Unremembered reminder
stands as a testament to his dedication to the act of recording KwaZuluNatal’s forgotten history, when Zulu and Indian people lived next to each other in corrugated iron shacks. When Sonny Pillay and Miriam Makeba were the Kim and Kanye of our ghettos. When the president of the ANC, Albert Luthuli, was a teacher who ran a spaza shop in the predominantly Indian town of kwaDukuza, then known as Stanger, immortalised in Kally’s iconic portrait of him framed in the shop window soon after he found out that he was the first African to win the Nobel peace prize. It was a different time.
Sadly, much of his work is still buried in archives and this is part of a broader issue of the missing visual histories of South Africa. In McKenzie’s opinion, the iconic images from apartheid that are seared into our collective consciousness aren’t wholly representative of the huge body of work that was created at the time. These “other histories”, as McKenzie calls them, are perhaps needed now more than ever as we still seek to create a new South African identity, 23 years after democracy.
“The image has been complicit in the creation of Afro-pessimism,” he continues. And, to this day, the front pages of mainstream newspapers will often only run a picture of a township when it’s “lit” with very little consideration as to why it’s lit. Contemporary freelance photographers, desperate for paying work, acquiesce. Very rarely reflecting, let alone coming from the communities they have been charged with representing.
“He leaves behind a legacy of a deep body of work, channelling South African history,” says Kalim Rajab, whose family connection to Kally spans three generations and who was instrumental in helping Kally to edit his book Memory Against Forgetting. “In the 1950s, if a foreigner came to South Africa and picked up a mainstream newspaper they would not have known that black people even existed in this country. It was only Drum and a few other publications that actually showed what life was really like in the townships. Yet his work was neither dark nor self-conscious. It doesn’t scream for your attention.”
For all his tireless endeavours and the enthusiasm for photography that remained with him until his last days, Kally received little financial reward or adulation for his efforts. Following his retrenchment from Drum in the 1980s, Kally made a living doing photography at schools and weddings and picking up the occasional freelance gig for local newspapers.
What little recognition he received for his years of dutiful and dedicated service came to him only much later in life. He had his first exhibition, at the Goodman Gallery, at the age of 79 when he was finally given recognition by the art establishment and was conferred an honorary doctorate from the University of KwaZulu-Natal aged 87. His book Memory Against Forgetting came out only three years ago.
The title of this “lyrical”, as Rajab puts it, and engaging visual record of South Africa’s history is derived from a quote by Czech novelist Milan Kundera, which reads in its entirety: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” How apt that his magnum opus, a chronicle of the black and Indian endeavour for dignity under apartheid in Natal would in itself serve as a reminder of a shared history, now relegated to the antechambers of our identities.
I am grateful for the work of Ranjith Kally, though I will have to live with the regret that I never got to meet the man himself. His photography continues to serve as a reminder that it is possible and indeed necessary for African photojournalists to create work as critical and as nuanced as our European and American contemporaries, despite the lack of resources, remuneration or recognition — which is the reality for freelance black photojournalists on our own continent.