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

White homes are the crucible of racism in South Africa. Here the races meet, face to face, as master and servant. But unfortunately they do not mix. Nowhere is there more animosity than in the everyday relationships between household domestics and their employers.

Ernest Cole 1962

In his canonical Blame Me On History (1963), Bloke Modisane describes South African life as characterized by the misfortune of being “born into a social position and playing out a patterned destiny”. It is these social positions, structured by fundamental racial Slave-Master antagonisms, that are of concern to the flâneur Ernest Cole. The late photographer puts to unflinching scrutiny the site of White domesticity, as well as the place and function of its quintessential figure, the Black ‘domestic worker’.

To look at these images is to look at a crime, a collective communal crime within what John Edwin Mason calls the “geography of the [White] household”; the violence and terror that secures and sustains White social life and its parasitic dependency n and constitutive relation to the production of the absolute and extreme racial other, the negre, in its phobogenic quality, as the threshold of being. Cole’s work, and critical meditation, beckons us, through the medium of photography, to reflect on the problematic relation between the field of vision and the domain of politics.

By Vusumzi Nkomo, Artist and Critic  

Following two major exhibitions in London at The Photographer’s Gallery and Autograph, and Cole’s publications ‘House of Bondage’ and ‘The True America’, published by Aperture in 2022 and 2023, this show provides perspectives from South Africa and the wider continent, with artists, writers and curators examining Cole’s methodology and offering new insights into his work. Part l of the exhibition took place at the London gallery last November. Part ll is on view at Magnum Gallery, Paris. While all three exhibitions include vintage prints selected from ‘House of Bondage’, each exhibition has been unique in its selection of chapters on view. 

Cole’s book ‘House of Bondage’, which came out to significant attention in 1967, exposed the horror of the Apartheid regime. Over a period of seven years, Cole captured in his photographs, the myriad forms of violence embedded in the everyday life of the Black majority under Apartheid: at work, in the mines, in education, healthcare and on the street. In 1966 Cole fled South Africa, smuggling his negatives out of the country, to eventually settle in New York where House of Bondage was published the next year alongside a powerful introduction by Joe Lelyveld, the South African correspondent of the New York Times, who was himself expelled from South Africa in 1966.

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

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 

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

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 

Taken together, the moneyed and the educated are the only Africans who have in any measure risen above the degradation imposed by the white community. Other blacks see their small triumphs as the only hope of escape from systematic repression. Whites view them with hatred as a threat to their supremacy. 

In my first encounter with Cole’s work, I remember thinking that these did not feel like the categories of a photojournalist or documentary photographer. They felt more like those of a 1940s monograph like those of anthropologists Eileen Krige, Ellen Hellman and their predecessors. Especially those engaged in urban “documentation” for comparative study beyond the immediate utility in their academic monographs. While anthropology’s relationship with photography, especially in relation to the black subject, is largely problematic, during the period just before Cole’s time, it was still an experimental method. The camera was used as a casual note taking tool with photography about holding a series of fleeting images in play for reference later.

Following this, I appreciate Cole’s work to be interested in producing an archive instead of producing definitive, discrete images. They reminded me of images I have encountered in many people’s family photo albums. In this way, Cole was a man with a camera––he practiced it and participated, as all “true” photographers do, in all its paradoxes and possibilities. He built an archive from which we can see ourselves living, where others prefer we forget ourselves––he planted a tree knowing he would never enjoy the shade.

– Dr Tebogo George Mahashe, Lecturer and Researcher

The crime is that Africans are left kept artificially poor. The white establishment accomplishes this by barring Africans all but the most menial of jobs, paying them intolerable wages, and leaving them no recourse within the law by which to change their condition.  

The colonial-apartheid order was (and continues to be) a deskilling enterprise that also required considerable labor from those it dispossessed, disprized. Through the destruction of indigenous economies, it created people who would rely on its unreliable provisions, thus only to keep them in an untenable situation of near poverty. Such is the irony of progress under racial capitalism. While Ernest Cole’s photographs whisk us back to apartheid’s heyday with spectacular depictions of the mundanity of poverty, the experiences of those he photographed serve as a reminder of a reality that is not unfamiliar in the present. Instead, they enter the contemporary visual field as both pornotropic indices of a blackened life and as well as the ideological outcome that any hierarchized system must always reproduce to find coherence even when it denies its schemata of elitism. Thus, the suffering pictured here is as long-lasting and unwavering as it is deliberate and systemic. 

– Athi Mongezeleli Joja, Art Critic

Like everything else in South Africa, medical care is segregated and unequal. For black people there are too few doctors and nurses, too few hospital beds, too few medical supplies and services. There are shortages of everything but pain and neglect. 

Ernest Cole’s Hospital Care is a sobering account of the gruesome reality faced by Black patients under apartheid. The use of the word ‘care’ in the title of this chapter is heartbreakingly ironic. Cole’s photographs offer viewers a glimpse into apartheid’s legacy of “calculated neglect,” to use Cole’s words.

Cole would sneak into state hospitals with his camera concealed, photographing the true nature of medicine for Black citizens. Patients lined the passages of hospitals, most of them stretched out on the floor due to a lack of stretchers. The lines for paperwork, consultations and X-rays were too crowded for the meagre hospital staff, and many patients never made it to the end of their lines alive.

Even in the context of present-day South Africa, Cole’s images are hauntingly familiar. The violence of medical neglect still persists – the only degree of separation between then and now is time.

– Zada Hanmer, Art critic

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

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

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

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

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

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