Martyrs, Saints & Sellouts
Benny Gool, Zubeida Vallie, Adil Bradlow, Siona O’Connell, Jade Nair
Twelve years ago, photographs by photographers Benny Gool, Zubeida Vallie and Adil Bradlow were brought together in a group exhibition for the first time. These photographer friends had been documenting apartheid South Africa since the early 1980s, dodging the security police, taking part in protests and being detained on several occasions. This exhibition presents a vivid narrative of violence, loss and injuries which continue to reverberate under the rhetoric of the post-apartheid landscape.
The photographers and I pored through thousands of negatives to respond to the curatorial brief, beginning with images from the 1980s and ending with the memorable one of Winnie Mandela before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These photographs forced me to consider the afterlife of oppression. I remember clearly the instance when I understood that these images were not of a single event, but rather depicted thousands of moments, and hundreds of thousands of faces. Through apparently similar protest posters, each photo-negative illustrated the scope and breadth of the collective anti-apartheid struggle of ordinary, often unidentifiable men, women and children.
As I revisit this work, I recognise spaces, places and individuals; my breath gets caught as I recognise particular faces which now grace the front pages of South African newspapers for various reasons. I am confronted by the uncomfortable truth that the struggles documented in these frames never ended in 1994. The patterns of oppression, the machinery of violence, the ubiquitous dehumanisation—they have not disappeared. They have travelled elsewhere.
These images are not only of our past, but also of our global present. They record patterns of complicity and silence across decades and conflicts. The body language of survival is strikingly similar across contexts—how people shield children from violence, the expressions of defiance in the face of overwhelming force, the collective gestures of resistance. Echoes of these photographs are in Gaza, in Sudan, in countless other places where lives and dignity are under assault today.
The dynamics of selective outrage, careful calculations, and geopolitical considerations that allowed apartheid to endure persist in our responses to oppression. These images ask key questions across our interconnected world—questions of archives, history, freedom and repair. They prompt us to ask—how do we maintain the moral clarity of these photographers? How do we refuse to look away when the same patterns emerge in different places? They urge us to ask: How may we all yet be free?The lives that people these photographs demand of us a consistency of conscience that transcends geography and time. These images are proof that there can be no hierarchy of suffering, no acceptable casualties of convenience, no selective solidarity. As social justice activists, we may not pick and choose when to act and when to stay silent. Each of us faces limitations, and it is impossible to respond to every injustice with equal intensity. Yet, we must resist the comfortable amnesia that lets us celebrate the courage of those who resisted one apartheid while remaining mute when similar systems crush other peoples. To do so would be to betray the very principles these images represent.
Siona O’Connell