Then and Now at the Mariannhill Mission in KwaZulu-Natal: Repeating a Photograph in/as the Contact Zone.
Christoph Rippe
In the year 1899, the Rijks Ethnographisch Museum of Leiden acquired an extensive set of “ethnographic” photographs from the catholic mission station Mariannhill in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The missionaries took photographs of various kinds and themes, among these many of Black South Africans, who lived close to their mission stations. For these photographs Europeans provided a curious market. The ethnological museum in Leiden, one customer among many, was the predecessor of Leiden’s current Museum Volkenkunde [Ethnological Museum of Leiden].
In order to take photographs, Missionaries made use of their close, complex and prolonged relationships with the people they were attempting to proselytise. They often created a wide scope of different photographic themes, depicting their protégés in their “natural state”, as well as after the efforts of conversion, when the latter embraced the signs of civilisation in the form of clothing and European material culture. Eventually, these images were often indiscriminately used in mission publications and propaganda, in anthropological literature, as well as in more popular accounts of far away places and people.
Originally, the Mariannhill Mission station was founded as a Trappist Monastery in 1882, close to the city of Pinetown. Along with many of its more than twenty sub mission stations all over KwaZulu-Natal, the main settlement still exists today. The by now independent mission congregation has expanded its presence to many places worldwide, such as Papua New Guinea and the USA.
Among the purchased set in 1899 was a photograph that shows the only situation in the collection where Black South Africans and European missionaries have contact on a mission premises: A scene that takes place at some point in the early 1890s, in front of the mission’s mill and workshop building, a few miles south of the monastery.
Several women, supposedly belonging to the amaNganga community close to the city of Pinetown, bring their mealies (corn), to have them ground by the missionaries. Locals remember that the ground corn was either used for own needs, or traded against other goods. The mission’s mill was a social space where Africans would interact with Europeans in the hinterland of the mission’s area of influence. It was a harbinger for the exchange of ideas and practices that was probably easier and less formal to approach than the actual monastery, and therefore served as a kind of “contact zone”.
Another photograph, taken in 2007 shows the present state of the mill-building from the very same perspective as the old photograph. We witness traces of the past use, architectural reconstructions and of course the advance of color.
The current proprietor of the building is a NGO called “Street-Wise”, a “rehabilitation shelter” for boys between seven and fourteen, “who can not be returned home easily”.
Obviously, there are many gaps between the two photographs and their content, which can bring up questions concerning what has happened in the more than one hundred years in between. At the same time, these photographs - especially in their opposition - can serve as stimuli to fill in these gaps.
Mary Louise Pratt (1992) and James Clifford (1997) have framed the concept of the “contact zone” in different terms; the first as specific historical spaces where contacts between representatives of colonisers and colonised took place; the latter as a museum space where “cultures” are collected, can meet, clash, and be experienced. But also photographs can function as contact zones, and are, specifically in the present case, at the same time substantially related to the former two kinds of contact zones:
The image has been taken in a certain social field of encounter itself; a contact zone in the sense of Pratt, and was consequently preserved by ethnological museums, as described as a second kind of contact zone by Clifford. The third kind of contact zone, in the form of a photograph, provides a historical space where people can engage communally with each other and share and discuss ideas on the past. A fourth layer of contact zone is of course in various ways provided by this very instance of presentation, the Internet. Several particular initiatives, since the advance of Wikipedia, employ the potentials for online-community-building, interactivity and knowledge exchange.
See for example wiki Ulwazi.
- Clifford, James (1997). Routes - Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Pratt, Mary Louise (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.
- Pratt, Mary Louise (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.
