LINES AND BETRAYALS: THE COLONIAL OCCUPATION OF THE KWANYAMA KINGDOM ON THE ANGOLA/NAMIBIA BORDER AND POSTMORTEM PHOTOGRAPHS OF MANDUME YA NDEMUFAYO (1917)

Abstract

A zone of disputed colonial cartographies, the Cuvelai floodplain in southern Angola and northern Namibia (formerly German South West Africa) was belatedly occupied during World War 1 by a Portuguese army and South African officials. A Neutral Zone was established along the disputed border and the Kwanyama king Mandume forced to reside south of the contested and straight abstract lines that constituted the unstable border. Ongoing disorder led Mandume to exercise authority in Angolan territory. Anxiety about the revival of African power led to a South African military expedition to remove the king in 1917. A significant number of photographs were produced of Mandume’s dead body on the battlefield. Close examination suggests an unsettling series of documented actions, where the apparent motive was an incontrovertible identification shot of the dead king. However the prone body defeated the perspectival construction of the camera box. The buckling of linear perspective by the lifeless body required soldiers to manhandle Mandume. One such photograph prompted a radical remediation by the Namibian artist John Muafangejo. The limits of the camera, its structural ambivalence, produced a polarised reinterpretation that forcibly confronts the colonial metanarrative with the spectre of its own border violence.