Photography, memory and the archive in Namibian history

Patricia Hayes (History Department, University of the Western Cape)

This paper foregrounds visuality as a powerful route into memory and history in southern Africa. We
consider the results of an ongoing collaborative project on colonial photography in Namibia, a territory
formerly under South African rule (and previously under German control).Ö. This project has forced us
to think about two things. One is the position of photographic archives in a marginal colonial setting.
The second is the way photographs and images constitute social memory and historical knowledge -
especially as they move between archive and public circulation through exhibition or publication in
what is now a postcolonial setting.

To begin with, the colonial photographs in the project’s main exhibitionÄn entitled The Colonising
Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History were extracted from the archive. A set of
tensions is already generated by the juxtaposition of ‘archive’ and ‘photograph’. While the archive
“seems to make its contents invisible, the photograph appears to map its truths across its surface.” The
one is associated with darkness, the other light. As Pinney and others have argued, “the archive, as it
struggles to close meanings suggests imagined certainties, the photograph by stressing its causal links
with reality sets its indexical certainties free into the world. The archive declares its physicality, its
existence as an object, by attempting to hide its contents. The photograph strives to deny its materiality
and status as an object as it projects its seemingly transparent truths from its surface” (Pinney et al
1995: 10). “

Thus the archive - often associated with the closure of meaning, with disconnection, with forgetting -
interacts in a peculiar way with photographs. When these photographs come out of storage, it is as if
new energies are released and the tensions are unbundled.

One occasion where this happened was the picture of a four-piece band from the Old Location in
Windhoek [in Fig. 1]. This image, stored away for 45 years with other photographs from the early
1950s, was captioned by Pretoria's State Information Office as "the orchestra" of the "Bantu Social
Club". But recently, in travelling between its filing cabinet and exposure to the public, the archived
fixity of the picture broke down and the functional anonymity imposed by the state fell away. Former
residents of the Old Location1 Peter Katangolo and Victoria Uukunde related how, when seeing the
photograph, they experienced intense moments of recognition and recall. Here were the Mareko brothers
and their friend Naftali who made up the Warmgat Band. Vivid stories about the men flowed.2

.Ö
This paper is an expanded and updated version of some of the collaborative research in
visual history conducted by the authors for the exhibition and book project entitled The Coloni-
sing Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History, 1915-1950s.

nÄ
All photographs referred to in this paper derive from the exhibition The Colonising Camera:
Photographs in the Making of Namibian History, and the book of the same title (Cape Town,
Windhoek and Athens OH: University of Cape Town Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University
Press, 1998). Extracts from the exhibition How We See Each Other also appear in the publicati-
on, courtesy of the Okombahe photographers. Permission to exhibit and publish photographs
for this project was kindly granted by the following: National Archives of Namibia, Basler Afrika
Bibliographien; Archiv der Vereinten Evangelische Mission (Wuppertal); South African Museum.
The views expressed about these photographs are solely those of the authors.
A process whereby people would make connections between old photographs and stories of the past was
the intention behind the exhibition entitled The Colonising Camera. The desire was to bring colonial
photographs out of the archive and plug them into contemporary historical discourses in Namibia and
elsewhere. The exhibition was originally conceived as a visual backdrop to a history conference on
South Africa's colonisation of Namibia held in 1994 (see Hayes et al 1998). But this 'sideshow' soon
pulled the curators into a process which went far beyond the initial parameters. The exhibition's ensuing
reworkings and journeys between Namibia, South Africa and the United States3 confirmed a general
acknowledgement of the enormous impact and immediacy of photographs from the past. Photographs
were "better than the textbook", as one Namibian student put it (Kisting 1995). Because the past erupts
so powerfully into the present through photographs, argued one curator, they are "an excellent way of
making history more accessible" (Kisting 1995). The colonial archive had effectively starved the
Namibian (and wider) public of images of the past. Public pressure effectively pushed the exhibition
towards publication, and the book has already entered its second reprint for the Namibian market.

In becoming a book itself, The Colonising Camera was envisaged as a kind of album where photo-
graphs are central but where visuals and texts speak to one another. Considerable additional research in
various photographic archives following the initial exhibition resulted in a revision of both the exhibition
contents and the captions. Research work of university history students was incorporated. Further
individual commentaries were commissioned to accompany the exhibition, and these represent efforts by
scholars of different aspects of Namibian history and anthropology to engage centrally with the relati-
onship between colonisation and photography. To complement this, and indeed to take the 'colonising
camera’ into visual paradigms beyond colonialism, the book concludes with a contemporary
mini-exhibition and essay concerned with, as the rural photographers themselves put it, 'how we see
each other' (see Rohde 1998).

Visual history and African history

Most researchers of Africa's social history have had limited interaction with photographs. Indeed, until
now the most common location of photographs in books on Namibian and wider African history is on
their covers.4 They might also be included marginally within a text in order to provide a 'feel' or
'atmosphere' for the period, to identify a person or place, or simply because of their outright quaintness.
In general, visuality is subordinated to textuality which itself is grounded and empirically validated by
reference to documents and ‘sources’ (always logocentric) from the privileged site of the archive. Such
treatment of historical photographs has been at worst disdainful, at best condescending.

Southern African historians most frequently regard the photograph as a mere 'illustration' to a more
important textual reference, and treat it like a quotation. Quotation itself is treated as self-evident, and
not conceived of as a 'language' which seeks to persuade, or which constitutes a discourse with its own
structures of meaning. One problem in dealing with pictures is the reluctance of the discipline of history
to take up this linguistic turn, let alone a 'pictorial turn' (Mitchell 1994) which might give visual sources
a central interpretive value. There is ample evidence to suggest that "pictures form a point of peculiar
friction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual enquiry" (Mitchell 1994: 13). Visual studies
are typically cordoned off by disciplinary boundaries; libraries and academic seminars typically
replicate these divisions.

Disciplines such as art history and anthropology have been much readier than history to take
photographs seriously. Special issues of the journal African Arts on photography highlighted particular
historic collections. Their focus was very much on the photographers and the contexts in which they
worked, the conventions and motifs that influenced photographers, and the forms of display adopted by
Africans who were photographed. Much more work has since been done in tracing the emergence of
visual discourses around composition and subject-matter, and the specific codes adopted by
photographers and the photographed in different parts of the colonial world (Geary and Jenkins 1985;
Godby 1996; Hall 1996). Exhibition catalogues, of course, frequently offer the best visual sources and
texts on such issues (Engelhard and Mesenhöller (eds.) 1995; Guggenheim Museum 1996; Charity et al
(eds.) 1995; Revue Noire 1999).

Anthropology has had a particular interest in photography because of their 'parallel development' from
the late nineteenth century (Pinney 1992). A considerable historiography has emerged from the new
discipline of visual anthropology and from visually engaged anthropologists concerning photography in
Africa and other parts of empire (Edwards 1992; Taylor 1994; Gordon 1997; Landau and Kaspin
forthcoming; Pinney 1990, 1992 & 1997). Amongst the most exciting is the recent work of Christopher
Pinney on photography in India, which studies the projects and desires of both British colonialism and
contemporary popular culture. Robert Gordon’s work on ‘picturing Bushmen’ argues that
photographers gave audiences what they expected to see, and has opened up the question of the politics
of visuality in Namibia’s history (Gordon 1997).

Literary studies have not been slow to take a pictorial turn, and Kliem’s work on nineteenth century
stereotypes in southern Africa is of particular relevance (1995). But analysis of visuals as a body of
material in its own right, with its own contexts and discourses, is relatively recent in history, especially
African history. British social history and local history projects have admittedly treated photographs and
their collection seriously for decades (Samuel 1994), but the emphasis has been on locating previously
overlooked sources of evidence about non-elite social categories. The initial approaches to African
photographic collections by anglophone historians had a similar documentary motivation, though in
such cases it was a search for visual evidence about marginal peoples and colonial histories (Killingray
and Roberts 1989). With the rise in interdisciplinary influences, greater critical attention is being paid to
photographs and postcards, especially in view of an increasingly 'cultural' turn in studies of imperialism.
Ryan’s book, which embraces the uses of photography across a range of imperial activities and
enterprises, demonstrates how central visuality was not only in projecting colonial power but in
integrating Empire into British public life (Ryan 1997). Faris’ (1996) critical history of the
representation of Navajo peoples in the United States shows comparable colonial processes of
photographic incorporation and marginalisation. Even more interesting however are some of the recent
works on Indian and Andean photographic practices (Pinney 1997; Poole 1997) where paradigmatic
idioms have been turned on their heads by indigenous cameras: but this again is the work of
anthropologists.

Photography’s colonialisms

Most of us who collaborated in The Colonising Camera came to consider photographs after prolonged
periods of archival documentary research, field research or engagement with Namibian oral histories.
There has been a recent wave of deep but localised studies of Namibia, especially in the inter-war years
(Fuller 1992; Hayes 1992; Hendrickson 1992; Silvester 1994; Wallace 1997). One of the most slippery
problems confronting researchers of Namibia in the 20th century is that enigmatic entity: the South
African mandatory state in South West Africa (SWA). In their studies of South East Asia and East
Africa respectively, Stoler and Cooper (1997) have stated how little they knew about colonial states,
"their workings, their distinctive qualities, and the people who constituted them" (1997). Much the same
could be said about the marginal colonial state constituted by South Africa in the wake of the Germans
from 1915.5

South Africa occupied an ambiguous space between its own colonial (later dominion) status under
Great Britain, and its colonisation and trusteeship of Namibia. It displayed insecurities and at times
cultural overstatement. Photography by colonisers, whether in the employ of the administration or not,
provides particularly striking instances of the effort to project a South African colonial modernity and,
frequently and deliberately, indigenous Namibian premodernity or even primitivity (Gordon, Bollig,
Hayes 1998). We were repeatedly struck by how the South African occupation took place with a strong
sense of audience. At every stage of South Africa's bid to gain the League of Nations mandate to rule
Namibia and to control Namibians, photography was crucial to the politics of representing the place and
its peoples. In the attempts to depict, document, normalise and/or pathologise Namibians and to
legitimise and memorialise themselves - the colonial version of what Sekula (1989: 346) calls the
"double system of representation" with both repressive and honorific functions - large numbers of
photographs were taken and many of them published.

The whole question of photography throws open a number of problems about Namibia's colonialisms.
Southern Africa became deeply implicated in metropolitan processes of mechanisation of visual
reproduction from the late nineteenth century. Looking at the way photography spread through the
hinterlands of the subcontinent, following the uneven spread of capitalism and colonialism, a product of
industrial culture which could create new knowledge and easily export it, we can talk of simultaneous
processes of colonisation and visualisation of the other. But the 'colonial' photographs and commentaries
in The Colonising Camera show that, far from dealing with a linear history of colonisation by a single
power, there are plural and different colonialisms which break with the historiographically dominant
models of the British or French empires in Africa.

To begin with, much of the early body of photography extant on Namibia comes from the photographers
of a defeated colonial power, Germany, whose administration ended during World War 1. German
colonialism left enormously powerful vestigial influences in the form of settler photographers who
remained in Namibia after the mandate (or immigrant photographers who left Germany in the 1920s and
1930s), to say nothing of its huge photographic archive. This entire photographic economy straddling
Namibia and Germany encompasses early ethnography, consumer capitalism, political advocacy,
evangelical fund-raising, popular memorabilia, and much more.

The second colonial power in Namibia has been South Africa, initially in the name of Great Britain, but
from 1921 mandated by the League of Nations to administer the territory in its own right. As stated
elsewhere (Silvester et al 1998), Namibia fulfilled several roles for the Union of South Africa: it offered
the latter a new position in the international community; it lent its very space for settlement of poorer
whites in the land-hungry 'new South Africa' during a crucial phase of its nation building in the 1910s
and 1920s; and it offered raw material for the production of scientific knowledge (and images) about
'Bantu' and 'Bushman' which fed into a number of institutional and administrative initiatives in South
Africa itself (Silvester et al 1998; Rassool and Hayes 1997; Hayes 1997: 140-43). But in the early days
after the 1915 occupation, South Africa’s lack of any recent visual archive of the territory and its
peoples created special problems for the representational needs of the new administration and its
international supporters.

Incoming officials had no choice but to dig into the existing photograph archive. At times there are cases
of outright plagiarisation of German photographs.6 One example of this early 'borrowing' stands out.
Probably the most notorious publication on colonial Namibia is the so-called Blue Book (Great Britain
1918). This circulated a very disturbing vision of how German colonisers incorporated Africans into the
colonial economy before 1915. The Blue Book has an appendix with a medical report on German
corporal punishment. Photographs show the bodies of Namibians who had been tortured, flogged,
emaciated, chained, and hung by the neck. As Gewald (1998) points out, the photographs originated
from an official German inquiry into the treatment and corporal punishment of the indigenous
inhabitants of its colonies before World War I, a fact which is not mentioned in the Blue Book itself.
These photographs were opportunistically deployed by British-South African strategists to demonstrate
German cruelty and unfitness to retain colonial possessions. This in turn legitimated the South African
claim to be awarded the League of Nations mandate to govern Namibia.7

The German photographic economy, it should be mentioned, has proved very resilient. Despite massive
attempts at South Africanisation after the demise of German colonialism, commercial photography in
present-day Namibia has remained largely in German hands. Some of this photography has ensured a
visual continuum of the German colonial past. Photo Nink of Windhoek, for instance, has a thriving
trade in visual memorabilia of German colonialism to this day; others have ensured that the remnants of
German colonialism have been inserted into the consciousness of contemporaries and tourists through
calendar, coffee-table and postcard photography. Such photographers have also greatly contributed to
the Namibian landscape genre which constructed the country as a land devoid of people. Thus, while
German colonial rule may have ended in 1915, there has been a far less dramatic break in certain genres
of the overall visual history of the territory.

There are, therefore, two intriguing features in the ongoing biographies of German colonial pictures:
their plagiarisation by South Africans coming in after 1915, and their appropriation by German-
speakers in an effort (perhaps) to recreate a sense of German colonialism and to propagate a German
identity in late twentieth century Namibia.

Beyond the German and South African roles in the territory, there is also a third outside presence which
The Colonising Camera begins to explore: that of the United States of America, technologically and
diplomatically a nascent world power. The cameras of rich safari-goers like President Roosevelt (see
Landau 1998) or pseudo-scientific adventurers like Ernest Cadle (Gordon 1997 & 1998b) brought
images of Africans back to American audiences for various kinds of consumption. More to the point,
American camera technology - speeded up by the photographic demands of its own internal colonial
expansion westwards - was superseding that of other producers. This made it possible for sophisticated
photography to take place in the most adverse and remote of frontier conditions. Thus the notable
colonial photographer C. H. L. Hahn could use an American camera to produce panoramas of the
Kaokoveld and Owambo of astonishing technical and aesthetic standards some 60 years after James
Chapman despaired of achieving anything with his French apparatus at the Victoria Falls (Kliem 1995:
16). It is perhaps mostly through this technological input that a kind of American informal colonialism
happened: it allowed Americans to occupy a particularly central place in the spread of metropolitan
discourses and images to and from southern Africa in the inter-war years.

Hunt's (1996: 326) argument that colonialism "can no longer be viewed as a process of imposition from
a singular European metropole" is apt here. The colonialisms that Namibians experienced in the
twentieth century were indeed "multiple and distinct", characterised by defeat (Germany), emergence
(South Africa) and informality (USA). In their photographic interactions and encounters with
Namibians, each colonialism contributed to the tangled layers of representational politics.

Thus the ‘cultures of colonialism’ (Stoler and Cooper 1997; Dirks 1992; Thomas 1994) that developed
in this part of the southern African subcontinent were multiple, and they all implicated photography.
But even more important is the fact that they were not restricted to white colonial agents. While it
appears that until the 1960s there were relatively few black photographers and indeed journalists in
Namibia (Henrichsen 1997; Wallace 1998) compared with South Africa, and especially compared with
parts of West Africa (Viditz-Ward 1985; Killingray and Roberts 1989: 199; Revue Noire 1999),
photographic representation in the colonial space of Namibia cannot be reduced to a one-sided process.

By talking about the colonising camera, we do not intend to construct a sharp colonier/colonised
dichotomy, or to suggest that whites were active and Africans passive in these processes of
representation. The Namibians who became colonial subjects incorporated photography at different
historical stages and for different purposes, be it Herero leaders having their portraits taken in the 1870s
(Gewald 1998; see Fig 2), John Muafangejo subverting the photographs published in a colonial
magazine with his linocut art (Timm 1998; see Figs 3 & 4), or present-day Okombahe residents
representing their own daily lives (Rohde 1998). It is always possible to colonise the colonising camera.
The photographic paradigm here questions the representational strategies of both ‘coloniser’ and
‘colonised’, and shows they are complex, contradictory, at times (not surprisingly) blurring into one
another. This is because they are mutually engaged in "a semiotic web whose implications are not
completely controlled by any of us" (Hendrickson 1996: 1). Photography provides a deep suggestiveness
of the presence of ‘an indigenous syntax’ - in both content and form - and requires a continued and
profound probing.
Reading Namibian photographs

We have sometimes got into trouble with politicised audiences at home when arguing it is not our
intention to draw a direct and instrumental link between colonial photographs and colonialism itself.
Photographs of empty lands, we believe, did not necessarily produce hundreds of white settlers; likewise
photographs of Africans in 'savage' garb did not necessarily produce military expeditions and conquest.
The relationship between politics and representation is far more subtle, problematic and open-ended. We
have tried to facilitate more 'open-ended' readings by urging viewers of photographs (and especially
historians) to move beyond positivism. Stuart Hall’s exposition has been helpful here:

The conventional view used to be that 'things' exist in the material and natural world;
that their material or natural characteristics are what determines or constitutes them;
and that they have a perfectly clear meaning, outside of how they are represented.
Representation, in this view, is a process of secondary importance, which enters into
the field only after things have been fully formed and their meaning constituted. But
since the 'cultural turn' in the human and social sciences, meaning is thought to be
produced - constructed - rather than simply 'found'. Consequently ... representation is
conceived as entering into the very constitution of things; and thus culture is
conceptualized as a primary or 'constitutive' process, as important as the economic or
material 'base' in shaping social subjects and historical events - not merely a reflection
of the world after the event (Hall 1997: 5-6 [authors' emphasis]).

One constitutive process in the making of the photographic images here was the photographic equivalent
of what Pels (1994) has termed “the ethnographic occasion”. These 'photographic occasions' were those
'real' incidents where people or landscapes or animals came before the lens of a camera, and their
framed image was transposed on to glass plates or light-sensitive paper and then chemically developed
into a print or a plate to produce the photographic analogue of the actual event. There were power
relations, administrative contexts and discourses involved in these occasions. I have argued with regard
to Native Commissioner Hahn's photography in northern Namibia, for example, that the projection of
orderly hierarchy and consensus in his photographs of the 'tribal' gathering at Oshikango [Figs 5 & 6]
fed directly into the 1930s formulation of 'indirect control'.

As these colonial photographic occasions are singled out, it becomes clear that there was a vast
difference in what ethnographic photography produced at different times and in different contexts. When
Chapman or Hodgson (Kliem 1995; Schoeman 1996) took pictures of Namibians in what was then
called Damaraland in the 1860s and 1870s, the portrait figures show fluidity of identity and dress. But
when Fourie or Hahn took pictures between 1920 and 1930 (Harris, Hayes, Bollig 1998),
anthropometric and ethnographic influences become apparent in the attempts to fix identities and
appearances. These shifts in convention in photographic representation and their precolonial, colonial
and postcolonial frameworks need careful historicisation.

The Colonising Camera is not simply about the politics of colonial perception and deterministic
attempts to construct ethnicities and landscapes. There is a relationship between photography and
colonisation, but the nature of this relationship cannot be reduced to the predictable or the inevitable, the
instrumental or the functional. There is always the "messy contingency of the photograph" (Sekula
1989: 353) to undermine the supposed colonial purpose. It would also be unwise to predict in advance
how people from different walks of life or different academic disciplines might initially approach the
reading of photographs. Of the latter, a social historian might be expected to privilege 'evidence' and
'context', or the art historian form over content. But photographs cannot easily be contained by
disciplines. Even the most rigorous of social history, for example, the commentary by Marion Wallace
on urban Windhoek (1998), talks of the photograph which most represents settler fears: that of the
defiant-looking black women in town [Fig 7]. This settler affect is new territory for historians, a
paradigm of the emotions. Wolfram Hartmann's study of the possible or latent gayness in René
Dickman's photographs [see Fig 8], also heavily dependent on a foundation of historical
contextualisation, enters deep into desire and is itself couched in terms camp enough to make the said
Dickman turn (possibly pleasurably) in his grave (1998b).

This is not to say that these are the only readings possible, or the most authoritative. Different meanings
are created by different readers. These may shuttle to a greater or lesser degree between photography's
dual potentialities: between positivism and fantasy, between evidence and enigma, between truth-claims
and lies "that tell a truth", and between photographs that denote and those that connote. Rohde (1998)
argues that these are the fixed and open readings to which photographs lend themselves. Ambiguity is
inherent in the way people interpret photographs. Meaning is derived from the "reading" of visual
imagery at many levels, one of which is almost purely sensate and subjective, harking back to an
embodied, non-linguistic experience of being which is a fundament of perception. This innate ability to
lend cohesion to the world of appearances also gives rise to what has been termed elsewhere the optical
or ocular unconscious, where meaning, language and vision become conflated. The eye is said to have a
naturalising tendency, where "the biological ease of vision ... naturalises what is in fact a cultural
construct" (Kliem 1995: 2). This works on more than one level, for the eye of the photographer is
socially and culturally conditioned to seeing things in certain ways, thus prompting a particular framing
of a scene or people. For the viewer of the photograph, of course, the photographic print then
naturalises a further range of representations within its frame.

Photography is embedded in the history of the late nineteenth century when optical empiricism was
considered equally feasible as other forms of scientific empiricism. The "metrical accuracy of the
camera" formed part of a "truth apparatus" (Sekula 1989: 352-53) being forged by science and police
work in modernising states in Western Europe. In colonial contexts, anthropometric photography
offered a new form of imperial knowledge about colonial peoples that signalled a shift from mapping
sites to mapping sight (Banta and Hinsley 1986). As Landau (1996: 132) puts it, the anthropometric
photograph was "cousin to the police mug shot". Mofokeng (1996: 56) argues that ethnographic
photographs constituted "authoritative knowledge", which played "no small part in the subjection of
those populations to imperial power". The question here is whether such photography did so in the case
of Namibia and, if so, how?

The sleight of hand performed by photography was to separate the sign from its referent. Our concern
as historians in The Colonising Camera project was the attempt to re-attach some of the signs identified
in colonial images to at least some referents. It has emerged, for example, that the photographs of
activities in the reserves in the 1950s, showing the Advisory Board at Otjihorongo and dairy production
[Figs 9 & 10], were originally commissioned by the Visual Section of the State Information Service in
Pretoria for inclusion in a brochure to be distributed at the Van Riebeeck Festival in 1952 in Cape
Town. This purposeful creation of a set of images of 'natives' thriving in the reserves accompanied the
erection of a costly building to represent SWA at the festival (Witz 1997: 289). The images gave the
impression of colonial success at the very moment when dairy production in most reserves in central
Namibia, one of the few means of earning cash, was coming under threat from local white settlers
(Werner 1989; Fuller 1992). Most visitors were not to know this from the images of thriving progress.

Even without such contextualisations, close study of colonial photographs, their form and composition,
especially if read against other reference systems, can actually serve to fracture the narrative that they
appear to support. Bollig suggests, for example, that the pose adopted by the Himba man with two
women [Fig 11] was unlikely to have been an accepted mode of public gesture. The subjects being
photographed were possibly encouraged or instructed to demonstrate this more visibly affectionate
domesticity. If so, it possibly tells us more about white notions of presenting an African family than it
does about any such ‘Himba’.
But it is not only the observer who brings reference systems, subjectivity and knowledge to looking at
colonial photographs. There have been many previous sets of filters which have mediated the
photographs that appear in The Colonising Camera. It is crucial to identify the layers of selection - the
inclusions and exclusions - through which the photographs have passed, and the paths along which they
have travelled. From the photographer's background, to the photographic occasion in which the picture
was taken, to the way photographic subjects presented themselves to the camera, to the technical
production of the print, to the private or public circuits into which the image was inserted, to the
ultimate fate of the picture as a framed family portrait, a book illustration, part of a forgotten collection
that is destroyed or an item in the photographic files of an archive, it is important to contextualise,
historicise and theorise the processes by which the photograph has come before the public gaze (or not).
After the technical production of the original print, a wide range of possibilities exist for the
reproduction, dissemination, collection and storage of images, and during each stage images can be
re-captioned, decontextualised and recontextualised.

The Colonising Camera engages in such recontextualisation by having selected and privileged certain
images from the archive over others for exhibition and publication. At every level of selection or
exclusion, important agendas, needs and desires are at work. One of the most powerful sites of selection
and exclusion is, of course, the official body of received photographs from the past in the form of the
'national' or state archive, from which images filter (or do not filter) into the public gaze.

On archives and scopophobia

Compared with the present moment of visual saturation, the ways in which images of Namibia were
assembled and circulated in the period covered by the photographs in The Colonising Camera were
relatively limited. After World War 1, photography began to play a central role in the construction of
public and private settler histories. Photographs were taken for public consumption through publication,
or for private viewing through the personal visual narrative of the family album. Some photographs
were widely reproduced and circulated as postcards or within books, whilst others remained within
personal and private albums. The majority of the latter were ultimately discarded, although a few
filtered through to the privileged historical site of the national archive photograph collection.

A constant problem encountered in trawling through the emerging literature on visual studies is its
Euro- and American-centrism. Most work assumes that the paradigms of the modern state apply. Thus
Roberts talks of "the rigid archival ordering of images" (Iles and Roberts 1997: 9); and Sekula's classic
essay on Galton's and Bertillon's archives, in London and Paris respectively, takes the order for granted.
Such impressive metropolitan archiving allows one to problematise their purpose and - as recent
exhibitions and literature show - the contradictions and products of their classificatory systems (Iles and
Roberts 1997; Charity et al 1995; Skotnes 1997). But what has Foucault to do with Africa (Vaughan
1991: 8)? What happens indeed when the photographic archive has not been organised on long-standing
bureaucratic principles (as is the case in Namibia) but has been assembled unevenly, haphazardly,
anonymously - and is not easily rendered up for scrutiny, not through design but through lack of
prioritisation? An entire new historiography has emerged about the metropolitan and imperial archive
(Foucault 1972; Tagg 1988; Sekula 1989; Richards 1993), but the Namibian case forces us to ask
about the nature of the peripheral colonial archive.

Some specific problems derive from a substantial proportion of the photographs in the public picture
archive of the National Archives of Namibia not reaching this institution as part of a larger body of
images, such as a collection or government's legally regulated deposits. On the contrary, a great many of
the images were hand-picked and reproduced from private albums, magazines and books. And while
these photographs are quite remarkable in scope and depth,8 and unrivalled when compared to other
archives, a huge problem remains.

In fact, there exist two archives of pictures in one official archival institution. The one archive is
publicly and directly accessible, catalogued and computerised on a par with the documentary archival
holdings. But the other (and bigger) archive is the repository from which the images in the public
collection were culled. In theory, access to this repository - mainly private and other acquisitions stored
in the archive basement - is not in question. But the form in which these private acquisitions is
catalogued does not lead the researcher directly to the photographs. Moreover, even the highly skilled
and professional researcher tends to assume that the public collection is the one and only to be consulted
for all purposes of visual documentation.

Such transfer as there has been from hidden repository to public photograph library has entailed a
number of problems. Whereas, in general, great pains are taken to conserve documentary material in its
structural, chronological, political and historical context - they are dated and classified according to
government department, agency, company or other source - the pictures in this archive are in most cases
doubly or trebly removed from such contextualisations. Not only were images actively removed (even
torn) from albums or collections for the purpose of professional studio reproduction and frequently not
returned to their original place in the acquisitions, but they were also removed from whatever caption or
text went with the original print. Then, apart from the inevitable decrease in quality through
photographic reproduction of the original, in all cases there is the additional problem of unrecorded
format changes: for example, postcards were not reproduced in postcard format, and instances of huge
cropping took place. All of the above amounts to a massive dehistoricisation and decontextualisation
which, if it had occurred with documents, would have prompted a massive scandal.

To spell out some of the implications: images travelled in different circuits according to whether they
were produced as postcards, for example, or were part of a private collection in a family album. As a
postcard or a collectable, numerous people would have seen the picture and it would have had an impact
on public perceptions of a place, an event or the people photographed, especially if there was a caption
with the original. Large numbers of Germans, for example, were exposed to the postcard depicting the
beating of a man [Fig 12] because it travelled between SWA and Germany as a postcard. Mechanisms
of exoticisation and eroticisation relied largely on the construction of images in photography and the
percolation of these to the public through postcards, books and magazines. An image culled from a
private photo album, however, would have had different audience connotations.

Original captions and locations are crucial in piecing together the dynamics of colonial representation,
and the latter's circuits of dissemination and reproduction. It is necessary to trace these processes and,
ideally, the archive facilitates this. It is clear that different selections of photographs from the archive
have been presented in different collections or albums, and that even the same photograph may have
been presented in a variety of different ways - like that of Samuel Maherero (Hartmann 1998a; see Fig
13). Boundaries between visual media can be very porous. Photographs seem to fix time, but they also
float through it. In the worst cases where photographic images have been pushed out of earlier contexts,
genericisation tends to take the place of identification and historicisation (Rassool and Hayes 1997).

The lack of contextual information makes many of the stored images in Namibia's archives worthless.
Very often the name of the photographer, the studio and the place of publication (often the only clue as
to the date of a photograph) has been lost in the process of selection and reproduction.9 As curators and
editors of an exhibition and publication on colonial photography in Namibia during South African rule,
therefore, we faced continuous ironies ever since we started out with a naive notion of 'keeping the
integrity of a photographic archive' - whose very integrity its own archivists had simultaneously created
and undermined, engendered and ripped apart. In general one could argue that this is the result of
unthinking scopophobia, so seemingly inherent in academic historical work with its privileging of and,
indeed, fixation on the word.

Scopophobia - literally translated as fear of the picture or fear of the view - is used here as a term that
generically describes the dismissal and neglect with which historians and archivists have viewed
photographs as historical documents. History's disciplinary leanings towards positivism and empiricism
have encouraged the view that photographs represent prima facie evidence only: what is in the picture is
seen as a direct and true rendering of reality as it existed at the moment when the camera shutter was
operated. This may have tempted archivists and historians alike to define the photograph as a timeless
document that, after a minimum of identification, needed no further context, social background or
ideological framework to be understood and creatively re-deployed. Hence its positioning in the
economy of the archive and its merely illustrative use (if at all) by historians.

The flaws in the Namibian photograph archive point directly to one of the most interesting broader
features of this peripheral territory's colonial history: that processes of producing knowledge here were
very strained and ambivalent and did not necessarily feed into the colony itself. For the archive,
applying 'Foucault in Africa' is tricky. Sekula's and Tagg's elegant appraisals of the modern state's
appropriations of visual knowledge are of limited use to us here: as Stoler (1997) argues with regard to
Foucault, these analyses are too encapsulated in the European metropoles. The Namibian archive
suggests that the circuits of power and knowledge are plainly running on different courses and greatly
complicated by the peculiar 'tensions of empire' generated in this part of southern Africa.

Gordon (1998a) has argued for the outright antipathy of most white settlers in the Namibian context to
the acquisition of knowledge about 'the native', and one of the most under-researched areas of colonial
studies must surely be that of more general white anti-intellectualism in settler societies (Rassool and
Hayes 1997). These tendencies existed and created tensions for those few in Namibia who sought to
produce a range of knowledges about the territory and its inhabitants. Without the outside audience of
the League of Nations, it is doubtful that the little that was published on ethnography and history in the
1920s would have seen the light of day. Moreover, as the SWA Administration grasped the importance
of publicising the territory and their policies within it for international consumption (and to attract more
settlers), the tendency was to fawn over foreign and South African expeditions and scientists and offer
support in exchange for SWA being 'put on the map'. Locally based 'experts' were by no means
automatically valued and the establishment of 'collections' of artefacts, documents and research entailed
considerable struggle. It was largely to this end that the independent South West Africa Scientific
Society was formed in 1925.

Some of the most poignant complaints about recognition of the lack of a national intellectual effort and
its failure to feed into national institutions came from the territory's Medical Officer in the 1920s, Dr
Louis Fourie. Fourie was a dedicated student of ethnography and carried out a systematic
anthropometric photography of the 'Bushman' groups that became his field of expertise. He was
responsible for inducting the Native Commissioner of Ovamboland Hahn into the codes of ethnographic
production, and facilitated the writing and editing of Hahn's draft chapter for The Native Tribes of
South West Africa, published in 1928.

Fourie lamented the haemorrhage of research material and knowledge out of the territory, and advocated
'local collection', particularly as Namibia was in a "unique position with regard to the Bushmen" (cited
in Gordon 1997: 110). He was personally and politically offended by the plundering of Namibia's
incipient 'heritage', and the opportunism of colleagues and seniors who, it seemed, exploited and
plagiarised local intellectual efforts (including his own). In 1928 he wrote in bitter terms to his friend
Hahn: "old fellows like you and I should commence to think about ourselves and ... set our minds on
tasks which may possibly leave some heritage to the future".10

Both Fourie and Hahn were photographers as well as ethnographers. In producing visual knowledge
about Namibians, a neglected aspect of their intellectual contributions towards a 'heritage' for the
territory, we see the lineaments of a colonised 'nation' crystallising into racial, ethnic and gendered
categories. They are probably the most coherent ethnographic photographers of the first decades of
South African rule in Namibia. Photographs by both were used in government publications, Hahn's over
a longer period given that he outstayed Fourie in the SWA Administration by many years.
Both men kept the main corpus of their photographic output as private collections. Fourie's collection
was submitted to the University of the Witwatersrand after his retirement and is now housed in the
MuseumAfrika in Johannesburg; archivists from the National Archives of Namibia persuaded Rodney
Hahn to lend the bulk of his father's magnificent collection to the national institution.11 Hahn's collection
does not form part of the public photograph library, except for those pictures which were selected in
1994 by the curators of The Colonising Camera from the private accession boxes housed in the archive
basement.

Picturing the Past

"It's good to get the photos out of the archives and to the people," stated one viewer of The Colonising
Camera in Windhoek (Kisting 1995). But exhibition and publication have not been the only means
employed to open up the files of the pictorial archive to the public gaze in Namibia. Apart from being
televised in Windhoek in 1995, the exhibition was packed in boxes in late 1996 and taken on a field trip
to Owambo to be viewed and discussed during research visits. It was also shown to local Ovambo
photographers running commercial portrait studios. Then, in co-operation with the National Archives of
Namibia, further attempts were made to flush the photograph archives out into the open and spark off
debates around history and visuality. Every fortnight throughout 1997 (continued in 1998 and 1999) the
weekend supplement to the popular Friday edition of The Namibian newspaper ran a column called
"Picturing the Past", which featured the forgotten photographs from the archives.

Such initiatives, of course, have many precedents in social history (Samuel 1994: 337-49) and indeed in
colonial history - South Africa's Annual Reports to the League of Nations, for example. But in this most
recent Namibian case, the column urged the public to contact the newspaper, or one of the curators
based at the local university, should they have any information or opinion to advance about the
photographs. Some of this feedback was in turn printed in the next issue of the series. In a practical
sense, all of this has been historically satisfying because it has enabled access to (and made public)
those private knowledges which have identified and contextualised a number of photographs in the
exhibition and in the archive itself. Thus photographs in the state archive, with captions which literally
reduced individuals to representatives of a colonially defined 'type', are acquiring new layers of meaning
and, to some extent, being recaptioned.

The implications go much further, however. By shifting the medium, the archive has moved out into a
much more public space where, instead of being stored, it circulates along the paths of a national
newspaper. The photograph in this medium contributes towards a remembering and an historical
awareness on a wide scale, as against the colonial archive which has dismembered the 'evidence' and put
away its component parts into boxes and filing cabinets. The newspaper thus provides an interface
between unofficial knowledges and the photographic archive of the past as it is presented in this form.

Recognition of people or places in the images (the signs in the representational system) has led to
responses. One might say that the photographs trigger 'memory', leading respondents to re-narrate the
past, often in a form they state they learned from older relatives, particularly when the photographs have
featured tragic-heroic figures such as Mandume ya Ndemufayo, an icon in oral histories [Fig 14]. There
appears to be a very strong connection between visual history and oral history, the former galvanising
the latter. But the trap here is to see 'memory' as a passive storage system. Like the archive itself, it is
far from being so, and neither memory nor the archive should be fetishised for the imputed truths they
carry: memory's emotional/popular truth, on the one hand, and the archive's objective/bureaucratic truth
on the other.

Samuel (1994: x) has argued that "memory is historically conditioned ... It bears the impress of
experience, in however mediated a way. It is stamped with the ruling passions of its time". More to the
point (and following Freud), he suggests that "the unconscious mind, splitting, telescoping, displacing
and projecting, transposes incidents from one time register to another and materializes thought in
imagery". It is obvious that exposure to images can activate powerful mechanisms of remembrance or
association. When there is a conjuncture between photograph and stored knowledge (or images) of the
past, a process of re- cognition and release takes place which produces fresh new historical narratives
infused with both intellect and emotion.

The circulation of historical images through The Namibian has set in motion another process. It should
come as no surprise that families living in the black townships of Namibia have kept their own
photographic collections: studio portraits, townscapes (notably Swakopmund) and informal family
shots. The publication of colonial images in the newspaper has led to people communicating information
about these private archives. No such images have ever made their way into the National Archives of
Namibia, but from their unofficial sites they begin to challenge the assumption of a colonial monopoly
of photography.

The challenge to "portray Africans in a very different manner" (Mofokeng 1996: 56) is taken in yet
another direction by the recent exhibition by Okombahe photographers, part of which is reproduced in
the closing section of the project’s book (Rohde 1998). Unlike colonial ethnographic photography of 'the
other', the postcolonial photography here is an ostensible ethnography of closely intertwined people who
represent 'each other'. The possibility emerges of the production of visual histories by those groups
usually on the other side of the colonising camera, and of shifting the relations of representation in
Namibia's history.

Compare, for example, Albert Nawuseb's photograph of "Ouma Basaura and an old man" [Fig 15] with
the cover picture on the book [Fig 16]. Ouma Basaura and the old man have come together in front of
the photographer, whose shadow is visible. This intersection of people is fortuitous - just as fortuitous
as in the photograph where Hahn is present behind the two Kwaluudhi women who would normally be
the sole ethnographic focus (see Hayes 1998b). The first is taken from the uncertain crossroads of
postcolonial Okombahe, where the photographer narrates what he remembers and forgets, naming
people and stating what they do. The audience is taken into people's lives. The colonial photograph, by
contrast, shows the official trek into western Owambo at a crossroads with two women, with
colonialism very deeply inserted into the picture through the assertive figure of Hahn which implies
colonial occupation and possession (however transient). The audience is taken into colonialism.

Both photographs are about people meeting by chance, as it seems, en passant, the lines of their gazes
and histories intersecting with those of the photographers who have the means to frame, reproduce and
fashion these colonial and postcolonial moments. But the postcolonial analogue in Okombahe renders
the previously colonised as subjects, not objects, and effects a repossession of a landscape that is poor
and harsh, but theirs.

Endnotes
1
The Old Location in Windhoek shared the fate of many similar black urban settlements in
neighbouring South Africa when it was demolished in 1959 and its residents forcibly removed.

2
Interviews with Peter Katangolo and Victoria Uukunde by Jeremy Silvester, Windhoek 1997.
3
In Namibia the exhibition travelled in 1994-1995 from Windhoek to Swakopmund to Rehoboth and
back to Windhoek; in South Africa to Cape Town and Grahamstown in 1995; and to Yale University in
the United States in 1996.
4
Kratz (1994: 185) makes the point that academic books often use a black-and-white or tinted (rather
than colour) photograph on the cover and suggests that this is largely due to a question of economics.
But the conventional view that 'serious' art photography is generally conducted in black and white might
influence publishers trying to present a serious academic book. Of course, with history books it is also
often the case that the relevant images are only available in black-and-white.

5
The difficulty in the Namibian case has been that such an area of study falls between two stools.
Firstly, most state officials originated in South Africa, and it has been left to South African studies to
deal with ruling groups and their histories and this has effectively excluded analysis of their spells of
duty in Namibia. Secondly, it has not been fashionable in Namibian studies dominated by social history
in recent years to engage directly in questions of the state and its ruling figures - 'white histories' -
except in passing.

6
In later years some German photographs also re-emerged in photomontages, notably during the rise of
Nazism (Rassool and Hayes 1997; Exhib. photo no 94).

7
A propaganda war between London and Berlin, and between white settlers in Namibia and the South
African administration, rumbled on for nearly a decade until the Blue Book was officially banned in
1927 by demand of the newly constituted Legislative Assembly in Windhoek.

8
That this collection exists at all is due to the pioneering efforts of Christel Stern and Sally Harper who
initiated the systematic collection of photographs in the archives in the early 1970s, ably followed up by
the late Brigitte Lau and fellow staff (especially Everon Kloppers) more recently.
9
Who, for instance, was the photographer of the soft-pornography postcards portraying and exoticising
indigenous women from around the first decade of this century? Information found on the back of
originals, and a close reading of advertisements in the colonial press, suggests that the photographer of
this particular group of images, Wywias, practised until the outbreak of World War I in Windhoek and
was probably Catholic since he advertised only in the Catholic press.
10
NAN A450 Vol. 4 1/29, Fourie to Hahn, 27.4.1928.
11
We are indebted to Ann Wanless for information concerning the Fourie collection; and to Rodney and
Jessie Hahn, Dag Henrichsen, Carl Schlettwein and the late Brigitte Lau for information concerning the
Hahn collection.

Works cited

Banta, M. and Hinsley, C. 1986. From site to sight: anthropology, photography and the power of
imagery. Cambridge MA: Peabody.
Bollig, Michael. 1998. Framing Kaokoland. In Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes
(eds.), The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape
Town, Windhoek and Athens OH: UCT Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University Press).
Dirks, Nicholas B. (ed.). 1992. Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Engelhard, Jutta Beate and Peter Mesenhöller (eds). 1995. Bilder aus dem Paradies: Koloniale
Fotografie aus Samoa, 1875-1925. Köln: Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum.
Faris, James C. 1996. Navajo and Photography. A Critical History of the Representation of an
American People. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.
Fuller, Ben. 1992. Institutional Appropriation and Social Change Among Agropastoralists in Central
Namibia, 1916-1955. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Boston University.
Gewald, Jan Bart. 1998. Mirror images? Photographs of Herero Commemorations in the 1920s and
1930s. In Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonising
Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, Windhoek and Athens
OH: UCT Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University Press).
Godby, Michael. 1996. Images of //Kabbo. In Pippa Skotnes (ed.), Miscast. Negotiating the Presence
of the Bushmen. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.
Gordon, Robert. 1997. Picturing Bushmen. The Denver African Expedition of 1925. Athens OH, Cape
Town and Johannesburg, Windhoek: Ohio University Press, David Philip and Namibia
Scientific Society.
Gordon, Robert. 1998a. Vagrancy, law and ‘shadow knowledge’: the internal pacification of colonial
Namibia, 1915-1939. In Hayes et al (eds), Namibia under South African rule: mobility and
containment, 1915-1946. London, Windhoek and Athens OH: James Currey, Out of Africa and
Ohio University Press.
Gordon, Robert. 1998b. Backdrops and Bushmen: an Expeditious Comment. In Wolfram Hartmann,
Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the
Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, Windhoek and Athens OH: UCT Press, Out of
Africa and Ohio University Press).
Great Britain. 1918. Report on the Natives of South West Africa and their Treatment by Germany.
HMSO: London.
Guggenheim Museum. 1996. In/sight. African Photographers, 1940 to the Present. New York:
Guggenheim Museum Publications.
Hall, Martin. 1996. The Proximity of Dr Bleek’s Bushman. In Pippa Skotnes (ed.), Miscast.
Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.
Hall, Stuart (ed.). 1997. Representations. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London,
Thousand Oaks CA and New Delhi, Milton Keynes: Sage, Open University.
Harris, Brent. 1998. Photography in colonial discourse: the making of ‘the other’ in southern Africa, c.
1850-1950. In Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonising
Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, Windhoek and Athens
OH: UCT Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University Press).
Hartmann, Wolfram. 1998a. Funerary Photographs: the Funeral of a Chief. In Wolfram Hartmann,
Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the
Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, Windhoek and Athens OH: UCT Press, Out of
Africa and Ohio University Press).
Hartmann, Wolfram. 1998b. Performing gender, staging colonialism: camping it up/acting it out
in Ovamboland. In Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The
Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town,
Windhoek and Athens OH: UCT Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University Press).
Hayes, Patricia. 1992. A history of the Ovambo of Namibia, ca 1880-1930. Unpublished PhD
thesis, University of Cambridge.
Hayes, Patricia. 1997. South Africa doing African history: bone narratives from Namibia, 1915-
1920s. In MacGrath, Jedrej, King and Thompson (eds), Rethinking African History.
Edinburgh: Centre for African Studies, University of Edinburgh.
Hayes, Patricia et al (eds). 1998. Namibia under South African rule: mobility and containment
1915-1946. London, Windhoek and Athens OH: James Currey, Out of Africa and Ohio
University Press.
Hayes, Patricia. 1998b. Northern exposures: the photography of Native Commissioner C.H.L.
Hahn. In Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonising
Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, Windhoek and
Athens OH: UCT Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University Press).
Hendrickson, Hildi. 1992. Historical Idioms of Identity Representation among the Ovaherero in
Southern Africa. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, New York University.
Hendrickson, Hildi. 1996. Clothing and Difference. Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-
Colonial Africa. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Henrichsen, Dag (ed.). 1997. A Glance at Our Africa: Facsimile Reprint of the South West News
Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
Hunt, Nancy R. 1996. Introduction. Gender & History Vol 8 No 3, pp 323-337.
Iles, Chrissie and Russell Roberts. 1997. In Visible Light. Photography and Classification in Art,
 Science and The Everyday. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art.
Killingray, David & Andrew Roberts. 1989. An Outline History of Photography in Africa to ca.
1940. In History in Africa 16, pp 197-208.
Kisting, Nico. 1995. Curator’s report: the colonising camera, Namibian photo-history, the first
three decades of South African rule in Namibia 1915-1946. Unpublished report,
Windhoek.
Kliem, Silvia. 1995. The Eye as Narrator in the Nineteenth-Century Expedition Writing and
Photography of James Chapman, 1860-1864. Unpublished MA thesis, University of the
Western Cape.
Kratz, Corinne A. 1994. On Telling/Selling a Book by its Cover. Cultural Anthropology Vol 9 No
2, pp 179-200.
Landau, Paul. 1996. With Camera and Gun in South Africa: Inventing the Image of Bushmen, ca
1880-1940. In Pippa Skotnes (ed), Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen.
Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.
Landau, Paul. 1998. Hunting with gun and camera: a commentary. In Wolfram Hartmann,
Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the
Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, Windhoek and Athens OH: UCT Press, Out of
Africa and Ohio University Press).
Landau, Paul & Deborah Kaspin (eds). Forthcoming. Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial
and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press.
Mofokeng, Santu. 1996. The black photo album/look at me: 1890-1900. Nka. Journal of
Contemporary African Art Spring 1996, pp 54-57.
Pels, Peter. 1994. The construction of ethnographic occasions in late colonial Uluguru. History
and Anthropology Vol 8 (1-4), pp 321-51.
Pinney, Christopher. 1990. Classification and fantasy in the photographic construction of caste
and tribe. Visual Anthropology 3, pp 259-288.
Pinney, Christopher. 1992. The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography. In Elizabeth
Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press.
Pinney, Christopher, Chris Wright and Roslyn Poignant. 1995. The Impossible Science. In The
Photographers’ Gallery, The Impossible Science of Being. Dialogues between
Anthropology and Photography. London: The Photographers’ Gallery.
Pinney, Christopher. 1997. Camera Indica. The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Poole, Deborah. 1997. Vision, Race and Modernity. A Visual Economy of the Andean Image
World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rassool, Ciraj and Hayes, Patricia. 1997. Gendered Science, Gendered Spectacle: /Khanako’s
South Africa, 1936-37. Unpublished conference paper, Interdisciplinary Conference on
Gender and Colonialism, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, January 1997.
Revue Noire. 1999. Anthology of African Photography. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Richards, Thomas. 1993. The Imperial Archive. Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London
and New York: Verso.
Rohde, Rick. 1998. How we see each other: subjectivity, photography and ethnographic
re/vision. In Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The
Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town,
Windhoek and Athens OH: UCT Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University Press).
Ryan, James R. 1997. Picturing Empire. Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire.
Reaktion Books: London.
Samuel, Raphael. 1994. Theatres of Memory. London and New York: Verso.
Schoeman, Karel. 1996. The Face of the Country. A South African Family Album 1860-1910.
Cape Town: Human & Rousseau.
Sekula, Allan. 1989. The Body and the Archive. In Richard Bolton (ed) The Contest of Meaning:
Critical Histories of Photography. Cambridge MA: MIT Press: Cambridge MA.
Skotnes, Pippa (ed), Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen. Cape Town: University
of Cape Town Press.
Sontag, Susan. 1979. On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Stoler, Ann. 1997. State racism and the education of desires: a colonial reading of Foucault.
Unpublished guest lecture, Interdisciplinary Conference on Gender and Colonialism,
University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, January 1997.
Stoler, Ann and Frederick Cooper. 1997. Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research
Agenda. In Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire. Colonial
Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press).
Silvester, Jeremy. 1994. Black Pastoralists, White Farmers: The Dynamics of Land
Dispossession and Labour Recruitment in Southern Namibia. Unpublished PhD thesis,
University of London.
Silvester, Jeremy, Marion Wallace and Patricia Hayes. 1998. Introductory Overview. In Hayes et
al (eds.), Namibia under South African Rule: Mobility and Containment 1915-1946.
London, Windhoek and Athens OH: James Currey, Out of Africa and Ohio University
Press.
Silvester, Jeremy. 1998. Your space or mine? The photography of the Police Zone. In Wolfram
Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonising Camera:
Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, Windhoek and Athens OH:
UCT Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University Press).
Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographs and Histories
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Thomas, Nicholas. 1994. Colonialism’s Culture. Anthropology, Travel and Government.
Pinceton: Princeton University Press.
Timm, Margo. 1998. Transpositions: John Ndevasia Muafangejo and colonial photographs of
King Mandume ya Ndemufayo. In Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia
Hayes (eds.), The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History
(Cape Town, Windhoek and Athens OH: UCT Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University
Press).
Vaughan, Megan. 1991. Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Polity Press:
Cambridge.
Viditz-Ward, Vera. Alphonso Lisk-Carew: Creole Photographer. African Arts Vol 19 (1), pp 46-51.
Wallace, Marion. 1997. Health and Society in Windhoek, Namibia, 1915-1945. Unpublished PhD
thesis, University of London.
Wallace, Marion. 1998. Looking at the locations: the ambiguities of urban photography. In
Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonising Camera:
Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, Windhoek and Athens OH:
UCT Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University Press).
Werner, Wolfgang. 1989. An Economic and Social History of the Herero Reserves, 1915-1946.
Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cape Town.
Witz, Leslie. 1997. Commemorations and conflicts in the production of South African national
pasts: the 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival. Unpublished PhD thesis,
University of Cape Town.

Abbreviations:
BAB - Basler Afrika Bibliographien;
JMT - John Muafangejo Trust;
NAN - National Archives of Namibia;
SAM - South African Museum;
CC - The Colonising Camera;
SWA - South West Africa.