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A Young Photographer Makes a Family Tree about South Africa
Through his vivid landscapes and portraits, Lindokuhle Sobekwa portrays the harsh poetry of rural life in the country’s Eastern Cape.
A vast and variegated holiday destination, a bottomless repository of cheap Black labor, and a site of bitterly fought wars of resistance against colonial dispossession—South Africa’s Eastern Cape is as beautiful as it is unknowable. The province occupies the moodiest quarter of the country’s coastline and stretches into the semiarid escarpment and the southern edge of the Drakensberg mountain range. Its landscape is at parts lush, rugged, pristine, and broken.
In the Johannesburg-based photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s newest series Ezilalini (The Country) (2020–ongoing), the elements guide a search for wholeness. The terrain—misty, parched, and undulating—offers more vestiges and apparitions than signposts. Sobekwa likens the segue into this project, in which he travels between the township of Thokoza, where he grew up, and his parents’ rural homesteads, to “digging a hole I’m afraid to look into.” This outsiderness is writ large over many of the photographs. It is visible in the scraps of land overused to the point of collapse, in the somnambulism of everyday routines that overburden women, and in an idleness in young men interrupted only by the gendered enactment of ceremonial roles.
Sobekwa began making frequent trips to the Eastern Cape for an earlier series on the troubled life of his late elder sister. Even as he mapped his family tree, an endeavor to which he gives repetitious, totemic expression throughout Ezilalini, his obsession was undergirded by a desire to think of home in less regimented ways. “It’s not only about my family, it’s a family tree about South Africa,” he explains. “The history, the migration, my family’s legacy with mines. I almost worked in the mines myself. A lot of people can relate to that.”
Sobekwa’s work provides the space for personal contemplation and the wider political reflection required in a nation as young as South Africa.
Trees, plant life, and graves anchor this trip through the countryside. One of the project’s more evocative images, made in Tsomo, depicts his mother, shoulders covered and back to the camera, paying respects to her daughter and brother. Her reverence, split between two graves, recalls Sobekwa’s struggle to reconcile the maternal and paternal branches of his family tree. Viewing the series, we flit between Tsomo, his mother’s homestead, and Qumbu, 120 miles northeast, where his father was raised. Each location holds sacred family folklore: how his grandmother went into labor on a hilly outcrop in Tsomo, earning his mother the name Nontaba, meaning “child of the mountain.”
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In all these images, Sobekwa invites the harshness of rural life to stare at us in poetic ways, even as some of his subjects avert their gazes. The posed images do not mask the tensions, both personal and societal, arising in the wake of his search. In one image made in Qumbu, a church in which Sobekwa’s father married his first wife stands gutted after a fire. In another, Sobekwa photographs a woman named Gogo Lucy Zwane as she inhales the scent of hollyhocks from a garden she planted as a symbol of peace, as apartheid’s secret agents fueled political violence. On the same ground where photojournalists once recorded grim scenes, Sobekwa authors a new myth, one that recasts the killing fields of Thokoza as dreamy, fragile panoramas of serenity.
Sobekwa’s mother visiting the family’s ancestral graveyard, Tsomo, Eastern Cape, 2020
Sobekwa was introduced to photography through Of Soul and Joy, a workshop in Johannesburg’s East Rand, in 2012, as a high school student. Given the speed at which he developed his talents, Sobekwa’s dilemma would be honing a personal style from the wide pool of influences at his disposal. “My early work says a lot about the people that inspired me, like Ernest Cole, Santu Mofokeng, Peter Magubane, David Goldblatt,” he states. “I’m lucky that I discovered that passion early on, and I took it seriously.”
He remembers being reduced to tears on his first encounter with Cole’s 1967 photobook House of Bondage, and his ego being shattered by Mofokeng, who simply told Sobekwa to read in order to frame his work on his own terms. Sobekwa’s oeuvre is fittingly laden with homage. But the vulnerability with which he approaches his subject matter reveals a generational encumberment—a fitful, perhaps sacrificial, desire to get to grips with the cumulative horrors of a society coming undone. In this pursuit, the twenty-eight-year-old Sobekwa has turned to both the rich canon of his home country and the work of others who have continued to challenge the constraints of documentary photography. The power of a work like Ezilalini is that it provides the space for both personal contemplation and the difficult, wider political reflection required in a nation as young as South Africa.
© the artist/Magnum Photos
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 254, “Counter Histories,” produced in collaboration with Magnum Foundation.