Exhibiting images of Zulus from 1927 is a high-risk business, or so it seems. It’s a sign of our politically correct times, far removed from the institutionalised racism of the old days, that an exhibition and film about Zulus in the Twenties has to be accompanied by disclaimers and explanatory notes.
“The descriptions and views need to be read and considered in their context and in no way reflect the views of the Italian Embassy and the University of Johannesburg,” reads the disclaimer.
The Italian Embassy, which helped to source and bring the exhibition to South Africa, is commemorating the work of its nationals Attilio Gatti (1860-1940) and Lidio Cipriani (1892-1962).
Titled Siliva Zulu, the exhibition comprises an hour-long film and 47 photographs of Zulu people. All were shot in 1927: the film was made by Gatti, an Italian explorer and filmmaker, and the photographs were shot by Florence-born anthropologist Lidio Cipriani. The movie, unusual for its time, boasts an African cast at a time when, in the movies, whites painted themselves black to play African characters. Cipriani’s illustrious and, at times, controversial career took him to Southern Rhodesia, East and North Africa, Sri Lanka and India.
The work fits into the “colonial fantasy” template that post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha wrote about. It’s appropriate that the work is on show at an institution of higher learning at which discourses on the body and photography, the colony and anthropology are constantly under examination.
Some of the photographs recall Frantz Fanon’s anguished cry: “I am laid bare. I am overdetermined from without. I am a slave, not of the idea that others have of me, but of my own appearance. I am being dissected under white eyes. Look, it’s a Negro.”
Yet what cannot be ignored, indeed what has to be lauded, is the Zulu playing the Zulu (under the direction of the Italian director, of course).
In plot, the silent film is about a tribal man, Siliva Zulu, and his love for a Zulu maiden, his subsequent loss of wealth and his eventual redemption. The name Siliva (possibly a corruption of Silver) is neither Italian nor Zulu and curator Annalie Dempsey isn’t sure where the name comes from. It’s possible it’s a moniker the actor was given for the movie.
As the photographs were taken by an anthropologist, professional bias is to be expected. They attempt to capture the idyllic pastoral life of the Zulu. The captions are as revealing as the photographs themselves. They provide insight into the racial discourses and stereotypes existing then. Suggested in the captions are some of the stereotypes that would flow into mainstream narratives later on: myths about the unreliability of the “native”, his laziness (one caption says Zulu men “waste hours on end talking and smoking dagga”); the hygiene habits of Africans (a caption says among the Zulu “cleanliness for the strong and the healthy is, to a certain extent, one of their habits which is not always a priority in other African tribes”); and the fecundity of the African: an image of carefree boys staring at the camera inside a kraal is followed by the caption that notes “the first thing to strike the European is the extraordinary number of children” that Africans have.
The camera’s voyeuristic gaze rests on various aspects of the Zulu tribal way of life: a woman winnowing grain; another returning from the spring; one weaving a reed basket; and another suckling. There’s an interesting mix of the ritualistic and the quotidian: the marriage and the wedding dance; a woman grinding snuff; building a hut; a boy herding sheep; women fetching water from a stream; and the obligatory scenic landscapes of Zululand.
As the idea is to show “tribespeople” in their natural state, the emphasis is on the exotic. Exceptions are the images of a recently married Christian couple in Western clothes, flanked by well-wishers, and the photograph of a “maiden” holding an umbrella. You would be forgiven if you thought this was 1720, not 1927, when Christianity had won not a few converts in the coastal areas. But, then again, it’s not the approaching modernity that the anthropologist wants to record, but the vanishing traces of Zulu life as it was lived before the arrival of the white man. This is, I guess, what one scholar described as “salvage ethnography” — the documenting of “traditional culture in the face of irreversible change”.
The images are, to an extent, about the black body. It’s as if the photographer has chosen well-built men and women with pronounced features. The women, at times dark and brooding, at other times guileless and demure, are trapped in domesticity: fetching water, winnowing grain or suckling. The male figure, beautifully sculpted and standing tall, is suggestive of war. He is holding spears and shields, feeding into the legend of the warlike Zulu nation.
But it’s important to remember that, by that time, the Zulu had long been conquered and was, increasingly, part of the cash economy. Spears and shields were, by then, merely of ceremonial value.
The men — hunks in contemporary argot — stare into the camera and their faintly erotic appeal is unmistakable.
Sometimes there’s an attempt to own the other, to define his features by tried and tested European standards. One image showing a man with sharp features is described thus: “This youth, despite his very dark skin, has almost European features.”
This isn’t at all representative of Zululand in 1927. It’s a record, as Roland Barthes would say, a “fragment of the past that is transported in entirety to the present”.
Siliva Zulu is a preservation of an idea about Africa, by turns informative, provocative and moving. But it’s not any less valid because of that.
The exhibition is on at the University of Johannesburg’s Art Gallery until February 23. It will also show at North West University’s Potchefstroom campus and then at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town.