On Monday, October 9th, I'm taking Life back to Africa. It's been away since 1972, when it went out of business. For the previous 36 years, however, it had been America's most important source of visual information about the world and that world most certainly included Africa -- for good and for ill. I'm giving the opening address at the conference, 'Inhabiting the Frame: Documentary & Subjectivity in the Anti|Post|Colonial Visual Archive, at the University of Johannesburg's Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre." (Please don't ask me to explain that title.) The conference is one of the events surrounding "Priya Ramrakha: A Pan-African Perspective, 1950-1968," an important exhibition devoted to a pioneering photojournalist. I wrote about Ramrakha, here.
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Life paid attention to Africa. Not as much as it paid to America or Europe or the Soviet Union, but it reported on Africa a lot often more than you might expect. And that mattered. The pictures of Africa in Americans heads -- the pictures that they thought with -- came to a large extent from Life.
In the post-World War II era, Life dominated the media landscape like no magazine before or since. In a time before TV news, tens of millions of Americans saw it as their primary source of visual information about the world, near and far. Its photographers were at the very top of the profession, and they and their editors delivered images memorable and often stunning images week after week.
Life was far from fhe only place that Americans learned about Africa. They picked up tidbits of information and an endless supply of mostly demeaning and inaccurate stereotypes from movies such as the Tarzan series and The African Queen and from novels and short stories by the likes of Rider Haggard and Ernest Hemingway. They learned some anthropology (and acquired still more stereotypes) from National Geographic.
But Life had an authority and reputation for accuracy that no movie or work of fiction could match. And, unlike National Geographic, it was concerned with newsworthy events and issues of pressing contemporary importance.
So when Life pictured Africa and spoke about it, as it did, for instance, in a 1953 special issue that was entirely devoted to the continent, what it showed and what it said powerfully influenced the thinking of the American public and policy-makers as well.
Three fundamental realities shaped Life's perspective on Africa, one that it shared with government officials and, for that matter, with most white Americans. The first two were the ever strengthening civil rights movement in the United States and the rising anti-colonial struggles in Africa, both of which aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The third was the Cold War. The tensions and anxieties that these realities generated are clearly visible in Life's photos and reporting.
White Americans, including magazine editors and photographers, couldn't think about Africa without thinking about black Americans. From the country's birth, white people had defined themselves and their nation against black people, the racial other. Free vs. slave. Those with rights vs. those without. Jim Crow segregation followed enslavement and, in the post-war period, it was still alive and well.
Yet white Americans were all too aware of the steady cresendo of African American resistance to white supremacy that threatened to overturn the social and political arrangements to which they were accustomed. Many whites weren't sure they wanted that to happen. Racial anxieties were the order of the day, and it's no surprise that they were projected onto black people overseas.
In Africa the central tensions also had to do with white supremacy and resistance to it. Cold War competition with the Soviet Union complicated Amerian reponses to the challenges that African nationalism presented to the colonial empires of Britian, France, Belgium, and Portugal, four of America's closest allies. Race and geopolitics were thoroughly mixed.
These tensions and anxieties shaped Life's Africa coverage. It could not condemn any but the most flagrant injustices of colonialism nor whole-heartedly support African independence because it could not fully embrace the proposition that blacks were fully equal to whites. As a result racist stereotypes and caricatures mixed with grudging respect for selected antilcolonial causes. And almost always there was a lingering distrust of African nationalists, who seemed vulnerable to the lure of communism and all too eager to escape European tutelage.
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