Modern scholars can only study cases of colonial historical erasure and censure through records rather than remains (of the people) or sites where erasures occurred.
They focus on generalised, popular early documents such as photographs preserved as reminders of an era when fear of blackness intersected with scientific study and cultural appropriation.
The cultural legacy of Daniel Morolong’s long forgotten studio photography remains yet another of South Africa’s overlooked treasures, which often appears sporadically on websites that purport to be preserving lost troves from renowned artists and photographers of yesteryear.
Born and raised in Tsolo, East London, during the formative years of apartheid, Daniel matured to become a double bassist for the famed Havana Swingsters, a fifteen-piece band led by the legendary Eric Nomvete, co-founder of the Quavers in the late 1940’s.
Daniel Morolong’s lasting legacy and influence is underscored by his pictorial exploration of memory and identity, identity through memory and a depiction of black joy beyond confines of stereotypes.
Perhaps, his radiant air of jovial fame and musicality endeared him to the many people he eventually photographed as a freelance photographer for various publications like the Daily Dispatch’s African Edition; but when one looks at his images, the uncanny eye stand to show a vivid shape of reality beyond papers.
And through his journalistic flair, Ntate Kgomo was well positioned therefore to document some of South Africa’s musical icons, producing images during a period of social upheaval and repression; capturing some important social portraits that black history has produced.
Photographing dancers, and musicians like Johnny Dyani, immortalising his peers through captivating depictions of their crafts; his images could somehow insert or insinuate the spectator’s gaze into each frame, to feel that measured presences of people who have otherwise ceased to be “present” as they were presented.
This invites the viewer to confront the presence of these shadows and ghosts, the souls impulsed into emulsion shaping an new agency in a place of absence.
Capturing his subjects with a compositional integrity that is haloed by florescent floods of light, with intentional over-exposure of their fashionable garments; he frames an unfamiliar innocence into view, freezing pride written on well groomed hairstyles, clasped hands in dignified contrition signalling a reverence fir the art form, even by those he captured.
Sadly, when confronted by stereotypes of impoverishment depicted by many canonical photographers, white society's psychological interactions with black persons (even in images) was then primed to trends determined by exploitative financial outlooks; and this obsessive betrayal of authenticity spelled doom for artists’ of Daniel’s generation.
An exhibition of some of Daniel Morolong’s photographic work was held at Everard Read Gallery in Cape Town, where some of his images were exhibited alongside works by artists Nandipha Mntambo, Boemo Diale and Mongezi Gum.
And as debates rage across the country’s leading art journals and pages of embedded mainstream media, about how art is curtailed and co-opted to suite political agenda; what is the future for fragile archives such as Daniel Morolong’s
Photographic Archives and those housed in redacted vaults of western patronage?
As art collectors innocuously “supports the arts” from the barbaric creativity of natives, only to keep their hold of these cultural assets and totems for personal gratification, it is therefore given that profit-haunted art puritans and collectors will continue to exploit the archival value of the Daniel Morolong Photographic Collection in a time when art is more relic than representative.
And while his work became pivotal in global discourse around archiving black lives and experiences under apartheid, Morolong’s photographic work seemed to respond to a lack of social document among people who were being systematically erased.
Staged processes, choreographed gestures, human interactions with objects, both as subjects foregrounded against a background of common human splendour disguising poverty; these images are archives of dreams, what people wanted to see of themselves in the absence of validating social standing.
Living during a profoundly marked period of political repression and economic segregation of black people, his work emerged fascinated by humanistic views of social conditions of townships, participating in moments of black familial reflection and joy, moments of tragedy and upheavals that rocked and often displaced lives.
Yet, in their eyes we find and inexplicable presentness, a refusal to remain dead and past.
There is an expectant air tracing on their faces without no apparent motive, they seem unknowing of what is happening as they pose obstinately against backdrops that create magic worlds that would be frozen as part of their memories.
Stylishly fashionable ladies snapped unawares during moments of giggled frolicking with the photographer; and yet there remains something appealingly romantic about these scenes, something glamorous in morose township dwellings and gatherings constipated by poverty and oppression.
Morolong was a man possessed by an unwavering devotion to black beauty, creating renewed perspectives in moments of stillness (rare moments of quiet in an otherwise violent life), immortalising lived experiences of black creative communities in song, ritual, jubilation and disarray.
Faced with a life unfolding within a restrictive system that view black lives as subservient and less cultured, he carved a space for both his passion for music and photography, a space that he populated with common and uncommon faces that would otherwise be relegated to the obscurity of the past.
Homes are depicted as spaces where fleeting memories are occurred and captured, bodies resonating their stories concealed or exhibited; sportsmen and glamour queens in performative physicality, responding to a lens curating how the future perceives them.
These forms of personal resilience, embodied in the anonymity of persons, are detailed in a poetic, finely attuned and at times playfully contemplative way.
Discounted men lingering at train stations, women in their dreamt splendor paraded at funerals and weddings, baring their inherent selves and exposing their being human; all these people became more than subjects within Morolong’s frames, as they spoke of something wonderful beyond the confines of a traumatic political climate.
Through these monochromatic images, Ntate Kgomo’s lens captured the ruptures of our history, where experiences marked black people’s lives in a contradictory, polarised and repressive social system such as apartheid.
His images at all stages of his career challenged established stereotypes of black folk, keeping a close eye on the realities of life on different personae - a dancer, a musician, a boxer - that embody inner contradictions with historical realities of the times.
His tenure at the Morale Ideal Studios in East London, which he shared with his fashion designer wife burnt down during the Gqozo coup in 1990, and his equipment and life’s work perished beside the fragments that were later discovered through collectors and publication archives.
Daniel’s work is not an isolated case of obscuration occurring within a profiteering art world, because a vast number of black photographers such as Tladi Khuele, Mbuzeni Zulu also remain unknown by bourgeoning generations of lens based artists.
Across generations there are a select group exemplary photographers who “made a living” through their art, (Ernest Cole, Alf Khumalo, Omar Badsha and Peter Magubane come to mind); and invariably, merchants of culture punt their successes as exemplary of their efforts as “liberators of antiquities”.
Galleries as custodians of cultural opacity, therefore must direct trains of discourse around art and its monetary value, not as privileged owners of our intangible heritage.
In a country whose cultural institutions are threatened by systematic fracture, where hope for the betterment of the arts oscillates between tested certainty and untested assurances, artists will forever inhabit a tense space where their practices are constantly probed for capitalist value.
And in this unsettling terrain primed for survivalist instincts, many artists (and photographers) will content with advanced technologies that have displaced and replaced their craft, surrendering its mystic to all and sundry.
Now treated as high-value cultural objects, Daniel Morolong’s collection becomes a site for exploring questions of commodification without consent, history of reverence and the shifting meaning of historical records.
The ruthless materialism and liberal culturalism displayed by white elites liberal continues to strip African artists of their worth, embodied in works executed under duress and political tyranny of the same white elite class.
When (and if) these images are finally made visible again in new contexts, there is a required reinforcement of their foundational importance that is essential, where communities that were photographed are given exhibitions to see these collections.
