For Black South Africans, Apartheid Was a ‘House of Bondage’

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“I have choked it down and I know,” Ernest Cole (1940-1990) writes of the “barely edible” porridge fed to Black South Africans in hospitals and jails alike; but the phrase looms over HOUSE OF BONDAGE (Aperture, $65), his 1967 account of the atrocities of apartheid. The book has been out of print until now.

In a school without furniture, students crouch on the floor to write.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust
A schoolboy tries his best to pay attention in the heat of an overcrowded classroom.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust
A teacher at the end of her second daily shift, during which she may teach up to 100 students at a time.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust

Born in Eersterust, near Pretoria, Cole was a 20-year-old newspaper photographer in Johannesburg in 1960 when 69 Africans died in Sharpeville protesting the passbook laws that restricted their movements through their country. That same year, Cole’s Black neighborhood was demolished to make room for white development.

Police officers check passbooks for an employer signature, proof of paid taxes and permission to travel into white areas. Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust
A police check here entails searching a man’s belongings.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust
Police officers arrest a Black gang member, or tsotsi.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust
Men are arrested for “trespassing” in white areas.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust

He’d spend much of the decade determined “to show the world what the white South African had done to the Black.” Defying the pass police and hiding his camera in a paper bag, Cole surveyed crumbling schools, hospitals and workers’ dwellings, the streets where discretionary arrests enforced a daily climate of terror. The first book to visually expose and protest apartheid — “itself a fugitive object,” the curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo writes — “House of Bondage” also witnesses a people’s determination to continue living: socializing and studying, playing sports and music.

Men undergo a group medical exam before beginning monthslong contract work in the mines.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust
A man is fingerprinted for the pass that will authorize him to work in a white area.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust
New mining recruits await processing and assignment.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust

By 1968 both Cole and his images were banned from South Africa, but a new standard had been set for future photojournalists to harness art into political document.

Across South Africa, the literal signs of apartheid are everywhere.Credit…Ernst Cole Family Trust
A bank sign refers euphemistically to Black patrons.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust
A wedding among South Africa’s Black middle class involves a rented car.Credit…Ernest Cole Family Trust
When the government demolishes “black spot” townships for white settlement, residents are relocated to public housing projects far from their jobs in the city.Credit…Ernst Cole Family Trust

Lauren Christensen is an editor at the Book Review.

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