An eye on the shame of apartheid

Fred Khumalo: Ernest Cole's photographs document segregated black and white lives and their dehumanising intersections

I don't have a bladder near my eyes, as Irish-American author Frank McCourt said of one who cries easily.

But my tears gushed freely the other day when I visited the Johannesburg Art Gallery, which is hosting an exhibition by Ernest Cole, the legendary photographer who died in obscurity and penury in the US, away from his native South Africa.

How can a legend die in obscurity, you might ask. It is exactly this contradiction that got me crying tears of anger, shame and disappointment.

But what also made me cry were the images themselves. Such was the potency of the pictures, I found myself mentally clawing back to that horrible past that many of us know very little about, or choose to forget.

Because I lived some of the horrors myself, and had some of the stories told to me by my father, who was arrested numerous times for being a black man in a wrong place, at a wrong time - without the necessary papers that made him a "complete" man - I could relate to the images.

Let's start with this one: it's a group of nude gold-mine recruits who have been herded into a grimy room for examination. I have seen many images like this, but this one left me angrier. It's the understatement that enhances the drama.

The procedure of stripping men naked and "inspecting" them was practised not only at the mines but also at municipal offices (Native Affairs) when black men, newly arrived in the cities, would be "inspected" and checked for sexually transmitted ailments and other diseases before being released into the city.

My father has told me that a Native Affairs official would get the man naked and "inspect" his private parts - prodding these using a ruler or a cane, this in front of other equally naked men. Sometimes mineworkers were "inspected" by having their backsides probed with rulers to check if they hadn't stolen pieces of gold and hidden them there!

To see this inspection in picture form makes one's blood boil; the inhumanity of it all!

But the recruits had no say in the matter. They needed work as their other means of survival - their land, their cattle - had been taken away from them by successive land acts.

There is a series of pictures of tsotsis picking the pockets of white men , accompanied by a caption : "Whites are angered if touched by anyone black, but a black hand under the chin is enraging. This man, distracted by his fury, does not realise his pocket is being rifled."

The image reminded me of Alan Paton's prophetic words about how oppression tended to create social misfits.

Living in the crime-ridden South Africa of today, one can see how the seed was first planted by a system that reduced human beings to violent thugs who had nothing to lose - but their poverty.

But if you think the exhibition is tragic, consider the life of the man behind these photographs.

Ernest Cole, whose mother was a washerwoman and a tailor, was actually born Kole (pronounced Koh-leh), a Tswana surname, in Pretoria.

He left school in 1957 at 16 as the Bantu Education law, meant to consign blacks to menial labour, kicked in. He realised that the life of a black man was beyond redemption; he could speak excellent Afrikaans, so got himself reclassified as coloured. Coloureds were just a notch below whites and two notches above black people in terms of access to resources - education, jobs, housing.

He changed his name to Cole.

Among coloured people, it was also common to get some of them "playing white" - light-complexioned coloureds who abandoned their roots, adopted white lifestyles, moved to white suburbs and "became" white, in order to access the jealously guarded privileges of whites. Oh, our tragic country, our tragic history.

Anyway, Cole's ability to play coloured freed him from laws that required blacks always to carry a dompas and a work permit when in "white areas".

This mobility proved crucial to his photography.

But even as a coloured, he was still not good enough. He was largely a freelancer - although he later worked for Drum - and wasn't earning the same as a white photographer with a lesser talent and less dedication.

It was around this time that he started documenting the lives of ordinary South Africans, both black and white. The result was a book called House of Bondage, which was published to great acclaim in the US.

When the book came out, Cole was already based in the US, having fled his native South Africa in 1966.

The book was banned in South Africa.

However, the US was not a bed of roses either. Legend has it that he did not feel welcome there - even among black people.

He continued working as a freelancer. He had a stint in Sweden where he took to filmmaking, and later returned to the US.

By 1970 he was destitute and homeless, pounding the cold streets of New York City. Joseph Lelyveld, a US journalist with whom he had worked in Johannesburg, has said in an interview with the New York Times that when Cole was already homeless in New York, the two of them went together to a cheap hotel where the photographer had left his negatives and the photographs he had of his mother, only to discover they had gone to an auction of unclaimed items.

"For years rumours circulated that a suitcase of Mr Cole's prints had survived somewhere in Sweden," the New York Times reported. "David Goldblatt, a renowned South African photographer, had heard they were with the Hasselblad Foundation there. When Mr Goldblatt received the Hasselblad Award in 2006, and travelled to Gothenburg to accept it, he asked to see them. He said he was agape paging through the images, saying, 'They can't lie in a vault.'"

Goldblatt helped to repatriate the pictures back to South Africa - hence the exhibition.

What a homecoming for such a talented son of the soil whose life was cut short by powers much bigger than him.

Cole died at 49 in 1990, just a week after Nelson Mandela walked free.

What an irony - dying on the eve of the dawning of a new era in the country of his birth, the country that, sadly, had crushed his life like it had done to the lives of hundreds of thousands before.

You have to see this exhibition - for the sheer appreciation of the man's art, but also for a history lesson that is tender, humane.

Next year the exhibition, organised by the Hasselblad Foundation, travels to Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban and Mamelodi, outside Pretoria, where Cole's family still lives.