 1976. 5 Warne, “Photography and New Media.” 6 Van Reenen, Die Wêreld van Jansje Wissema, 19. 7 Ibid., 21. Wissema photographed many of her friends and several of these portraits appear in Die Wêreld van Jansje Wissema. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 287 needed someone to keep her studio going while she was away. Jansje Wissema was 27 years old at that time and had been married to architect and painter John Sargent for a year. Wissema took up the apprenticeship with Fischer and began to work intensively in the studio, perfecting her techniques. She took wedding photographs and family portraits, photographs of theatrical productions, and of ballet. For a time she also worked as a photographer at Groote Schuur hospital. Van Reenen writes that Wissema mastered the art of photography long before her twoyear apprenticeship with Fischer came to an end and that she developed her own unique style, quite different from that of Fischer.8 In 1964, she separated from her husband and two years later bought a house in Gardens in Cape Town where she lived with Pieter Bijl, landscape designer and craftsman. She died in Cape Town in 1975. Die Wêreld van Jansje Wissema contains 27 black and white plates, almost all of which are portraits. The first three photographs portray children and are similar to the many images Wissema took of children drawing and playing on the streets of District Six in the way in which they convey the children immersed in their own worlds. The first of these is a portrait of a little boy dwarfed by the chair in which he sits and by the over-sized print on the wall behind him of a French street scene.9 The face of the child is at the center of the image, his skin pale and his shirt white, the primary points of light in an otherwise dark room. The child is Adrian (Adi) Greshoff, the son of Wissema’s friend, the architect Jan Greshoff who also took photographs in District Six.10 The image that follows is of a girl of about three or four years old and who appears to be intensely engaged in pulling a single strand of hair from the brush she holds. She herself has golden-blonde hair and wears a knitted cardigan and a wide, embroidered skirt. She stands in the pose of a dancer, half in darkness, her slight form emerging from the blackness that surrounds her. She is identified as “Greta.” Wissema’s portraits are beautiful studies in light and dark and in this image, as in many of her photographs, Wissema uses contrast to great effect. The image overleaf is of a boy standing in a large field, an expanse of ground with no homes or buildings nearby and a gray and heavy sky. The child is holding a bicycle wheel without its tire and stands quite still, looking into the distance. This child is not named and the photograph is captioned “Kind met Wiel” [Child with Wheel].11 8 Ibid., 33. Robert Greshoff, the brother of Adrian, identifies the backdrop as an 8 sheet Steinlen Lithograph poster that featured in the sitting room of their family home. See Greshoff, “Jansje Wissema and her South African Cow Parsley Photogram,” 2013. 10 Jan Greshoff was a Professor of Architecture at Stellenbosch University who took hundreds of photographs of District Six. These images were the subject of an exhibition at the District Six Museum that resulted in the publication of The Last Days of District Six, a book that focuses on the architecture of the District. 11 The same child is the subject of a portrait included in District Six, a book by Adam Small that contains photographs by Wissema. In that image the size of the wheel is exaggerated by the camera angle. 9 Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 288 K. Thomas Wissema’s portraits of children are interesting in their insistence on the individuality of each subject. This results from the fact that the children are not portrayed as representative of a particular race or class, but as individual subjects in a state of absorption. The images show black and white subjects alongside each other, not together, not altogether apart. The inclusion of images of children from different races and classes on the pages of the same book dislodges the dominant and conventional ways in which subjectivities were portrayed under apartheid. These images, and in particular their juxtaposition, convey how Wissema’s work quietly exceeded the prescriptions of apartheid-era representation. Such understated modes of resistance are undercut, however, by the way in which the white subjects of Wissema’s photographs are, for the most part, named, while the photographs of black subjects are captioned in generic ways. For instance, the ninth portrait in the book is “Vrou met ketel” (Woman with kettle) and shows a woman pouring boiling water from a kettle into a teapot. Overleaf is an image of an elderly woman pouring tea. She is identified as “Sannie Krige, Skrywer” (Sannie Krige, Writer).12 What at first appear to be two equivalent portrait studies, two women in the act of preparing tea—are separated by the captions that cast the first woman as an anonymous person engaged in domestic chores and the other, a writer, who is named. “Vrou met ketel” is a portrait of a woman who, under apartheid, would have been classified as colored. The first woman may be a servant preparing tea for others. The second woman would have been classified white under apartheid and is shown wearing a white cardigan and jersey and a dark hat. She is seated and is shown pouring tea for herself and a guest. The juxtaposition of these images and the difference in the way in which they are captioned speaks of the different lives of these two women and of their places in the South African social order under apartheid. At the center of the selection of photographs in the book are two images that work to expose the politics of white racial domination of the time. “Outehuis, Langa” (Old-age Home, Langa) portrays a dark room, parts of which are illuminated by the light that enters through the window that is partially visible in the upper right-hand side of the photograph. The windowpanes do not open a view to the outside, but appear to be filled with gray smoke or fog. On the windowsill is a battered enamel mug. The image is dominated by the intensity of the shadow that threatens to consume the contents of the room. A blanketed figure can be made out curled up on the bed. Against the bare wall stands a single crutch, an indication of the physical state of the unidentified figure on the bed. The image overleaf, captioned “Bertha,” portrays a young white woman dressed in a white cotton nightdress resting on her haunches at the edge of a wooden bed, a tangle of sheets and blankets beside her. She is positioned immediately in front of a large light-flooded window that is opened to the trees, road, fields, and river beyond. The young woman faces the camera and seems to be gazing at the viewer. In the distance, close 12 This image is one of two photographs included in the book in which Wissema’s signature is visible. In this image it appears in the bottom left-hand corner. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 289 to the banks of the river that flows whitely into the distance, are two figures, one crouching, the other upright, his arm bent and his hand at his waist. These two photographs portray different modes of being under apartheid and Wissema’s use of contrast here lies not only within the frames of the images themselves but between and across them. The confined, dark space of the old-age home in Langa presents the dark underside to the milky, youthful glow of the young woman in her room and the bright world that seems to extend from her open window. These images show us that the photographer saw these radically different spaces and the subjects who inhabit them and through her presence at each scene, has made them visible to us. Jansje Wissema’s images testify to her movement across the borders of those areas demarcated for white people under apartheid. Like Anne Fischer, she took photographs in the township of Langa, and it is possible that her friendship with people who lived in District Six, such as anti-apartheid activist Minnie Gool, enabled her to take the kinds of intimate portraits she took there. Die Wêreld van Jansje Wissema is an unusual book in that it offers a view of life under apartheid through photographs without an overtly stated political end nor is it a work explicitly documenting a particular group of people or social issue. In this sense the book is a rare aberration to the generic conventions of the time. The second book containing Wissema’s photographs was published after her death and appeared in 1986, the year of the declaration of the second state of emergency, a time of intensification of state violence and mass resistance. Along with numerous images by Wissema District Six contains a prose poem by writer, poet, and philosopher Adam Small, who was forced to resign from his position as Professor of philosophy at the University of the Western Cape in 1973 as a result of his activities as part of the black consciousness movement. District Six sought to realize the radical potential implicit in Wissema’s images of the area during the time of its destruction for political action in the present. In the 1980s, the Cape Flats were the site of ongoing battles between the state and anti-apartheid activists who were subject to the violence of the South African police force and the security police. The publication of District Six at that time served as a record of the history of violence and of struggle and also provided a visual projection of what people were struggling for—their right to occupy the spaces of the city and to claim their place as citizens of the country. This book also positions Wissema’s images alongside those of black South African photographers like George Hallett, Clarence Coulson, Gavin Jantjes, Wilfred Paulse, Jackie Heyns, and Peter McKenzie.13 THE WORLD OF DISTRICT SIX District Six was declared a “white group area” on 11 February 1966 and over 60,000 people were forcibly removed to the Cape Flats over the next 15 years.14 At 13 District Six Revisited, edited by photographers George Hallett and Peter McKenzie, contains images by the photographers listed here and was published in South Africa in 2007. 14 Approximately 66,000 people were forcibly removed from District Six. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 290 K. Thomas this time, the area was the largest suburb in Cape Town and it was one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city.15 From the turn of the century, as historian Vivian Bickford-Smith notes, the neighborhood was “one of the most cosmopolitan areas in the Cape, if not the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.”16 District Six presented an unequivocal challenge to the vision of white racial purity and of white cityscapes given legislative form by the Group Areas Act of 1950. Anwah Nagia, ex-resident of District Six and one of the founders of the District Six Museum, which was established at the end of apartheid, argues that those who perceive the area as a “coloured” area effectively affirm the racial classifications of the apartheid state. For him, the destruction of District Six was bound to the fact that the area was one “where color and the whole notion of color was never uppermost in people’s mind,” in which “you never had that feeling as you had just one foot outside of District Six, of being back in the old social engineering South Africa.”17 For Nagia, “This obviously explains why they had to clear the District.”18 The apartheid government was giving social engineering its course. It was creating the “Malay Quarter” for the Muslims, this and that area for “coloureds”, while here in District Six, people were beginning to get used to the idea that people are the same and they are not different. And this was a fear. It was a panic. It wasn’t just because of the “slum” that they wanted to clear the District. Their social engineering was being hampered by the fact that Europeans from Europe were coming to District Six and were treating these people as normal human beings. The District Sixer realised that these people were drinking out of the same mugs.19 Nagia’s understanding of why District Six was razed makes clear that what was destroyed, as so many ex-residents of the neighborhood have also articulated in their autobiographical accounts and testimonies, was far more than the buildings, streets, and houses, but an alternate social world to that of white racist domination brought into being and kept in place by systemic structural and physical violence.20 In a paper entitled “White Racism and Black Consciousness” and delivered at a student conference in Cape Town in 1971, Steve Biko stated, “The white man’s quest for power has led him to destroy with utter ruthlessness whatever has stood in his way.”21 District Six is a case in point—the first demolitions there occurred in 1968 and by 1985, what remained of the once vibrant neighborhood, 15 Swanson and Harries, “‘Ja! So Was District Six! But It Was a Beautiful Place’: Oral Histories, Memory and Identity,” 63. 16 Bickford-Smith, “The Origins and Early History of District Six to 1910,” 43. 17 Rassool and Prosalendis, Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum, 177. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 See the testimonies of people who were forcibly removed included in Field, Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town and Rassool and Prosalendis, Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum. 21 Biko, I Write What I Like, 61. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 291 officially renamed Zonnebloem, had “a population of 3,500 consisting largely of middle income, Afrikaans-speaking ‘whites,’ who are mostly state employees.”22 The state built a technical training college for white students on part of the land and a large tract remained empty. The Hands Off District Six campaign fought the proposed redevelopment of the area in the late 1980s by the British Petroleum company.23 Terence Fredericks, a member of the campaign, writes: “There was a pressing need to ensure that all plans by the authorities to redevelop the area of District Six were obstructed so that the abandoned, scarred slopes of Devil’s Peak would be a ‘living’ reminder to all of what had happened there and elsewhere.”24 In his account “Creating the District Six Museum,” Fredericks writes that the idea for a museum developed through the Hands Off District Six campaign and the desire to convey the message “Never, Never Again.”25 When the District Six Museum was founded the museum curators were faced with the significant challenge of creating exhibitions about “a story of complete destruction.”26 By a stroke of luck, the curators discovered that a foreman who had been briefed by the Department of Community Development to dump the rubble of District Six into Table Bay had kept the street signs from the neighborhood. These 75 signs were unearthed from the cellar in which they had been kept and, exhibited in the museum, are tangible signs of the world that was District Six. The museum was opened in 1994 and its inaugural exhibition was entitled Streets: Retracing District Six. Photographs played a central part in the exhibition “as visual signifiers of real lives in a real place that had been destroyed through forced removals.”27 The museum received photographs of life in District Six from ex-residents and also acquired the work of several professional photographers who produced photographic studies of the area or who lived in the neighborhood and documented their surroundings. Included among these photographic essays is Wissema’s work commissioned by the Cape Provincial Institute of Architects documenting District Six before it was entirely destroyed. In fact, when Wissema began photographing in the District in the early 1970s the demolitions had already begun and forced removals were underway. However, many of the streets of the District remained intact and some of Wissema’s images show demolished buildings alongside inhabited homes. It would not be until 1982 that all the residents of the area were uprooted and their houses and streets reduced to a barren wasteland. Wissema’s photographs validate the assertion “people lived there” and give evidence to the lie of the apartheid state—there were slum conditions in District Six, just as there are slum conditions in the areas to which people were forcibly removed, but what was demolished was far more than a slum. To see photographs of District Six is to recognize the extent and the complexity of what was destroyed. 22 Hallett and McKenzie, District Six Revisited, 20. Soudien and Jeppie, The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present, 5. 24 Ibid., 13. 25 Fredericks, “Creating the District Six Museum,” 13. 26 Prosalendis et al., “Punctuations: Periodic Impressions of a Museum,” 80. 27 Smith and Rassool, “History in Photographs at the District Six Museum,” 131. 23 292 K. Thomas Wissema’s photographs portray an alternative city, images that lead us to reflect on what might have been if apartheid had not occurred. They also, and perhaps more importantly, lead us to confront what did occur and to engage with the legacy of forced removals in the present. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 PHOTOGRAPHY AND CITIZENSHIP In her book, The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), Azoulay writes of how the camera has always been used to document catastrophic events and sites of disaster. She argues that underlying such uses of photography are the assumptions that such events are of interest not only to those directly affected, but also by people across the world, and that such images affect the ways in which such events are perceived and how people respond to them.28 Azoulay argues that “these uses of photography are part of the way in which citizens actualize their duty toward other citizens as photographed persons who have been struck by disaster.”29 Photography provides modern citizens with an instrument enabling them to develop and sustain civilian skills that are not entirely subordinate to governmental power and allows them to exercise partnership with others not under the control of this power or acting as the extension of this power’s operations and goals. In other words, photography is one of the distinctive practices by means of which individuals can establish a distance between themselves and power in order to observe its actions and to do so not as its subjects.30 For Azoulay, the encounter between the photographer, the photographed, and the viewer can be understood as a space of politics that takes place within the bounds of the dominant power structure but at the same time runs parallel and counter to it. The Civil Contract of Photography presents Azoulay’s thinking about how photographic practices and photographs themselves operate under conditions of violentstate oppression. For this reason, her work offers a productive way to think about photography produced in South Africa under apartheid. For Azoulay, photographs always hold the possibility of and for resistance and are invested with the democratic potential that brought the image into existence in the first place. She argues that “The civil gaze doesn’t seek to control the visible, but neither can it bear another’s control over the visible. In particular, it cannot consent to any attempt to rule the visible while seeking to abolish the space of plurality.”31 In this sense, even when photographs are taken to secure particular forms of power, photographs can always exceed the intentions of the photographer and can be read outside of and against the photographer’s intentions. Azoulay argues for thinking 28 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 104. Ibid. 30 Ibid., 105. 31 Ibid., 97. 29 Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 293 about our practice of engaging with photographs as “watching” rather than “looking” and she claims, counter to conventional wisdom, that photographs are “moving” images. Photographs offer the possibility of unfixing the past, of dislodging histories from the set-narratives in which they are cast, and are themselves unstable signifiers that mean different things across space and time. Most important for my readings of Wissema’s images of District Six and for my thinking about how to approach photographs taken under the apartheid regime are Azoulay’s ideas about photography and citizenship. As she notes, the conjunction of the terms “photography” and “citizenship” is uncommon, and yet, as she shows, the relation between the practices of photographic representation and of political representation has always been in place. “Exactly like citizenship, photography, is no one’s property” Azoulay writes, “It cannot be owned.”32 Photography, at least the kind that I am concerned with in this book [The Civil Contract of Photography] in which photographs are taken on the verge of catastrophe, also is a form of relations of individuals to the power that governs them, a form of relations that is not fully mediated through such power, being a relation between formally equal individuals—individuals who are equal as the governed as such. It is a form of relation that exists and becomes valid only within and between the plurality of individuals who take part in it. Anyone who addresses others through photographs or takes the position of a photograph’s addressee, even if she is a stateless person who has lost her “right to have rights,” as in Arendt’s formulation, is nevertheless a citizen—a member in the citizenry of photography. The civil space of photography is open to her, as well. That space is configured by what I call the civil contract of photography.33 Azoulay argues that the photographic encounter produces a civil contract which can be understood as a form of resistance to those forms of power that seek to delimit the practices of citizenship. Of what does such resistance consist? Unlike those theorists who invoke the future that is yet to come or the community that is not yet formed, Azoulay’s formulation of the civil contract of photography recognizes the possibility, and indeed, the realization, of forms of resistance in the present, on the verge of and in the midst of disaster. While such forms of community and resistance may have their limits, they are often all we have. In times of disaster they are the means we have to work with and in this sense provide more hope than utopian visions of the future that is always-to-come. Such forms of resistance summon the hoped for justice of the future and also provide us with an example of democratic praxis. Photography offers both a means of critique and a way of making visible forms of power that are not intended to be seen. Photographs can be used to bring the past into direct contact with the present—this means that photographs can be understood as more than historical remainders and can be deployed as political tools. 32 33 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 25. Ibid., 85. 294 K. Thomas PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE FUTURE Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Basically, therefore, photographers wish to produce states of things that have never existed before; they pursue these states, not out there in the world, since for them the world is only a pretext for the states of things that are to be produced, but amongst the possibilities contained within the camera’s program. – Vilém Flusser34 Among the photographs, Wissema took in District Six are three images of a small child crouched over, kneeling in the street, absorbed in the production of a detailed chalk drawing. The clear lines of the child’s drawing contrast with the low white wall, wooden fence, and doorway to the house that provide the blurry background for the image. The other images in the series hone in on the child and the drawings that appear under her hand. Many of the photographs, Wissema took of the neighborhood and its inhabitants feature children, and many of these images are of children playing in the street. Such images reveal the ways in which children occupied the public spaces of the city. These photographs show the streets of District Six to have been places of sociality, of community and of belonging. Another of Wissema’s photographs taken in District Six shows a group of children drawing in the street. The photograph shows nine children who form a partial circle, a kind of human frame, around the drawings they are engaged in making in white chalk. In the foreground is the arm and hand of a boy who is drawing the outline of a large head. At the center of the image is a rectangular shape crossed with a series of lines. A small girl, the youngest of the group of children, has turned her head and looks away from the children and their drawings. She is the only child who is not absorbed in the act of making and her gaze is directed at the world beyond that of the children. In the background, beyond the circle of children, the legs and part of the body of a dog can be seen, and behind this, the limbs of children sitting at the edge of the road. In the next image, the same group of children can be seen but they are portrayed from a greater distance. While the children occupy the street across its width, from the row of houses on the left to the brick wall on the right, the rows of apartment buildings in the background and the car parked on the cross street situate the children in the larger geography of the city. If in the first photograph the landscape the children inhabit is portrayed as self-contained and self-made, the second image shows how the world of the street and of play is subject to surveillance. Although there are no adults present, the flat face of the building at the end of the street and its multiple windows signify the adult world beyond.35 While the camera angle emphasizes the children’s drawings that are depicted in the foreground, the drawings and those who made them are dwarfed by the world that 34 Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 37. For the history of the apartment buildings in the background of Wissema’s photograph see Shamil Jeppie’s moving account of returning with former resident Menisha Collins to the Bloemhof Flats (renamed “Kaapse Huis” after the forced removals) and the trauma of finding them “literally sanitized” (113) and “dead” (115) in his chapter, “Modern Housing for the District: the Canterbury and Bloemhof Flats,” 2001. 35 Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 295 Figure 2. Jansje Wissema (1920–1975). Portrait of a child drawing on the street, District Six, Cape Town. c. 1970. Courtesy Cape Institute for Architecture and University of Cape Town: Visual Archives frames them. Beyond the apartment buildings, the dark surface of Table Mountain looms like a wall. The composition of the image shows the world of play and of making to be central to the children who seem oblivious to the fact that what is to be destroyed are the row of cottages behind them and the site of their play. Examining photographs of District Six reveals what was destroyed under apartheid to be worlds and practices of world-making and in this way Wissema’s photographs of District Six bring the psychic wound of forced removals into clear focus. Her images are also in marked contrast to the presence of children on the streets of the inner city after the destruction of the District and up to the present day. These children are the street children of Cape Town who are either homeless or who come to the inner-city from their homes on the Cape Flats in order to beg for money and food. Such children are sometimes accompanied by adults, but most often wander the streets alone or in groups. The children who live on the streets of the post-apartheid city have also been subjective to successive forced removals —they have been repeatedly removed by the city council in attempts to sanitize and “uplift” the city center. District Six was not a place of affluence nor was it devoid of violence and crime and yet Wissema’s photographs of the ways in which the children of the area claimed the streets of the District casts a cold light on the effects of apartheid on the present. The city of Cape Town remains divided by race and class and the areas to which people were forcibly removed number among the most dangerous in the world for the children who reside there. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 296 K. Thomas Figure 3. Jansje Wissema (1920–1975). Portrait of a child drawing on the street, District Six, Cape Town. c. 1970. Courtesy Cape Institute for Architecture and University of Cape Town: Visual Archives In their account of the history of District Six, oral historians Felicity Swanson and Jane Harries note that there are close parallels between the District and “other inner-city areas such as the Left Bank of Paris, the East End of London and the Bronx in New York.”36 The destruction of the area indelibly changed the nature of the city of Cape Town and the history and effects of forced removals necessarily affect any attempt to read images of the neighborhood outside of the frame of violence. Images of everyday life in the District during the time of its destruction have become instances of what Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have described as “incongruous images”. These are images that provide evidence of what appears to be ordinary, and therefore incongruous, in the midst of catastrophe. Wissema’s images of children making chalk drawings in the streets of District Six prior to its destruction summon lost worlds. These images, like those by American photographer Helen Levitt of children on the streets of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, are remarkable portraits. However, as images taken in a time of racist oppression and intense state violence, Wissema’s photographs call on us to see not only the particularity and magic of the world that was but the enormity of what was destroyed. 36 Swanson and Harries, “‘Ja! So Was District Six! But It Was a Beautiful Place’: Oral Histories, Memory and Identity,” 63. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 297 Figure 4. Jansje Wissema (1920–1975). Portrait of a child drawing on the street, District Six, Cape Town. c. 1970. Courtesy Cape Institute for Architecture and University of Cape Town: Visual Archives “No White authority had ever bothered to ask me whether they could take my past away. They simply brought in their bulldozers,” writes Richard Rive.37 Wissema’s photographs show that what the children in her images lost was not only the past but also the future that would have unfolded had the worlds they inhabited not been destroyed. Where does this leave us if not in that melancholic relation to history that photographs conjure? blues for district six early one new year’s morning when the emerald bay waved its clear waters against the noisy dockyward a restless south easter skipped over slumbering lion’s head danced up hanover street tenured a bawdy banjo strung an ancient cello 37 Rive, Writing Black, 5. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 298 K. Thomas Figure 5. Jansje Wissema (1920–1975). A group of children drawing on the street, District Six, Cape Town. c. 1970. Courtesy Cape Institute for Architecture and University of Cape Town: Visual Archives bridged a host of guitars tambourined through a dingy alley into a scented cobwebbed room and crackled the sixth sensed district into a blazing swamp fire of satin sound early one new year’s morning when the moaning bay mourned in murky waters against the deserted dockyard a bloodthirsty south easter roared over hungry lion’s head and ghosted its way up hanover street empty forlorn and cobwebbed with gloom Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim)38 38 Brand, Dollar, “Africa, Music, and Show Business: An Analytical Survey in Twelve Tones Plus Finale.” Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 299 Figure 6. Jansje Wissema (1920–1975). Children playing and drawing on the street, District Six, Cape Town. c. 1970. Courtesy Cape Institute for Architecture and University of Cape Town: Visual Archives The south easter in the poem by musician and poet Abdullah Ibrahim is the name of the wind that torments the city of Cape Town to this day. Like the storm that blows in from paradise and catches the wings of the angel of history in Benjamin’s ninth thesis, the wind in Ibrahim’s poem travels through time, moving through District Six before and after its destruction. The restless, dancing wind becomes a bloodthirsty ghost that haunts Hanover Street, once the heart of District Six, and in 1971, in the wake of forced removals, “empty/forlorn/and cobwebbed with gloom”. Benjamin’s angel of history is “irresistibly” propelled by the storm “into the future to which his back is turned.”39 This notion of the backward looking gaze that cannot be shifted is one that has held considerable appeal for cultural critics. For Marxist art historian Otto Karl Werckmeister, Benjamin’s ideas, and particularly his Theses on the Concept of History, have been thoroughly de-radicalized by critics on the Left who have replaced politics with cultural critique. Werckmeister argues that the figure of the angel of history: 39 Benjamin, Collected Writings, 258. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 300 K. Thomas Figure 7. Jansje Wissema (1920–1975). Children in District Six, Cape Town at the time of forced removals. c. 1970. Courtesy Cape Institute for Architecture and University of Cape Town: Visual Archives has become a meditative image—an Andachtsbild—for a dissident mentality vacillating between historical abstraction and political projection, between despondency and defiance, between challenge and retreat. The image keeps the aggressive critical impulse of such a mentality in a decisionless abeyance, so that the tension stays put within the politically disenfranchised, and hence ideologically overcharged, realm of culture.40 He goes on to argue that “without a political perspective, a critical thinking that wishes both to diagnose and rectify the world at large cannot be carried to any conclusion.”41 For him, history in the Gramscian sense has, ironically, been deradicalized through the appropriation of Benjamin’s thought. One hundred years since the declaration of the iniquitous 1913 Native Land Act; 63 years since the passing of the Group Areas Act; 46 years since the destruction of District Six began; and almost 20 years since the legislative end of apartheid, District Six remains what many writers have termed “a scar” on the landscape of the city of 40 41 Werckmeister, Icons of the Left: Benjamin & Eisenstein, Picasso & Kafka after the Fall of Communism, 12. Ibid., 156. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 301 Cape Town.42 I want to suggest that an engagement with photographs and the histories they provoke may not offer ways to heal or erase the scars of history. Instead they can be used to open old wounds, not simply to reanimate the hurts of the past or to bring about further trauma in the present (although they may have precisely this effect), but to provide a way to interrogate the scars, to contest the ways in which they have been formed, and to offer different modes of address. In the last five years, there have been several international photographic exhibitions that have taken South African photography as their subject.43 These exhibitions bring the work of South African photographers into global, public circulation and provide an opportunity to make connections between the effects of apartheid on conditions of life after apartheid’s legislative end. These connections, however, are rarely made explicit. More often images of the atrocities of apartheid and its aftermath have been turned into highly valued objects that circulate in the global art market. There have also been two recent exhibitions in South Africa that have featured the work of Jansje Wissema. In 2012, the Cape Institute for Architecture together with the District Six Museum produced an exhibition entitled “District Six: People Lived Here” that displayed forty photographs by Wissema and in 2013 the Cape Town Heritage Trust exhibited her photographs of District Six in Cape Town.44 In the case of the forced removals from District Six and its aftermath, photographs like those taken by Wissema, unless they are read in relation to ongoing injustice in the present, risk being converted into consoling signs that the injustice of apartheid is behind us. The photographs chosen for the Cape Town Heritage Trust exhibition, for instance, emphasize the picturesque and omit those photographs that portray destroyed buildings or children playing in the rubble left in the wake of the bulldozers. The Restitution of Land Rights Act number 22 of 1994 allows for those who were dispossessed of land as a result of forced removals to claim restitution rights. The original closing date for the submission of claims was set for the 31 December 1998.45 Since that time, only 1,060 claimants have registered claims. As a result, 42 See for instance Beyers, “The Cultural Politics of ‘Community’ and Citizenship in the District Six Museum, Cape Town,” 360 and Rassool, “Remaking Cape Town: Memory Politics, Land Restitution and Contests of History,” 13. 43 Among these are “Figures and Fictions,” curated by London-based South African Tamar Garb, showed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2011 and led to the publication of a book containing photographs by many of the most significant contemporary South African photographers; The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, curated by Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester and exhibited first at the International Centre for Photography in New York in 2013, then in Germany, Italy and finally in Johannesburg this year, traces the history of South African photography from the Drum Decade to the present. Paul Weinberg’s The Other Camera: South African Vernacular Photography opened at the University of Michigan in 2014 and offers insight into the works of many previously unknown South African photographers. 44 The Cape Town Heritage Trust was founded in 1987 and according to the mission statement on the organization’s website, aims to “conserve the architectural, cultural and natural environs of Cape Town for the benefit of the inhabitants of the city and the nation at large” (http://www.heritage.org.za/home/about-us/mis sion). 45 District Six Reference Group, “Technical Team Position Paper on Restitution and Related Matters,” 29. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 302 K. Thomas the time period for applications was reopened in June 2013. Of the original 150 ha of land in District Six, only 40 ha remain for restitution purposes. The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform now has a team dedicated to working with claimants to rebuild District Six. At a claimant’s meeting held in Cape Town in 2013 the Social Integration team concluded their presentation with the following words: “The sounds of happy children will be heard again in District Six.”46 After more than 15 years of delays and contest over the lack of transparency of the District Six Beneficiary and Development Trust and of the state, who are reported to have profited from the rebuilding of the first phase of houses as part of the restitution process, it is difficult for former residents to feel anything more than a cautious optimism. The return of children to the streets of the District remains to be realized. In 2011 and 2012, artist Haroon Gunn-Salie created a series of site-specific works in District Six. Gunn-Salie worked in collaboration with four people who had been forcibly removed from the area during apartheid to produce works that powerfully evoke the legacy of the removals and their ongoing effects in the present. Together with former resident Zelda Hendricks, Gunn-Salie created a largescale triptych of three framed mirrors that were mounted on the wall of a ruined building on the edge of District Six. This piece formed part of a series of installations and interventions held on 9 November 2012 on the site of the building that was soon to be demolished. The piece is entitled “Turn the other way” and these words are sandblasted onto the central mirror and illuminated by LED lights. The title of the work refers to Zelda Hendricks’ experience of people in Walmer Estate, the neighborhood adjoining District Six, simply “turning away” from the violence and injustice of the destruction that occurred alongside them. While the work is intended to provoke viewers to reflect on the ethical implications of turning a blind eye to the suffering of others, it can also be read as an injunction: once we have gazed into the mirror and seen ourselves reflected there, to turn away from the failings of the past, away from the ruins of history and towards the future. Gunn-Salie’s work leads us to simultaneously bear witness to the past and “to turn the other way,” to look in the opposite direction through the window frame in Wissema’s image with which this paper began, away from the house of ruin, away from the stony face of the mountain. Across to the harbor to where the ruins of District Six, a place described by Richard Rive, the writer who was “born and nurtured” there, as “a notorious slum in a beautiful city in a bigoted country,” lie beneath Duncan Dock in the Table Bay harbor.47 Away from the broken past and the lost homes that cannot be rebuilt—for a home, as we know, is not merely its material form, but the space and time it enfolds. Over to the Cape Flats, the large area that extends away from the city, all the places to which black city dwellers were forcibly removed over the long years of apartheid tyranny. This reminds us 46 47 District Six Reference Group, “Technical Team Position Paper on Restitution and Related Matters,” 30. Rive, Writing Black, 145. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 303 Figure 8. Jansje Wissema (1920–1975). Houses at the edge of the wasteland to which District Six was reduced after thousands of people were forcibly removed and their homes demolished. c. 1970. Courtesy Cape Institute for Architecture and University of Cape Town: Visual Archives that apartheid remains with us and the promise of the Freedom Charter, that there shall be houses, security, and comfort continues to be deferred.48 On 17 August 2013, Gunn-Salie changed all the street signs for Zonnebloem to District Six. To see the short film he produced to document his visual activism see: “Zonnebloem renamed District Six by Haroon Gunn-Salie,” www.youtube. com/watch?v=CSB872bhIaw. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Paul Weinberg for introducing me to the work of Jansje Wissema and for so many important conversations. Thanks to Alastair Douglas, Michael Godby, Brian Michael Muller, the reviewers who commented on this article, and to 48 In this regard see my critique of the South African National Development Plan (NDP), co-authored with Sergio Alloggio, and the collection of position pieces included in the special issue of Social Dynamics on the NDP. 304 K. Thomas Haroon Gunn-Salie for his inspiring work. I am grateful to Sergio Alloggio for reading my work and discussing it with me. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Thumeka Mantolo and Jaine Roberts at the Research Office at Rhodes University during the time I taught in the Fine Art Department there. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 REFERENCES Alberts, Paul, and George Gibbs. Children of the Flats. Cape Town: Reijger Publishers, 1980. Alloggio, Sergio, and Kylie Thomas. “Resisting the Lure of Deferral: Realising the South African National Development Plan.” Social Dynamics 39, no. 1 (2013): 108–10. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. London: Corgi Books, 1972. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Beyers, Christiaan. “The Cultural Politics of ‘Community’ and Citizenship in the District Six Museum, Cape Town.” Anthropologica 50, no. 2 (2008): 359–73. Bickford-Smith, Vivian. “The Origins and Early History of District Six to 1910.” In The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present, ed. Crain Soudien and Shamil Jeppie, 35–43. Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990. Biko, Steve. I Write What I like. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1996. Brand, Dollar. “Africa, Music, and Show Business: An Analytical Survey in Twelve Tones Plus Finale.” Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts 1 (1966): 53–57. District Six Reference Group. “Technical Team Position Paper on Restitution and Related Matters,” 2013. http://www.ruraldevelopment.gov.za/phocadownload/District/2013/d6_final_ draft_tech_position_paper_20130128_version_10_word_97.pdf (accessed March 7, 2014). Field, Sean, ed. Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town. Cape Town: David Philip, 2001. Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. First published in German in 1983. Fredericks, T. “Creating the District Six Museum.” In Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum, ed. Rassool Ciraj and Sandra Prosalendis, 13–4. Cape Town: District Six Museum, 2001. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Greshoff, Jan. The Last Days of District Six. Cape Town: District Six Museum, 1996. Greshoff, Robert. “Jansje Wissema and Her South African Cow Parsley Photogram.” http://gres hoff.com/tag/jansje-wissema/ (accessed May 12, 2014). Gunn-Salie, Haroon. “Witness: A Site-specific Exhibition by Haroon Gunn-Salie in Collaboration with District Six Residents.” http://www.witness-exhibition.withtank.com/introduction/ (accessed December 1, 2013). Hallett, George, and Peter McKenzie. District Six Revisited. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007. Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer. “Incongruous Images: ‘Before, during and after’ the Holocaust.” History and Theory 48 (2009): 9–25. Jeppie, Shamil. “Modern Housing for the District: The Canterbury and Bloemhof Flats.” In Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum, ed. Ciraj Rassool and Sandra Prosalendis, 113–130. Cape Town: District Six Museum, 2001. Jeppie, Shamil, and Crain Soudien. The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present. Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 02:34 19 August 2014 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 305 Louw, Allegra. “Micro-studies in the Western Cape.” African Studies Library, University of Cape Town, 2010. http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/asl/groupareas.pdf (accessed March 7, 2014). Prosalendis, Sandra, Jennifer Marot, Crain Soudien, and Anwah Nagia. “Punctuations: Periodic Impressions of a Museum.” In Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum, ed. Rassool Ciraj and Sandra Prosalendis, 74–94. Cape Town: District Six Museum, 2001. Rassool, Ciraj. “Remaking Cape Town: Memory Politics, Land Restitution and Contests of History.” Unpublished seminar paper delivered at the University of the Western Cape Geography Department Seminar Series, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, March 2014. Rassool, Ciraj, and Sandra Prosalendis, eds. Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum. Cape Town: District Six Museum, 2001. Rive, Richard. Writing Black. Cape Town: David Philip, 1981. Small, Adam, and Jansje Wissema. District Six. Johannesburg: Fontein Publishing, 1986. Smith, Tina, and Ciraj Rassool. “History in Photographs at the District Six Museum.” In Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum, ed. Rassool Ciraj and Sandra Prosalendis, 131–45. Cape Town: District Six Museum, 2001. Swanson, Felicity, and Jane Harries. “‘Ja! So Was District Six! But It Was a Beautiful Place’: Oral Histories, Memory and Identity.” In Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town, ed. Sean Field, 62–80. Cape Town: David Philip, 2001. Van Reenen, Rykie. Die Wêreld van Jansje Wissema [The World of Jansje Wissema]. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1976. Warne, Pam. “Photography and New Media,” undated. http://www.iziko.org.za/static/page/pho tography-and-new-media (accessed March 7, 2014). Werckmeister, Otto Karl. Icons of the Left: Benjamin & Eisenstein, Picasso & Kafka after the Fall of Communism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.