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

Abstract

| african arts AUTUMN 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 3 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 “Africa’s First Woman Press Photographer” Mabel Cetu’s Photographs in Zonk!