Introduction: An Apartheid Scheme^{Footnote 1}

In the early 1950s the apartheid government of South Africa embarked on one of its most ambitious and extensive schemes directed at the registration, identification and control of its subject population. Two pieces of legislation, the Population Registration Act no. 30 of 1950, and the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act no. 67 of 1952 laid the grounds for the administrative re-articulation and implementation of control policies and practices prescribing and curtailing people’s rights of residence, mobility and work.^{Footnote 2}

While the population registration scheme made provisions for every South African above the age of sixteen years to be issued with an identity number and document, the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act concerned those classified as “native” alone and required them henceforth to permanently carry a so-called reference book.

The reference book or the dompas, as it was popularly known among those who had to carry it, was an intricate object.^{Footnote 3} Usually kept in a brown cover, it was made up of two parts. On the one hand, it enclosed a laminated identity card that featured the name of the bearer, his or her ethnic affiliation, the date on which the card was issued, the signature of an official, and a black-and-white portrait photograph. On the other hand, the book included five consecutive documentary sections (A–E) which listed information on permissions to enter urban areas, record of required medical examinations, names and addresses of employers, work status, and receipts for tax payments.^{Footnote 4} The reference book replaced a plethora of permits, passes, tax receipts and identity certificates, which had been in use since the early twentieth century, and while the government praised its new system as a modern, rational and efficient form of registration, the book first and foremost marked the advent of a panoptic form of policing envisioned by the apartheid regime.^{Footnote 5}

The registration of men classified as “native” and the issuing of reference books to them began in March 1953.^{Footnote 6} Mobile teams of the Native Affairs Department chose the main industrial employers around Pretoria, the Witwatersrand and the Vaal Triangle for a first round of registration that lasted six months and saw more than 400,000 industrial workers being issued with reference books. The main institutional body responsible for the process was the Central Reference Bureau in Pretoria, and it was here where fingerprints taken were henceforth classified, associated with a national identification number and a set of photographs, and filed in a cabinet. Once registration was underway in the main urban and industrial centres, the process was extended to the rural areas of Natal and the Transvaal, and by 1958 the scheme began to target women as well. As Keith Breckenridge has rightfully argued, the reference book system began to crumble at a very early stage in its implementation. Although being registered and issued with a dompas required every individual to have an impeccable record of tax payments – a prerequisite that caused problems to many – the overwhelming number of people who applied for reference books, and accordingly submitted fingerprints and photographs to be processed, caused long delays in the work of the Reference Bureau. Additionally, applications for duplicate books due to theft or loss of originals reached an average of 3,000 per month as early as 1954 and added to increasingly chaotic conditions. If nothing else, recurrent confusion of fingerprints, identity numbers and photographs eventually induced the Bureau to introduce mechanical filing cabinets and microfilms in the late 1950s, but by then, massive resistance to the reference books and systematic acts of forgery brought the entire scheme near to a collapse.^{Footnote 7} The state’s response to these acts of defiance manifested itself in increased policing and large scale arrests of “offenders” that reached a monthly average of 49,000 in 1962.

Because the dompas signified the coercive nature of the apartheid state, it has ever since captured popular and political imaginaries – prominently so e.g. in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead ^{Footnote 8} – and has accordingly played an important role in historical writing.^{Footnote 9} Within these imaginaries and debates the focus has been on how the reference book system led to a deterioration of the lives and working conditions of men and women classified as “native,” how the book served and perhaps even fuelled the racial politics of a totalitarian regime, and how, accordingly, it provoked immense every-day and unionised resistance by those placed under its rule.^{Footnote 10}

The Dompas as an Object and Image

This paper choses a slightly different entrance into the theme by proposing and analysis of the dompas as an object and image. Because the reference book was the material result of an alleged simplification process, one aimed at synthesising earlier forms of documentation on an individual’s life, his or her provenance, life history, health condition, residence, and labour relations, it is worth unravelling how this sophisticated and complex object was materially constituted, what it was made of and from what kinds of discursive registers it drew. The population registration scheme was the first occasion on which the South African state systematically required every adult citizen and subject to be photographed. We hence encounter a context and moment in time in which photography was applied on a large scale and affected vast sections of the subject population. Because the photographic medium came to occupy such a distinctively important place in the scheme, the population registration and introduction of reference books throughout the 1950s and 1960s constitutes an exceptional case study, which enables us to inquire what kind of photographs it yielded, how these images were used, what they were meant to do, and how the photographs eventually acquired meaning within and beyond the registration context. The discussion draws from historical and anthropological scholarship concerned with the materiality of images and questions about the material and social practices they constituted, as much as it reconsiders the population registration and the introduction of the dompas within recent histories of photography in southern Africa.^{Footnote 11}

The reference book became the new blueprint for the classification and identification of individuals, and it accordingly drew from a combination of indexical registers and an elaborate bureaucratic taxonomy and nomenclature. Yet, to become operational, i.e. a useful means of control and policing, and meaningful in terms of the information it enclosed, the reference book required an adequate institutional and semantic backdrop. It was the function of the Central Reference Bureau to provide this framework of legibility, and most of the work done by its employees indeed consisted of inserting the information gathered in a rapidly expanding system of registers and filing cabinets, and to guarantee for the comparability and verifiability of visual and written data. As we shall see, while the Bureau focused on fingerprints as the modern from of biometric identification, every-day control and surveillance of men and women required to carry the book, by police, magistrates and employers would rest, however, on the material and visual integrity of the book as an image and object. ^{Footnote 12}

Notes on an Archive

This essay is based on research conducted in the Western Cape Archives and Record Service in Cape Town throughout 2012 and 2013. My main interest was in tracing photographs produced in the course of the registration scheme and to explore the place of photography in the classification and surveillance of women and men issued with reference books. The documents filed at the Western Cape Archives concern the implementation of the scheme in the Western and Eastern Cape, and occasionally include materials related to a number of towns in the Northern Cape as well. The archival composition and classification mirrors the character and workings of the apartheid administration at the time and the chronologies and geographies of the registration scheme. The archive’s centrepiece is made up of files produced in the magistrate’s offices throughout these regions, who had been commissioned with executing the registration and issuing reference books. While I was going through these archives I came across a file entitled “Itinerant Photographer 1962–63,” which caught my attention.^{Footnote 13} It enclosed fragments of correspondence between the magistrate in Kentani, the chief native commissioner/magistrate in Umtata, and the director of the Bureau in Pretoria composed in 1963. My subsequent reading of the archives followed the narrative threads suggested by the documents kept in this particular file, and “Itinerant Photographer” encouraged my decision to focus on the scheme’s implementation in the Eastern Cape, and more precisely in the former Transkei, where population registration and the issuing of reference books began around mid–1955.

The paper hence approaches the introduction of the dompas with a particular interest in photography, and it looks at the scheme within a regional and local context. The files compiled by the magistrates, some of which also served as native commissioners, comprise correspondence among the officers stationed in the smaller towns and villages throughout the Transkei; letters and minutes between the magistrate and chief native commissioner in Umtata, the administrative centre at the time, and the Central Reference Bureau in Pretoria; the communication with the mobile teams that travelled throughout the region and registered men, and later women during a period of almost ten years; and finally, correspondence between the magistrates and local residents, missionaries, teachers and church elders, photographers and others on issues relating to the population registration and the reference books. Most importantly these files enclose a large number of applications for dompases, i.e. an assemblage of written and visual documentation which will be of particular concern for the analysis proposed here.

Yet, before we move to a closer reading of these images and texts, there is a need to point to some material and discursive absences in these archives. With one exception, i.e. the reference book issued to Xalisile John Tiwani in 1958, there are no reference books as such kept in the magistrates’ files, although the correspondences provide a tangible sense of how the books were produced and circulated between Pretoria, Umtata and the respective towns and villages in the Transkei until they were eventually delivered to their owners.^{Footnote 14} Generally speaking, this archive conjures and enforces a narrative of undisturbed and untroubled rationality, effectiveness and functionality of a bureaucratic system and scheme, which seemed to have been unconditionally sustained even by those state officials stationed on the most remote internal frontiers. And it is precisely this narrative of modern rationality that stifles any reference to contestation, inquiry and resistance. This essay will hence read the archive along the grain and try to explore how a careful inquiry into the visuality and materiality of the photographs produced in the course of the population registration and issuing of reference books in the Transkei might provide directions for unhinging the self-referentiality and self-righteousness of one of the most notorious apartheid schemes.^{Footnote 15}

Itineraries – Images and People on the Move

As mentioned above, the archive suggests that the systematic registration of individuals applying for reference books in the Eastern Cape was up and running in 1955.^{Footnote 16} Here too, the economic rationale behind the scheme was more than obvious, and the authorities left no doubt that the significance of the region for industrial and agricultural labour recruitment made the formal registration of men in the Transkei an urgent priority.^{Footnote 17} Although the Native Affairs Department in Pretoria had provided regional offices throughout the country with Consolidated Standing Circular Instructions regarding what was by then administratively called “the population registration of natives” immediately after the Act of 1952 had been passed,^{Footnote 18} it was only in April 1955 that the Chief Magistrate requested the commencement of operations in and around the Transkeian administrative centre.^{Footnote 19} Two months later, the first round of registration materialised: a mobile unit, consisting of twelve men, namely “a team leader, one official photographer, one fingerprint assistant, one embosser, six temporary native clerks, one temporary native recorder and one camera assistant” was said to be visiting Umtata in June, and the local magistrate was required to inform residents accordingly, who would be then asked to report at the designated registration centres and bring along their tax identity numbers.^{Footnote 20} In theory, this procedure was meant to be repeated throughout the Transkei by two mobile units, and Pretoria expected all men above the age of sixteen and residing in the region to be issued with reference books by the beginning of February 1958.^{Footnote 21}

Yet, on the grounds this template soon proved to be unsustainable, particularly so, once the registration of women began in 1957 and increased the demands on the mobile teams.^{Footnote 22} The Transkeian authorities had indeed reckoned at an early stage that procedures needed to be tuned to local conditions, and as early as April 1956 the magistrate in Umtata had urged his fellow officers throughout the Transkei to report on the number of people that needed to be registered in their relative districts, assess the availability of photographers on the spot, and make suggestions for the location of registration centres and suitable itineraries.^{Footnote 23} As we shall see, the magistrates” response was quite revealing and the archives provide a vivid picture of a complex visual economy and diverse visual practices at hand in the region at the time. But let’s first go back to the registration process per se and have a closer look at the materiality of work the mobile teams performed once they registered individuals.

The materiality and visuality of the registration

Figure 2 shows the application forms attributed to a sixteen year old youth called Andile Pinkerton Booi, who applied for a reference book in Engcobo in 1961.^{Footnote 24} At the time, this assemblage constituted a characteristic, if not model application insofar as it included the C. 25 form (the yellow card with personal information on the applicant including a space for the photograph), the B.A. 147 form (the dactyloscopy, i.e. the set of fingerprints) and a brown E5 envelope with two black and white photographs enclosed. It is at this point where the files provide a vivid image of the bureaucratic backdrop to the population registration and the growing degree of administrative centralisation. Indeed, once the application process was concluded, all the information produced was sent by the magistrate to the Central Reference Bureau in Pretoria, where, as mentioned before, it would be processed and archived and where, eventually, the applicant would be issued a reference book. The book was then sent back to the local magistrate who would finally instruct the person concerned to collect it. All in all, the entire procedure would (ideally) require a period of at least one month.

Figure 1. Western Cape Archives and Records Service (KAB), 1/UTA 6/1/79, book issued to Xalisile John Tiwani, on 25 February 1958.

Figure 2. Western Cape Archives and Records Service (KAB), 1/ECO 6/1/32 N1/23/2, application submitted by Andile Pinkerton Booi, Engcobo, 1961.

The course of action summed up here flattens the configuration of the application process in many ways, and it suggests a material and administrative clearness and purposefulness that soon proved much more erratic, unstable, chaotic and – to say the least – contested. Although the scheme was meant to simplify and standardise the documents in use, applying for an identity document continued to mean very different things in terms of its material outcome: brown or green reference book, exemption certificate, temporary identification certificate – or no book at all.^{Footnote 25} Moreover, the fact that Andile Pinkerton Booi’s application is kept in the Engcobo magistrate’s files up to date points to an important bureaucratic disruption, and the questions of why his application was not forwarded to Pretoria or if he ever received a dompas remain unanswered.

What, thence, does this conglomerate of cards, forms and photographs, one example of many more of them kept in the files of the various magistrates in the Transkei, tell us about “the population registration of natives?” And what can we say about the role photography played therein?

The application forms provided a particular kind of information on the subjects applying for reference books. In Andile Pinkerton Booi’s case the C. 25 card stated that he was born in Engcobo in 1944, hence sixteen years of age and a South African national by birth; he was single, male, Xhosa Zibi, and at the time of registration residing at Tora, a village about 50 km south of Engcobo. The card furthermore listed Pinkerton Booi’s old tax identity number, added his new national identity number, and recorded the date of his last tax payment. Lastly, it noted when and where precisely the registration had been done. A dactyloscopy featuring the young man’s entire fingerprints and a set of two black-and-white portrait photographs, certified by a government official, completed the application.

The process described illustrates what bureaucratic rationality had come to mean by the mid–1950s in apartheid South Africa. For those men and women classified as “native” registration under the population registration scheme entailed a fragmentation of the subject, which required them to represent themselves according to a number of prescribed administrative categories, including age, racial and ethnic classification, and gender.^{Footnote 26} These categories served as the invisible backdrop against which individuals would thereby become manageable entities in a register that allowed to reconstitute bureaucratic subjects furnished with a number (the National Identification Number), recorded statistically (according to the tax records), identified biometrically (based on the fingerprints), and classified (along ethnic and racial lines).^{Footnote 27} And it was this classificatory framework that defined the space in which the photograph would act, responding as it were to the ways in which the bureaucratically recomposed subject eventually came into view.^{Footnote 28}

The Photographs

The photographs kept in the population registration archive are ephemeral. Some of them are attached to the corresponding application and kept in the brown envelope, but many of them are loosely placed between documents, slipping between papers. They are small, hardly larger than a stamp, and hence always at risk of being lost, prone to be swapped, both in the past, when they were produced and included in an application, and the present, within the archive.^{Footnote 29} Their ephemerality is likewise apparent in the dwindling quality, as most of the photographs have begun to fade, whereby some of their subjects appear almost unrecognizable. This material and visual volatility in the archive circumvents unambiguous interpretation and it threatens any attempt at historical recovery. And still, these images evoke a powerful presence.

There is, indeed, an unsettling ability of the photographic image to (seemingly) recreate its subject in the present. Scholars of visuality have addressed this effect in different ways, often through an engagement with Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura in relation to photography. Miriam Bratu-Hansen for example begins her seminal essay on Benjamin with a reflection on a common understanding of aura as “an elusive phenomenal substance (…) that surrounds a person or object of perception, encapsulating their individuality and authenticity.”^{Footnote 30} Aura, it seems, participates in and instantiates the logic of the trace or the indexical dimension in photographic signification. Here, Benjamin conceived of aura less in terms of an inherent property of persons or objects, as Bratu-Hansen continues to explain, but as something that pertains to perception, and which becomes visible only on the basis of technological reproduction. In other words: it is not the presence of the photographic subject itself, but the particular condition of exposure and the kind of looking (or gaze) it anticipates and responds to that at once threatens and inscribes the subject’s authenticity and individuality.^{Footnote 31}

How do this contestation of the subject’s presence in the photograph and the structure of vision resonate in the Eastern Cape magistrate’s archives? The photograph shown in Figure 3 takes us back to Andile Pinkerton Booi’s application for a reference book in Enqcobo in 1961 and to its particular kind of framing.^{Footnote 32} It relied, as we shall see in a moment, on particular visual conventions, in which the camera focused on an individual’s head and face placed against a neutralised backdrop. Arjun Appadurai has called these photographs on official documents face prints; images that claim to capture the subject’s individuality – his or her aura – not through any documentary technique, but rather by echoing their indexical companions, fingerprints.^{Footnote 33} The terminology is powerful, and the rhetorical move highlights the ways in which these photographs “imprison the subject in visual realism” and semiotic standardization.^{Footnote 34} Yet, the framing nevertheless remains epistemologically ambivalent, as it was precisely the undefined backdrop that marked the uncertainty about what these photographs were meant to represent.^{Footnote 35} The population registration scheme, thence, raises the problem of the subject, and its aura, in particular ways. It requires, if we continue to follow Appadurai’s argument, an assessment of wider discursive framings – frames and practices that helped contain photographic meaning and determined the ways in which the photographs would be perceived. And it is, ultimately, the question of framing and perception that takes us back, once again, to the work of the mobile registration units.^{Footnote 36}

Figure 3. Western Cape Archives and Records Service (KAB), 1/ECO 6/1/32 N1/23/2, photographer unknown, photograph included in the application submitted by Andile Pinkerton Booi, Engcobo, 1961.

As mentioned earlier on, the registration of men, and later women, in the Transkei was meant to be done by an official mobile team, which included one photographer and a number of auxiliary clerks.^{Footnote 37} Yet, as a result of the rapidly growing numbers of people who needed to be registered, local magistrates decided to make use of quite diversified photographic practices available on the ground. The strategic use of local resources at first disclosed economic interests in the registration project. In fact, a number of labour recruitment agencies, such as the Natal Sugar Planters, the Native Recruiting Corporation Ltd., and the Illovo Sugar Estates Ltd., offered to register and photograph labourers by themselves, as they had actually always done.^{Footnote 38} Obviously, this proposal helped maintain some of their freedom of scope in the organisation of labour recruitment, and although the Transkeian administrative authorities resented this on-going market autonomy, the scheme’s requirements forced them to give in.^{Footnote 39} But the magistrates’ search for a sustainable registration method spotted further protagonists in a quite sophisticated photographic culture. A few commercial photographers, such as F.L. Simpson and Raymond Lee entertained photo studios in and around Umtata and East London, and in some of the smaller towns and villages members of the tiny settler community, who usually indulged in amateur landscape photography and portraiture, likewise agreed to produce appropriate registration photographs.^{Footnote 40} Most importantly though, and to the administration’s astonishment, the most noticeable initiative came from local black photographers, who proactively approached the magistrates and offered their services. Between 1958 and 1962 seven independent photographers, namely W.B. Diko and Edward B. Ntsane in Mount Frere, S.M. Mabude in Bizana, Nelson Manxiwa in Willowvale, Isaak Keswa in Umzimkulu, Elliot Sixabayi in Cofimvaba, and James Mpuku in Ngqeleni, applied for permission to participate in the registration scheme, arguing that their knowledge about the area, their experience in servicing their own communities, and the quality of their photographic work made them genuine candidates.^{Footnote 41}

In view of the diversity of photographic practices and the need to use all services available in the Transkei for the registration scheme, the Reference Bureau in Pretoria tried to control the heterogeneous visual economy from the very beginning, and they did so through the prescription of technical equipment to be used and the standardisation of the photographic images themselves. In an annexure regularly attached to the circulars sent by the magistrate in Umtata over a period of several years, the format, style and materiality of the photographs were meticulously determined. According to the guidelines, every photographer had to produce two separate photographs of each individual, 1 9/16 inches in height, 1 1/8 inches in width (corresponds ca. 4x2.85 cm), with no white margins; the frame of the image was to include head and shoulders, with “the size of the head not less than 7/8 of an inch and not more than 1 inch.”^{Footnote 42} The person was to be photographed without a hat, turban, veil, eye glasses, spectacles, or any other addition to the face that would “alter the natural likeness.” No shadow of the person was to be visible, and no part of the face or the shoulders blended to the background. Full face visibility, including the ears, was required, and the photographers had to advise those in front of the camera to refrain from tilting their head. Likewise, photographers were asked to use good quality negative and printing paper, panchromatic emulsion of reputable brand, negatives of normal contrast to be printed on suitable grade of single weight glossy paper, with full tonal range and without loss of detail. Finally, every photographer was invited to adopt a system by which he would be able to trace particulars of the photograph of any person taken by him, if, when necessary, either the photograph or the registration form was handed to him by any state official. Based on these instructions the Central Reference Bureau reserved its right to reject any photograph considered to be insufficient.^{Footnote 43} But the main strategic interference by Pretoria concerned the prescription of technical equipment, and the population registration scheme became the occasion on which the apartheid state facilitated the mass introduction of Polaroid cameras throughout South Africa and into the most remote areas of the country. While in the early phase of the registration scheme photographers in the Transkei used different cameras, by the early 1960s the Polaroid became a prerequisite of any professional involvement.^{Footnote 44} While this technical shift facilitated the work of photographers to some extent, as it reduced delays and made their equipment lighter,^{Footnote 45} it nevertheless transformed their interaction with clients substantially: while portraiture had thitherto taken place in the context of personal encounters between photographers and photographed,^{Footnote 46} producing portraits for registration henceforth became part of a rationalised, accelerated, and palpable technological operation.^{Footnote 47} L.J. Lemmer, chief clerk of the Reference Bureau, had indeed anticipated these operational effects.^{Footnote 48} During an official conference held in Pretoria in 1953 Lemmer had envisioned the required rationality and its purpose:

The implementation of the population registration scheme in the Transkei in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with its focus on two powerful indexical registers – photography and fingerprinting – and a prescribed administrative structure that gravitated around the Central Reference Bureau in Pretoria, came to distinguish the mediation between those classified as “native” and the apartheid state as an increasingly technological matter. Critical and at times resolute responses from residents in the region are consistently marginalised in the archive, and if they received attention at all, the defiance was blended into a narrative of harmless negotiation that concerned questions of organisation and rationality of registration. This was the case e.g. when the magistrate in Umtata received a letter of complaint by a group of women in Mputi, a village 35 km east of Engcobo, in 1957, who asked the official to “appoint the date and come and explain to us all about this photographing,”^{Footnote 50} or when individuals wrote letters and complained about mismanagement and corruption among headmen and clerks who used the registration scheme as a means of political tutelage or personal gain.^{Footnote 51} But what these interventions likewise indicate is a growing concern of men and women in the light of a panoptic regime imposed by technocrats, and the production of standardised photographs, which fed a classificatory, bureaucratic nomenclature. As we shall see, it was precisely the photographic standardisation that came to occupy a pivotal place within the politico-ideological project of the apartheid state.

Aesthetics of Registration

Why did the apartheid state invest so significantly, both in economic and administrative terms, in the photographic recording of the entire population? What was photography meant to do within the population registration scheme? As would seem natural, photographs served the need to identify an individual, and sure enough the scheme remained a context in which the question of photographic likeness or semblance surfaced many a time.^{Footnote 52} Yet, by the late 1950s, the question and, more importantly, bureaucratic practice of identification was unambiguously linked to fingerprinting and a complex system of multiple numerical registration and archival order.^{Footnote 53} Fingerprinting, as Christopher Pinney has argued for colonial India, provided the complementary means by which the instability and uncertainty of photographic meaning could be contained.^{Footnote 54} Yet, I would argue, the two indexical registers were, while they shared discursive grounds, deployed within different representational and perception practices, and it seems, hence, as if we are invited to think about these photographs beyond the problem of identification. The magistrates’ archives are, as we shall see, quite suggestive at this point.

I would like to propose a way of thinking with and about the photographs produced for the population registration in the Eastern Cape within the framework of a distinction between semblance and resemblance, or play, proposed by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.^{Footnote 55} Benjamin’s dialectical reflections on technology are based on a distinction between a first technology, which constitutes a counterpart to nature, and serves man to shape and master natural forces (and magic). What marks the mechanical age, in contrast, is the emergence of a second technology, which differs in orientation and aims at the interplay between nature and humanity, thereby operating by means of experiments and varied test procedures:

Further on in his essay, it is the notion of play that serves as an entrance into the discussion of technological mediation and perception. In an extended footnote, Benjamin retraces the origins of artistic activity in mimesis, where he locates two polar aspects of art: semblance and play, semblance being key to auratic perception (in its Hegelian articulation). Yet, what makes the polarity between semblance and play significant in dialectical terms is that it is determined by the first and second technology, and while the former continues to be motivated by the logics of semblance, the latter accrues from an inexhaustible reservoir of experimenting procedures, from play, imitation or re-semblance.^{Footnote 57}

In his essay, Benjamin’s concern was with film in particular, a medium in which he believed the element of semblance had entirely been displaced by the element of play. And it was precisely at this point where he located the technology’s revolutionary potential.^{Footnote 58} Photography, in contrast, continued to be haunted by an unresolved tension between semblance and play. And as we shall see, this undetermined position of photography as a form of technological mediation pervaded its role and place in the population registration scheme. While it might be unjustified to read the polarities between semblance and play in this archive as an expression of a revolutionary potential, retrieving the ways in which the Eastern Cape materials reference different forms of technological adaptation^{Footnote 59} might, perhaps, disclose some of the contestations that otherwise remain submerged in and marginalised by the colonial archive’s hegemonic gesture.

The Bureaucratic Desire for Semblance

I have argued above that the photographs produced for the reference books functioned within a specific classificatory and archival framework, which on the one hand helped constitute the “native subject” in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and age. On the other hand the classification and nomenclature determined a specific kind of reception, which helped contain the instability of the image in terms of meaning.^{Footnote 60} But the effects of the photographs within the logics of the registration scheme remained complex and the desire for semblance, i.e. the wish to use photography as a technology to mediate the relationship between a subject marked by race and its sovereign, the apartheid state, caused one of these complications.

The population registration scheme provided indeed a space in which the apartheid state re-constituted its subjects and determined their socio-political appearance. The dompas became the iconic object that marked this re-articulation of the state’s hold on its subjects, and it constituted the material and visual instantiation of every man and woman, outside of which there would be no acceptable, legitimate or perceivable form of existence. And it is at this point where the photograph became a reminder – of the permanent exposure to a state apparatus that monopolised the possibility and right to determine a person’s identity, home, work, health and mobility. In its entirety, its material multiplication and narrative repetitiveness, the population registration served the ideological project of racial mapping, the constitution of a political space fragmented into tribal areas and marked by racial frontiers. One of these frontiers concerned the differentiation of an eminently problematic category of persons – coloureds^{Footnote 61} – and, again, required a particular kind of photographic mediation.

The “question” of coloureds in the Eastern Cape had seemingly taken the magistrates and registration teams somehow by surprise.^{Footnote 62} The presence of people in an area classified as “native,” and Xhosa in particular, who claimed mixed descent and hybrid cultural heritage complicated notions of ethnic and racial homogeneity that, by the late 1950s, was increasingly meant to translate into stable and “racially integrated” spatial configurations. The issue was uncomfortably dragged along for a while until in June 1960 the administration decided to send two official photographers, H.L.G. Botes and J. Verhoeven, to the Ciskei and the Transkei, who would exclusively photograph “Coloureds” and facilitate applications for identity cards.^{Footnote 63} A month later the Reference Bureau in Pretoria additionally commissioned N.S. Harrison to travel through the region and photograph “all Whites, Coloureds and Asiatics.”^{Footnote 64} Within the Transkei the administration chose a pragmatic and rational approach to the problem of classification, also because the magistrates sketched a situation in which there were “white” and “coloured” pockets in but a few villages.^{Footnote 65} Eventually, it was decided that residence and the particulars of tax payment would inform racial classification and hence determine if a person was to be declared “coloured” or “native.”^{Footnote 66}

But the archive draws further attention to the problem of racial mapping through a small group of files that seems, at first glance, misplaced, as it includes a particular set of documents and photographs produced during population registration to the north, in the Northern Cape.^{Footnote 67}

The photograph in Figure 5 was taken in 1956 and attributed to Martha Swarts van Wyk, who applied for an identity card (persoonskarte) in March of that year, and used the registration form N.V.R. 7 prescribed for “Cape Malays, Cape Coloureds and other coloured persons” over the age of sixteen.^{Footnote 68} As in this image, some of the Kuruman photographs featured a number plate held by the person portrayed, though it remains unclear if the numbers referenced bureaucratic systems such as taxation, or if they were part of an indexical register used by the photographer in order to retrieve copies of images.^{Footnote 69}

Figure 4. Western Cape Archives and Records Service (KAB), 1/TSM 7/1/46 N1/23/2, photograph included in “The Director of the Registration Office Pretoria to the Magistrate Tsomo, 28 April 1960.”

Figure 5. Western Cape Archives and Records Service (KAB), 2/KMN 22, N 1/23/2, Vol. 1. The photograph is kept in an envelope stitched to the N.V.R. 7 form of Martha Swarts van Wyk, certified in Kuruman, 17 March 1956.

Van Wyk’s application and those of her fellow applicants kept in these files had given cause for concern. They were all accompanied by a formal request issued in the office of the Population Registrar in Pretoria, which invited the magistrate or native commissioner on the ground to re-evaluate the person’s racial classification. The form phrased the registrar’s doubts as follows:

The invitation from Pretoria usually led to the magistrates or native commissioners inviting the respective person into their office, where he or she would be required to provide specification for the completion of the said questionnaire. The interrogations were narratively framed as a mere bureaucratic inspection and verification of information related to familial status and history of residence. But what they actually served was a re-evaluation of the photographs and a reassessment of semblance, i.e. the photographic mediation of a bureaucratically contained subject. This is why the registrar in Pretoria always included photographs in his requests, which implicitly invited the respective officers on the ground to reconsider if the image at hand conveyed the applicant’s racial affiliation in an appropriate way.^{Footnote 71} The result of this idiosyncratic exercise caused an intricate debate, throughout the files, on image quality, appropriateness of cameras used, and the technological skills of semi-professional and amateur photographers.^{Footnote 72} In Martha Swarts van Wyk’s case, who had indicated that she originated from the Kuruman area, and both her parents had been classified as “coloureds,” as was her husband, the renegotiation and inspection eventually incited the magistrate in Deban [sic], a village 70 km West of Kuruman, to reclassify her as “native.”^{Footnote 73}

Impersonation

A narrative trope of a different kind that emerges in the archives of population registration in the Eastern Cape is a phenomenon called “impersonation,” a term the magistrates and native commissioners used to describe cases in which an individual had assumed another person’s identity and had thereby committed an offence. On one hand, these cases of impersonation voiced the administration’s claim to detect, identify and prosecute all those men (and women), who would not align themselves to the prescriptions of the law.^{Footnote 74} On another hand, the concern with impersonation disclosed the ambiguities of colonial discourse, which threatened to undermine its own authority from within. Ironically, and inevitably perhaps, the fantasy of a panoptic system of individual identification produced loopholes and counter-acts, and the files mirror a growing anxiety among state bureaucrats slumbering beneath the rampant accumulation of technocratic data. The logics of bureaucratic identification, grounded on an archive organised along a prescribed set of classificatory categories, ultimately determined what administrative personnel would inevitably envision as possible (com)plots and how they would make sense of colonial subjects’ responses to the dompas system.^{Footnote 75}

One narrative around a particular case of impersonation is worth being quoted at this point:

The one fact which aroused great suspicion, however, was that according to the records at Langa, Mlungu John Philip is a man of 55 years of age whereas the person interviewed was not more than 23–25 years old.

The suspected impersonator was thereupon charged with being in this area illegally and also with mutilating or altering a reference book. He was admitted to bail in the sum of £10 while further investigation was carried out.

A Photostat copy of the C. 26 Card of N.I.N. 2246319 reveals that the reference book has been tampered with.

The impersonator has, however, now disappeared from Cape Town and cannot be traced by the Police. His £10 bail has been estreated [sic] and, as he cannot be found, the charges against him have been withdrawn. As far as can be ascertained, the correct John Philip is at home in your District.^{Footnote 76}

As for many others, the advancement of this case dissolved among the conglomerate of correspondence on other issues, and the response from Kentani was not preserved in the file. Such as response would probably have rendered an account of the Kentani magistrate’s interrogation of local headmen and members of the community, and possible responses to the photograph of the alleged impostor. But the text quoted already provides insights into what I have called the bureaucracy’s desire for semblance, and the importance of the integrity of the dompas as an object and image mentioned at the very beginning of this essay. Yet, what is of greater importance at this point is that the narratives of impersonation, although authored and mediated by state bureaucrats, precisely though unintentionally uncover practices of impersonation by those forced into the reference book system. Pretending to be someone else, impersonating and miming another person could, as the case described above shows, mean that people resorted to the “manipulation” and “tampering” of the reference book photograph. And while on one hand the commissioner based his suspicion on semblance, on the other hand the man who “claimed to be Mlungu John Philip” anchored his impersonation, mimesis or play, to recall Benjamin’s concept, in the “inexhaustible reservoir of experimenting procedures” provided by photographic mediation.

As has been suggested earlier on, the population registration system cleared a space in which the material, visual and semantic stability of the reference book constantly threatened to mutate into other things, other images, and other persons. Some of these mutations were caused by deliberate acts of defiance. Indeed, impersonation might have been coined in terms of forgery and crime by the state bureaucracy. Yet the element of insubordination by those suspected of impersonation emerged from the assumption of a public, administrative identity – the “Native” or the “Bantu” – that didn’t necessarily belong to someone else, let alone denoted an individual’s personal identity, but rather favoured and facilitated the fabrication of multiple, mimetic subjectivities.^{Footnote 77}

But forms of impersonation were likewise produced by the registration system itself and the scale and complexity of the written and material data produced in the course of the scheme’s implementation. The presence of applications, such as the one by Andile Pinkerton Booi, that were never sent from the magistrates’ offices in the Eastern Cape to the Central Reference Bureau in Pretoria leave many questions open, among them if Pinkerton Booi reapplied for a reference book, or if he simply acquired a different identity at a later stage, somewhere else.