Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness

Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness

The series was selected for the archive by the curator Renée Mussai, who wrote the accompanying text and described the work as a visionary mosaic of identities — an empire of selves. Each photograph, in her reading, depicts a self in dialogue with countless others: implicitly gendered, culturally complex and historically grounded black bodies, invited into a conversation with the viewer rather than presented to one.

Somnyama Ngonyama is isiZulu for hail the dark lioness. In the series, ready-made objects and found materials are transformed into culturally loaded props. Scouring pads and latex gloves address domestic servitude and racial inequality while alluding to sexual politics and the constraints of gendered identity. Rubber tyres, electrical cords and cable ties reference social brutality and capitalist exploitation, and foreground the position of workers from maids to miners. Cowrie shells and beads point at Western fascination with exoticised representations of African cultures, and at the global economies of migration, commerce and labour. Some props comment on specific moments in South African history — the Marikana massacre of 2012, the 1956 Women's March on Pretoria — and on Muholi's own family background, including her mother's forty-two-year tenure as a maid for the same white South African family under apartheid.

Any fixed geopolitical reading is interrupted deliberately. A kimono or a giant bonsai enters the frame and the cultural boundary is transgressed again, which is how the series avoids becoming a catalogue of symbols.

A turn from documenting a community to entering the frame

Born in Umlazi, Durban, in 1972 and living in Johannesburg, Muholi is first and foremost a visual activist. She co-founded the Forum for the Empowerment of Women in 2002 and Inkanyiso, a platform for queer activist and visual media, in 2009. After studying advanced photography at Johannesburg's Market Photo Workshop she established herself internationally as one of the most committed practitioners working on the continent, documenting the lives of LGBTQI people in South Africa and beyond.

Somnyama Ngonyama marks a departure from that decade of photographing her community. Muholi becomes both image-maker and protagonist, and the resulting visual memoir — or archive of the self — opens a genre of socially engaged self-portraiture in which each portrait poses questions about social justice, human rights and contested representations of the black body.

Courage as the subject

Mussai's text returns repeatedly to one term. The portraits are unapologetic in their artistry and unafraid of the image archive they conjure; Muholi's gaze and the darkness of her skin become the focal point of an interrogation of beauty, desire and the daily navigation of racism and interlinked phobias. Drawing on personal experience and on global political events, the work offers reflections on black resistance, black insistence and black existence.

The conclusion Mussai reaches is that these photographs are essentially about courage — the courage to emerge, to resist, to persist, to see, to step in front of the camera and to face oneself. It is a reading worth recording as a reading: this entry documents a curator's selection, and the framing is part of what was published.

The curator-selection format itself deserves a note, because this entry works differently from the others in the archive. Most features here present a photographer's account of her own project; this one presents a body of work through the argument a curator built around it, and the two cannot be cleanly separated afterwards. Mussai's reading — the empire of selves, the dialogue with the image archive, the insistence on courage as the through-line — travelled with the series into its institutional life, shaping how Somnyama Ngonyama was hung, catalogued and written about. For photographers studying how careers are actually constructed, that is the lesson in this entry: at a certain scale, the advocate who frames the work publicly becomes part of its apparatus, and choosing that advocate is as consequential a decision as any made in the studio.