Ukuphila ubomi: Daniel ‘Kgomo’ Morolong’s photography and black aliveness

I first came across Daniel ‘Kgomo’ Morolong’s photography when I visited 16 on Lerotholi, an art gallery kwaLanga, Cape Town. Morolong’s images were part of a group exhibition, Abantu Bethu/Our People, which featured many artists across a variety of mediums, including: Ricky Dyaloyi, Benjamin Furawo, Phillemon Hlungwani, Teresa Kutala Firmino, Charles Kamangwana, Speelman Mahlangu, Ignatius Mokone, Blessing Ngobeni, Selwyn Pekeur, Atang Tshikare, Breeze Yoko, Mongezi Gum, Duke Norman, and Restone Maambo. I was stunned by the range of the exhibition and the artists featured, as well as the gallery space, which is in the heart of kwaLanga, a first for the township that was established in 1923.

After a conversation with Mpilo Ngcukana (one of the owners of the gallery), I decided to buy one of the pieces from the exhibition. I was fixated on Morolong’s images. I loved the joy they depicted as well as the range of the experience of black life in the 1950s and 1960s. Until seeing Morolong’s photography, I had mostly experienced this historical period through images by photographers such as Alf Kumalo, Peter Magubane, and David Goldblatt. Much of it documented the atrocities of apartheid, combining everyday experience together with the grand politics. Morolong’s images were reminiscent of Ruth Motau’s images, even though hers are from a later period. In Morolong’s world, there were no apartheid guns and lifeless bodies splayed in the streets, nor any revolutionary salutes. There were tea parties, women in hats, farewells at train stations, boxing champions, and friends dancing and drinking. There was a sense of aliveness, despite the signalling of apartheid as the overarching political context.

DANIEL “KGOMO” MOROLONG, WEDDINGS #13,

PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT. Image courtesy of the Estate of Daniel ‘Kgomo’ Morolong & Everard Read Gallery)

When I read further on Morolong, I was surprised that he was a photographer from East London. I had never heard of him, despite growing up there. His images immediately brought to mind stories my mother told about growing up in East London in an urban home that always had a traffic of people. While an urban black experience is something that has come to be taken for granted, my mother’s childhood in East London seemed to rival the insistence that black people belong in the rural areas. Their existence in towns and cities is an accident of mining and development, thanks to colonial and apartheid expansion. And yet, this world existed in family photographs my mother shared: weddings, birthday parties, portraits, poses in the garden, school uniform portraits. Life in its most ordinary curation.

Mama had shared images of herself as a baby in a studio in the 1950s. The oldest photograph she shared, which I still have, is a portrait of my grandmother as a little girl standing with her siblings and her grandmother. Access to these photographs in my family archive helped me understand the myriad experiences of what it meant to be black, urban, and educated in the early to mid-twentieth century. Mama had been opening up this world to me since my years in high school, when she realised that my school history curriculum only told a single story of struggle: a political story about the big men of history. There was no everyday history, which seems to be dotted all over East London, just another marked colonial city. Mama took it upon herself to provide a parallel curriculum, which included stories about Nongqawuse, the story behind Tiyo Soga’s famous hymn “Lizalis’idinga lakho”. In a sense, Mama became the first black historian in my world who made history an affective subject that was alive in the everyday.

She told stories about being raised by her grandmother, uMaRadebe, who had been a teacher and a member of i-Y, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). MaRadebe was strict and ran a household of which she was proud. Mama’s grandfather had been a carpenter educated at Lovedale and, later became Baptist minister. According to Mama, hers was one of the first homes with electricity in Duncan Village. Hers was a world of teachers, clerks, nurses, choir conductors, and Sunday lunch in the dining room with a white table cloth. All these stories were evident in the images she shared: a family portrait of my great-grandfather, Shadrack Mashologu, with his children who were Fort Hare College and Shawbury Girls graduates: proud, sepia portraits from the 1930s and 1950s.

It is thanks to Mama’s stories that my matric history project was about my great-grandfather. I visited the pre-school and church which were named after him. I interviewed people. I was becoming a historian thanks to a personal family archive. But these connections would only make sense decades later, now, as I work both as a historian and researcher.

But let me return to Morolong. The photograph which I eventually bought was not my original choice. But in retrospect, it was the most apt. After some back and forth with Mpilo, I settled on an image of two women at the beach (Beach #11). I was captivated by the contrasting demeanours: one is scowling, clearly unhappy about being at the beach, and one is lying in the water, smiling and camera-ready. The two women reminded me of my sister and me: she would be scowling, and I would be the one frolicking in the water! The women felt familiar. I even convinced myself I could recognise the beach, eFullers (Bay), perhaps the one which had rock and tidal pools, the beach designated for black people during apartheid.

DANIEL “KGOMO” MOROLONG, BEACH #11,

PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT. Image courtesy of the Estate of Daniel ‘Kgomo’ Morolong & Everard Read Gallery)

There is something so familiar about these women. Perhaps they are sisters, friends, or lovers. I love the tension between them. I imagine the picture was taken at the end of the day, and the scowling sister/lover/friend was fed up with being at the beach. But she refused to take her sunglasses and hat off, because she still needs to look good even if she no longer wants to be at the beach. There is a story in both their postures which sit together in the frame.

The other part of the story, as well as Morolong’s beach series, is the confrontation with stereotypes about black people, swimming, and the beach. Black people and leisure. Most of Morolong’s catalogue documents black people’s joy in the presence of apartheid. It was possible to have tea parties, weddings, ballroom dancing, and beach days, even as people were being arrested, murdered, or fleeing into exile. Morolong’s images insist that it is possible to humanise ourselves in the midst of horror. There is a dignity in seeing black people bephila ubomi, living full lives in a political context that was actively pursuing their death. Ukuphila: to be alive. Ubomi: a life in its wholesomeness.

DANIEL “KGOMO” MOROLONG, BEACH #18,

PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT. Image courtesy of the Estate of Daniel ‘Kgomo’ Morolong & Everard Read Gallery)

Further reading about Morolong helped me recognise connections with my gran: Morolong had a studio eMdantsane, possibly in the same building where my gran had her sewing business, eHighway. The connections were uncanny. Morolong was revealing another world that I needed to take more seriously for its historical significance and not simply my mother’s stories. It was a few months later that the penny dropped: by the time I bought the image from the gallery, I already had Morolong images in my family archive, but I just hadn’t realised. I was having lunch, gazing at Beach #11, which had found the perfect spot next to Zenande Mketeni’s Mfazi omabele made, a portrait of Nokutela Dube. I can’t quite pin down what made the connection in my head, ngesiXhosa we say kwathi qatha!

I rushed to the photo album I had which contained images Mama had kept over the years, and my sister passed onto me. One of my favourites: an image of my gran, uMawe, with another elderly woman sitting on a couch as though in conversation. A few years ago, I kept the image in a frame because it captured a story about my family which I enjoyed. It was my gran in conversation with a Mrs Mohapelo, her daughter’s new mother in law, abakhozi, as we say in isiXhosa when people are connected by marriage. They both looked happy and proud. Their printed dresses and the doilies on the couch told another story about beauty in the everyday. I had scribbled notes on the back so I could remember Mama’s story about uMawe and Mrs Mohapelo. Beneath my scribbles was the stamp which I had seen and ignored: Morolex Ideal Photos, 1047 Douglas Smit Highway, East London: Daniel Morolong’s studio. The elation is hard to describe. I was absolutely giddy and stupefied that, all these years, I had a Morolong image in my family archive but had bought another from an art gallery. I wondered how many other Morolong images existed in my family archive.

A few weeks after this discovery, I noticed my cousin’s WhatsApp picture of my great- grandfather and uMawe sitting on the same couch. Mawe was wearing the same dress she wore in the photograph described above. I wondered if the image was taken on the same day and whether it, too, was from Morolex Ideal Photos. I called Mama soon after this epiphany, and I asked her about Morolong. She laughed “Ohhh, ndiyamkhumbula uMorolong,” (I remember Morolong) and proceeded to tell me about the church he went to, the woman he was married to, and the village where he was from. Of course Mama would know all this; she was part of the world in Morolong’s photography, even though she was a child.

I instantly wished my gran was still alive, as she would probably recognise the people in the images. I like to imagine that she would recognise the women in Beach #11, as well as the other images in the exhibition and online. She would have a story about the two sisters. My gran was a seamstress (the clumsily gendered word, where men are tailors and women are seamstresses), which means she knew many people who sought out her services at a time when wearing clothes made by someone in the community or the home was the norm. Another of Mama’s stories is about my gran’s younger sister, uPhathi, Phatheka Mashologu, a teacher cum jazz singer cum socialite who later became a nurse but whose life changed so dramatically it was hard to believe that she had lived the glamorous life Mama described. uPhathi was a singer who would be invited to sing at beauty competitions and other events. Her older sister made some of her outfits, sometimes begrudgingly. If I knew what Phathi looked like, maybe I could find her in Morolong’s images. A world of pageant shows and singing competitions. And Morolong was there to capture some of these moments. Of course, I didn’t tell Mama I had bought Morolong’s photograph from a gallery; I didn’t want her to laugh at me (as she often does) for buying something that already existed in my life.

I was left wondering how this shift happens: how does a photograph become an artwork that appears in a gallery and circulates in the art world as a prized possession worth acquiring and collecting? I am fascinated by the leap Morolong’s work can make between family archive and prized artwork, even though they were initially not intended for a gallery or exhibition but for posterity nonetheless. This transition reminds me of what Santu Mofokeng achieved with The Black Photo Album/Look at Me: 1840–1950. In his essay, Mofokeng begins with a statement which could be applied to Morolong’s photography: “These are images that urban black working and middle-class families had commissioned, requested, or tacitly sanctioned.” There is an agency and active participation in Mofokeng’s observation. This is the same participation which seems apparent in Morolong’s images. They carry the energy of subjects who declare, “Look at me being alive and joyful,” in other words, “Ndijonge…see me because I am beautiful to behold”. Much like the images Mofokeng selects, Morolong’s images beckon to us, as Mofokeng continues, “When we look at these images we believe them, for they tell us a little about how these people imagined themselves.” It is this imagination that I am interested in when it comes to black urban life, then and now.

DANIEL “KGOMO” MOROLONG, WOMEN #112,

PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT. Image courtesy of the Estate of Daniel ‘Kgomo’ Morolong & Everard Read Gallery)

Mama’s encounter with Morolong’s photography was through his studio, not through a gallery. Morolong’s images have given me a proximity to Mama’s world beyond the stories she told and the family photographs she shared. Hers is not an exceptional story, but a story which exists within many stories such as the ones which appear in Morolong’s photography. Perhaps this is part of the reason why I chose an image of my grandmother as the cover for my first book, Ilifa. It is an image of her as a young woman. She is poised and looking directly at the camera, even while her posture is askance. She too is saying, ndijonge, see me. My grandmother’s image was never meant for the cover of a book. It hung above her bed throughout my childhood; she gave me a small copy of the original when I asked her how old she was when the image was taken. Even though it was meant for our private family archive, that is, for posterity, it has become a sort of missile for the future about how black women imagined themselves in a world that refused to see them. It never crossed my mind to ask my grandmother who the photographer was. But perhaps having my grandmother on the cover of my first book is another way of mitigating the losses which are inevitable with precarious family archives.

This personal connection with Morolong’s photography has made me more curious about Mama’s world. Thankfully, she has always been generous with stories about her childhood, even if, at times, there were painful stories. She insisted on telling these stories because she wanted us to know that we were not the sum total of apartheid’s tragedy and post-apartheid’s disappointments. Mama’s family stories evoked a world where aspirations were truncated by apartheid, which made upward mobility difficult, especially for those who could not enter into the social and economic circles being established in the Bantustans.

I’ve come to appreciate that Mama grew up in a world of makers and creatives. She herself is a creative who has made beautiful clothes with her own hands. In a sense, if someone grows up in a world where the quotidian is also about beauty and design (because people can custom make their clothes and furniture), it is possible to take for granted some of the trends related to custom-made living today, which are belaboured with over-pricing and, at times, elitism. Mama was raised by creatives who valued beauty for beauty’s sake. Art was in the clothes one wore which were adorned at home (Mama made her own wedding dress, and I have a vivid memory of a wedding dress fitting happening in my gran’s house; together, they had made and beaded it). Art was in the doilies and the chair covers stitched and crocheted by hand. Mama grew up in a world where the ability to create beauty also meant dignity in an ugly, oppressive world. And the ability to sell the beauty they had created meant survival.

This connection with Morolong’s photography has highlighted the ways in which the convergence of art, making home, storytelling, and family archiving reveals so many layers about how to make a life. Perhaps I surround myself with images of black women in my home because so much of what I see and experience once I leave the safety of my home does not reflect me. I am paying attention to the aesthetic of a particular kind of black woman who does not appear in magazines and billboards but looks like the women in my church (who are so incredibly stylish!) and the women in my family photo albums. So much of what success has meant for me has been about distancing myself from these women, and yet they have taught me much of what I know about beauty in a world that would rather we only existed as labour, or repositories of labour.

The photograph Beach #11 now sits comfortably with other images of women which I’ve framed from Nonzuzo Gxekwa’s Taxi Diaries series: two women wearing their Sunday best, holding hands; another image of women wearing red berets, possibly from epostile (a black evangelical church branch). Then there are oomama bomanyano from Lidudumalingani Mqombothi’s village, Zikhovane, which he captured for a series of photographs of his village during the COVID-19 pandemic. The two women at the beach helped me realise that most of the images I have in my home are black women in community with each other as well as a few photographs of Mama as a young woman.

After the conversation with Mama, I decided to buy photo albums. I imagine my nieces and nephews will find them one day and see the world of their grandparents. The albums have pictures of my parents’ wedding day, and there are pictures of Mama as a young teacher. I have a Google Drive of photographs I’ve been hoping to print for years. I feel like I owe it to Mama to continue the tradition they seemed to have sustained effortlessly. A simple practice of printing pictures and organising them into albums: an embodied practice of memorialisation.