1891 African Choir comes back to life
Photographs of black South Africans taken in Victorian England were all but forgotten
Aphotographic exhibition which opened at the University of Johannesburg on Friday shows portraits that have not been seen for more than a century. They could be portraits of any middle-class Victorians, but what makes them different is that the subjects are black.
Black Chronicles IV is an exhibition that includes images found in an archive after more than 120 years, hidden among a treasure trove of 80 million largely uncatalogued materials.
Some of these images are of a group of black South Africans who toured Victorian England as a choir and performed for Queen Victoria. Also exhibited are about 200 photos of African-Americans, taken 35 years after slavery was abolished.
Two months ago, at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, I attended the opening of an installation that forms a key part of this one. Titled The African Choir 1891 Re-Imagined, it featured 14 large portraits that gazed out regally while a soundtrack filled the space with choral singing and stomping. The effect was mesmerising.
Precious, fragile history
The exhibition is extraordinary on many levels: how it came about, who it portrays and its musical soundtrack all add to the impact.
The African Choir portraits had not been seen for more than a century. Their glass negatives had “lain undisturbed, bound in brown paper and string for more than 120 years”, said Matthew Butson, vicepresident of the Hulton Archive, a division of Getty Images in London where they were unearthed.
The photos were not so much discovered as excavated, to use the terminology of Renée Mussai, senior curator and head of archive and research at Autograph ABP, the British nonprofit photographic arts agency.
Mussai has presided over all four iterations of Black Chronicles, shown at venues such as Harvard University and the National Portrait Gallery in London.
The negatives “were deeply buried amid 80 million largely uncatalogued materials”, said Mussai. Finding them was part of a project called The Missing Chapter, a search to find the first photographic depictions of black people in the UK.
“The project was inspired by a remedial visual desire for visibility, for excavation, if you will — an attempt to interrogate the archive to offer new knowledge and annotate the cultural history of photography,” said Mussai. The result is “the most comprehensive body of photographs depicting the black subject in Victorian Britain”.
Central to that body is a group of South Africans born between 1850 and 1862, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the first converts to Christianity in the Eastern Cape. They were members of a choir associated with mission institutions that performed in Britain for a year.
Within four days of their arrival in 1891, they sang at the final event of the Jubilee celebrations for Queen Victoria at Crystal Palace and were then invited to perform at her summer palace of Osborne on the Isle of Wight. They also toured northern England, Scotland and Ireland and sang at high-profile events.
Charlotte Maxeke, the chorister
Knowing the names of some members of this choir adds another layer of frisson to the exhibition encounter.
They included Paul Xiniwe, his wife, Eleanor, and two children believed to be his nephews, John Xiniwe and Albert Jonas. Xiniwe was a teacher and activist who became a member of the political group Imbumba Yama Nyama and later a leading figure in the South African Native Congress, the forerunner of the ANC. He had taught two other choir members, sisters Charlotte and Katie Manye, who at the time the portraits were taken were 18 and 16.
Charlotte has left the most prominent legacy. She married Marshall Maxeke, who later became editor of the weekly Umteteleli wa Bantu (The People’s Advocate). Today her name is well known because of Charlotte Maxeke Hospital, formerly Johannesburg General Hospital.
After the tour, Charlotte went to the US where she obtained a BSc at Wilberforce University in Ohio, becoming the first person of African descent and the first South African woman to earn such a degree. She was the driving force behind the formation of the Bantu Women’s League — precursor to the ANC Women’s League — and its first president.
Catherine Burns, an associate professor at the University of Pretoria who spoke at the exhibition’s Apartheid Museum opening, said Charlotte also formed the Bantu Women’s Purity League, “the purpose of which was to give women power over their sexuality and to insist on children’s scientific education about sex”.
Charlotte’s sister Katie told her life story to Margaret McCord and the resulting book, The Calling of
Katie Makanya (her married surname), won the 1996 Sunday Times Alan Paton award for nonfiction. When the choir’s portraits were first exhibited in London, they were accompanied by recorded
➜ excerpts from a speech on archives and cultural memory by the late cultural theorist, Professor Stuart Hall of the Open University.
For Black Chronicles IV, the soundscape consists of songs composed and arranged by Tshisha Boys Productions, namely Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi, which include an isicathamiya version of God Save the Queen.
There was no recording of the original choir, but Miller and Sibisi located a programme and, rather than merely recreating the songs, they set about, with a group of 15 singers, reimagining their inner narrative through music.
The bulk of the visual exhibition consists of digitally reproduced photographs first shown at the Paris Exposition in 1900 in an exhibition called The American Negro by WEB du Bois, a sociology professor at Atlanta University and the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard University.
“Du Bois was effectively the first black curator of photography,” said Mussai in an interview for Aperture magazine’s website.
“Together with others who shared his mission, he strategically deployed 363 photographs to stage a claim for the humanity of the black subject.”
The images are all of affluent, elegant people. Professor Henry Louis Gates jnr, director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, said he imagined Du Bois had wanted “to refute the extremely popular [and derogatory] images of black people that peppered postcards, advertisements, sheet music, and virtually every other form of popular visual culture during the 1890s, precisely at the same time that Jim Crow segregation was being legalised”.
The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, which houses the original prints from Du Bois’s 1900 American Negro exhibition in Paris, has this note on the subject: “The wide range of hairstyles and skin tones represented in the photographs demonstrated that the so-called ‘Negrotype’ was in fact a diverse group of distinct individuals. The one public statement Du Bois made concerning these photographs was that visitors to The American Negro exhibit would find ‘several volumes of photographs of typical Negro faces, which hardly square with conventional American ideas’.”
The most modern piece in Black Chronicles IV is a digital reproduction in the form of a large-scale wallpaper of a work commissioned in 1996 by Autograph ABP.
Titled Effnik, it is a satirical self-portrait by London-born, Lagos-raised artist Yinka Shonibare, who appears in the dress and exaggerated pose of an 18th-century nobleman. This, alongside the solemn portraits of past generations, shines a powerful light on questions of cultural identity and representation.
Black Chronicles IV is an Autograph ABP touring exhibition, presented in partnership with the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). It is at the FADA Gallery at UJ’s Bunting Road campus in Auckland Park until May 31