1.1 Subversive Resistance

While District 9 used digital cameras but manipulated the film to achieve the effects of analogue nostalgia, the broader idiom evokes analogue nostalgia in diverse ways. As previously discussed, Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema is shot entirely on analogue cameras with old film stock, and Goldblatt is known for only working with analogue photography. The preference for analogue cameras is perhaps indicative of the valorisation of analogue media since the inception of digital media, paralleling the kind of reaction that filmmakers, such as Spielberg, and cinematographers, such as Christopher Doyle (Clarke 2017: 105–106) and Wally Pfister (Mateer 2014: 6), had (and still have) to digital cameras being used in the film industry (Lucas 2014). Although digitally retouching their work, younger photographers such as Subotzky and Waterhouse also use analogue cameras, such as the Mamiya medium-format camera. The valorisation of analogue media conveys a sense of authenticity and historicity in District 9, as in the other instances mentioned above.

In South Africa, there are numerous examples of Instagram photographers and fashion bloggers using similar techniques to represent Johannesburg in a manner that constructs a feeling of historicity. They include the aforementioned collectives Khumbula, the Sartists and I See A Different You. The Instagram bloggers’ photographs of Johannesburg and its surrounds are nostalgic and yet – like District 9’s evocation of the past – ironic. I See A Different You, in their photographs in Figures 22 and 23, portray some of the grittier neighbourhoods in the city, such as Hillbrow and industrial parts of Soweto. They are accompanied by fond hashtags connoting belonging – “hood”, “home” and “kasilami” (a vernacular word for “location”, which is what the townships were often called in apartheid’s institutional language). The colouring of these images resembles photographs of the city by Subotzky and Waterhouse, Tillim and Goldblatt. In Power Park//Soweto (Figure 22), which depicts the abandoned power station at the foot of the surviving towers, the ruins of the structure are juxtaposed with glowing cloud formations; in Johannesburg//Home (Figure 23), which depicts the inner city of Johannesburg and Hillbrow, the historical high-rise architecture is limned by the sunset, giving the buildings a rosy halo. In both images there is evidence of a manipulated colour palette that echoes the backward-looking cinematographic agenda of District 9 and recalls aged analogue photography such as Polaroid prints and family photographs from the 1980s. The colours are warm and dusty, with even the sky a dusky blue. Johannesburg//Home glows with such deep browns that it reminds one of faded film photographs from the 1960s to the 1980s that often become more brown and red in tone as they age.

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Power Park//Soweto. Photograph by I See A Different You, 2016.

Courtesy of iseeadifferentyou 2016

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Johannesburg//Home. Photograph by I See A Different You, 2016.

Courtesy of iseeadifferentyou 2016

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In an article on the practices of collectives such as I See A Different You, Khumbula, and the Sartists, Leora Farber (2015) argues that the practice of depicting the present in a nostalgic register, and the use of a dated visual language, signifies how these collectives grapple with the apartheid and colonial past of South Africa. They reimagine the past as they wish it to appear. Even though the past is not a pleasant place or time, romanticising it gives these photographers some agency over it: in a sense, they re-write history and create it differently. The past about which they feel nostalgia is not the actual past, but an imagined past in the manner of reflective nostalgia. In Harness Hamese’s photograph of three young men in a township context (Figure 24), they appear to be on the street, but are pouring tea and drinking it from teacups. They are dressed in vaguely old-fashioned attire, all three in suits and one wearing a 1920s-style boater. According to Farber, they are performing one of the identities (almost like personas) that these collectives employ to counter historical stereotypes of Black men as uneducated layabouts and criminals: they portray themselves as perfect gentlemen. They counter apartheid-era perceptions of Black men living in townships, and reimage that past by projecting the present onto a nostalgic past of their own making. The nostalgic quality is heightened by the sun appearing to set in the smoggy surroundings, one of the few touches of colour in a largely monochrome photograph. Farber (2015: 114) refers to this practice as “subversive resistance”,¹ but one may also understand it in terms of Lees’ (2004: 24) “freedom to” shape the city and their own identities along with it. The landscape of Johannesburg is steeped in a history they should not celebrate, and yet these photographs present the city nostalgically, reclaiming the past despite its sordid character. The bloggers recast the city of the past as a city they feel fond of, one that bears the historical traces with which they choose to imbue it.

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The Three Stages of Preparing Tea. Photograph by Harness Hamese, 2014. Digital print.

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1.2 ‘Native Nostalgia’

It is crucial to consider the significance of nostalgia in the larger South African context when examining analogue nostalgia in these representations. As with all forms of visual representation, District 9 does not exist in a visual vacuum, but within the context of nostalgic portrayals of South Africa’s past in other forms and expressions, such as literature and popular media. The broader context also points to the fact that the idiom and its nostalgic impulses are not the preserve of a white view of Johannesburg and its townships alone, as my previous examples might suggest.

The way the photographers discussed above depict the townships in their work brings to mind one of the most influential accounts of township life of recent years: novelist Dlamini’s book Native Nostalgia (2009), published in the same year as District 9’s release. Dlamini’s account of his childhood in the township of Katlehong near Johannesburg elicited harsh criticism from fellow author Eric Myeni and journalist Andile Mngxitama, who accused Dlamini of an apologist depiction of apartheid (Jones 2014: 110). It has also, however, been described as brave and daring, since he refutes the master narrative of Black suffering under apartheid (Akpome 2018: 105–115). Although Dlamini makes it clear that his intention is not to pardon the atrocities of apartheid or to imply that it was positive in any manner, in Native Nostalgia he asserts that poverty, crime and degradation did not determine Black life under apartheid in its totality. Instead, he seeks to complicate how townships and Black life are understood in contemporary South Africa (Dlamini 2009: 1–19). This seems especially important when looking at seemingly stereotypical depictions of townships exemplified in nostalgic dystopian depictions.

Dlamini’s description of Katlehong is invaluable as a register of the complexity of an individual’s lived experience of township life. The nostalgia he professes to feel comes from his childhood in a specific place, and from the viewpoint of having lived there. While he describes his particular feeling as reflective by referring to Boym’s discussion of nostalgia (Dlamini 2009: 17), as I do with reference to District 9, his view of the township is distinctively different from the perspective of a white person visiting the township, such as the character of Wikus – or the experience of director Blomkamp, a white middle-class man who grew up in suburban Johannesburg, and indeed my own experiences as a white middle-class woman living in a Johannesburg suburb today. Dlamini’s view is from inside a township, and thus his use of nostalgia is situated differently to District 9’s portrayal of the city as nostalgic, or films such as Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema and The Battle for Johannesburg, made by directors who portray parts of the city from outsider perspectives to at least some degree. Dlamini (2009: 65–76) admits that some readers may regard him as a traitor of sorts, a “rat”, for undermining the master narrative of Black struggle under apartheid, but he maintains that his depiction of township life aims to generate a complexity which counters the notion that Black life is homogenous. His more recent book, Askari (2014), is an equally daring investigation, in this case of the Black enforcers of apartheid who worked with the government, and hence against the Black population of South Africa who suffered under its laws.

Dlamini describes Native Nostalgia as neither memoir nor cultural biography, but a combination of both in a narrative of fragmented memories. He explains that townships may have been planned to impose racial and ethnic or tribal segregation, but that his lived experience was in some ways very different (Dlamini 2009: 45). Like the photographers discussed in this chapter, his view of township life is infused with acts of resistance to the apartheid regime. While townships such as Katlehong were part of the reformist or scientific “new” townships planned after the advent of apartheid policy in 1948, the planning agendas they represented were often undermined in residents’ lived practices. Dlamini mentions, for example, how Katlehong was planned using a grid system, alongside a railway running its length, and divided into rectangular sections with numbered houses. Yards or plots were allocated to houses, and he describes his own home as having an L-shaped lawn, with a peach tree planted in the front of the house with its stoep, or veranda. There was an outdoor toilet, a coal shed and a fence, with two separate gates for pedestrians and cars to enter the property. Amidst all this pretence of suburban structures, essentially planned by the government, he recounts how people would erect fences and subdivide their plots according to agreements between neighbours. In this way, residents asserted agency and laid claim to the space in seemingly prosaic ways. One might compare it with how fashion bloggers reclaim the township landscape and its past to bend it to their own narratives.

Niq Mhlongo (2010: 11–15), who grew up in Chiawelo in Soweto, has similar fond memories of that township. In an essay for photographer Jodi Bieber’s photo essay book entitled Soweto (2010), he describes the township of his childhood in terms of how people lived ordinary lives there, despite facing severe challenges. He remembers the township with nostalgia, recalling social events: watching “Chinese movies” at the nearby bioscope, places such as shishanyamas (barbeque or braai restaurants), soccer games, stokvel (informal saving schemes), gatherings, and so forth. He describes how his family of eleven people lived in a two-bedroom house, and how the owning of a television was a measure of wealth. He recounts the prevalence of gangs and violent crime, but he describes how Soweto, or Msawawa as he refers to it colloquially, became the symbol of democracy and the “New South Africa” (Mhlongo 2010: 14). As with the fashion bloggers, the townships represent home to Mhlongo and, although his account may be considered romanticised, it also serves as a counterpoint to what he calls the “nuisance questions about crime, unemployment, or how it is to live in a place of poor shanty dwellings where people die of violence and disease every day” (Mhlongo 2010: 11). The Chiawelo he describes is not by any means the same place depicted in District 9, despite his acknowledging the same circumstances: poverty, unemployment, violence and segregation.

1.3 Constructed History

As discussed in the previous chapter, Caoduro (2014) suggests that the visual style of analogue photography emulated in digital photography indicates a yearning for authenticity in amateur photographic practices like those on Instagram. Authenticity is rootedness in a particular history, which gives it a fixed quality. One of the significant aspects in the depiction of decay in Instagram photography is the focus on tactility: texture in the landscape and environment. Such texture and tactility is equally evident in District 9, and reflects the larger media trend of analogue nostalgia at work in a nostalgic visual language.

In a photograph in the Black History Tribute series, by Anthony Bila (2014) for the collective Khumbula, tactile elements are visible in both the subject matter and the treatment of the image.² In the township setting (in this case Alexandra in Johannesburg), there is evidence of much decay, from the disintegrating paving in the foreground to the textures on the walls of the structures, and the worn patches of grass near the feet of the two men who pose for the photograph in the foreground. There are miscellaneous abandoned architectural elements and scattered rubble, and the door behind the figures seems battered and peeling. Razor wire (ubiquitous in District 9) tops the walls, and an oil drum serves as a chair. The formality of the men’s appearance contrasts sharply with their environment, dressed as they are in a vintage style, with jackets made of heavily textured fabrics that evoke tweed and houndstooth. The photograph itself seems to have been digitally altered, as if treated to look like an aged Van Dyck print, with sepia colouring, and scratches on the surface of the image – digital filters that add further texture to the image.

Writing about home movies and nostalgia, Giuseppina Sapio (2014: 44) considers the yearning for tactility in analogue nostalgia with reference to Benjamin’s discussion of the loss of tactility in daily life. In the 1930s, in The Writer of Modern Life, Benjamin (2006) suggested that the use of rich fabrics such as velvet in interiors in Paris was an attempt to bring back a sense of touch to modern life. Sapio (2014) argues that by using analogue effects such as the application of filters, users bring back tactility to their digital home videos. In other words, the flaws of analogue video in old home movies, such as noise, poor focus, and decay in colour and film quality, have become associated with the time when they were made, and stand in for the authenticity associated with that time.

Sapio (2014: 39–50) discusses “hipster” culture as a search for tactility and authenticity in “vintage” products such as clothing and accessories.³ Pam Cook (2005) also refers to this desire for authenticity, which is apparent in the evocation of nostalgia in consumer capitalism. The work of South African bloggers can be contextualised within this wider analogue nostalgia boom. But, although the way they imbue their work with an appearance that evokes the past is not unique to South Africa, the way they apply it is unique to the local context. They make use of digital media’s propensity for recreating analogue effects to evoke and reconstruct South Africa’s racialised past of trauma and violence, which allows them to control the historical narrative of race to some extent. While District 9 seeks to transform the township (perhaps questionably) into an unlikely site of redemption for an Afrikaner man, the work of the bloggers I’ve been discussing unearths a different fictional version of a past Johannesburg, where the townships are inhabited by gentlemen who appear educated, dignified and refined against all odds. The feeling of historicity and authenticity in their photographs affords their constructed version of history more nuance and value.