Subtle views reframe Sharpeville
Reimagining
Gumbi’s vantage point is elevated, perhaps shot from the rooftop to reveal what he calls “the relative order of Sharpeville, apparently designed as a ‘model township’, if the justification of John Sharpe, a city planner, is to be believed.” Gumbi says, if this was the case, it later turned out to be false, because it evolved into yet another labour camp.
In Natasha Vally’s thesis, The ‘Model Township’ of Sharpeville: The absence of political action and organisation, she writes: “One would expect a place this iconic to mirror the national historical narrative, because one might expect a place so remembered for a political event to be a consistent hub for political organising.
“Yet Sharpeville was neither a place of consistent organising nor a place where the quiescence of the 1960s, followed by intensified black working-class resistance in the 1970s played out exactly according to the script.
“While Sharpeville being designed for order did make organising difficult, it was a combination of this and the fact that Sharpeville did provide a better lifestyle to former residents of the ‘old locations’, which had a palliative effect on the population.”
In a sense, this statement is a pivot that both photographers use to swing their works in two opposite yet non-binary directions.
Gumbi’s use of colour, and the intimacy pervading the images of Reimagining, move them away from a central narrative, whereas Dhlamini’s exhaustiveness achieves this by opposite means.
“When you see a crippled old person in Sharpeville, you wonder whether was it a result of the shootings or not. And when you ask, you find that you are right. And that the trauma hasn’t been dealt with right. Some cry when you interview them.”
Dhlamini says his project was initiated when he was part of a learnership in 2010. Of the 10 people in the group, only two others continued with photography. Dhlamini alludes to the fact that there remains a pervading difficulty in reframing the imagery of Sharpeville.
He explains that, in his use of colour, he has attempted, more often than not, to desaturate his images to draw the observer in to find multiple readings. He also uses abstraction to communicate the degrees to which the story has pulled him in and, in some cases, confounded him.
“I feel I spent so much time there that I inherited the trauma myself.”
With the flurries of activity in Sharpeville occurring in an annually prefigured cycle, reflecting the crass politicisation of its memorialisation, the voices of the survivors, and of future generations, are needed to free the narrative from the prison of history.
Dhlamini says his work is ongoing, with slow, almost archaeological scope. Gumbi’s quiet intervention in Reimagining Sharpeville has a home in an upstairs exhibition space at the Market Theatre. It is symbolically hidden, a narrative that does not seek the populism of the day.