Ernest Cole – House of Bondage: Vintage works from the Ernest Cole Family Trust Part One

That first day I saw them standing in their patient lines, some queuing up to be fingerprinted, others stripped naked for mass medical examination. Some had been issued a tunic and pants, the cost of which would be deducted from their first wages and an identification bracelet. 
Ernest Cole 1962

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The Mines body of work is emotionally charged for me because I have a family history of relatives working in the mines. My grandfather came to Johannesburg in the 1960s, around the same time Cole was making these works and he worked in the gold mines. He never returned home. He was one of thousands of black labourers who disappeared into the gold rush. One either got unlucky, injured, killed or died of illness. Or became a fugitive trying to escape the terrible working and living conditions. The Mines is a reminder of the destruction of Black lives and family structures. When looking at Cole’s photographs, I cannot help but reflect and relate - as they remind me of things that haven’t changed enough in democratic South Africa.

Cole was not only a ninja photographer, as his fellows described him, but also an astute image-maker. He mastered a level of blending that is reminiscent of greats like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. The smoky image of the mine worker queuing for the Last Supper evokes a spiritual quality, much like the dust swirling in a mine shaft. When I see this image of a young man lost in his thoughts I can’t help but think of jazz musician Hugh Masekela’s “The Coal Train” and imagine his thoughts dwelling on loved ones back in the rural areas.

By Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Photographer, Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize Finalist

Remnants of everything, of joy, of peace and harmony, of culture, of creativity, and of all the things they failed to stamp out.
Ernest Cole 1962

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Black Ingenuity is an abandoned chapter of Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage, shown for the first time. Partly an homage to the history of Dorkay House, Johannesburg, a site of convergence for practising artists, Black Ingenuity is also an ongoing confrontation with the perceptions and limitations placed on Black artists and their work. 

Perhaps what led Cole to retitle the chapter to miscellaneous and eventually remove it entirely, was the burden of transmuting the experience of Black expression and creative communion in the context of an inescapable white audience in the time of the apartheid regime. Consider the overwhelm of the oppressive presence and violent viewership and its influence on Black artists and their work as they negotiate with their audiences. 

By Misha Krynauw, Art Critic

Faculties are understaffed, underqualified and underpaid. Work loads are inhuman. A new school at GaRankuwa was permitted to open with only three teachers for seven hundred students.
Ernest Cole 1962

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It would be a relief to believe that Ernest Cole’s photographs of the appalling conditions endured by the victims of H.F. Verwoerd’s Bantu Education policies – where black children were taught only the skills necessary to allow them to become “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” – were an uncomfortable, archival reminder of a buried past. However, as Mongane Wally Serote has noted, those who view Cole’s images in the post-apartheid era “should be shocked into full-blown disgust to find that indeed, life lived by the majority of Black people in South Africa is still the same.” It shouldn’t be easy to see correlations between Cole’s photographs of children crammed into classrooms with inadequate facilities and few resources then; and children been taught under trees in schools equipped with pit toilets today, but it is. The question, as it is for far too many of Cole’s legendary historical images, remains, why?

Tymon Smith, Art Critic 

The nightmare rides that the African endures not only sap his strength but strip him of individual dignity. Yet as a disenfranchised sub-citizen he has no recourse. He can’t vote to throw out the Transport Minister and to get additional trains, extra cars, and reasonably dependable service—because he has no vote.
Ernest Cole 1962

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The photograph is suitably unstable, leaning to the left under the weight of massed bodies. Movement is composed rather than inscribed by long exposure, that cheap old confidence trick of silver crystals and time. This allows Cole to achieve the impossible by photographically describing the still point of the turning world, just like some of his subjects here whose calm dignity is written in their faces as they resist bodily pressure, time itself, and apartheid’s endless attempts to dehumanise them.

If those who saw or experience the Ernest Cole photographs when they were published in 1967 froze in disbelief and shock and were outraged that people ever lived life that way, fifty-five years after its publication they should be shocked into full-blown disgust to find that indeed, life lived by the majority of Black people in South Africa is still the same.

On Looking at House of Bondage Now: A Lament, An Indictment, Mongane Wally Serote

Mongane Wally Serote’s aptly-titled lament, when set against the precision of Cole’s words in House of Bondage, gives perfect context to the foremost tragedy of contemporary South Africa. Yet Serote also appeals to the “Coles of tomorrow” to demonstrate against this state of affairs. Knowing some of these artists personally, I have far more faith in them than my own generation to tangibly address the wrongs of colonialism, apartheid, and the wasted opportunities of the past 30 years of democracy.

By Mikhael Subotzky, Artist

The white missionaries, no matter how high their purpose, could not help but impose their own Western background into African converts whose traditions and cultures were far different. To clear the way for Christianity the missionaries destroyed the culture they found without stopping to examine it.
Ernest Cole 1962

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The tale goes that when the oppressor sought to justify his methods, he constructed an “Other” —separating him from humanity by denying his connection to the divine. “These people do not have a God, therefore they are not really human”. By denying this connection to divinity, not only could the oppressor dehumanise the other but also validate his violent imposition of so-called civilization upon them. It is difficult to speak of religion within the context of Africa without thinking about perversions of belief through oppressive systems that promoted and justified racial subjugation.

Ernest Cole’s images remind us that within the context of Africa, religion is synonymous with spirituality rooted in interconnectedness with ancestors, nature and unseen divine forces. Through rituals of purification and healing — water cleansing, libations, initiation ceremonies and prayer — many Africans maintained a connection with earth and community. With remarkable clarity and intimacy, Cole captures these sacred practices  performed in the making of self and community. The images, evocative and reverent, reflect paths of gathering, communing and offering. 

By Nkgopoleng Moloi, Art Critic and Editor ArtThrob 

Breakfast over, the orphans - scores of them - converge on the car park adjoining, and start scuffling for cars to wash. This is their major occupation and source of income.
Ernest Cole 1962

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Imagine a world in which Black subjects inherit justice, liberation, emancipation and joy — heirs of freedom. In order to conceive such imagination one has to confront the reality of the legacies of colonialism and apartheid. 

Ernest Cole’s images — raw, brutal, harsh and often difficult to look at, force us to confront racial capitalism. The process through which young boys and men are plucked away from rhizomes of familial connections towards cities through the migrant labour system. As the process through which Black bones, blood, sweat and tears are churned into output from which economic value is derived. As the process through which images of suffering; children scavenging for food, children performing child care duties or struggling to keep themselves warm in the cold nights of Joburg, are rendered commonplace. 

Cole’s images, if anything, are a stark reminder of abjection captured with daring tirelessness to confront the fracture of human dignity. To look at them, is to witness and to acknowledge suffering. And, perhaps (if one can muster up the strength) to imagine a world in which inheritance of poverty is an impossibility.

By Nkgopoleng Moloi, Art Critic and Editor ArtThrob 

Two kinds of drinking are found in South Africa today: legal consumption of brandy and Government-produced Bantu beer in barren, city run beer gardens, and illegal drinking of hard liquor and strong beer in privately run hangouts called shebeens.
Ernest Cole 1962

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They don’t call it Phuza Face for nothing. The inevitable collapse of the face’s composure, the puffy eyelids and the bloated lips caused by the overconsumption of alcohol. This deterioration takes its biggest toll on drinkers of what used to be called ‘Bantu Beer’ or ‘Patshutshu’ as we used to call it. Home brew or bottled liquor, it made no difference. The face wears the weariness of too many pints and the drink steals away youthfulness and vigour.

By the time Ernest Cole pointed his camera at the beer drinkers, they were already casualties of the intoxicating ‘skokiaan’ and yet, in Cole’s eyes their stories mattered. The tottering mothers with babies strapped to their backs were not moralising causes; they are humanised. The men drinking from a tin labelled ‘Total’, had their humour about drinking ‘crude oil’ honoured. No matter that they increased the social workers’ caseload; the Friday night bacchanal of emptied cartons and emptied pockets was a veritable feast day.

By Dr. Hlonipha Mokoena, Associate Professor, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research

No prior notice is required. No trial is necessary, no appeal possible, and no time limit set. Banishment can stretch into eternity.
Ernest Cole 1962

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Banishment, states Cole in the final chapter of House of Bondage (1967), ‘is the cruellest and most effective weapon that the South African Government [sic] has yet devised to punish its foes and to intimidate potential opposition.’ Its use as a tool for neutralising political dissent was widely deployed in the 1950s and 60s. Cosmopolitan and rural leaders alike were silenced this way, among them Winnie Mandela, Albert Luthuli and Basotho leader Paulus Mopeli, who Cole photographed at Frenchdale, a remote banishment camp in the Northern Cape. Banishment was commonly used by Dutch and English colonial administrations; Unionist and Nationalist governments gladly continued the tradition. The cruelty of banishment was exposed by courageous acts of witness, notably by Cole, but also by Helen Joseph, whose samizdat book Tomorrow’s Sun (1967) provides context to the bare circumstances of the isolated and silenced peoples in Cole’s photographs. Ironically, House of Bondage produced two stark outcomes for Cole: censorship and banishment. He was refused permission to return home after publishing his photobook abroad and died in exile.

By Sean O’Toole, Art Critic and Editor