Posted on November 15, 2011
Every now and again, I receive a query about 'Lives of Colour: The Cape Photo Album', an exhibition I curated for the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 1999. These queries are mainly from University of the Western Cape visual history students researching South African photography. The exhibition consisted of photographs drawn from the photo albums of various people classified 'coloured' under apartheid. Each photograph was accompanied by a text based on a story told about the photo by the owner.
'Lives of Colour' was aimed at honouring the life experiences and memories of a community that evolved from the contact and interaction between indigenes, European colonialists and immigrants, slaves, and black Africans. Collectively, these life experiences and memories make for a rich, multi-faceted legacy that, leaving aside the District Six Museum in Cape Town, is relatively unexplored in public history. It was for this reason that I developed the 'Lives of Colour' project: I wanted to represent my community in a national museum.
Recently, I wrote an article on the 'Lives of Colour' exhibition, which was posted on the Archival Platform website (18 October 2011). The article elicited a flurry of comments. As there seems to be a fair amount of interest in 'Lives of Colour', and the use of the family album as a resource for exploring community history in particular, I thought it would be appropriate to post a few more photographs and texts from the exhibition.
In the 1940s Suzanne Adriaanse met a white sailor, Percy Dashwood, with whom she had a child named Andrina. Suzanne thought the world of her daughter and always acted in what she thought to be her best interests. When they travelled by train, Suzanne, who was dark-skinned, sat in the third-class carriage but always placed her lighter-skinned daughter in the first class coach with instructions as to where to alight.
Suzanne eventually married the sailor but after the Immorality Act was amended in 1967, they were forced to part as sex across the colour line was now prohibited. After their parting, the sailor married a white woman. As for Suzanne, she moved in with her only child, Andrina, who by now had children of her own. In this studio photograph, Suzanne poses with her lighter-skinned daughter and three of her four grandchildren. Suzanne never wanted her grandchildren to have boyfriends or girlfriends who were dark-skinned.
Edgar Maurice built his house in Plumstead in the days when milk in glass bottles was still delivered to your house. He named his house 'Maryland', after his wife, whose name was Mary. The name of the house was positioned next to the front door, that barrier between the intimacy of family life and the world outside. This photograph shows Mary standing in the doorway of their house in Plumstead. Part of the house's name, as well as two milk bottles on the stoep, can also be seen.
One day in 1966, Edgar opened his front door and walked to the letter box. There, an eviction notice under the Group Areas Act (1950) awaited him, which was euphemistically known as a 'love letter' in District Six, where Edgar was a high school principal. There was now no escape from the invasion from the outside: not even the simple act of closing his front door could shut the big bad world out. Edgar closed his front door in Plumstead for the last time in 1968, when he and his family moved to Wynberg. His new home was also named Maryland.
In the 1950s and 1960s middle class 'coloured' people from the suburbs regarded a trip to central Cape Town as a real outing. Most travelled to town by train and everyone dressed up for the occasion, as in this photograph showing a woman wearing an over-the-knee skirt and gloves, and a man in a suit and tie. Town was a place to shop, to relax in the Gardens and generally to show who you were. In Cape photo albums, the pictures showing 'coloured' people in town were mainly taken by white street photographers in Darling Street, opposite the old Cape Town Post Office. Once photographed, people would take their receipts to Movie Snaps, a photo shop on the corner of Darling and Plein Streets. There for 4s 6d (4 shillings and 6 pence) for three photos, or 7s 6d for six, you would receive your photographs. Today the street photographers of Darling Street are gone, but their pictures of people of colour in the Cape Town CBD still kindle memories of dressing up for the trip to town.
Based in Wynberg at the William Herbert Sports Ground (Princeton Sports Ground until 1963), the Cape District Football Association (CDFA) was synonymous with the organisation, development and promotion of soccer in the 'coloured' community of the southern suburbs. When it was launched in July 1929, the CDFA barred Muslims and so-called 'natives' from joining its ranks on the grounds that they had their own unions. The CDFA persisted with this policy for thirty-one years, and it was only in 1960 that the notorious Clause 20 dealing with segregation was deleted from its constitution. It took a further seventeen years for the CDFA to finally adopt a policy of non-racialism in sport, when it re-wrote its constitution in 1977. The CDFA is said to be the first sports body in the country to have adopted such a policy.
By all accounts, many a soccer wizard played under the banner of the CDFA. The photograph shows the team selected in 1940 to represent the union. None of the selected players, of course, are Muslims or 'natives'.
Located next to the Gem, a popular 'coloured' cinema on Main Road, Woodstock, Van Kalker was the photographic studio most frequented by people of colour in days gone by. Every now and again, children were scrubbed, dressed in their finest and taken to Van Kalker for the classic, formal portrait. Somehow Van Kalker had the knack of making you look good, clean and fresh, and respectable to boot - as if you came from a really good home. If you were 'coloured' and wanted your children to look squeaky clean, Van Kalker was your man.
No matter your religion, Christmas in Cape Town is a time of great festivity and celebration and everyone, except the miserly, spends whatever money they have on buying presents for loved ones. So, in the spirit of goodwill, Abdullah Kamaar, a Muslim, took his family shopping in the Christmas season of 1961. They ended up at CTC, a then popular departmental store in Plein Street in the Cape Town CBD, where they came across Father Christmas. What each of his children received from him was a Christmas wish and a present, which made them very happy. The photograph shows one of Abdullah's children standing next to Father Christmas in CTC. Needless to say, that bearded man who dished out presents to 'coloured' and other children was always white.
When in other countries, people of colour do what all tourists do - they head for museums. This photograph of the Gibbs family and their friends was taken in the natural history museum in Lorenço Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique. Racists have called 'coloureds' 'boesmans' (literally men of the bush, or wild) - a derogatory term with connotations of the uncivilised and the savage. That the group of 'coloured' people in this photograph chose to have their picture taken in front of a diorama with wild animals is therefore not without its touch of irony.
Muslims are required to make a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia at least once if they are able to. A married woman, however, makes the pilgrimage only if she is accompanied by her husband, and a single woman is only allowed to go if she is accompanied by a 'protector'. The 'protector' has to be a man who she may not marry - a relative, for example.
In Mecca, pilgrims walk around the Kaaba, cuboid-shaped building, seven times in a counter-clockwise direction. The Kaaba, known as the House of Allah, is the most sacred site in Islam and was built by the prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) and his son Ishmael under divine instruction. This photograph of unmarried Muslim women in Mecca was taken in a photographic studio. It shows the 'protected' set against a painted backdrop of the Kaaba. As photography is not allowed at the actual Kaaba, a simulated backdrop had to do.
Emile Maurice is an independent arts writer and curator
