Showing posts with label Welsh Makanda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Welsh Makanda. Show all posts

Friday, July 12, 2019

A Photograph of Archie


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My first post on this blog in 2011 was about an exhibition that Andrew Banks mounted of Archie Mafeje's university life in Cape Town. Because the article had photographs of him, I have been contacted ever since by people wanting to use them. This one below is hanging up at the Department of Social Anthropology at Kings College Cambridge!

Last year 3 different people wanted pictures. Some were even prepared to pay for them.

But I didn't take the photograph! I wonder if someone could tell me whom it might have been? There were pavement photographers in the city who took pictures of people walking - mostly in Adderley Street - although I think this one from 1961 of Archie with Welsh Makanda, was taken in Darling Street.  The photographer would give you a ticket and you could collect the pictures some days later after they were developed. You were not obligated to buy them.

Archie and I used to meet together between the stacks of Jagger library - the main campus library. There were not many places that a black man and a white woman could meet in those years! On one occasion I noticed he had one of those tickets. (I had perhaps a half-dozen street pictures of myself at that time that I had collected.)