‘My mission,” Zanele Muholi has said, “is to re-write a Black queer and trans visual history of South Africa, for the world to know of our resistance and existence”. With photographs that range from small to colossal, this self-proclaimed “visual activist” captures people in their communities, people who have often been subjected to violence because of their sexuality. Muholi tells their marginalised stories.
Born in 1972, Muholi grew up in South Africa during apartheid, and was a young adult when the brutal system came to an end in 1994. This was meant to usher in a new era of political and social progress: the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa banned all discrimination on grounds of gender and sexuality. Ten years later, the country legalised same-sex marriage, the only one to do so in the entire African continent. Yet queer communities still face injustices daily, from abuse to much worse.
Muholi took up photography in their youth. “I was going through a rough period,” they once told the Guardian. “The camera was a tool through which I could speak about whatever was inside – the feelings, the pain, the personal experiences.” Weaving their stories into art history, placing them on museum walls for all to see, Muholi makes LGBTQ+ people visible so that “future generations will note that we were here”.
In 2006, Muholi sought to build a living archive for the queer community through Faces and Phases, a vast series that contains more than 500 photographs. It tells us about the individuals who are shaping this new South Africa – and also risking their lives by defiantly looking into Muholi’s lens and stating: “I am here and my story deserves to be told.”
Tinashe Wakapila, from Durban, features in the series, their Instagram bio describing them as “Poet, Civil Rights Activist, Feminist, Revolutionary Human, Model, Queer AF”. Muholi also photographed Lungile Cleo Dladla, from the township of Kwa-Thema, who in 2010 was raped by a man with a gun and subsequently diagnosed as HIV positive. “Just existing daily,” says Muholi, “is political in itself.”
In 2009, three years after same-sex marriage became legal, there was a sign of how far South Africa still had to go. Lulama Xingwana, minister of arts and culture, was criticised for walking out of an exhibition featuring Muholi’s photographs. Xingwana called the show “immoral, offensive and going against nation-building” and judged it a threat to children. How will discrimination end if the government, rather than driving positive change, chooses instead to condemn anything that raises awareness about the experience of LGBTQ+ people?
Muholi, at their exhibition at London’s Tate Modern in 2020, chose to leave gaps on the walls in the display of photographs from Faces and Phases. The decision seemed to echo the invisibility of these people – and speak to their loss, their death, through hate crimes. The gaps also suggested those yet to be photographed.
How long will it take for all people to feel safe – and heard – in this world? This is the question posed by Muholi’s work and it feels especially resonant this month as the World Cup kicks off in Qatar, where same-sex sexual activity is illegal. Khalid Salman, the country’s World Cup ambassador, recently called homosexuality “damage in the mind”. One prominent activist claimed that gay Qataris have been promised safety from torture in return for helping the authorities to track down other LGBTQ+ people in the country. Fans who hang LGBTQ+ flags in stadiums will be removed, apparently.
Echoing the response to the South African culture minister’s refusal of LGBTQ+ representation, James Cleverly, the British foreign secretary, was criticised for urging fans to be “respectful” of Qatar’s culture. Does Cleverly really want an idle acceptance of something so deeply unjust? This keeps the issue out of sight and such invisibility is damaging. It all makes Muholi’s growing archive feel more necessary than ever. One can only imagine what effect it would have on young queer people in Qatar to see brave, defiant faces proudly asserting their identities and telling the world their stories.
