Ranji Mangcu

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

Group Catalogue Site

In Biko: A Biography, my father, Xolela Mangcu, writes about “invisible lineages”. This term refers to hidden histories that make up the primary context and frame of thinking of the individual, and reinforce the idea that we do not come into this world as “blank slates”. Through this body of work, I became acquainted with photographic archives built by my grandparents, that provide evidence of lineage, identities and knowledge that re-attached me to the histories that I previously felt were lost to me and my generation. Through IQHINA, I have chosen to continue this project of building archives that was initiated by my grandparents.

“IQHINA” refers to a tight knot, speaking to the many points at which the intricacies of my personal identity meet my family history, which then meets the greater South African political history and the current landscape of South Africa that I have to navigate as a Black, Xhosa woman.

Both sides of my family have formed and projected their identities through uniforms. My father’s family in the cloak of academia, and my mother’s in the cloak of a Xhosa-Christian identity, iterated through the military culture, practices and aesthetics of the Salvation Army. It has given them agency from cultural amnesia. Both my maternal grandfather Mhlobo Zihlangu and my paternal grandmother Nonji Mangcu ensured that their children had the weapon of knowledge and self-identification to wield in the face of the systemic disruption of Black identity, and ensured that these identities were immortalized in a photographic archive. These archives have now come to represent something close to a tangible map through which I, as their granddaughter, can understand that my history and identity can transcend the parameters of white supremacy, generational trauma and the violent erasure of Black African histories.

As the namesake of Rantshi Mangcu and his daughter Nonji, I represent the continuation of my great-grandfather and grandmother’s powerful legacies of treating knowledge as a tool of agency. As such, through this body of work I aim to continue the legacy of my grandparents, by presenting a body of work that helps re-frame African modernity in the minds of contemporary Africans, starting with myself and my own family’s photographic archive. In continuing my family’s photographic archives, I aim to bring light to the importance of Black lineages, memory and self-identification as tools in reframing Black African history in a way that informs a new way of being and self-understanding for myself, my siblings, my cousins and descendants to come.