Photographer Jodi Beiber’s Soweto (Jacana) is a remarkable achievement and stands out among a crop of books that look, from the outside, into the life of the South African township. Perhaps one should write that as “township life”, to best describe the thing white photographers have, periodically, gone in search of. They go to great lengths to find an image, or a series, that encapsulates the true spirit of the people and the times.
Each one — whether it was Craig Fraser with his now famous Shack Chic or Swedish photographer Per Englund with The Beautiful Struggle — takes a deeper foray into the township than the one before. And they return with colourful, priceless gems.
Bieber’s book is most definitely lighter and more palatable than her previous published work. In 2006 she published Between Dogs and Wolves (Double Storey), a grainy black-and-white exploration of the hazards encountered by lower-class youth from both sides of the colour divide.
The photographs of borderline dilapidation were almost impossible to look at. The hardest were the images of happy, painfully young South Africans playing with real and toy guns. In the middle of the book there was a picture of an abandoned newborn baby in a bucket, floating in blood.
But this is not the world Bieber has chosen to show us this time. No doubt, had she travelled to Soweto to find a horror story one would have been waitng there. Surely, had she gone to Westbury in 2006 to find a sense of communtiy she would also have found that there.
The theme of Soweto is how Sowetans are “creating Soweto anew” (to quote the Goethe-Institut’s Peter Anders and Cara Snyman, representatives of the organisation that sponsored Bieber’s work). The book, then, is an effort to turn away from the controverial image of the Soweto of the past, and any engagement with it has to begin from this point of departure.
The moment of the book’s appearance aids the creators and sponsors in their plight. This week the world-famous township will, at last, make a gargantuan attempt to move itself forward. It will try to abandon its underdog position as “ghetto” and will attempt to move to a new position as a truly cosmopolitan, although proudly African, neighbourhood.
The faces in Bieber’s photographs are not those of the embittered, underprivileged township denizens of the past. As Bieber herself descibes them: “Sowetans believe they are at the cutting edge of the trends being set in this country.”
As they stare back at Bieber’s lens, the new middle class doesn’t bother to oblige the visiting white woman with a stereotypical Colgate smile. For local white readers, at any rate, Soweto (the book) is a very settling experience indeed.
In this, it seems, it has achieved its goal.
Extracts from the text
Another beautiful Soweto feature, which differs from the Johannesburg suburbs, is that when there is a wedding, funeral or the birthday party of a one-year-old, it is okay to place a tent in the middle of your street because all your neighbours would be invited and everyone fed. The spirit of this for me was admirable. You have to remember, though, that nothing starts dead on time in Soweto. It is a standing joke among the people. One-year-old birthday parties are a big trend in Soweto. The parents have all the possibilities of playing with fantasy for this special day. It can range from a Barbie Doll-themed party to inviting the Jo’burg fire department to show off their beaming red fire truck. — Jodi Bieber
A rumour circulated around Soweto that before a game in the olden days Pirates players and the coach used to go to Mpanza’s grave to perform rituals and ask for luck. Umuthi was commonly used and they would also make white players, such as the goalkeeper and coach Anderson, undergo the same ritual. It is also said that during the 1976 student uprising cars that had an Orlando Pirates sticker on them were not burned, irrespective of who the owner was. Even today you see immaculate, expensive German cars with Orlando Pirates stickers and it is said that this protects you from would-be hijackers because they are likely to be supporters of this legendary Soweto football club. — Niq Mhlongo