History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 34-51 © Wesleyan University 2009 ISSN: 0018-2656 SANTU MOFOKENG, PHOTOGRAPHS: “THE VIOLENCE IS IN THE KNOWING” PATRICIA HAyES ABSTRACT Born in 1956, Santu Mofokeng formed part of the Afrapix Collective that engaged in ex- posé and documentary photography of anti-apartheid resistance and social conditions dur- ing the 1980s in South Africa. However, Mofokeng was an increasingly important internal critic of mainstream photojournalism, and of the ways black South Africans were repre- sented in the bigger international picture economy during the political struggle. Eschewing scenes of violence and the third-party view of white-on-black brutality in particular, he began his profound explorations of the everyday and spiritual dimensions of African life, both in the city and in the countryside. His formal techniques favor “ictions” that contain smoke, mist, and other matters and techniques that occlude rather than expose. Using an- gularity and ambivalence, he also ruptures realist expectations and allows space for the uncanny and the supernatural. He works with the notion of seriti (a northern seSotho term encompassing aura, shadow, power, essence, and many other things). The essay follows strands in Mofokeng’s writings and statements in relation to certain of his photographs, most recently repositioned in the substantial 2007 exhibition Invoice, to argue that he has pushed for a desecularization and Africanization of photography from the 1980s to the present. In more recent work the scourge of apartheid has been replaced by the HIV/AIDS virus, a mutation of nature, exacerbating the spiritual insecurities of many people in post- apartheid South Africa. The essay concludes that Mofokeng’s work poses a critique of the parallel paradigms of Marxist-inluenced social history and documentary photography in 1980s South Africa, both still highly inluential, by attempting to reinsert aura (seriti) into photography and by highlighting what secular Marxism has concealed and proscribed. Keywords: Africanization, apartheid, documentary, everyday, secular, spirituality, struggle, violence Born in 1956, South African photographer Santu Mofokeng talks about the lim- ited number of images surrounding people when he was growing up in Soweto, compared to the present day in South Africa. In particular, he refers to “snowy television,” the white fuzz on the black-and-white television when transmission broke down, that was somehow for him a memorable image. Fellow South Af- rican photographer David Goldblatt has described the photograph as a very at- tenuated thing. 1 I am interested in the way Mofokeng attenuates the photograph much further. Even in the 1980s, while his Afrapix colleagues were chasing police and protests and producing sharp realist images of unassailable clarity for local 1. Video footage, David Goldblatt Retrospective, Johannesburg Art Gallery, August 17–October 31, 2005.