Defining apartheid in the public mind
For people around the world, images conveyed a sense of what was going on in South Africa under apartheid: who had power, how they used it and the human cost of a system where a white minority dominated a black majority.
Internationally, relatively few people understood the context in detail – e.g. what factors led to the growth of Afrikaner nationalism? What was the history of the African National Congress? What were the political rights of different groups under the tricameral parliament system? However, images like those that appear here could readily be understood. They conveyed the inequality of the apartheid system, the damage it did, and the violence used by the government to enforce it.
Dismantling apartheid: cultural power mattered.
Among all of the factors that mattered in the process of dismantling apartheid, the cultural power of visual images and the politics of ‘public image’ counted. Cultural power stood alongside ‘people power’ and economic leverage in the process of creating a new political climate where apartheid was no longer politically viable.
Apartheid existed as a legal and political system and as a daily human reality. Images – and stories – made the system and its reality intelligible, and made dismantling apartheid an urgent and pressing concern for people around the world.
Shaping South Africa’s public image
The South African government took images seriously, taking steps that included blocking television coverage and hiring global PR agencies to influence its global public image.
The government’s response to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre illustrates the process.
At Sharpeville, 69 black protesters had been killed by police, most of them shot in the back as they fled. The world reacted: Nelson Mandela recalls how ‘outraged protests came in from across the globe’.
New York Times journalist Ron Nixon records how the government responded by turning to public relations firm Hamilton Wright, ‘one of America’s premier image-makers’. The Hamilton Wright Organisation organised for photographs of smiling black South Africans to be circulated to newspapers across the US. It created photo essays that appeared in magazines such as National Geographic and Life, as well as cinema newsreels.
Nixon quotes the PR firm’s president describing this strategy in action: ‘When you are in the front lines you must use heavy artillery and lots of it’. Much of this ‘artillery’ consisted of images.
Apartheid in the 1980s: images and analysis from A Force More Powerful
The documentary A Force More Powerful portrays the violence of apartheid during the 1980s, and analyses how ‘people power’ and the ‘leverage politics’ of a consumer boycott exerted pressure on the government. The narrator describes the interaction of cultural power and people power, noting how the legitimacy that apartheid relied on had been shattered.
Images from the anti-apartheid movement
The anti-apartheid movement: voices
The film Have You Heard From Johannesburg: From Selma To Soweto captures something of the spirit of the global anti-apartheid movement.
The following selections from the transcript of the film highlight how important imagery was for:
- defining what was happening
- energising and motivating the movement
- tarnishing the image of the apartheid government
- galvanising a public response
- creating a ‘climate of opinion’ where politicians could be moved to act
Watch the trailer
Official Trailer: Have You Heard From Johannesburg: From Selma To Soweto
Tony Glover (student divestment leader at Columbia University):
In the media every day there seemed to be images of tear gas, singing students, bullets flying, people getting injured.
Danisa Baloyi (divestment campaigner at at Columbia University, later business strategist and academic):
There was no way one could turn away from the struggle in South Africa during that time, during that period because so much was happening and it was in the face. You couldn’t ignore it.
Narrator:
Despite the ongoing brutality the rebellion inside South Africa continued. So Prime Minister P.W. Botha declared a state of emergency, giving the government unlimited powers. The police could search any home without warrant, they could detain and interrogate anyone without filing charges, mass funerals–a critical source of unrest—could only be held indoors for one person at a time. Within four days the government had used its new powers to detain almost 700 people. Around the world the evening news showed images of burning black townships. The state of emergency demolished any illusions that conditions in South Africa were improving. It changed minds everywhere.
Les de Villiers (deputy in of South Africa’s Department of Information)
The country looked ungovernable. The headlines came over to the U.S. It was on television almost everyday.
Reporter:
New restrictions on the foreign press, especially television, amount to total censorship of coverage of the violence that has claimed more than 800 lives in the past year. The authorities seem more concerned that the world believes that all black townships look like this all the time, but in Soweto today, police wounded four mourners at a funeral. There are no pictures. The press was banned.
Randall Robinson (founder of TransAfrica, which lobbied the US Congress to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, and founder of the Free South Africa Movement):
South Africa knows and has known for a long time that this is a television driven country. That in America, if it is not on television, it does not exist. And with that understanding, President Botha of South Africa said, ‘We must take what we’re doing in our country off the American television screen.’
Walter Fauntroy (civil rights movement veteran and founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus):
They were doing it because their consciousness had been raised. They’d been bombarded for a year with pictures and television commentary of people being killed at funerals that were being held for the people who were murdered the week before, as they demonstrated in South Africa. People were fed up with it.