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Old pictures tell enduring rural truths

The Cold Choice: Operation Hunger: A photography exhibition at Iziko Slave Lodge by Struan Robertson focusing on the plight of rural people during apartheid.

 

 

STRUAN Robertson was one of the photographers included in the first photographic exhibition at the National Gallery in the 1970s.

 

Roberson was 84 when he died in March. It seems a great pity that the photographs that make up this exhibition and taken over six years, when Robert recorded Operation Hunger, were not exhibited a few months earlier while he was alive.

 

He became a professional and a writer in the mid 1950s.

 

In the 1970s he had an exhibition for the Black Sash called Who Cares and in the 1980s another called Death of Sophiatown.

 

One of his prints is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, part of photographer Bill Brandt's The Land exhibition.

 

Earnest Cole dedicated his House of Bondage to Robertson.

 

According to his friend Michael Goldblatt, Robertson's real love was landscape. He used the zone thee system developed by Ansel Adam and Fred Archer, in which numbers or zones from 0 to 10 are given different brightness value, with 0 representing black, 5 middle grey and 10 pure white.

 

The result is a particular clarity where subjects that are light are shown as light and dark subjects as dark.

 

Operation Hunger was made up of 10 organisations that merged as a response to the drought in Kwazulu Natal in the 1980s.

 

Although the accompanying panels provide a basic context for The Cold Choice, Pictures of a South Africa that provide  a fascinating in-depth account of Operation Hunger through his photographs and his keen insights expressed in the text.

 

Operation Hunger was according to Ina Perlman, who was once its executive director, a feeding scheme that started as crisis intervention with the long-term solution lying in self help and development.

 

Dependency was discouraged and so was the idea of imposing on a community. In its place there need to be humility and the ability to listen. The aim was the working partnership with the community.

 

It is from Parlman's foreword to book that we get a sense of Robertson, the man. Perlman writes of Robertson's sensitivity, his caring and compassion, his anger at injustice and his joy when people took back their lives.

 

"I firmly believe that what we receive from people is what you bring them," Robertson said. "If you bring fear and suspicion, you will get anger and hatred. If you bring trust and human warmth, that is exactly what you will get back."

 

When Robertson begun the project he "expected to record suffering and injustice", of which there was lots, but what struck him most was "the resilience of the human spirit".

These images, against the back ground of apartheid, show precisely a range of suffering and resilience.

 

You will see images of Ndebele women with their beautifully crafted beadwork, a women sewing a dress, wire fence made at the clinic, and then bloated child with kwashiorkor in front of a well-feathered hen, two ill women sharing a bed in a shack an a malnourished child in a hospital bed with a wooden plaque above her head with the word hope in it. You will also find images of poor whites.

 

Robertson wrote of his love for the Great Karoo, which changed when set off to visit the "locations" of the Karoo towns with Operation Hunger; such was the effect of his six-year journey with the organisation.

 

Robertson also gives an example of how we are more inclined to be concerned with tragedies in other countries than those under our noses at home.

 

He writes how in the 1980s people in Johannesburg's northern suburbs were more concerned with Ethiopian famine when, a mere 200km north-east of Pretoria – in "the Transvaal, the richest province of the richest country in Africa" – children had kwashiorkor, pellagra and marasmus because of poor diets.

 

The exhibition, according to the curator Dudu Madonsela, may "serve as a tool to measure the achievements of the current government" and "engage those in authority in terms of delivering services to the redress the imbalances, suffering and injustice of the past".

 

Eleven years ago Robertson told Goldblatt he could not deal with the fact that the rural poor were no better off than when he had photographed them for Operation Hunger. This was one of the reasons why he left South Africa.

 

One wonders what images a photographer would come back with, 30 years later going into the areas visited by Operation Hunger in the 1980s.

 

Hopefully these would reflect what photographer Peter Magubane told Robertson he wanted to show in his photographs: "confident, determined and competent" people, and not a continuation of Parlman's concerns, which includes a lack of provision for the rural poor, the need for realistic land reform, and the danger of urbanisation been seen as a panacea for all that would leave the people worse off than before.