A favorite police harassment trick in the apartheid years was to raid the house of some luckless person, discover a banned book in their bookcase and, waving it triumphantly, announce the book’s owner was under arrest.
Suppressing information, ideas, and images as found in published material was a key strategy in the attempts of the State to control public knowledge. Regular listings in the Government Gazette, the official journal used for communication with the public, would name the offending book, play, film, or publication as banned by the Publications Control Board. From then on it would be illegal to distribute or even own the offending item.
Banning was the fate that befell young black photographer Ernest Cole’s book of photographs and text House of Bondage on its arrival in South Africa from New York. Subtitled A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Words the Bitter Life of His Homeland Today, Cole’s book was published by Random House in 1967.
As a banned book, Cole’s remarkable photographic essay of blacks struggling to make a life under desperate circumstances remained little known in South Africa, though overseas the photographs were frequently used to portray apartheid’s injustices from an insider’s point of view.
Working freelance, Cole had captured candid scenes of dejected men crammed into the bleak single-sex mine hostels or undergoing the humiliating medical examinations required by the mines. Of particular note were the images that recorded the endless pass raids. Every African above the age of sixteen had to carry a passbook, a small brown book that carried every detail of his or her identity, at all times. Failure to produce the hated little book usually led to arrest.
Cole himself, born near Pretoria in 1940, had in 1966 changed his birth name from the African Kole to the English-sounding Cole and managed to get himself reclassified from “Black” to “Coloured,” or mixed race, so no longer had to carry a pass. Thus he had been able to work more freely and was able to qualify for a passport to leave the country to organize the publication of his book.
Named as a banned person by the South African government in 1968, the year after his book had been banned, Cole, who was represented internationally by the Magnum Photo Agency, never returned to South Africa and died in New York in 1990. His work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as in South African art museums.
Cole was only one of a number of fine photographers documenting the life of black South Africans under apartheid. But his unique contribution was to bring his intensely moving images together in a single book at a time that surely led to the hardening of international attitudes to apartheid.
“Pass Raid” 1960–66
A young boy is stopped for his pass as a white plainclothes man looks on.
23.5 x 19.5 cm
Silver print
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
Image courtesy of the Ernest Cole Foundation and Iziko South African National Gallery
© The Ernest Cole Foundation
“Arrest” 1960–66
A student who said he was going to fetch his textbook is pulled in. To prove he was still in school he showed his fountain pen and ink-stained fingers, but that was not enough; in long pants he looked older than sixteen.
23.5 x 19.5 cm
Silver print
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
Image courtesy of the Ernest Cole Foundation and Iziko South African National Gallery
© The Ernest Cole Foundation