Available light: Documenting the struggle for dignity during apartheid

Daniel Magaziner first met Omar Badsha in 2013 while in South Africa researching a book on art education under apartheid. Badsha, raised in Durban in a Gujarati Muslim family, was running an archival website called South African History Online, but he also had a long history as a political activist and as a photographer whose images documented the impacts of and struggles against apartheid. 

When Badsha (now 79) later asked Magaziner, a Yale historian, to write his biography, he was uncertain at first. But he knew from visiting Badsha’s home that there were decades worth of materials stored there that could help him put together a detailed history of grassroots organizing against apartheid and the emergence of artistic works that were political in nature. 

“He had this unparalleled archive that offered unique insights that I wasn’t going to find anywhere else,” Magaziner said. 

Magaziner pieced together Badsha’s complicated story over a five-year period. In “Available Light: Omar Badsha and the Struggle for Change in South Africa” (Ohio University Press), he tells that story against the broader backdrop of the shifting ideologies and strategies of the anti-apartheid movement.

A professor of history in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Magaziner is a specialist in the intellectual and cultural history of 20th-century Africa. His previous books are “The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977” and “The Art of Life in South Africa.” 

Magaziner sat down with Yale News to talk about the interlacing of art and politics in South Africa, some key photos from Badsha’s archive, and his commitment to preserving the dignity of his subjects. The interview has been edited and condensed.

Let’s start by talking about the title: “Available Light.” It directly refers to Omar’s reliance on available light in his photography — he never learned to use a flash. But you found a deeper meaning in the term. 

Daniel Magaziner: In South Africa, there’s a tendency not to refer to the anti-apartheid movement, which is how it’s mostly referred to internationally, but instead to refer to “the struggle.” I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of the struggle, which suggests that it is ongoing. And one of the reasons that I was attracted to telling Omar’s story was because he is someone who, from the 1950s through to the present, has been involved in the struggle in various ways. One of the things I was trying to capture is that mentality of the people who make the struggle their work, which was a widespread South African experience. This persistence. The notion of available light was a useful metaphor because it showed that there was always this notion, this ability to keep going. There was always something to do, however seemingly minute. 

Omar wasn’t a major figure in the struggle — he wasn’t someone who was well-known internationally. Why did you feel it was important to document his life? 

Magaziner: One reason is his extended CV, as it were, of being engaged in the struggle. That enables the reader to consider 70 years of South African history, really important decades with a tremendous amount of transformation, from before the advent of apartheid and then many decades after apartheid. 

In addition, part of what the book narrates is the development of this imperative for culture to be responsive to, or at least in dialogue with, political circumstances. Omar was at the forefront of that practice and his artistic trajectory mapped that practice. First, as a graphic artist, then especially as a photographer. Documentary photography plays this really important role in South African political history, and Omar is one of the leading practitioners of that. 

As you said, he began expressing his politics through drawing and painting. But he found that wasn’t enough and moved into union organizing in factories in Durban, a center for chemical, industrial, and textile manufacturing. Would you talk about that shift?

Magaziner: The government had always fearsomely repressed efforts to organize Black trade unions because it recognized that what really made the country run was its industrial base. And if you organized the workers, and the workers turned against white supremacy, then the government was in a lot of trouble. But in the late 1960s, you have this moment when people begin to think, how do we really make a concerted effort to organize Black trade unions? Omar was raised within a political tradition that was very closely related to the Communist Party, but also to all sorts of left-wing socialist groups that had been involved in small-scale labor organizing. And many of his mentors were people who had been involved in trade unionism. So it was logical that he would move in that direction. 

The other thing that was notable for Omar’s story is locality. There are these particular spaces in South Africa that, because of various contingent factors, become the engines of social movements, political movements. Omar happened to be raised in one. In Durban, because of the way segregation worked, there were two downtowns — one for white people and one for Indians. And the Indian business district was an area where Africans could pass through freely without any sort of pass or political surveillance. So that central business district became an important center for cultural life, political life, and organizing life. 

He next takes up photography in a serious way. Let’s talk about a couple of his photos. First, this cover photo of “Letter to Farzanah,” a book published by the Institute for Black Research in 1979, a year the United Nations had declared the International Year of the Child. The book contained photos of South African children of color, all taken by Omar. It was ultimately banned by the state. Would you talk about this photo and why the book was deemed a threat? 

Magaziner: The cover photo depicts Omar’s daughter as a newborn. She’s the Farzanah of the book title. And she is being held by Omar’s paternal grandmother, who had traveled to South Africa from Gujarat, India after World War I. On the one hand, it’s this incredibly intimate study of multiple generations of a family. He’s using his own family as a way of opening up the subject of what it means to be part of a family under apartheid. And he builds off that in his letter to Farzanah, which is the preface to the photographs. On the other hand, the language of the letter and the images that follow kind of deny that familial intimacy and move instead towards what I consider a sociological study of family life and of children in and around Durban. 

On the surface, the content of the book would seem not to be politically controversial. The photos are images of kids doing kid things — kids on swings, kids in the swimming pool. But the captions move into the territory of political critique. “A migrant laborer and his family are together on a 36-hour pass.” Kind of indicating the ways in which families are separated. And within the book you have newspaper clippings that indicate the ways in which apartheid affects Black families. And the state is particularly sensitive at that moment because it’s post-1976, after the Soweto uprising, which is this formative moment after which political protest never really stops in South Africa. 

The other photo, from the early 1980s, is a striking image of a Black husband and wife in their very modest home in Inanda. 

Magaziner: Yes, that is an image of a stevedore — someone who works on the docks — and his wife. What’s important about that image is everything that surrounds them, as well as where the image is shot. Inanda is an area outside of Durban where, at this point, Omar had been working for more than a decade. Inanda has vast historical significance — Gandhi lived there, the founder of the African National Congress lived there. It’s about 30 kilometers from downtown Durban. Black people who want to work in Durban are able to put up their own homes, which are like shacks, and access Durban’s markets.

We don’t know the stevedore’s legal status or what papers he has. We only know he has managed to eke out a home in Inanda. It’s tremendously impoverished. But one of Omar’s commitments is to always reflect the dignity and humanity of Black working people. In this image he shows the world what apartheid has created — people living in these very meager circumstances — but also the wholeness of life within this space. You see the care with which they maintain this meager home. There’s a humanity and pride in that. 

You write that Omar deliberately chose not to publish images of political violence, even though it was very much a part of the struggle. Why was that? 

Magaziner: It wasn’t just Omar. It was all of these photographers who became part of the Afrapix photo collective. It was this idea that rather than allow the politics of apartheid to define their existences, they were going to attempt to capture peoples’ lives as they knew they were living them. Kind of like the available light motif — this is what’s here, and we’re going to work with it. Part of it was also the focus on humanity. In their photography, which was their activism, they were rehearsing the society that they wanted to create, one that would respect the innate humanity of all people. 

Omar established the South African History Online website in 2000 and received a prestigious award for it from the president in 2018. What was and is he seeking to accomplish with it?

Magaziner: Omar has always been intrigued by the idea that everybody has a story to tell and that we do a disservice to understanding what it means to live in a society if we only focus on a few shared stories. That we need to cultivate a broader-based story of culture. He was really attracted to the notion of archiving all these stories. He was also very aware of how powerful people had always claimed for themselves the unique ability to tell stories about what mattered in the past and that didn’t represent the full extent of history. This site, in a sense, represented a correction to that.