10/11/2025
REVIEW by Matthew Krouse of Hlonipha Mokoena's The Nightwatchman on News24.
"The complexity of sitters’ experiences, while having their portraits taken, and in relation to their lived experiences, is provided by academic Hlonipha Mokoena in her book The Nightwatchman: Representing Black Men in Colonial Society. It’s a collection of seven extraordinary biographical explorations of men who were photographed in the late 19th century, and whose outlandish experiences under colonialism show individualism and fortitude, dressed up subversively in wacky sartorial fusions of tribalism with a neocolonial bent. In her chapter titled Frontier Dandies, about “the lives and fates of the men whom the colonial state appointed as ‘chiefs’ and ‘captains’ in the volatile milieu of rebellion, war and desertion.” Mokoena tells us, “clothing and dress were used by these men to express novel identities they were endeavouring to create in an otherwise repressive and totalising colonial situation.” The chapter on the photographing of King Cetshwayo on the deck of the British steamer SS Natal, while he was on his way to exile in Cape Town in 1879, is worthy of a feature film. The images were ultimately sold through adverts in the Cape Argus in June of that year, adding a cheap lustre to the experience of a king in the throes of humiliation, a man who may not have comprehended the manipulations of the whites surrounding him, but who turned out to be rather photo-savvy.
The Nightwatchman is a book I would love to have in my keep if ever I were stranded on a desert island. Not that the history of Southern African men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and their approach to sartorial matters, would be useful in total isolation. But that’s the point – why tell the stories, and show the personalities of long-forgotten African men (even if they were once famous), who aspired through their dress and demeanour to maintain something of the style of the British Empire, while it adversely controlled their lives?"
BOOKS discussed in this review:
Life Itself: Photography and South Africa by Simon A. Clarke (Reaktion Books);
The Nightwatchman: Representing Black Men in Colonial Society by Hlonipha Mokoena (Wits University Press);
"Black Chronicles: Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian
Britain edited by Renée Mussai (Thames & Hudson, Autograph)
Wits Anthropology Southern African Historical Society Historical Association of South Africa
These books show how the power base of the photographic medium shifted over time, eventually ending up on the right side of history.
