Zanele Muholi - “We Don’t Document for Fun”

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Jan 29, 2018
by Louise Hallman
Zanele Muholi - “We Don’t Document for Fun”

Zanele Muholi's on the marginalization of the black LGBT community in a post-apartheid South Africa

South Africa is the only African country where not only is homosexuality legal, but same-sex couples can also marry and adopt children, and are legally protected under anti-discrimination legislation. However, this masks the horrors faced by many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender South Africans. Through the medium of photography, one South African “visual activist” aims to show the truth of what it is like to live as a black lesbian in the country.

“I’m a visual activist before I’m a photographer, before I’m an artist,” says award-winning photographer Zanele Muholi.

Despite all the supposed legal protections the LGBT community receives in the increasingly prosperous southern African country, lesbians, especially black lesbians, are frequently subjected to “corrective rape” attacks, where often gangs of men pin down and sexually assault lesbians in attempts to “cure” them of their homosexuality. Some of these attacks have even resulted to the death of their victims. As South Africa struggles to combat its high level of crime, these attacks often go unprosecuted.

Muholi explains why she believes photographing this marginalized group is important: “If I even talk about the work that I’m doing on black lesbians, I’m not doing it for myself. I’m doing it for the younger generation. I’m doing it for the older generation, who were never even given the opportunity to open their mouths.”

As a black lesbian, Muholi sees her work as part of a wider effort to document black history in the post-Apartheid country. “My focus has ever been on black lesbians, on black gays, on black trans-men. And why black specifically is because as black people, they don’t have a tangible history that is captured by us on us,” Muholi explains. “We have people who write our history on our behalf as if we did not exist… I think one has to find ways to re-write the history, for our own great-grandchildren. For them to know that we were once here and for them to understand fully the resistance and other struggles that we still encounter…“It’s sort of like capturing the visual presence, which then becomes a visual history… To say, yes we are here.”

Muholi’s photographs often capture intimate moments between lovers. But she has also been working with her photography collective to document the abuses South Africa’s lesbians suffer – and the funerals held for the victims. When speaking with Muholi, her anger at the atrocities committed against South African lesbians is glaringly apparent. As a member of the community, these are issues that she feels personally – not as a neutral observer. “We don’t document for fun, or just because we have powers and cameras. With my team, I have a collective calling; we document all of these atrocities because we want the world to know that we have a situation at hand.”

Just as the oppressive regime of apartheid was ended in South Africa in 1994, Muholi hopes to see the end of the persecution of the LGBT community in her country, and believes photography can be a tactic in doing so, bringing the plight of her community to the attention of the wider national and international consciousness.

“We call upon those with powers to agitate with us, just like the people who worked with activists in South Africa to end apartheid and I think the same strategies could be used,” she says – angry yet optimistic.