This issue’s main feature is a celebration of South African photography, and there is good reason for that. The old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words — barring, of course, cases where a photograph is misused to serve a particular narrative — applies very much to South Africa and the African continent as a whole, so often subjected to stereotyping and an outside, frequently prejudiced gaze. In a new series called “Beyond the Image”, the first instalment of which we publish today, ZAM’s Heidi Sincuba hears from photographers, their loved ones and those working to preserve their legacies about their struggles with stereotypes — including some they, too, had absorbed and later came to confront through their camera lenses.
The legacy of the photographers in Sincuba’s story is that they show a South Africa — and, by extension, an Africa — alive with humanity, with the daily rhythms of loving, relaxing and working, while also grappling with challenges and injustices. In South Africa’s case, these include apartheid and its enduring scars. Their images challenge the stories of sorrow, misery and hopelessness that outsiders so often tell about Africa. Most of all, they inspire hope by bringing into view humanity’s enduring capacity to respond to whatever life throws at us.
That inspiration and agency also run through the other stories in this newsletter. For every Ghanaian cocoa executive who mismanages the dollars flowing into the country, and every international bank that enables kleptocratic practices, there are Ghanaian journalists crunching the numbers and exposing those responsible. For every false prophet, there is a photographer revealing their true face, as our partners at Makanday in Zambia do in the images of placards begging the new president for crumbs from his table (see ZAM Recommends). For every fishmeal factory depleting Senegal’s coastline, as our “Seafood Platter” story highlights, there are people rising up and demanding change. And recently, as you can read in “Civil Society Rising”, the agency of human communities was placed firmly on the agenda of organisations from thirty African countries.
In our enduring commitment to hope and positive change, ZAM will place more photography and art from across this vibrant continent at the very heart of our regular coverage. Happy reading!
Team ZAM
