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.

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Notes

1. While there are important ethical questions regarding the reproduction of postmortem photographs in the context of colonial violence, this article contends that these images in fact change that context. In addition, Muafangejo's linocut in Figure 8 cannot be understood without reference to them. Finally, unresolved questions concerning Mandume's remains continue to be raised in both Angola and Namibia today, leading to ongoing requests for these images to be made selectively available.

2. Ingold, Lines, 50; and Hayes, “Land of Goshen,” 225.

3. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 1.

4. Reid, “Past and Presentism,” 136.

5. Stoler, Imperial Debris.

6. Hangula, International Boundary.

7. Kracauer, History, 144.

8. Hirsch and Spitzer, Group Photos, 19.

9. Ibid., 65.

10. Union Government, Report on a Tour.

11. Hirsch and Spitzer, Group Photos, 7.

12. Ryan, The Cartographic Eye, 104.

13. Ingold, Lines, 160.

14. Khosravi, “Borders.”

15. The borderline issue was resolved in 1926 with Portuguese claims to the southern line of the Neutral Zone acknowledged, and renegotiation of limited water rights in 1928. Vigne, “The Moveable Frontier,” 300.

16. National Archives of Namibia, Administrator Windhoek — Secretary for Defence, Cape Town, 8 March 1916.

17. See National Archives of Namibia, RCO 10/1916/1 (Vol 2) re Mandume, Neutral Zone, Boundary, etc. File No 2, 1 November 1916.

18. De Jager’s grandson Alwyn P. Smit writes: ‘I am currently in possession of an old Kodak concertina-type sliding camera that he (Colonel de Jager] may have used for this purpose, but it could also be that it was a camera he used when he joined the troops in 1915 as commander of the army. … It is impossible for me to know whether the camera was purchased by him personally and whether it was issued to him by the South African or Union Force when he was transferred from Tempe outside Bloemfontein to Windhoek. Of course, he should have had it in his possession at the beginning of his service in Windhoek during the end of the South West Africa Campaign of 1915 and/or the Ovamboland expedition of 1917’ Given that de Jager appears in several photographs in the album, it is unlikely that this particular camera was used. Smit, “Verdeelde lojaliteite.”

19. Union of South Africa, Report on the Conduct, 18.

20. See Thompson, “Bambatha after Mome?” 23–48. These photos are now embargoed at Campbell Collections, University of KwaZulu-Natal.

21. See note 18 above.

22. I am grateful to Alwyn P. Smit for sharing his unpublished memoir about de Jager which includes these photographs. The Manning album is held at the Killie Campbell Collections of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

23. This observation is derived from Smit, “Verdeelde lojaliteite.”

24. Paoletti, Portrait and Place, 70.

25. Edwards, Photographs, 94.

26. Timm, “Transpositions.”

27. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, 23–24.

28. Edwards, Photographs, 9.

29. Pinney, “Notes from the Surface of the Image,” 202.

30. Ibid., 202–3.

31. Ibid., 208.

32. Jay, Downcast Eyes, 47.

33. See note 30 above.

34. Ibid., 219.

35. Trachtenberg, “Albums of War,” 1.

36. Paoletti, Portrait and Place, 24, 95.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation [SARChI Unique Grant No 98911].

Notes on contributors

Patricia Hayes

Patricia Hayes is National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and currently holds a FIAS (French Institutes for Advanced Study) fellowship at IEA-Nantes (2023-24). She is co-editor of Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (2019), the special issue of the journal Kronos 46 (2020) on ‘Other Lives of the Image,’ and Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa (2021).