Suzy Bell
WHETHER it’s the tender image of Katrina Thomas gathering her goats or the anxious look in Freddie Bosman’s eyes on the bus journey towards his beloved home, Riemvasmaak, after spending 20 years in the Ciskei, some pictures do speak a thousand words.
Winner of a Mother Jones International Documentary Award (1993) for his highly acclaimed images of the fisherfolk of Kosi Bay, one of South Africa’s leading socio- documentary photographers, Durban’s Paul Weinberg, has just published some of his most poignant photographs to date in his fourth book, Back to the Land.
Weinberg played a pivotal role in placing South African photography on the world map in the 1980s with the establishment of Afrapix and Southlight photo agencies.His images forming a study of the Bushmen of Southern Africa, Footprints in the Sand, currently grace The Northern Territories Museum Art Gallery in Australia, before the exhibition moves on to Holland and Norway.
Though fresh from a travel assignment in Sri Lanka, Weinberg’s passion lies in documenting the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, together with related land issues. He has witnessed the brutal forced removal of South Africans from the land of their ancestors, an emotional contrast from witnessing, and again documenting, the celebrations and joy of those same people returning to their land.
“What was most interesting for me was tracking and documenting the Bakwana ba Mogopa people on the West Coast, following the whole cycle from their resistance to removal in the spring of 1983, to their first harvest in the winter of 1995.”
>From the Kalahari to Kosi Bay, Weinberg has documented the untold histories of our time – “yet the ones that everybody talks about” – the first people returning to their land in rural South Africa, land lost under apartheid and even further back, to the days of Jan van Riebeeck and, in Achmat Dangor’s words, “his motley vanguard”.
Today Weinberg feels that one of the many ironies of South Africa is that people who live on formerly dispossessed land are not in the frontline of the struggle. “They are not overtly political and therefore do not hit the news, yet they have been through as much hell as everyone else has. This book is the untold story that only now is beginning to be told.”
Funded by the British Overseas Development Administration and co-ordinated by the Land and Agriculture Policy Centre, this valuable project took 18 months to develop, and Back to the Land is the extremely fine and gripping end product.
For Weinberg, the most moving photograph in the book is of two women friends in joyful embrace. “They had been separated for 21 years and I saw them meet. It was so tender and touching … the pain and the joy of returning.”
Achmat Dangor echoes Weinberg’s sentiments in the book’s introduction: “People returning to the land have begun to build homes, plough and plant, graze their animals. Look at the emptiness filling up – slowly but inexorably. It is a beginning that cannot afford to fail.”
Back to the Land is available in bookstores. It can also be ordered from the publishers, Porcupine Press (011) 402-4308, at R89,95