Fables of death: Law, race and representations of African mine workers in Umteteli Wa Bantu in the 1920s

Abstract

This article is an attempt to understand the relationship between racist regimes and the representational strategies that went into the insertion of black bodies into specified economies of labour in early twentieth century South Africa. I take as my primary focus the cartoon narratives depicting African mine workers in the newspaper Umteteli Wa Bantu in the 1920s. The pictorial narratives constructed by the cartoons are instructive for they indicate an instance in which the transformation of the black body into a moral sign was tied to the larger terrain of the political economy.