“Africa's First Woman Press Photographer”: Mabel Cetu's Photographs in Zonk!

Abstract

For years, researchers have been searching for photographs made by Mabel Cetu, who “was said to be the first Black South African woman photojournalist” (Siopis 2006: 10). Cetu was a Black woman who worked as a nurse for more than twenty-five years before she was trained as a photographer in 1956, eight years after the National Party took over South Africa's government and introduced apartheid—a system of institutionalized racial discrimination against people of color. She received her training at the monthly publication Zonk! African People's Pictorial, which was launched in 1949 as the country's first widely circulated magazine directed at a Black readership (Maingard 2020: 153). Perhaps because many magazines published their images uncredited at the time, it seems as if none of her images have been found, meaning that they have never been discussed in scholarly research.1 Critically examining Cetu's photographs printed in Zonk! in 1956 and 1957 and analyzing in how far she might have been able to subvert common representations of gender, I want to reveal gendered power structures determining the field of photography in 1950s South Africa.The search for Cetu's photographs can be understood as part of recent scholarly interest in female South African photographers working prior to 1994 (Newbury, Rizzo, and Thomas 2021; du Toit 2005; Corrigall 2018; Danilowitz 2005; Thomas 2018). It is interesting that, although most of these photographers, including Cetu, would probably not have considered their photographs as art, nearly all researchers concentrating on their works are art historians. While photographs had been displayed in a fine art context in South Africa from 1858 (Bull and Denfield 1970: 63), the 1950s photographs of Cetu and her contemporaries were only rediscovered in the late 1980s, when they started to circulate “as aestheticised images … [ascending from the] grainy pictures in magazines” (du Toit and Gordon 2016: 158). The recent interest in these women's photography can also be related to the efforts made in the field of humanities to broaden the canon and include more works by those groups that have historically been marginalized. For instance, the former director of the South African National Gallery, Marilyn Martin, claims that in South Africa's history of photography, Black women form “the most telling absences” (2001: 51). During the 1950s, when Cetu began working as a photographer, the field of photography in South Africa was largely dominated by men and White people. The artist Penny Siopis takes the example of the photographs of the notorious 1956 Women's March to point to the absence of women photographers covering the event (2006: 10). She claims that “Black women did not see photography as a viable profession. Those few chances to build a photographic career seemed limited to men, as witnessed in the photojournalism of Drum magazine of the fifties” (2006: 10).The lack of representation of Black women in the history of photography in South Africa is closely related to their nonexistence in or unavailability through archives. Pam Warne, the former curator of photography and new media at Iziko Museums, explains that “the paucity of research on both Black and White South African women photographers suggests that the lives of many female professionals and amateurs have thus far remained unrecorded, their work hidden in archives and lost” (2006: 15). This is also the case for Zonk!, which has very limited accessibility. Maingard highlights that, while both the British Library and the National Library of South Africa hold hard copies of the magazine, only the former makes the publication available on microfilm (2020: 156). She further argues that no resources for digitizing such publications exist in South Africa, noting that “large-scale digitization projects have tended to favour only certain parts of the world and privilege mainstream resources, particularly those located in or pertaining to the ‘global north’” (2020: 156). Warne points to the fact that “Mabel Cetu may not have been the only Black woman photographer working during the 1950s in an apparently exclusively male contingent of photographers at Drum and other magazines such as Zonk” (cited in Stemberger 2010: 55). She reasons that their work might just not have been documented, giving the example of Cetu, who is “not even listed by the Bailey Archives (which holds the photographic archives from Drum) as having worked for the magazine” (cited in Stemberger 2010: 55).The magazine Drum is prominent in recent scholarship on the history of photography in South Africa. While scholars often highlight the magazine's importance in employing numerous distinguished Black photographers from 1951, they also criticize Drum for its masculinist approach (Killingray and Roberts 1989: 205). For example, Clowes writes about far-reaching gender biases present in Drum as “images and texts produced by the magazine tended to reinforce male authority over women” (2008: 179). Walker claims that the magazine's “treatment of women was generally frivolous, stereotyping women as beauty queens, cover girls, and social ornaments” (1982: 149). Driver reveals that, aside from the monthly women's column, numerous texts published under women's names were actually written by male journalists (2005: 231). She argues that Drum's “shift from rural ‘past’ to urban ‘present’ was negotiated largely by means of belittling and damaging misrepresentations of women” (2005: 228). Yet, in the early years of Drum, examples of women's involvement in the photographic process can be found, such as the coming into existence of the famous investigative photo essay “Mr Drum Goes to Jail,” which was printed in Drum in March 1954. To gain access to the view of the prison courtyard, the Black photographer Robert “Bob” Gosani and the Black writer Arthur Maimane pretended to be working for the magazine editor's White secretary Deborah Duncan, who posed as a photographer (Newbury 2009: 133–34).While I do not want to deny the strong gender bias prevalent in many South African 1950s publications, I want to point toward Adichie's warning about the dangers of telling a single story: “The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story” (2009). What might be gained by searching for and writing about alternative stories indicating Black women's contribution to South Africa's history of photography is what Achebe termed “a balance of stories” (2000). This paper tries to contribute to such a balance through highlighting Cetu's story.Cetu, widely known as Sis May, was born at Viljoensdrift, Orange Free State, in 1910 or 1912.2 The daughter of a Methodist Church minister, Cetu and her family moved a lot during her childhood (Zonk! 1956b: 12). Having obtained her Junior Certificate at Amanzimtoti, Natal, in 1928, she qualified as a nurse at St. Monica's Home, Cape Town, in 1930.3 Subsequently, she worked at different clinics in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), New Brighton, Evaton, and Gqeberha, also after she married Russel Cetu and had her son Churchill (Zonk! 1956b: 12).4 Trained as a photographer in 1956, she first worked for Zonk!, the Golden City Post, and Drum and was later employed by the Eastern Province Herald and the SABC's Radio Bantu (Martin 2001: 51; Matyu 2005). Her house, which was located in the township called White Location, was frequented by “journalists, socialites, and intellectuals [who] gathered every weekend to raise elbows and discuss topical issues” and “her buxom figure and box camera were familiar at social functions” (Matyu 2005). Born into a religious family, Cetu was involved in Gqeberha's Christian community, where she acted as captain of the Ethiopian Church brigade and was a regular member of the church's choir (Zonk! 1956b: 12–13). Given that Christianity in Southern Africa in the early 1950s was often related to “the contexts of education and … the resulting social options for women,” being “less bound to missions than to a social network of independent evangelists and teachers,” it might have played a particular role for Cetu's biography (Rizzo 2005: 109). It can be said that Cetu led a life that was very unusual for a woman at that time, as it was characterized not only by a significantly high degree of education resulting in professional independence but also noticeable community commitment and numerous moves within South Africa.The country's government largely curtailed spatial freedom for the majority of its population throughout the twentieth century. It enforced racist legislation which assigned where people could live according to their ethnic classification, such as the Native Land Act (1913) or the Group Areas Act (1950). In contrast, Cetu interacted abundantly with people from across South Africa since her childhood. Her fluency in Afrikaans, Sesotho, and English helped her to establish and maintain the diverse social contacts that she cultivated on a professional and private basis (Matyu 2005, 2006; Singapi et al. 1979). Gbadegesin pondered how political commitment in the African context with aspirations such as pan-Africanism could be prompted through “geographic mobility and exposure to varied spaces and communities” (2014: 36). This might have impacted Cetu's political opinion-forming.Cetu became actively engaged in politics in 1978, when she became ward councillor for the Khayamnandi Town Council as part of the Black Local Authority (BLA) (Matyu 2005). This led to a halt of the social activities in her house “as people did not want to be associated with Tamsanqa Linda, the so-called mayor” (Matyu 2005). While there had not been major incidents of political violence in Gqeberha before 1984, the situation changed when the United Democratic Front (UDF) turned against the BLA and Linda (Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report 1998: 96). Matyu described the threats that accompanied Cetu's political engagement:Cetu died five years later in KwaDwesi, where she had moved to be near her adopted daughter Poppy (Matyu 2005). In honor of Cetu and despite some resistance from the Community Council, the Khayamnandi Town Council changed the name of White Location to Cetuville in 1978 (Matyu 2005; Editorial collective 1980: 7). Cetuville thus is one of the few public places in South Africa which refers to a female community leader.5 In my analysis of Cetu's photographs in Zonk!, I keep in mind her engagement with her community, scrutinizing what impact it might have had on her photographic practice.Published monthly between August 1949 and July 1964, Zonk! African People's Pictorial was the “first ‘mass circulation’ magazine aimed at African readers in South Africa” (Maingard 2020: 153). Being White-owned, the magazine complied with the “common formula in South Africa's printed media in the period 1931–1977” of “White ownership—Black readers” (Johnson 1991: 37). Furthermore, Zonk! was “the first South African magazine— White or Black—to make photojournalism rather than text its prime focus” (Manoim 1983: 63). Manoim writes that this was due to the magazine's first White staff, who believed that “the poorly educated—even illiterate—township workers would appreciate pictures more than words” (1983: 66). Hence, Zonk! placed great importance on photography, being the first Black magazine to use “elaborate photo-cropping techniques like deep-etches and overlaps” (Manoim 1983: 109). Manoim explains that “pictures and picture themes were chosen increasingly for their visual impact (composition, print quality, enlargement possibilities, links with other pictures), rather than as accessories to the written word” (1983: 111).Even though Zonk! was a pioneer in many regards, the name of the magazine “seldom moves beyond the footnotes” (Manoim 1983: 62). Instead, Drum magazine, which was founded two years after Zonk!, is remembered and researched to a much greater extent. Feyder states that Drum “has tended to eclipse the existence of Zonk! in present-day collective memory, having successfully marketed its heritage value” (2014: 227). This might explain why, while scholarship on the representation of women in 1950s magazines in South Africa exists, these accounts focus solely on Drum, not mentioning Zonk! at all (Johnson 2009; Driver 2005).Zonk! was also the first publication to employ a “woman to edit a Black magazine” (Manoim 1983: 70). However, having started as Zonk!'s editor in 1951, Janet Eliza Hasted only worked in this position for a few months before photographic editor John Lee became Zonk!'s general editor (Manoim 1983: 70). Again, this appointment as “photographic editor” hints at the importance of imagery for the publication. Thus, Cetu was not the first female employee of the magazine. Neither was she the first photographer trained by and for Zonk!. As there were few Black South African journalists in 1949, the Zonk! editors trained their own photographers from the beginning. Lee, the photographic editor at the time, described:Based on their success in teaching its own staff, Zonk! wrote in 1952 that “this experiment has encouraged us to extend this training to as many readers as possible, by publishing monthly notes, hints, and news about photography” (Zonk! 1952: 24). Thereby, Zonk! democratized some of its knowledge about photography. How far the readership could apply this information remains open to question, given the cost connected to owning a camera.Zonk! advertised its policy as absolutely nonpolitical (Manoim 1983: 181). Manoim, however, argues that the magazine was never neutral, because it advocated modernity, furthering the ideal of the “urban Black middle-class” (1983: 182). Still, Manoim explains that these were empty beliefs because Zonk! offered neither comprehensive analyses of the problems nor suitable solutions (1983: 182). Publicly, the magazine reported on a political South African event once when documenting the Sharpeville massacre (Manoim 1983: 218–20). In addition, Zonk! addressed political issues when documenting events outside of the country (Manoim 1983: 184). Manoim asserts that when Zonk! addressed political issues in these rare instances, “it showed itself cautiously conservative” (1983: 184). Moreover, during the last months of Zonk!'s existence, “under the control of a pro-apartheid publishing house, it was used unashamedly to propagate Government views” (Manoim 1983: 186).While the magazine declared itself nonpolitical, Cetu herself was politically engaged. This might have to do with her involvement with the township of New Brighton, where she worked for several years and which Drum's editor Anthony Sampson described as “the most politically active township in South Africa” (1956: 254). Not only was Cetu engaged in politics, but her family was also, as the imprisonment of her son Churchill shows.6 The surveillance of Cetu's house and the visits by the police's Security Branch resulting from her son's arrest made Cetu feel so unsafe that she asked Matyu to stay with her (Matyu 2005). Given the timing of Cetu's training by Zonk!, it's worth reevaluating the apparent contrast of political attitudes on the part of the magazine and Cetu.Cetu's appearance in Zonk! occurred during a highly charged time of women's political unrest. In 1952, the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act was passed. A far-reaching influx control measure, the Act stated that all Black women and men had to carry reference books with personal details with them at all times. Yet only in 1956 did the state start “to implement the law and issue these documents to Black women” (Arnold 2005: 6). As a consequence, newspapers and magazines were filled with discussions about pass laws for women, the anti-pass campaign, and questions about women's rights (Walker 1982: 190). For instance, Drum stated in January 1956 that “Will Our Women Carry Passes?” was “the very big question of the year” (Walker 1982: 190). The 1954-launched Federation of South African Women estimated that between January and July 1956, 50,000 women protested against the pass laws in thirty-eight demonstrations taking place in thirty different cities, Gqeberha— Cetu's hometown—among them (Walker 1982: 193). The culmination of the protests took place on August 9, 1956, in form of a march through Pretoria to the Union Buildings, where estimates of participating women reach up to 20,000 (Walker 1982: 195).The euphoria that must have followed this event among all those fighting for freedom and equality started to deflate just three months later. In November 1956, about 1,000 women and some men who protested against “the arrival of the reference book units were baton-charged by the police. The crowd resorted to stoning, the police opened fire, and two Africans were shot dead. Six police and two other Africans were wounded in the confrontation” (Walker 1982: 199). Only one month later, 156 leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle were detained. Among them were some of the main female figures behind the Women's March, such as Lilian Ngoyi and Helen Joseph, who were later charged before the court during the famous four-and-a-half years-long Treason Trial (Walker 1982: 199–200). It might have been in this short timeframe of euphoria following the Women's March that Zonk!'s editors took the decision to train Cetu as the first Black woman photojournalist. One could therefore read Cetu's training and her following prominence in the publication's pages as a political move on the part of the magazine, taking a stance in favor of the gendered and raced protests for freedom that pervaded South African society at the time.The first mention of Cetu in Zonk! was big news. The front page of the October 1956 issue not only showed her in the act of photographing but also announced in bold letters: “First African Woman Press Photographer” (Fig. 1). The cover image is a photo collage, combining four different photographs, graphic elements, and the lettering “Top of the World.” The bottom of the cover picture shows the graphic depiction of a skyline by night. Like a beam of light disappearing in the night sky, lines fan out from bottom left to the top right of the image. This widening beam of light serves as the backdrop for three photographs showing the same young woman in different dancing positions. She wears short hair, earrings, lipstick, a short, patterned dress, and high-heeled peep-toe shoes. Turning while dancing, the young woman causes her dress to fly up to her waist. On the biggest photograph she even seems to hold her dress up with one hand, smiling widely at the spectator, who can now look at her bright underpants. Next to this depiction, another photograph is montaged into the cover picture. It shows an older woman who holds a camera to her face. Only her upper body is visible, showing that the photographer is wearing a much more discreet outfit, consisting of a long-sleeved sweater, a ring on her left ring finger, large earrings, and a headscarf. Her photograph seems to be mounted slightly tilted, presumably to direct the focus of the camera and thus the dynamics of the visual axes in the picture to a certain point: the bright underpants of the young woman.Although this reference to same-sex desires cannot be denied, the photomontage could also be read as a testimony to the magazine's “male gaze.” according to which the camera lens of the photographer, in addition to the headlights and the enlarging images, would only be another means of directing the viewing regime onto the young woman's underpants. As was custom in the magazine, the contents page provides further information about the cover picture:This presentation illustrates not only the magazine's emphasis on layout, but also its marketing strategy, consisting of repeatedly reminding its readers of its accomplishments (Manoim 1983: 123). This strategy was applied in the article on Cetu's photography training, which was publicized in the heading “FIRST AGAIN! Zonk Trains Africa's First Woman Press Photographer” and in the article stating all the “firsts” the magazine accomplished so far (Zonk! 1956b: 11). In this list, Cetu's photography training becomes just one more of Zonk!'s good deeds and a further step in its pursuit of supporting and reporting on the “progress” of Black South Africans.7The report on Cetu's instruction encompasses three full pages. Photographs take up at least half of the space. On the first page is a large-scale portrait depicting Cetu from upfront, with part of her head behind the camera taking pictures (Fig. 2). The second and third page show seven smaller pictures of Cetu (Figs. 3–4). Most of these images illustrate how she learned to photograph in the darkroom and on her first assignments. The text on the first page explains how Cetu's photography instruction came about:This description, although supposedly written objectively, reveals some of the gendered power structures inscribed in the magazine. For instance, while Benn Lindeque is described as “Mr. Lindeque,” Mabel Cetu is only referred to by her first name. This has a patronizing effect, especially in the context of South Africa, where for decades Black working women, such as domestic workers, had only been called by English-substitute first names instead of their actual names (Coombes 2003: 273).While the first part of the article explains the photography training, the second part describes Cetu's biography, outlining her career as a midwife as well as her personal interests. Again, Zonk!'s editors use the strategy of presenting quality through quantity when Cetu is described as a “Woman of Many Parts— Press Photographer; Midwife; Singer; Captain of Church Brigade.” While the entire article seems to be inscribed to sensationalism, this becomes particularly evident in the fact that the editors chose only to print the following sentence in capital letters: “Mabel's most unusual nursing experience was when she delivered Siamese twins in Grahamstown.”8 The focus on sensationalist reportage was common in South African publications of the 1950s, such as Drum or the Golden City Post (Newbury 2009: 103–153; Rabkin 1975: 80; Switzer and Switzer 1979: 9). The exclamation mark of its name already indicated that Zonk! was “the first of a new breed of magazines that saw all of life in exclamatory phrases” (Manoim 1983: 69). Therefore, the spectacle can be viewed as the pivotal point and frame from which to consider not only this article but also the general tenor of numerous publications at that time.Another important framing of the article consists of the gendered advertisement printed next to it. While the entire page preceding the article on Cetu is devoted to the promotion of a clothing ordering company for men, two products targeted at women—bleached calico and Juno-Junipah salts—are offered for sale on the same page that shows Cetu at her photography training (Fig. 3). Manoim states that advertisement in Zonk! was predominantly targeted at men until the later part of the 1950s (1983: 122). He offers three reasons for this bias: the predominance of men in urban areas; many women's occupations as domestic servants, which obliged them to wear uniforms; and patriarchal family structures whereby social rank was predominantly represented by men (1983: 134). Thus, the articles and advertisements of Zonk! reflect the gendered power structures that shaped South African consumer society in the 1950s. How these structures are expressed in Cetu's own photographic reports is the focus of the following analysis.While the October 1956 issue of Zonk! mainly printed photographs of Cetu, the following issues printed images by her. All of the twenty-eight photographs credited to Cetu in Zonk!'s 1956 and 1957 issues revolve around her assignment to produce “full pictorial reports on Port Elizabeth” (Zonk! 1956b: 11).9 Judging from the resulting pictures, which portray the urban Black working class, Cetu was mainly asked to cover minor events and scenes of everyday life in her hometown. Her photographs can be assigned to two types: portraits staged for the camera and snapshots that capture people in action. Cetu's group portraits show families, sport teams, denominations, scoutmasters, recent matriculants, as well as women with their newborns and hospital staff. When looking at the photographs taken by Cetu, two things become apparent. First, a great number of the people depicted wear formal or uniformlike attire. Second, the photographs mainly show the sitters from their hips upwards. This is reinforced by the fact that people are often shown in sitting positions, drawing the focus on their upper body parts.The prevalence of such static photographs might be attributed not only to Cetu's status as a novice photographer (as it is easier to capture people sitting than moving) but also to South Africa's media landscape, which only in the 1950s began to include photographs other than the usually motionless “traditional newspaper pictures” (Schadeberg cited in Newbury 2009: 115). This shift was largely caused by the arrival of the young German immigrant Jürgen Schadeberg, who started working at Drum and mentoring several young Black photographers whose work is now known worldwide, such as Ernest Cole, Peter Magubane, and Gosani (Newbury 2009: 115). According to Newbury, their mid-1950s work at Drum exemplifies the emergence of humanist photographic essays that address pressing social issues in South Africa (2009: 142–47). Their serial documentary images—often action snapshots—showcased scenes of violence and poverty and covered political events.This is quite different in the two photo-features credited to Cetu in the 1957 issues of Zonk!, though these were probably not the only photographic essays taken by Cetu, given the inconsistent approach of Zonk! and other magazines to crediting photographers. One feature documented a story on the Black painter Mhlobo Malgas, whose work was included in a 2019 exhibition at the Standard Bank Gallery, linking Cetu's photographs to the sphere of art, where they were remembered many years later (Sassen 2019; Mdluli, Mda, and Standard Bank Centre Art Gallery 2019).10 The other feature covered a mass baptism by the famous bishop Limba. Both photographic essays were inscribed into the prevalent patriarchal power structures of the time. While the cover story on Malgas shows the male as active creator looking and the female as passive sitter being looked at, the prominence of the Bantu Church of Christ, which “reproduced existing gender relations of a patriarchal society,” more confirmed than unsettled existing power structures (Baines 1992: 113–14).11 In contrast to the works of her male contemporaries at Drum, Cetu's photo-features in Zonk! are not only closely linked to her persona but also present events of less social urgency accompanied by more static imagery.Aside from the two magazines' distinct agendas, this might be explained by the photographers' different personalities. Cole, Magubane, and Gosani started working at Drum when they were about 20 years old and were able to dedicate most of their time to photography (Newbury 2009: 166, 176–77). Cetu, on the contrary, learned how to photograph in her mid-forties and continued working as a nurse, sustaining her family's income. Furthermore, for Cole's photographic practice, for instance, his ability to go unnoticed in groups of people and his reclassification as “Coloured” —providing him with additional freedom of movement—were advantages which a middle-aged, sturdy Black woman did not have (Schadeberg 2006). Different external conditions apparently impacted the subject matter of the photographers. Yet, to what extent are the practitioners' different personalities reflected in their approaches to photographing gendered subjects and how far can the appearance of their images in the magazines be attributed to their own or the editors' choices?Among the individual portraits Cetu took for the 1956 and 1957 issues of Zonk!, the only two depictions of individual women stand out. These photographs, which were included on Cetu's “Reports from P.E.” page, show full-body pictures of young Black women in fashionable clothing who are obviously posing for the camera. The photograph of “18-year-old Dorothy Kwatsa, of Cape Town, ‘snapped’ during a visit to Port Elizabeth” shows the subject standing in the sun on an asphalt street leaning against a large, light-colored car (Zonk! 1957a: 19; Fig. 5). While her features can only be identified vaguely due to strong shadows in her face, her outfit, consisting of a sun hat, a light blouse, high-rise dark trousers, and sandals, is clearly visible to the viewer. This outfit was probably considered particularly modern, because women usually did not wear trousers in the 1950s (Feyder 2014: 250). The young woman's stylish appearance is further enhanced through the urban setting where she was photographed. The title confirms her status as a modern, mobile woman. The other individually photographed woman is “Miss Virginia Magonga,” whose full-body portrait seems to have been taken indoors in front of a dark curtain (Zonk! 1957b: 31; Fig. 6). Wearing what appears to be a swimsuit, she confidently places her left hand on her hip while holding a light cloth with her right arm and smiling. Depicted in standing positions, the two young women allow the viewer to contemplate not only their clothing but also their bodily attributes. In fact, only the portraits of these two women include the subject's legs in full length, whereas not one of the seven portraits of a man includes his legs (Figs. 7–9). The full-body format enables spectators to inspect the outfits of the women. In contrast, in most of the individual portraits of men the subjects wear suits. However, it sh