Photographer’s oeuvre a vision of black urban life
WITH the passing of Ranjith Kally earlier last week in Johannesburg, apartheid-era photography has lost one of its stalwarts.
From his appointment in 1956 as a photographer to Drum, a magazine which Bob Crisp and Jim Bailey launched in 1951 as a vehicle for the expression of black urban life, until his retirement in the mid1980s, Kally worked assiduously and yet creatively to furnish a record that is nearly without equal of the racial element in South African life and, just as importantly, he chronicled the heroic and everyday transgressions of the insidious racial boundaries that make the struggle against apartheid one of the most arresting chapters in modern history of the triumph over oppressive adversity.
His sprawling oeuvre is a veritable library of what are now recognised as iconic snapshots of the principal political and artistic figures who brought the Struggle in South Africa to the world’s attention. But Kally was equally a chronicler of Indian plantation life, working-class culture, the politics of the street, and the quotidian element in the social lives of South Africa’s black, coloured, and Indian communities. His camera was to become an object lesson in how one might begin to understand the extraordinariness of the ordinary.
Kally was born in 1925 in Isipingo, which had been a “whites only” area before it was reclassified Indian. His grandfather had been among those who had worked on the sugar plantations; his father, Kallicharan, was similarly born into this work, leaving for the fields at 3.30am where he executed his duties as an overseer.
One of Kally’s earliest and most moving photographs is of his father poring over a Sanskrit text: reproduced in Kally’s Memory Against Forgetting (2014), it conveys an impression of his father as a learned man rather than as a farm worker. His father is foregrounded against a black sheet, which accentuates the early morning light. As Kally was to write, “I had wanted to use an old book which he would read often and this is the pose by which I’ve come to remember him.”
Kally walked the 3km along a dirt road to school every day. Schooling among Indian and black children seldom extended beyond adolescence in his days, and Kally took a position in a shoe factory after finishing Standard 6.
Meanwhile, a Kodak Postcard camera, which Kally had picked up at a jumble sale, had spurred his interest in photography, and after a part-time stint at the Durban-based newspaper The Leader, Kally assumed a paid position with Drum and the Golden City Post. Sometime in the early 1950s, through in an interview with the historian Goolam Vahed on February 9, 2016, he places the event in 1957, a photograph by Kally was selected in a competition sponsored by the Japanese firm Pentax for third prize among 150 000 entries.
Kally’s first photographs of anti-apartheid figures would be taken in the late 1950s. At a break during the Treason Trial in Pretoria in 1958, the young photojournalist saw his opportunity.
Monty Naicker, a doctor who turned to trade union activism before assuming leadership of the Natal Indian Congress and in time initiating the close co-operation between Africans and Indians that would signal the solidarity that would mark the distinctiveness of the anti-apartheid movement, commands the scene: a young Nelson Mandela and the communist leader Yusuf Dadoo are in the background.
Naicker remained among Kally’s favourite subjects, and he was one of the Indian political leaders who was featured regularly in Drum; but Kally’s proximity to the Indian community, and his own awareness of the political moment, led him to other Indians who were staunch advocates of racial solidarity.
A photograph from the 1970s shows the attorney Phyllis Naidoo who engineered the escape of many prominent anti-apartheid activists. It was taken at her offices in Maseru after she had herself gone into exile – a pensive Naidoo reflects on her narrow escape from an assassination attempt.
Kally would capture, in a series of striking photographs, the travails of the Meer family. In the early 1960s, Ismail Meer, then in detention, sought a portrait of his wife, Fatima, and their three young children to keep him company in his prison cell.
In Durban’s Botanical Gardens, Kally seated Shamin, Shehnaaz, and Rashid around their buoyant-looking mother. There is no hint here of anxiety, fear, or the oppressiveness of racial terror. Less than 20 years later, Kally would snap a photograph of Fatima Meer, a gigantic figure in the Struggle in her own right, emerging from a courtroom with steely determination flanked by three lawyers who represented her as she sought to fight the repressive apparatus of the state.
Taken together, the two photographs do not only point to the passage of time: writ large there is the tale, inter alia, of women assuming a place in the public sphere, the many guises of the political, and the little-discussed role of Indian Muslims in shaping secular narratives of freedom.
However, for reasons that likely tell us something about Kally’s own political disposition, it is above all the figure of Albert Luthuli to which he was likely most drawn. Kally was despatched to Groutville in 1961 when the news of the award of Nobel Peace Prize to Luthuli, who was under a banning order, was made public.
Kally photographed Luthuli against a rustic window frame, looking out at what is perhaps an uncertain future. He is dressed in a workman’s overalls – rather apt, if we consider that he was a man of the people. The frame tells its own story, of a man who had been framed by the state.
We may say that the framing device surfaces elsewhere in a different register, in Kally’s photograph of a peace rally where a handful of men are holding aloft a huge photograph of Luthuli – a photograph also taken by Kally.
It is perhaps fitting that Kally concludes Memory Against Forgetting with a facial portrait of a smiling Luthuli who never stooped to the level of his opponent while reminding his readers that “as we celebrate freedom, we would do well to equally remember the legacy of the other great man of peace, Inkosi Albert John Luthuli.
While Madiba taught us how to forgive, Chief Luthuli first taught us how to love.
Lal is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He can be reached at vlal@history.ucla.edu
This is the first of a two-part series