Contesting Visibility: Photographic Practices on the East African Coast [1. Aufl.] 9783839424568

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface / Acknowledgement
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Providing the Context: The East African Coast
Chapter 3 Polemic Encounters: Photography as Medium and Object of Ethnographic Research
Chapter 4 Textiles and Images: Photography as Unveiling
Chapter 5 Creating Spectacles: Studio Photographers of the Indian Diaspora
Chapter 6 Ambulant Photographers
Chapter 7 The Bakor Studio and the “Aesthetics of Withdrawal”
Chapter 8 Weddings, Photography, and the Aura of Modernity
Chapter 9 Withdrawal of Life: Photography and Death
Chapter 10 Iconoclastic Spirits
Chapter 11 “Killer Panics” and Digital Photography
Bibliography

Citation preview

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Heike Behrend WORKED AS A 0ROFESSOR OF 3OCIAL !NTHROPOLOGY AND !FRICAN 3TUDIES AT THE 5NIVERSITY OF #OLOGNE 'ERMANY (ER RESEARCH INTERESTS ARE NEW MEDIA PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO RELIGION AND VIOLENCE 3HE IS RETIRED NOW AND LIVESIN"ERLIN

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Contesting Visibility Photographic Practices on the East African Coast



Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek 4HE $EUTSCHE .ATIONALBIBLIOTHEK LISTS THIS PUBLICATION IN THE $EUTSCHE .ATIO NALBIBLIOGRAFIE DETAILED BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA ARE AVAILABLE IN THE )NTERNET AT HTTPDNBD NBDE © 2013 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

!LL RIGHTS RESERVED .O PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRINTED OR REPRODUCED OR UTI LIZED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC MECHANICAL OR OTHER MEANS NOW KNOWN OR HEREAFTER INVENTED INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING AND RECORDING OR IN ANY INFOR MATION STORAGE OR RETRIEVAL SYSTEM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER #OVERLAYOUT+ORDULA2£CKENHAUS "IELEFELD #OVERILLUSTRATIONPHOTOGRAPHEDBY3AMMY.JUGUNA 'RAZ  4YPESETBY4HOMAS,ADENBURGER 0RINTEDBY-AJUSKEL-EDIENPRODUKTION'MB( 7ETZLAR )3".    

Contents

List of Illustrations

7

Preface / Acknowledgement

9

Chapter 1 Introduction

11

Chapter 2 Providing the Context: The East African Coast

27

Chapter 3 Polemic Encounters: Photography as Medium and Object of Ethnographic Research

47

Chapter 4 Textiles and Images: Photography as Unveiling

65

Chapter 5 Creating Spectacles: Studio Photographers of the Indian Diaspora

87

Chapter 6 Ambulant Photographers

121

Chapter 7 The Bakor Studio and the “Aesthetics of Withdrawal”

147

Chapter 8 Weddings, Photography, and the Aura of Modernity

173

Chapter 9 Withdrawal of Life: Photography and Death

199

Chapter 10 Iconoclastic Spirits

219

Chapter 11 “Killer Panics” and Digital Photography

241

Bibliography

249

List of illustrations

All pictures presented are from Heike Behrend´s collection, if not mentioned otherwise.

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Preface

Acknowledgements This book has taken a long time to complete and I am deeply indebted to many people who kindly and generously assisted me in my work. Above all, I would like to thank Maina Hatchison who has accompanied my research since 1996 for his enduring friendship, his fervent interest in photography, and his generous assistance. Christine Noll Brinckmann, Fritz Kramer, Johannes Harnischfeger, and Gisela Völger were so kind as to read the whole manuscript carefully and provided most valuable insights. Mitch Cohen kindly polished my poor English. Thomas Ladenburger was responsible for the layout. Ina Sykora, Omar Babu Maryan, Gerrit Dimmendaal, Dorothea Schulz,1 Hannelies Koloska, and the late John Middleton read and commented on different chapters. Athman Omar Lali, Abdalla Uba Adamu, the late Sharif Khitamy, Dr. Rasik Patel, Birgit Meyer, Martin Zillinger, Timm Starl, Esha Faki, Thomas Fillitz, Monika Feinen, Tobias Wendl, Anton Holzer, Ivonne Treis, Kerstin Pinther, Ulrike Ottinger, Sanata Nacro, Astrid Kusser, Matthias Wittmann, Ruppert Gaderer, Hans Belting, Birgit Mersmann, Piet Meyer, Clara Himmelheber, Ann Biersteker, Brigitte Reinwald, Mwanaisha Mahmoud, Ahmed Sheik Nabhany, Esha A. Ahmed, Narendra C. Patel, Ahmed Yassin, Judy S. Aldrick (now Baron),Mr. Salim from Salim Video and Decoration (Mombasa), Husna Sheeali Omar, Patrick Desplat, Ustadh Harith Swaleh, Sharif Said Hassan, Mohammed Hyder, Bibi Salma, Asya Sunkar Salim, Mohammed Hassan, Linda Giles, Anne Storch, Alif Omar Said Bakor, Malara Farinde, Sammy Njuguna, Najid Omar Said Bakor, Arif Bakor, Mohammed A. Jahadhmy, Henrike Grohs and, in particular, Elizabeth Edwards, and Particia Hayes kindly assisted me in various ways and provided important insights that entered into the text. David Easterbrook, curator of the Africana Collection of the Northwestern University, kindly introduced me to the Winterton Collection. In addition, I would like to thank the IFK in Vienna for a scholarship in 2007, the FK 427 in Cologne, and the Tokyo University of

1 Dorothea Schulz and Martin Zillinger also assisted me to find the title for this book.

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Foreign Studies, and Osamu Hieda, who provided me with a visiting professorship in 2010, allowing me to expand my interest to include photographic practices in Japan. In addition, I am very grateful to the students who attended my classes on photographic practices along the East African coast for their questions and invaluable comments. And I am deeply indebted to the members of the Institute of African Studies of the University of Cologne whose kind assistance and patience helped me to complete this book.

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Chapter 1

Introduction The “Discover y” of African Photographers Although Stephen Sprague had published his meanwhile famous articles on Yoruba studio portraits in Nigeria in 1978, it was not until the early 1990s that African photographers became the subject of Western knowledge and their photographs started to be shown in Western museums and galleries. While colonial photographs have been critically studied since the 1970s, it is scandalous that anthropologists and art historians realized so late that Africans, too, had worked as photographers and created their own visual traditions. In 1991 Susan Vogel showed a few studio photographs by the Malian photographer Sedou Keita1 in the exhibition „Africa Explores“ in the Center for African Arts in New York. This was followed by „In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present“ in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, curated by Okwui Enwezor in 1996, and by the publication of the works of Sedou Keita and Malick Sidibé by André Magnin. In 1998, Tobias Wendl, Kerstin Pinther, Henrike Grohs, and I organized an exhibition of African studio photographers (Wendl and Behrend 1998) in Munich that traveled to Amsterdam, and parts of it were exhibited in London, Paris, Bamako, and Berlin. More exhibitions followed and opened up a new field of image production that has been increasingly explored by anthropologists and art historians. Around 2000, Sotheby‘s organized the first auction of photographs by Sedou Keita and Malick Sidibé, and this economically very successful event marked the entry of African studio photographs into the Western art market. At the same time, Western art dealers started to buy the archives of various photographers in Africa. The choice of African photographers who would „make“ it into the Western art market was tightly controlled by a small group of collec-

1 The prints displayed in the exhibition were designated the work of an unknown photographer.

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tors and museum experts whose tastes as well as stylistic and formal standards established a framework for the appreciation of African photography and determined the criteria of connoisseurship. These gatekeepers also decided which aspects of a photographer‘s work were worth exhibiting and what would be his „trademark.“ Some photographs that entered the Western art world had a strange fate. For example, the I.D. photographs that the Ivory Coast photographer Cornélius Azaglo Augustt produced in the 1960s and 1970s – often under constraint of the colonial state – were bought by collectors and nicely printed on large-format paper by the best laboratories in Paris or New York. Since these photographs were much more widely exhibited and published than Augustt‘s studio photographs, they became emblematic of his work. The makers of such „icons“ for the Western art market never mentioned the pictures‘ original use nor how and by whom they had been selected to be converted into valuable commodities in the art market (Werner 2001:266). 2 In addition, canonized photographers such as Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita were placed in misleading genres, Keita as the exemplary studio photographer and Sidibé as the quintessential reportage photographer of “party” photographs (Keller 2008:3). Yet, early studio photographs produced for more or less private consumption were also often turned into commodities and, for example, sold and circulated on a global level as postcards (see, for example, Geary and Webb 1998). The new Western interest in African studio photography also had a few positive consequences in Africa. It has allowed some studios to survive, albeit in a precarious way. For example, the Capital Art Studio in Zanzibar – one of the first studios on the East African Coast, originally established by A.C. Gomez from Goa in the 1860s – today mainly sells prints from old black-and-white photographs to Western tourists (personal communication from Brigitte Reinwald). The success of and increasing interest in popular studio photographers from Africa in the Western art market stimulated a few African 2 In contrast to, for example, the book by Marc Garanger, who served as a photographer in colonial Algeria and took I.D. pictures of women who were forced to unveil their faces in front of the camera. He published the photographs in a book as a rather ambiguous apology to the Algerian women.

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artists – those who had already made it into the art market such as Santu Mofokeng3 and Sammy Baloji4 – to experiment and critically play with old studio photographs as well as the conventions of studio photography. The photographs that made it into the Western art market circulated as art in a different regime of value in space and time (Appadurai 1988:4). A „tournament of value“ took place that separated photographs from the ethos of conventional economic exchange and followed a new logic of value (ibid.:21). Although being images of technical reproduction, they were provided with what Baudrillard calls „sign value“ – the signed, appraised piece of art as a luxury value and rare object, for example, as a vintage photograph. Photographs were thus transformed into distinctive material that served as the foundation of the „noble“ in a restrained exchange (Baudrillard 1981:112f,120). Although sanctioned by the artists, the reissue of their work for predominantly Western audiences constituted a radical recasting of form and function; while the photographs had previously been privately commissioned and printed on an intimate scale, in the art context the subjects became anonymous and it was the photographer‘s presentation as artist that spoke to the Western viewers. All the meanings created through a portrait‘s rootedness in the texture of life were thereby denied, while the photograph was transformed into an object of value that now centered, above all, on the author‘s name (rather than on that of the depicted person) (Lamuniere 2001). Since the “discovery” of African photographers in the early 1990s, a new field of knowledge and research has opened up that has been named “ethnography of photographic practices” (see, for example, Edwards 2011:160,176ff; Vokes 2012). Here attempts are made to decenter the Western discourse on photography and bring in perspec3 See Santu Mofokeng’s “The Black Photo Album/Look at me: 1890-1950”, a collection of photographs that urban black working- and middle-class families in South Africa had commissioned. The Black Photo Album is part of an ongoing research project. 4 See Sammy Baloji’s “The Beautiful Time”, a collection of photographs and photomontages of industrial landscapes of Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, into which he has montaged photographs of colonial subjects, prisoners, and workers (see Jewsiewicki 2010).

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tives from other cultural spaces that may shift, illuminate, and complement understandings of the medium (Edwards 2011:183). Here, not only locally generated aesthetics but also new sets of analytical and conceptual tools are explored to liberate photographic thinking from the demands of a Western canon (ibid.:185). This is the relatively new field of research and knowledge in which this study is situated.

Photography as a Global Medium Three months after Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre presented his “invention” at the Academy in Paris, the first daguerreotypists reached Cairo in Africa and were „daguerreotyping like lions“ (Howe 1994). Early photographers such as Felice and Antonio Beato (born in Venice, Italy) were not only cosmopolitan but also highly mobile, working in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and in Egypt and Greece; in Egypt, Antonio established the Beato Studio in Luxor and took as his assistant Attaya Gaddis, who later bought the studio and became one of the first Egyptian photographers (Gaddis 1999). Both Beato brothers visited India and China; in Japan,Felice took residency in Yokohama and began teaching some members of the first generation of Japanese photographers (Lacoste 2010; Hockley 2006). In India, photography was first employed in 1840, only a few months after its invention had been announced in Paris (Pinney 1997a:17). And only two decades later, in the 1860s, peripatetic Indian photographers, especially from Goa, brought the new medium to Zanzibar and other places on the East African coast and established the first studios there. In Brazil, photography was independently invented by Hércules Florence – contemporary with Daguerre and William Henry Talbot Fox – but his discovery had only minimal impact and fell into obscurity (Kossoy 1998:23). The first daguerreotypists reached Latin America in 1840, and from the 1860s on there was a noticeable increase in the number of photographic studios operating in the main cities of South America (ibid.:27,35). The global flows, circulations, and complex itineraries of early photographers and their new medium still need further research, but from its beginnings, photography transcended localities, nations,

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and even continents and questioned the boundedness of cultures. In fact, photography is a global medium not only because it has crossed national and cultural boundaries, but also because the technical apparatus was created by means of substantial exchanges and borrowings from different cultures. As historians of science suggest, the “invention” of photography should be broken down into various more or less unexpected and practical sets of skills to produce images. Optical devices, such as the camera obscura and lenses, had to be joined with light sensitive chemicals and different supporting materials like glass or paper. The linear perspective and the technical apparatus to produce it – such as pin holes and the camera obscura – are what Bruno Latour has called “immutable mobiles”: they allow the transfer and translation of an object without modifying its internal properties. They create “optical consistency,” a translation without corruption that invites mobilization, travel, and displacement (Latour 1986:7,14). The first mention of the principles of the camera obscura is by the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti (470 BC to 390 BC). He referred to it as a “collecting plate” and a “locked treasure room”. Later, around 840, experiments with pinholes and darkened rooms were described in Chinese texts (Needham 1962:98). In contrast to the West, however, the Chinese scholars made use of the camera obscura to develop “axometry,” which translates as “equal-angle see-through.” Unlike linear perspective, axometry has no vanishing point and therefore has been connected to the scroll as a pictorial medium. The scroll does not take the viewer through a collection of separate images, but rather a continuous and seamless visual image that unfolds itself. It does not assume a fixed position by the viewer. Many early Chinese landscape paintings display multiple perspectives whose focus is not in an outside viewer but instead in the tiny persons depicted in the paintings. 5 It was the optical theory of the Arab scholar Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham (965-1040), better known in the West under the name of Alhazen, that provided Europe with the preconditions to „invent“ photography. He not only constructed a camera obscura but also, in his book whose Latin translation is titled „Perspectiva“, developed a 5 I am grateful to Fritz Kramer who kindly informed me about the multiple perspectives in Chinese paintings.

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mathematical theory of light that much later formed the basis for the invention of linear perspective in the Renaissance in Italy (Edgerton 2002:70ff). Through the camera obscura, Alhazen managed to produce mechanical images, „drawings of light,“ as Henry Fox Talbot named photographs nine hundred years later. In contrast to the artists of the Western Renaissance who relied on the camera obscura to produce perspectival paintings, Alhazen, as a mathematician and Muslim, was not interested in developing a mathematical theory of images, but instead a theory of light and its refraction. As Hans Belting has suggested, ironically, the camera obscura was taken up in the West through the mediation of the texts of an Arab scholar himself not interested in and perhaps even hostile toward images. Against its original purpose, it was then reformulated for the creation of perspectival images and later of the visual media of technical reproduction. Linear perspective was inscribed into the photographic camera, which produced permanent images on a mass scale, thereby (re-)exporting linear perspective as part of colonization to most parts of the world (Belting 2008:12,104ff). The production of perspectival images constituted a break and a qualitative leap and led to a unique visual history in the West that was not shared in Africa (and only partially in Asia) until the 19th century. There is a connection between Western linear perspective, visualism, and subjectivity; and these foundations are integral to visual media such as photography (Weiner 1997:198). Thus, although produced on the basis of Chinese and Arab optical knowledge, globalized (Western) media carry within their apparatus a specifically Western visual regime and epistemology that cannot be described as either innocent or neutral. Against this background, the history of photography as it has been told by the West has to be complemented and countered by histories as they have unfolded in Asia, Latin America, Australia, and Africa. The photographic practices that flourish outside the West allow us not only to complement, but also to decenter European knowledge and experience. By localizing photography in various parts of the world and connecting it with pre-existing media, aesthetics, and practices, new questions are raised about what a photograph – as act, image, and object – actually IS. By decentering the West, not only historical agency but also the centrality of Western representational practices is

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shifted, relocated, and transformed in new spaces (Pinney 2003:12). In fact, as I intend to show in this book, photographers in Africa have tricked the photographic apparatus in various ways and created diverse strategies to counter the linear perspective inscribed into the camera.

Photographic Spaces of Refusal WhenDaguerre presented his „invention“ to the Academy of Science in Paris in 1839, it created a frenzy of excitement, approval, outrage, and rejection. While some celebrated the new medium as a miracle and wonder, others denounced it as the devil‘s work, an “infernal French art,” and dismissed it as an infringement of the Old Testament prohibition of images. Walter Benjamin, for example, quoted the Leipzig City Advisor to illustrate this negative response: „To fix fleeting images is not only impossible, as has been shown by thorough going German research, but to wish to do it is blasphemy. Man is created in the image of God and God‘s image cannot be held fast by a human machine. At the most the pious artist – enraptured by heavenly inspiration – may at the higher command of his genius dare to reproduce those divine/human features in an instant of highest dedication, without mechanical help“ (Benjamin cit. Trachtenberg 1980:200). Thus, from its beginning, the tensions between the prohibition against representing human beings and (technical) image making were inscribed into the history of photography. The camera met with resistance not only in Europe, but also in many other parts of the world. For example, in Japan (Kohara 2010:230f), on the Western Solomon Islands (Wright 2008), and in many parts of Africa (Behrend 2003b), in popular discourses the new medium of photography – as a “devil’s engine,” a machine “to capture a person’s spirit” or subtract bodily substance – was associated with death, misfortune, theft, and sorcery by many people who were subjected to the (colonial) camera gaze. It seems that the violent nature of photography itself – freezing its subjects in the act and in the picture – was integrally connected with both indigenous resistance to it and concerns about it (Edwards 2003:84).

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Local forms of media engagement contested the superiority of technical visual media as claimed by the colonizing project of the West. Modes of (self-)representation were entangled in processes in which photographs of oneself and of others were translated and mediated in new ways, generating not only new visibilities, immediacies, and proximities, but also distances, ruptures, and withdrawal. It took some time to transform the new medium from a wondrous, dangerous, and deadly machine into a part of everyday life. Paradoxically, it was in times of war, despair, and violent death – when too many young people died – that photography became increasingly accepted and “democratized” in many parts of the world. In the USA, during the upheavals of the Civil War, the idea of photographs as a way of preserving memory gradually came to the fore. In Japan, during the wars with China and Russia, Samurai and later also ordinary soldiers developed a desire to leave a photographic picture behind before going into battle (Kohara 2010:237f). And among the Yolngu, Aborigines from Arnhem Land in Australia who initially vehemently rejected photography, in particular photographs of the dead, a turning away from the images of the dead recently came to seem no longer appropriate or even bearable; instead, there emerged a consensus that young persons who had lived only half-lives required attention and response through photographs on the one hand marking loss while on the other hand creating continuity (Deger 2008:304). Despite the shock, rejection, and sense of utter improbability that accompanied the new technology as the very sign of the foreign (Morris 2009:1), in the long run photography became a global success and was inserted into nearly all domains of social life in most parts of the world. Yet, in spite of photography’s seeming ubiquity, there are still specific times and social spaces in which photography is shunned. Along the cosmopolitan East African coast, some Muslim people have contested and problematized the camera and its uses, sometimes to the point of rejection, counter-violence, and destruction. While before the 19th century, the coastal regions of East Africa – inhabited by Muslims since the 8th century – were characterized largely by some sort of aniconism and a certain indifference toward images, since the 1860s photography deeply entered everyday life and radically transformed existing economies of representation, ritual passages (weddings and funerals), the culture of festivities, ways of remembrance, and sub-

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jectivities, though it was never uncontested. Here we find forms of resisting the reduction to a visible trace and modes of establishing a negative relation to the camera that open the way of what has been largely excluded within the now familiar rhetoric of the hegemony of photographic vision (Morris 2009). In spite of photography‘s localization and increasing routinization, the multitude of photographic images and their global flow were accompanied, as I attempt to show, by a refusal to accept the medium‘s representational capabilities and by an urge to counter them by defacement and the creation of new opacities. This book attempts to contribute to a history of photography on the cosmopolitan East African Coast. It seeks to complement, de-center, and counter the history of photography as it has been told by the West and thereby shift and transform the agency and centrality of Western representational practices. It attempts to envisage a history as in part determined by struggles occurring on the level of the visual (Pinney 2004:8), struggles that may evolve around visual media and the question of what should be given to see and what should be withdrawn from visibility. It takes photography as an image-making technology that may also become a potential historical force in its own right. It seeks to explore not only the making, circulation, and consumption of photographs, but also the other side, their rejection and obliteration, an essential aspect of a medium‘s history that should not be neglected. In fact, it deals with various social spaces in which visibility was (and is) contested in different and creative ways, thereby transcending the simple divide between appropriation and rejection. While local actors’ adaption and creative use of traveling visual media technologies in the context of globalization processes have been extensively explored, in the following I will focus on the opposite processes of disentanglement, rejection, and withdrawal from global media and the creation of new opacities and secrecies that scholars have largely ignored.6 I understand this contribution as an attempt to complement the existing theories of mediation by focusing on the discontinuous and disruptive role of media technologies in processes of globalization. While it seems as if most scholars take it for granted that modern media technologies have gained an undisputed place everywhere in the world and that a counter-history to the hegemonic spread of mass media on a global scale cannot be told (anymore), I 6 As exceptions, see Siegel (2009), de Witte (2010) and Spyer (2001, 2009).

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will explore specific social spaces on the East African Coast in which possibilities of the rejection of and withdrawal from photography have been created and particular forms of mediation are disputed.

“Aesthetics of Withdrawal” along the East African Coast Along the cosmopolitan East African coast, since the 1980s and in particular after 9/11,7 reformed Muslims have increasingly questioned figurative representations. In fact, different and opposing attitudes toward images have gained a new religious-political importance and have become intensely debated and contested, perhaps more than ever before. In addition, Muslims have actualized a gendered concept of purity (“purdah”) that centers on seclusion and concealment and has been extended to prohibit the circulation of pictures of women in the public domain. In strong opposition to the West – which they associate with immorality and decadence – interdictions and collective moral claims on female bodies to conform to a particular aesthetics of propriety and piety have translated into new strategies of concealment and the creation of new opacities in relation to photography. Yet, as Michel Foucault suggested, interdictions do not necessarily function solely in a repressive manner; they can also become extremely productive and unleash a creative potential when people seek different ways of observing as well as undermining the interdiction. Thus, this book focuses not only on the creation of “spaces of rejection” in a historical perspective, but also on what I call an “aesthetics of withdrawal”: the various ways and techniques that process the photographic act as well as the photographic image to theatricalize the surface of the image in new ways by veiling, masking, and conceal-

7 9/11 has not only reinforced the ancient opposition between the Christian West and Islam, but has also inscribed itself into existing conflicts in Kenya on a national, regional, and local level. In Kenya in 1998, thousands of men and women had already experienced the “Embassy Bombing” of Nairobi and since then have suffered a whole series of terrorist attacks. Under the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression, a spiraling process of progressive alienation took place between Muslims and Christians.

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ing.8 My argument here is that a veiled person, an opaque surface, or a tapestry of flashlights also provide something to see by creating a secondary image of defacement, thereby challenging the simple binary opposition of creation and destruction, image making and image breaking, revealing and concealing. The “aesthetics of withdrawal” I will explore thus focus on the process or act of becoming visible in a particular form that insists, however, on (partial) concealment of, for example, the body or face of women and thereby creates a visible screen or “outside,” hiding and protecting the “inside” from view. This concealment or withdrawal, however, produces a strange surplus of energy or desire that is likely to be aroused from within the defaced object itself. As Michael Taussig (1999) suggests, this visual negativity of seeing what is not given to see that is inherent in the “aesthetics of withdrawal” lies at the very heart of a vast range of social powers and different forms of knowledge. It is important to clarify that making the “aesthetics of withdrawal” one of the subjects of this book is not an attempt to reinstate Orientalism and the old opposition that takes the West as a pursuer of visibility, truth, and enlightenment and the Orient (including the East African Coast) as prone to secrecy and deception. As Walter Benjamin suggested, truth is not a matter of exposure that destroys a secret, but of a revelation that does justice to it. Following Michael Taussig (1999), I prefer to dissolve the opposition between truth and secrecy and join them, one enveloping the other, truth being a secret and secrets holding some truth.

On the Threshold to Digital Photography Since 2006, digital photography, in particular in the form of camera phones, has changed the media landscape along the coast. With this new media technology coming up, writing about analogue photographic practices in Africa situates this study on the threshold of a „new“ era in which digital media supersede and interact with the older analogue medium. Yet, as a rule in the history of media, when a new medium is introduced it largely subordinates itself to the old ones and only later slowly unfolds its own specific possibilities. As

8 See the discussion of the concept „aesthetics of withdr

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McLuhan has stated, the first effects of a new medium are simply the simulation and replacement of an older one. What digital photography is doing to the senses, the body, the referent, the sign, the image, and the subject and what new forms of audience and communication it will create in Africa we will only find out in the future. Yet when a new medium is superseding an older one, this process also puts the old one in a new perspective. With the new medium, new conflicts, promises, expectations, and problems emerge that allow us to see the old medium in a new way. For example, questions of the objectness and materiality of photographs have come up with new intensity in the context of digital images‘ capacity to remain „virtual“ as long as they are not printed (see Edwards and Hart 2004). Moreover, the „de-realization“ to digital photography that some scholars have deplored has opened up new questions about the indexicality of analogue photography and its manifold relations to the „real.“ In this book, I will mainly trace the history of the „old“ analogue medium from a perhaps slightly nostalgic perspective. However, this highly fragmented history will already be informed by certain questions and predicaments that relate to the digital. Media, so Niklas Luhmann (and others), open up the perspective on the world. Yet, this opening at the same time closes access to the media’s own historicity. Media are always already there and not only create their cultural milieus, but also change our perceptions before we can attempt to understand them. Through media we are constantly being caught in our own traps (Innis cit. Hagen 2002:220). Thus, when exploring the history of (analogue) photography in Kenya, we have to keep in mind that it is the medium of (digital) photography as it has already evolved that determines our perspective on earlier media. Consequently, I will end the book with a critical outlook on the various practices, threats, and panics that accompanied the rise of digital photography.

General Outline This book moves along the pathways of colonialism and modern capital and explores the practices of individuals as well as different institutions and their often opposing ways of producing, distributing, consuming, and rejecting photographs from a historical perspective.

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Yet, it does not adopt a chronological approach to the general subject; instead, it situates photography – as performative act, image, and object – at the crossroads of three institutions – the state, the photo studio, and the mosque. Although the first two of these institutions created their own fields of image production, circulation, and consumption and developed specific visual genres, there also emerged overlapping spaces into which and out of which (sometimes the same) photographers would move, engaging with customers in many different ways. In contrast, the mosque stands for a more negative and critical relationship to photography, a space of negotiation into which is inscribed an actualization of concepts of female purity and an “interdiction of figurative representations.” In addition, photographs are discussed in terms of their (changing) pictorial characteristics and their visual precedents. I am interested in the ways pre-existing media, in particular textiles, spirit mediums and scripture, and their visual economies have shaped photographic practices and modes of representation. Furthermore, I also explore the uses, circulations, and exchanges of photographs as objects, as culturally meaningful artifacts, and their insertion into ritual practices (funerals and weddings) and exchange networks. On the whole, the book raises urgent theoretical questions about visibility and its withdrawal, the relationship between photography and death, and the often-assumed „innocence“ or „neutrality“ of Western technical media and the epistemologies they imply. How can visual media such as photography that privilege the act of making visible cope with secrets and concealment? How can concealment be recorded or reproduced by photography? How can non-representational rituals that attempt to transform the initiate be mediated through visual technical media? Though I am particularly interested in the emergence of a specific local “aesthetics of withdrawal” that evolved in a Muslim milieu through the import of photography and the various local struggles and attempts to accommodate the camera and/or to withdraw from visibility, I will explore a whole range of different photographic practices from a plurality of positions that I will not try to unify. While photographers from the Indian Diaspora and Christian migrant laborers from the “hinterland” who worked as photographers in Mombasa on the Kenyan coast aligned with the logic of modern mass media

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and embraced photography with all its inherent possibilities without reservation, Muslim inhabitants of Mombasa and Lamu created and experimented with the afore mentioned “aesthetics of withdrawal” that play with defacement, veiling, and opacities. In fact, the different practices and attitudes of Muslims, Christians, and “traditionalists” toward the camera cannot be understood in isolation, but must be seen in their oppositions to and interactions with each other and also in relation to the different positions of power in the public arena of the postcolonial Kenyan state and to the West. What holds the various chapters together beyond the subject matter – photography – and the circumstances of place is the specific focus on the numerous attempts in quite different historical situations and milieus to contest photographic visuality, withdraw from the violence of the camera, and create new opacities. Besides exploring the studio photography of Indian photographers and (Christian) migrant photographers, it is the negative relation to photography that is elaborated in the various chapters from rather different perspectives. In this way, the book centers in particular on those many representational possibilities that photography seems to foreclose, such as opacity, exclusion, oblivion, prohibitions, and even indifference. It also centers on the “tricks” (de Certeau) with the help of which photographers and their customers subvert and undermine the “technical program of the camera” (Flusser 1997), thereby transcending the simple divide between resistance and appropriation. After the introduction, in chapter 2, I situate the main area of my study, the Kenyan coast, and in particular the towns of Mombasa and Lamu, in a historical and global context. I deal with the cosmopolitan urban Islamic culture of the “stone towns” as part of the global economy and “image world” of the Indian Ocean, Islamic revival, and mass tourism along the coast and will end the chapter with a discussion of the repercussions of the Gulf War and 9/11 and their inscription into local conflicts in Kenya. Chapter 3 deals with ethnographic research in a world in which the ethnographer and the subjects of ethnography more or less share the same media. It attempts to provide insights into the complicated and conflicting processes of generating ethnographic knowledge about photographic practices. I explore, in particular, the predicaments that opened up through the collision of ethnographic methods and local media practices during my field research.

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Chapter 4 presents fragments of a media history of photography on the East African coast that takes its beginning with textiles and explores the mutual relationship between the two media. It deals in particular with the negative side of this relationship: photography as unveiling. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 explore different aspects of studio photography from a fragmented historical perspective. After a more general introduction to the institution of the photo studio, I look at the production of photographs by photographers of the Indian Diaspora (1860-1980) and Christian migrant workers from the Western and Central province in Kenya (since 1990). While Indian and Christian photographers had no difficulties aligning with photography’s transparency and inclusivity, in chapter 7 I discuss the photomontages of the Bakor Studio in Lamu as an example of the “aesthetics of withdrawal.” I attempt to show how Muslim notions of (female) propriety and piety have translated into new strategies to veil, mask, and conceal the surface of the photographs and to create new opacities. The last chapters focus on the “aesthetics of withdrawal” and a more negative relation to photography from various perspectives. In chapter 8 and 9, I focus on the insertion of photography into Muslim weddings, Muslim rituals of mourning, and Christian funerals. And in chapter 10, I not only interpret the defensive performative logic that interdicts the presence of the camera in rituals of spirit possession as connected to the ambiguous political and historical position of spirit mediums in the modern nation state of Kenya; I also formulate a few structural propositions as to why – in contrast to the West – spirit mediums in Africa may have shunned photography. Finally, the last chapter, as a supplement, provides an outlook on some of the transformations that were triggered by the introduction of digital photography since 2006/7.

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Chapter 2

Providing the Context: The East African Coast In this chapter, I first situate the main area of my research, the cosmopolitan Kenyan coast and in particular the town of Mombasa in a historical and global context. To understand the complex history of photography on the East African coast, the perspective has to be widened to include the Indian Ocean, migration, and cultural exchange. I then discuss the urban Islamic culture of the „stone towns“1 and their changing relations with the “hinterland,” Islamic revival and Muslim attitudes toward images, mass tourism, and the impact of Christianity since the coming of the Portuguese. This chapter ends with a discussion of the repercussions of global events such as the Gulf War and 9/11 and their inscription into local, regional, and national conflicts in Kenya.

A Cosmopolitan Space For centuries, the East African coast has been a cosmopolitan space where the African hinterland and interior are connected with the Indian Ocean linking Africa to Arabia, Persia, and India. In the 19th century, the coastal societies were in the center of an immense trading system stretching from the Great Lakes of Central Africa to the islands of Indonesia and to China and from Europe to southern Mozambique. The trade involved both local coastal exchange and international commerce, based on the role of the coastal inhabitants who acted as commercial and cultural brokers between different countries, nationalities, and continents (Horton and Middleton 2000:3).

1 Two types of towns have been distinguished along the East African coast. “Stone towns” such as Lamu, Mombasa, and Malindi are built of stone – that is of coral block – while the “country towns” were made of less-permanent materials (Middleton 1992:55ff).

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As early as 600 AD, coastal societies formed part of a „world system,“ a world of extraordinary travel, trade, and coexistence among Africans, Arabs, Indians, and people from Persia and China. The East created this global economy, and the East actively contributed to the rise of the West by pioneering and delivering many advanced technologies – among them the afore mentioned camera obscura (Hobson 2004:5). It preceded the rise of an expansionist Europe and gives evidence of past alternative cosmopolitanisms and diasporic networks as crucial political visions (Clifford 1997:176). The coastal societies were mercantile, highly stratified, and multiethnic with urban centers like Zanzibar, Mombasa, Malindi, and Lamu (see Middleton 1992). Ibn Battuta, the great Arab traveler who visited the East African Coast in 1331, described Kilwa, for example, situated on the southern coast, as one of the most beautiful and wellconstructed towns in the world. He portrayed the inhabitants as pious Muslims and characterized also the people of Mombasa as devout, chaste, and virtuous people. Their mosques, so he wrote, were firmly constructed of wood and each mosque had one or two wells from which people could draw water to perform their ritual ablutions (Battuta 1962:31). Ever since they became merchants, the inhabitants of the coast have taken and adapted goods and know-how from those who colonized them and with whom they traded: clothing from Oman, India, and Europe, porcelain from China, Japan, Holland, and Portugal, cuisine from India, music from Arabia and India, and so on (Horton and Middleton 2000:196). For centuries, a pervasive hybridity characterized this area, rendering closely-observed and isolated cultural worlds obsolete as the descriptive unit of ethnographies. While the inhabitants of the stone towns succeeded in institutionalizing the constant integration of strangers, they set up distinctions and hierarchies between old established residents, recently settled immigrants, new arrivals, and „people of the bush,“ the latter forming the radical opposite of the patricians of the towns. The capacity of coastal societies to integrate and absorb a multiplicity of outsiders went along with a seemingly contradictory tendency to uphold a social hierarchy that centered on the divide between waungwana, urban patricians, and washenzi, barbarians of the hinterland. The two terms signified the polarized ends of the social spectrum, including an intermediate category, the watwana, agricultural slaves, and the watumwa, domestic

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slaves or servants, with whom the waungwana established a sort of Hegelian, mutually dependent master/servant relationship (Middleton 1992:24). While people from India, Persia, Arabia, Somalia, and the Comoros were integrated as traders and citizens of equal status, the people from the hinterland were incorporated as slaves and servants. Although the latter could, after some time, become full members of coastal societies, social integration meant, first of all, subjection (Kresse 2007:50).

Islamization of the Coast While the hinterland was not Islamized before the early 19th century, since the 8th century AD, mosques and burial sites testify to the presence of Islam on the coast (Horton and Middleton 2000:48f). The Islamization of the coast was intimately tied to the emergence of cosmopolitan port cities that formed part of the global trade system of the Indian Ocean. As a result, the Islam of the East African coast was not a “monotheism of the desert,” but grew out of a tradition of urban religion (Hobson 2004:39). In addition, Islamic armies did not conquer the East African coast (Middleton and Horton 2000:48); rather, people seem to have converted because of the trading advantages that Islam offered and as an insurance policy against enslavement and raiding. As Horton and Middleton have suggested, there was not a single „conversion“ moment; rather, the acceptance of Islam came about in a variety of ways, producing a pattern of variation that continues into the present (ibid.:51). Although different branches of Islam, such as the Shiites known as Zaidites or the Carmathians (Ismaili Shiites), made an early appearance on the coast, it was above all Sunni Islam of the Shafii school who became dominant in the coastal areas (ibid.:61ff). It is important to note that the Islam of the East African coast, sometimes also called „Swahili Islam,“ has never been a homogenous and continuous form of Islam. Besides the tensions between the universal claim of Islam and its specific forms of localization, coastal Islam was dynamic, shaped by a history of constant debates and power struggles in the region and by internal divisions. As everywhere in

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the Islamic world, along the East African coast, at different times various reform movements that criticized and struggled against unIslamic innovations made their appearance. However, this return to „original“ Islam was not an expression of backward-looking conservatism, but always an attempt to adapt to contemporary challenges. The encounter between local Islamic cultures and new Islamic influences repeatedly produced new religious and cultural forms that, in their turn, were again challenged by different readings of Islam (Seesemann 2006a:241). As in other parts of the Islamic (and Christian) world, the East African coast experienced not only an internal fragmentation but also a succession of „glocal“ syntheses in the form of various attempts to reform, purify, and revive Islam (ibid.:247). In the 16th century, for example, newcomers from Benadir ports and from southern Arabia led to increased conversion to Islam and introduced new ideals that were more urban and, from a religious standpoint, more literate and more „orthodox.“ Interestingly, this took place when the Portuguese led their crusade against „infidel“ Muslims; as Pouwels has stated, the commercial and religious aggressiveness of the Portuguese was a major factor in stirring up a religious revival on the coast (Pouwels 1987:38f). A later reformist movement in East Africa is inseparably linked to Sheik Al-Amin al-Mazrui from Mombasa, who also acted as Chief Kadhi of the Kenyan colony for many years. He systematically and publicly denounced local religious practices as bidaa, as un-Islamic innovations. He also attempted to create a reformed Islam that responded to the radical changes of the colonial period, ensuring that Muslims would not be crushed (Seesemann 2006a:234f). He was followed by the Zanzibari scholar Abdallah Salih al-Farisi, who settled in Mombasa after the Zanzibari revolution and encouraged young Kenyan scholars to continue their religious education at the Islamic centers in the Arab world, such as the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia or the Al-Azhar University of Cairo in Egypt. When they returned to Kenya, this generation of highly educated young scholars continued the work of reform to this day. They became known as watu wa bidaa, „the innovation people,“ a rather ironic term, because the Arabic name they chose for themselves Ansar al-Sunna, „Helpers of the Sunna,“ was a programmatic label for their desire to remove all innovations (ibid.:235). These attempts to reform Islam have led to intense debates about particular ritual practices,

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such as the celebration of Maulidi, practices of healing and harming (uganga), spirit possession, and ushirikina, a word deriving from the Arabic term shirk, meaning to share other gods with God and so to transgress monotheism by idolatry (Parkin 1993:235). Since the 1980s, a number of Muslim-led welfare organizations and societies have been founded, most of them funded by the wealthy Arab countries to provide education, training, and medical care (Beckerleg 2004:23). In 1988 in Nairobi and since the 1990s also in Likoni/Mombasa, new Islamic schools called mahad were established especially for women in order to discuss what is haram (forbidden) and what is halal (allowed), including the problematization of figurative images and the „right“ ways of dealing with new visual media, such as photography and video. Subjects that used to be part of theological debates among scholars nowadays have become increasingly popularized. Against secularization and Westernization that has reduced Islamic knowledge to an abstract system of beliefs with no direct bearing on the practicalities of daily living, a conscious training in self-improvement also promoting „disciplinary dimensions“ is now provided. Besides Islamic learning and welfare, a marked display of religious sociability is intended; it is expressed, for example, in the adoption of the veil and an efficient consumption and production of religious media and literature (see also Mahmood 2005). Thus, interactions between different Islamic traditions as well as with the (Christian) “West” and an increasing oppositional attitude toward the latter created a more intense awareness of the ways that images (of women) intruded into everyday life and opened up various debates on (female) purity and the interdiction of figurative images in relation to visual media.

Mombasa and its Relations to the “Hinterland” Mombasa was one of the most powerful city-states to emerge along the coast. The Portuguese destroyed and looted it three times, but it always managed to recover. From Portuguese sources we know that in 1505 the town already had a wall and multi-storeyed houses (Strandes 1899); it was described as wealthy, the majority of its inhabitants being slaves who, however, appear to have lived in a state of easy dependence. Indians, engaged in commerce, completed the population (ibid.).

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The Mombasa polity consisted of twelve groups, each known as mji or taifa, meaning literally a „town“ and here referring to people living as single units on and immediately behind Mombasa Island. In the 17th century, they started to build up complex alliances with the so-called Mijikenda – various groups of people such as the Giryama, Rabai, Digo, etc. living along the coast and the near hinterland – that allowed them to keep up a surprising social diversity within a larger framework of unity in the urban system (Middleton 1992:42f; Kresse 2007:46). After the expulsion of the Portuguese, the Mazrui from Oman took power in Mombasa, until Sultan Sayyid Said overthrew them in 1839 and nominated so-called liwali, governors, to have the highest authority in the town. Yet, the Mazrui and the Twelve Tribes continued to regulate their internal affairs to a certain extent, and this may be why a certain sense of equality with the Omani Arabs was installed (ibid.:47). As Kresse (2007) and Willis (1993) have shown, this radically changed during colonial times when, with the end of slavery, power relations shifted. Mombasa became the terminal of a railway line into the interior; but Indian and European newcomers to Mombasa now dominated the new economic system and profited from it. In addition, the transfer of the capital to Nairobi moved power to the „hinterland,“ and the building of a huge modern port in Kilindini diminished the economic importance of Mombasa‘s Old Harbor. People from upcountry were employed at the port because the members of the Twelve Tribes resented working for the colonial administration and, besides, retained some independence with regular paid employment. While some upcountry newcomers continued to convert to Islam to gain social standing and participate in the social life of Mombasa, most of them – against the background of a Christian colonial government and intense Christian missionary work – refused integration into the old networks of wanungwana hegemony by becoming Muslims. Instead, people from the hinterland who had long suffered discrimination at the hands of some coastal people now became serious competitors seeking to dominate social, economic, and political life in Mombasa. The conditions for being „Swahili,“ meaning „coastal“ (from the Arabic sawahil, i.e., coast) had been negotiable, flexible, and relational.

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But during colonial times, the British administration forced coastal people to identify along lines of descent. They gave the status of „nonnatives“ to those who could claim Arab ancestry. The waungwana, the patricians, however, were classified as „Swahili“ under the general term of „natives,“ together with all other Africans. This was a serious blow to their self-image of being different from Africans from the “hinterland,” and this is why they increasingly claimed Arab descent in order to qualify as non-natives, although this obliged them to pay higher taxes (but also gained them some privileges). With this strategy, the waungwana sought to close the gap with the Arabs while creating a new gap between „Swahili“ and „African“ (Kresse 2007:40). When attempts at political autonomy for the coastal strip failed and the coast finally became part of the postcolonial, independent nation state of Kenya, this meant serious decline for many Muslims. In postcolonial times, increasing immigration to the coast by people from „upcountry“ resulted in even more conflicts over land rights, employment opportunities, and political representation. The central government in the hands of (Christian) politicians continued the economic, political, and social marginalization of the coast. The government gave huge tracts of land on the seashore that it deemed „unoccupied“ to upcountry people to settle (Oded 1996:408; Mazrui and Shariff 1994:141ff). Furthermore, under the Moi regime, Kenya was defined as a Christian country by a president who appeared on television praying every Sunday (Oded 1996:408). Thus, many Muslims in Mombasa increasingly felt like a neglected minority within their own country and even their own home region (Kresse 2007:78). After Independence, local intellectuals and Western scholars redefined the „Swahili“ as Africans, but the counter-discourse that denied the „Swahili“ autochthony never lost its power. While people from the western and central parts of Kenya defined themselves as „true“ Africans, they increasingly defined coastal Muslims as „Arabs“ and „foreigners“ who had enslaved and sold them. As in other parts of the world, intensified processes of globalization in Kenya went along with a hardening discourse of autochthony and increasingly violent attempts to exclude a certain category of people as „strangers“ (cf. Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005). Thus, ironically, when in colonial times the waungwana attempted to define themselves as „Arabs,“ they laid the foundation for a discourse of autochthony that in post-colonial times took up this definition to exclude them as „non-Africans“ and strangers in contrast to the „real“ Africans from upcountry.

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Coastal Muslims were shown in many ways that they were not considered real citizens of Kenya, for example by making it difficult for them to obtain a passport (Oded 1996:407). Because of increasing competition, land grabbing, and intolerance, the coast has become a conflictual field exploited by local as well as national politicians.

Christianity and Attempts of Conversion To understand the complex contemporary situation along the coast, it is not enough to deal with Islam and its inherent fragmentation and dynamics in isolation. Instead it is absolutely necessary to consider also the other competing religions with which Muslims interact. Coastal Islam must be understood in terms of its oppositions, borrowings, and interpenetration with Christianity and “pagan”2 religions (and vice versa). The first major attempts by Christian missionaries to convert Muslims and “pagans” along the coast took place when the Portuguese started their journeys to the East. They were driven not only by their interest in spices, gold, ivory, and other riches and their will to break the monopoly of the Arabs and Indians, but also to search for the legendary Prester John and other lost Christian brothers (and sisters) (Strandes 1899:22). When they reached Malindi and visited the town, Vasco da Gama and his companions believed they had discovered a group of Christians who had come from India. To find out if they really were Christians, the Portuguese showed them images of Holy Mary, Christ, and the Apostles; and when they threw themselves on the ground as a sign of their veneration, they were accepted as Christians (ibid.:30). As Hobson (2004) has suggested, the Portuguese voyages were not so much the outcome of a pioneering modern European age of discovery but the „last gasp“ or the „second round“ of the medieval age 2 I decided to use the term “pagan” because the term is trapped in its relationship with monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam. Though the term has pejorative connotations, it comes from the Latin paganus, which means “rural” or “rustic” and was originally devoid of religious meaning. I use the term “pagan” as a category that was defined from a specific hegemonic position of power and that should be re-evaluated and defended in its dependency.

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of the Crusades. They were informed by the old Crusader mentality, rather than by a set of modern ideas. In fact, Christianity, a religion that had originated in the East, had become so successfully localized and Westernized that it could be turned into a bulwark against Islam in the Crusades. A non-Western religion was appropriated by the emerging West and then turned into a weapon against the East (see Hobson 2004:112). Portuguese ships always carried clergymen, not only for the salvation of the people on board but also for the conversion of „pagans“ and Muslims. If neither the pagans nor the Muslims could be persuaded to convert, worldly weapons would assist the more spiritual weapons of the Bible. Indeed, the war against Muslims was legitimized by declaring that there was eternal enmity between Christians and Muslims (ibid.:37,55). Violent assaults against the population were launched under the eyes, and with the apparent approval, of Catholic priests who sailed with the fleets. Active proselytizing began in the 1560s when the Jesuits started working on the southern coast, to be followed soon afterwards by the Dominicans and Augustinians at Mombasa, Zanzibar, Faza, and Pate (Pouwels 1987:39). In Mombasa, as early as 1598, 3 a monastery of Augustinians was established, who together with the priesthood encouraged the conversion of „pagans“ as well as Muslims (Strandes 1899:174f). Augustinian friars had specialized in the singularly difficult and unrewarding field of the mission to the Muslims and were also working in Muscat and Ormuz on the Persian Gulf (Boxer 1960:30). Although they did not achieve great success and were chiefly employed to minister to their own countrymen, they were able to make inroads among the lower classes and non-Muslim Africans. There are some reports, too, of a few triumphs among ruling families in Pemba, Zanzibar, and Faza (Pouwels 1987:39). Portuguese sources narrate that after the fall of Kilwa, 200 local women came on board the ships and asked for conversion to Christianity. They threatened to drown themselves if they were sent back to the town (Strandes 1899:48). Significantly, Muslim women are described as the ones who tried to escape their husbands and fathers. 3 Boxer (1960) dates the establishment of a monastery of Augustinian friars at Mombasa in 1597 (ibid.:29).

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Although not overtly expressed, a connection is made between the oppression of women in Islam and their attempts to gain „freedom“ through conversion to the Christian faith, a topic that was taken up again in the colonial discourse of the 19th century (see Ahmed 1992) and reappeared strongly after 9/11 in the „war against terrorism.“ In 1631, the „king“ of Mombasa, who had been converted and educated as a Christian in Goa, led a successful revolt against the Portuguese, killing most of them and re-converting most Christians to Islam (while a few became martyrs) (Strandes 1899:199). After this victory, a number of churches were destroyed and Christian objects and images were desecrated and annihilated (ibid.:200). Thus, an iconoclasm developed against the symbols of the colonial power that had been defeated. As mentioned before, the commercial, military, and religious aggressiveness of the Portuguese was a major factor in stirring cultural and religious revival on the coast. Reformed Muslim migrants from Hadramaut and other regions of the Arabian Peninsula assisted resistance to the Portuguese (Pouwels 1987:40ff). They are remembered as „Arabs“ who taught religion and the Quran to local non-Muslims or lapsed Muslims and often were also viewed as healers and mediators (ibid.:42). Scholars debate the impact of Portuguese colonization. While some, like Justus Strandes, consider Portuguese influence rather superficial despite the inflicted violence and ruptures, C.R. Boxer claims that the chronicles of Mombasa and Pate give evidence of the great impression the Portuguese made, which lasted after their expulsion (Boxer 1960:84). In any case, Richard Burton could still find the ruins of Portuguese churches in the 1850s; in one of them, a bit of steeple was still standing (Burton 1872:16). According to Burton and contrary to received opinion, tradition asserted that the Portuguese conquistadores penetrated far into the interior. The Swahili spoke, so Burton, of a ruined castle on Njuira, a hill north of the Pangani River and placed by Johannes Rebmann 160 miles from the Indian Ocean. In a district west of Mombasa named Chaga, whose apex is the wellknown Mount Kilimanjaro, stone walls, a breastwork for cannon, and an image of a long-haired woman seated upon a chair and holding a child were reported to remain (Burton 1872:30). The „Wanyika“, „people of the wilderness“ living in the Mombasa range, had preserved certain images in their strongholds near Rabai Mku, which they

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declared came from the west. According to the missionary Ludwig Krapf, these statuettes, called kisuka or little devil, were carried in war processions to encourage the combatants. Since iconolatry is unknown to these people, so Burton, they probably derived their kisuka „from some civilized race“ (Burton 1872:30f). Justus Strandes – referring to Krapf, too – also mentioned the image of Mary that he said was left behind by the Portuguese and that around the 1840s was still used and venerated by the „Wanyika,“ ironically as „their god of war“ (Strandes 1899:321). It may not be by chance that the Swahili still have a saying „proud (or violent) as a Portuguese“ (Boxer 1960:86) referring to the particularly violent troubles that were brought by the Portuguese. During British colonial times, Protestant and Catholic missionaries backed by the colonial government attempted to convert Muslims in the coastal region, but without much success. Against Islamic aniconism, they introduced Christian images and sometimes even asked their African followers to form human as well as animal figures out of clay. However, these representations were only produced to be sold to foreigners (Stuhlmann 1910:108f). It was Christian evangelism that aroused the strongest reactions among local Muslims. In Mombasa, the missionary W.E. Taylor is particularly remembered. Proficient in Swahili, he chose the marketplace for his sermons, since it was the one spot where people from both the town and the mainland would gather daily. He also wrote little homilies and verses, which he distributed as pamphlets. But local poets responded to and ridiculed them. In addition, fervent debates took place about topics such as the divinity of Christ or the Holy Trinity. Judging by the complaints of some Muslims, most of these texts were intended as attacks on Islamic beliefs and on the figure of the Prophet (Pouwels 1987:187). But it is primarily the rise of Pentecostal Christianity in the 1970s that spurred a more radicalized competition between Islam and Christianity. The rise of the Pentecostals, sponsored by North American money, was countered by a number of new mosques built with Middle Eastern oil money invested in projects propagating Islam (Parkin 1991:199). The struggle between Church and Mosque continued, and the opposition between the two religions – each, however, internally fragmented and facing internal oppositions – radicalized even more after the Gulf War and 9/11.

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After the Gulf War and 9/11 Global events such as the Gulf War and 9/11 had strong local repercussions and people became deeply divided by siding with either Iraq or the West. During the Gulf War of 1991, so many quarrels broke out in Lamu between supporters of Saddam Hussein and those of George Bush that the playing of radios in public spaces was forbidden (Beckerleg 1995:32). Many children born during this time received the name „Saddam.“ And there was a photo studio in Mombasa that invited its customers to „participate“ in Operation Desert Storm. While most East African Muslims initially sided with the Iraqis, most Christian migrant workers – such as the Likoni photographers with whom I will deal in chapter 6 – took sides with the USA and its cause. Thus, the Kenyan coast, although far away from the USA, Iran, and Iraq, nevertheless became caught up in these powers‘ struggles for hegemony. Global conflicts inscribed themselves in different ways into national, regional, and local politics of Kenya. With the introduction of a multi-party democracy in 1992, the activities of the Islamic Party of Kenya (IPK) 4 and its leader Sheikh Khalid Balala – and their brutal repression by the government – led to violent struggles and a warlike situation in some parts of Mombasa, especially Old Town, in the course of which the IPK was destroyed, many of its members killed, and the leader arrested and tortured, so that he became insane (Oded 1996). In August and September 1997, before the national elections, the socalled „Likoni clashes“ took place in Mombasa. Politicians had organized armed gangs (with the assistance of members of the Rwandan Interhamwe, as I was told) to stir up violence between (Christian) migrant workers from the “hinterland” and coastal Muslims. Among the migrants, photographers from the western and central provinces who had their ambulant studios in Likoni were also chased away, their studios destroyed and burned. As Sammy Njuguna, one of the

4 To reduce the power of or even destroy the IPK, the United Muslim Party was founded to divide Muslims on ethnic and racial lines. “Black Africans” formed the United Muslim Party against the “Arab Muslims” of the IPK. Here, obviously the “discourse of autochthony” was used to split Muslims.

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„Desert Storm“, Anyole Photo Studio, Mombasa 1998

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Likoni photographers, told me, they ran and were able to save their lives – in some cases with the help of Muslim inhabitants who sheltered them. Early in 1998, most returned to Mombasa and built up their studios again, as I was able to witness when I came back the following year. The „Embassy Bombings“ in Nairobi in August 1998 and the repercussions of 9/11 in 2001 in Mombasa and its surroundings, as already mentioned, reinforced the tensions between Muslims and Christians, inhabitants of Old Town and migrant laborers from other parts of Mombasa. After the Embassy Bombings and 9/11, the government showed a new interest in Muslims. Muslims felt „as having been placed under a microscope by state agents“ (Mwakimako 2007:3). Because two of the terrorists who were accused of being responsible for the „Embassy Bombing“ in 1998 were identified as Muslims originating in Mombasa‘s Old Town, Muslim inhabitants became the target of „security measures“ and brutal searches for „terrorists.“ Muslims were stigmatized as never before, associated with terror, and subjected to constant surveillance and suspicion. In their own homes, many Muslims felt under siege and had to experience what it means to become the object of the United States‘ and the West‘s „War against Terror.“ They were forcefully silenced and a few young men even disappeared into a secret camp in Ethiopia. Two others are said to be in Guantanamo to this day, so I was told. In 2003, the government published the Suppression of Terrorism Bill. Many Muslims found the bill objectionable on the grounds that its provisions violated the constitution and would lead to the abuse of human rights. When in 2004 thirty Muslims were arrested on terrorism charges, the Council of Imams and Preachers of Islam in Kenya, CIPK, accused the government of harassing Muslims and prematurely applying the bill before it became law. Although the state backed off from its initiative, many Muslims saw the continued efforts to revive the bill as attempts of a foreign government to influence the state and institutionalize discrimination against Muslims (Mwakimako 2007:43). A number of Muslims participated in political demonstrations in response to police harassment and anti-terrorism legislation and complained that Muslims were always accused of supporting terrorism. Indeed, the fight against terrorism has been widely (mis-)used to harass Muslims in various ways, for example by refusing to give them passports and national identity cards (ibid.40ff).

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In 2003 I saw a matatu, a public taxi, with a signboard „Terrorist“ driving through the streets of Mombasa, silently commenting on the wave of accusations that Muslims had to endure.5 The matatu with its witty, ironic message bypassed the official media producing – as a mobile graffiti – a transgressive reversal of discourse. In 2005, a coalition of Christian evangelical Churches started a campaign by opposing vigorously the kadhi courts where civil cases and matters of marriage, divorce, and succession between Muslims are adjudicated. Christians held that kadhi courts in the constitution bestowed special favors on Muslims and saw them as attempts to introduce sharia law in a „Christian“ country. This campaign aggravated the tensions between Muslims and Christians even more (ibid.:70f). After the elections in 2007, violent clashes were again recorded in Mombasa, but fortunately, in contrast to those in Nairobi and the Rift Valley, they soon stopped thanks to the combined efforts of local elders and other people. Not only Muslims, but also people from western and central Kenya, many of them „saved“ Christians, have experienced hardships in Mombasa. As already mentioned, in 1997 and later in 2007, they became the target of violent aggression and had to fear for their lives. Yet, unlike Muslims, they are backed by the (Christian) government. As a response to the discrimination, repression, and marginalization (if not exclusion) that Muslims have experienced in the Kenyan nation state, they have increasingly invoked a moral order based on Swahili traditions as well as on Islam. Yet, although many oppose and criticize the West – which they identify, above all, with the United States and its allies, including the Kenyan government – most of them reject terrorist violence (Seesemann 2006b). Even if Anti-Americanism among Kenyan Muslims has increased, as the Pew Research Center stated in 2002 (see Seesemann 2006b), attitudes toward the USA are much more complicated and contradictory. For example, among Muslim youths there are many fans of (black) American music, especially hip-hop and rap (see Behrend 2002b). In this complex historical situation, the oppositions between the East 5 At the same time, another matatu with a signboard “Arrest Development” offered its services to customers in Mombasa and expressed some people’s antiWestern attitude.

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and the West, Muslims and Christians, “autochthones” and strangers, migrant workers and long-term inhabitants have hardened. 6 At the same time, however, they all are deeply entangled, strongly interact, and engage with one another.

Tourism In the 1930s, Mombasa became a place particularly attractive for tourism by white settlers. The sea and the creeks that surround the island provided immense pleasure for devotees of deep-sea angling, sailing, and – later – water-skiing. Numerous sports clubs were established and created an atmosphere of „sea level and sanity“ (Jewell 1976:Xiii). During this time, white settler tourism singled out and demarcated privileged spaces – the beach, the sea, and certain buildings in the Old Town – from which Africans were excluded. Space was regionalized into different zones occupied by different classes of people. In the 1960s, the forces of new technology and globalization processes allowed Western mass tourism to invade the coast. During the 1980s, Kenya‘s tourism industry was the country‘s number one foreign exchange earner and one of the largest employers. Western mass tourism turned certain sites and landscapes along the coast even more into potent cultural symbols and commodities and invested them with new meanings. In Mombasa, Fort Jesus, which had been built by the Portuguese and had then served as a prison under the British, became a historical monument. It was transformed into a museum offering tourists a „night and light show,“ a dramatic performance with lots of torches and local people in Portuguese costumes, including a candlelight dinner with „traditional“ Swahili food. Western tourists constituted another invasion of strangers (and non-believers) along the cosmopolitan coast, in this case, however, only in the short term. Coastal people and Africans from upcountry became highly involved in the tourist business as hotel employees, tourist guides, and “beach boys” and in many other ways. Tourism 6 These local oppositions often were and are translated into ethnic categories and made use of by politicians and other people. Ethnic categories have become not only highly politicized but also militarized, and “ethnic cleansings” took place in 1997 and 2007; this is why I decided to avoid ethnic terms and instead – whenever possible – to use geographic categories.

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opened up new avenues of consumerism, confronting local people with a Western lifestyle that often clashed with local ideas of morality and modesty. Prostitution and the consumption of alcohol and drugs created new threats and led to attempts to strengthen a moral order that took recourse to Muslim notions of (gendered) purity and Swahili ethnicity. While tourists provided local people with an image of the West as of moral decay, sexual perversion, and materialism, the status of Western tourism was ambivalent, because many Muslims depended on tourists and their spending power. Whenever tourism declined because of so-called „ethnic cleansing“ or terrorist activities, numerous local people experienced economic hardship. So many local men and women tended to regard tourism as a necessary evil (cf. Parkin 2006:99). Since the 1990s, in addition to Western mass tourism and the tourism of Afro-Americans, a local African tourism has developed that, to my knowledge, has been more or less overlooked by Western researchers (Behrend 2003b). On weekends and holidays, many labor migrants from the central and western provinces change into tourists. Together with other travellers, they may visit the Indian Ocean, Fort Jesus or other tourist sights of Mombasa and, as proof that they were there, have themselves photographed (see next page). To be a tourist and to be photographed as a tourist has become a “must,“ said the photographer Maina Hatchison, who offers his services at Fort Jesus especially to African tourists. Ambulant photographers and hawkers who try to sell curios and souvenirs around Fort Jesus have built different stalls to cater to the wishes of Western or African tourists who pay either Mzungu (European) or „African“ prices for their goods. Whole families from the western or central provinces voyage to the coast in December, while school and college classes visit mainly in August. In addition, various church and women‘s groups travel to the coast, sometimes combining their visit with a pilgrimage to Malindi‘s Vasco da Gama Pillar. For many Kenyan Christians, this pillar with a cross on its top has become the site „where Christianity was planted.“ Some Christian tourists, especially members of the Anglican Church, also pay a visit to the Krapf memorial in Mombasa, Lud-

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Photographic Series with Fort Jesus as backdrop

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Sammy Big 7 Studio, Bombolulu, 2004

Simon Expert Studio, Likoni, 1996

Simon Expert Studio, Likoni, 1994

Sammy Big 7 Studio, Likoni, 1996

wig Krapf being the first CMS missionary to teach the Gospel on the coast; or they visit Rabai, where the first missionaries were stationed together with freed slaves. Most African tourists from upcountry visit the ocean, sometimes taste the salty water, and take the opportunity to travel back and forth on the Likoni ferry free of charge. Thus, along the Islamic coast, tourists from upcountry have singled out certain sites to be visited that relate to their Christian background and offer another Christian perspective on the history of the coast. In fact, the coast and its historical sites have become highly contested and an issue of political, ethnic, religious, and geographical placement. The power to define the historical meaning of a site most often has been taken away from local Muslim inhabitants and now lies in the hands of tourist guides from upcountry who tell their versions. For many Muslims living in Mombasa and its surroundings, tourism is a kind of threat not only because of the presence of so many wageni, guests, but also because they experience an increasing estrangement from their own environment, which is increasingly defined by others. As I have shown elsewhere (2003b), there is a long-standing association between travel, tourism, and photography. Photographs helped tourists to take possession of space in which they might have felt insecure (Sontag 1977:9). Photographers who established themselves along the coast never catered only for local people but also for tourists. The photographs they provided also give evidence about the history of tourism and about the efforts to visually appropriate and define different sites and locations in representations. Against the backdrop of mass tourism, and because being a tourist and taking pictures have become synonymous, for some local Muslims the only means to escape the threat of being captured in a picture by a stranger is to withdraw from visibility.

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Chapter 3

Polemic Encounters: Photography as a Medium and Object of Ethnographic Research Ethnography is currently conducted in a globalized world that is increasingly mediated by technical media. The ubiquity and globalization of technical media and media practices, also in the peripheries, have radically changed the relationship between the ethnographer and the subjects of ethnography. While in the old days Malinowski among the Trobiand Islanders and Evans-Pritchard among the Azande were the only ones who owned a camera and took pictures – and the Trobriand Islanders and the Azande did not – today, most subjects of ethnography have access to modern media and make use of camera phones, radio, TV, video, and the Internet. Ethnographers and the subjects of their research share the same media and participate in a reality that is created by them. Both are confronted with situations, sites, and social relations that are technically mediated; spatial and social distance or closeness, presence, absence, and immediacy are often organized by technical media, and anthropologists have to reflect on these mediations and how they influence and transform ethnographic knowledge. Although ethnographers and the subjects of their research share the same media, local media practices and conventions may substantially differ from those of the ethnographer. In fact, local media practices may collide with ethnographic methods. In this chapter I will discuss various “polemic encounters” in which the subjects of ethnography expressed not only their concern or refusal to be photographed but also declined to exchange photographs. I will explore the predicaments and contradictions of ethnographic media research as well as the astonishing productivity of these more negative experiences. In fact, this chapter is also a plea to include in ethnographies those situations in which the ethnographer has been thwarted and is failing. Instead of telling an ethnographic story of success, I will focus on situations that were not only withdrawn from my control, but also gave me an experience of failure and rejection, since their inclusion opens up the perspective to what normally remains concealed and unsaid. Since the 1990s, I have been working with various photographers and their customers on the production, circulation, and consumption

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of photographic images in the towns of Mombasa, Lamu, and Malindi in Kenya and Birmingham in England. Although technical media transcend space and time, I decided to study photographic practices in situ, in localized social and cultural contexts. Likewise, I practiced a multi-local ethnographic form of research. In various places, I participated in photo sessions and festivities, held long (casual and more formal) conversations with photographers and customers, and visited national and private archives. I experimented with various methods of creating intercultural feedbacks and of increasing interactive engagement, for example by visiting friends at home and in the Diaspora to look at their photo albums together. The latter method often unleashed an astonishing stream of information and stories. It was as though the photos opened fields of knowledge of their own accord, creating ethnographic knowledge I could never have tapped with well-chosen questions alone. In addition, I was able to get insights not only into the circulation, movement, and flows of photographs and people, but also into the flow of materials and ideas. Thus, ethnographic work on photographic practices demanded not only a critical reflection on the more conventional methods in anthropology, but also demanded experiments with new methods. In fact, it called for the exploration of possibilities to include in the research process photographs themselves as instruments to generate knowledge. The research process I tried to engage in was largely determined by local actors and, as mentioned before, was troubled by accidents and conflicts. But shifting my interest to these troubling situations and, in particular, to the collision of local media practices with ethnographic research methods provided highly productive insight that made me think in new directions.

Methods, Visibility, and Photography The term “method” derives from the Greek hodos, i.e., path or road. Methods are paths one takes together with other scientists and scholars. They allow researchers to duplicate and reiterate the research process and the results. In addition, they calm the feeling of insecurity; after all, one is not taking the path alone. In the context of ethnographic research, methods give assurance in a mostly uncertain terrain and permit the illusion that the ethnogra-

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pher is able to master the situation although the subjects of research “open” the door (Middleton) and the ethnographer is most often given up to their interests and, in addition, to accidents, disturbances, and imponderables of various kinds. Though every object of research demands its own specific method, it was the “method of participant observation” that was canonized and became the dominant mode of research in modern anthropology. Inscribed into this method is a Western epistemology that connects visibility and truth. Trouble comes when the ethnographer is confronted with fields of knowledge that are invisible and secret. For example, as the studies of witchcraft and sorcery by British social anthropologists show, their analysis is frequently reduced to witchcraft accusations, to questions about who is accusing whom and in what context. From the Western anthropologist’s perspective, it is the situation of accusation that forms a “fact” that can be observed and is therefore also to be studied, while mistakes and errors lurk in the domain of the invisible and in what the ethnographer thinks his or her ethnographic subjects believe. The power of words and ritual action is more or less denied and local discourses about power and witchcraft reduced to a specific event: the accusation (Favret-Saada 1990). Epistemological difficulties also arise when we are confronted with local visual regimes that do not celebrate transparency and visibility as the path toward truth but instead are much more skeptical and opt for secrecies and opacities. To accept, deal with, and engage in these invisibilities, the ethnographer risks leaving his or her scientific project behind. It is as if scientific mastership and rationality produce a strange sort of “remnant” that cannot be assimilated or understood by using the ethnographic method of participant observation. The use of technical media such as photography or film in ethnographic research does not solve the problem. On the contrary, visual media intensify the connection between visibility, reality, and truth. Although visual media create new domains of visibility and presence and shift and (re-)organize the relations between the ethnographer and the person studied, the exclusion of important spheres of invisibility is not overcome. In fact, as Friedrich Kittler has suggested, until the early modern period, the postulate of visibility reigned in the West: What is, can be seen. However, technical media, so Kittler, have destroyed this visibility postulate. Today, what being is, is in

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principle not visible, although or because it is what makes it possible to see the visible. From Kittler’s perspective, the history of optical media is thus a history of disappearance. What visual media give us to see is always accompanied by a process of disappearance or withdrawal. In this sense, making visible and withdrawing from visibility are two aspects of the same process (Kittler 2002:35).

The Ethnographer as a Camera As has been observed by various scholars, classical anthropological fieldworkers such as Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard cultivated a distinctive ethnographic eye that was encapsulated in the phrase “going to see for yourself” (Grimshaw 2001). Both did “participant observation,” aligned the male eye with a camera and took pictures. This went along, however, with a strange denial of their presence and of the camera’s presence in the field. In fact, the ethnographer – also in his role as photographer – disappeared in the images and the text of the monograph. To achieve a new scientific objectivity, the object of scientific research had to speak, act, and show itself as far as possible without the mediating and intervening presence of the ethnographer. Instead of the disturbing presence of the ethnographer, the camera as an automatic instrument of inscription was to record impersonally what happened (Daston and Galison 2002:30ff). To avoid destroying the purity of the culture studied, the ethnographer tried not to be seen when observing other people with or without his camera. To conceal the presence of the camera, the photographed people were asked not to look into the camera, one of the rules that had been stated already in the Notes and Queries. While ethnographer and photographer attempted to stay invisible, the subjects of their gaze were made extensively visible in text and images. When observing the Azande or Trobriand Islanders, the ethnographers partially acted like the camera as a recording machine. In fact, after World War II, anthropology had absorbed the idiom of photography within the production of its texts, the anthropologist recording facts as if he or she were a camera (Pinney 1992:81). Yet, while extending and reinforcing confidence in vision, the use of the camera ironically also undermined it (Grimshaw 2001:25). From the beginning of ethnographic research in the 19th century, there

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were moments of uncertainty in which the authority of the camera was intensely questioned. In particular, anthropologists before Malinowski, such as W.H.R. Rivers and Franz Boas, intensely problematized observation and the presence of the camera in the field. Much later, in the context of the “writing culture” debate up to the present, this questioning continued and led to a radical critique of ethnographic and photographic authority. However, also in texts of today’s media anthropology, there is a tendency to study the media practices of other people without reflecting on one’s own use of media in the ethnographic research process. It is as if the ethnographer – still the great master – attempts to make invisible the technical instruments of his craft in order to avoid destroying his magic (and authority).

Predicaments of Ethnographic Media Research In 1982, I met Mr. Singh, the owner of the Ram Singh Studio in Nairobi. It was a few weeks after some students from the University of Nairobi and members of the Kenyan air force had attempted a coup to overthrow the government of Daniel arap Moi. In the ensuing struggle with the government forces many people were killed. Although the “rebels” had been defeated, soldiers, police, and other people made use of the situation to kill, plunder, and loot. Indians and their shops, in particular, became the targets of hatred and violence. Mr. Singh narrated that he had been lucky because his shop – one of the oldest photo studios in Nairobi – had not been looted, burned, or destroyed. However, the shock of what he had seen and of what some of his relatives, friends, and neighbors had experienced during the last days had affected him deeply. We talked for a while and he told me of his plan to leave Kenya and go into exile in England or Canada where some of his relatives already had taken refuge. In the back of his shop, a painting of his father, Ram Singh, the founder of the studio, with a large golden frame was hanging on the wall. About 1880, Bahgat Singh, Ram Singh’s father, had come from Lahore in what is now Pakistan to Kenya. He made a living by producing wagon wheels for the settlers. When he was sixty years old he married a second time, and the first son who sprang from this union was Ram Singh. Ram Singh worked as a banker before he took over the studio that his brother Jaswant Singh had opened. The studio named “Ram Singh Studio” became very successful. Members of the political elite, Jomo

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President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Ram Singh & Sons Studio, c. 1965

President Julius Nyerere of Tansania Ram Singh & Sons Studio, c. 1965

Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, and Julius Nyerere, to name just a few, visited the studio to have their picture taken. In 1962 Ram Singh retired. His son took over, changing the name of the studio to “Studio One.” Business continued to flourish. Ram Singh went to Hamburg to study color photography. After he had told me the history of the studio, he kindly gave me as a present some fifty photographs from his archive that formed the beginning of my collection. He gave them to me suggesting that it was better for me to have them than for the photographs to be looted or burned. He died in 1989. His widow, Mrs. Manjeet Warah, whom I visited in November 1996, sold the studio to Kenneth N. Kamau, a Kenyan from Central Province, in 1990. She told me that, after her husband’s death, in her sorrow she had burned nearly all the pictures that had reminded her of him. Only a few were left. It took until the early 1990s before I started doing research on popular photographic practices in Mombasa, Malindi, and Lamu on the East African coast, generously funded by the German Research Foundation. From 1998 to 2011, with many breaks, I continued my

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conversations with local photographers, this time as a member of the Special Research Program “Media and Cultural Communication” of the University of Cologne, again financed by the German Research Foundation. In 1998, I visited in Birmingham, England, the photographer N.V. Parekh, owner until 1982 of one of the most important studios in Mombasa. While various colleagues of mine have made use of the camera as part of their field research and offered their services as photographers to the people they did research on, I did not. Against the background of a Muslim cultural milieu that increasingly questioned photographic portraits and felt intensely threatened by the cameras of Western tourists who rather often and without any sensitivity stole pictures of local people, I decided not to take pictures. Though I actually brought a camera to Mombasa, I concentrated on the many pictures that were already there, displayed in studios or the more private sphere of salons, sitting rooms, and albums, that had been produced by local photographers. But my attempt to avoid conflicts by NOT photographing opened up a new field of controversy. Because I did not take pictures, I had to collect already existing photographs for my archive. In this way, I connected to the highly problematic history of collecting in anthropology, a history of colonial expeditions, unequal exchange, theft, and violent robbery. Since there was no local market for photographs – no flea markets or specialized shops as we have in Europe – I tried to buy pictures in photo studios. I realized rather soon that my endeavor to buy pictures created uneasiness and mistrust and obviously did not conform to local practices and conventions. My attempt to explain my desire and interest in photographs of unrelated people by referring to “research about photographers in Africa” or saying “this is for my collection or archive,” was not very convincing. It took me some time to find out that the photographs sold to me in some studios were leftovers: they had been commissioned but had never been collected. In Kenya, after the photographic session the customer pays half of the price and the rest when he or she comes to collect the picture. Since many people enjoy the act itself of having their picture taken, because the act as such marks it as an important event and gives it an

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added value, photographers complain that rather often customers fail to collect their pictures. Studio owners and photographers therefore lose money, and to discipline dilatory customers they have invented a whole arsenal of punishments. A studio owner in Mombasa told me that as some sort of reprisal he would display such photographs in his showcase. And he narrated that, after having been told that his photographs were shown “in public,” a customer immediately came, paid, and collected his pictures. Another photographer acted even more drastically by exposing these photographs upside-down in the showcase, a gesture well understood as retribution. And some street photographers displayed portraits of dilatory customers on boards as some sort of advertisement for their work but also, as one photographer explained, to “let them drown” when it rained. Although the studio is a public space, the photographic portraits and their exposure in the showcases visible to passers-by was a violation of their privacy.1 Obviously, in spite of the commodification of their production, photographs are something more private, something that belongs to the person depicted and therefore should neither be exposed in public nor sold to strangers. After being produced as commodities, they are exempted from commercial circulation and shift into a more private sphere in which they are exchanged as gifts with trustworthy people, relatives, and friends. Selling remaining photographs to strangers like me was – from the perspective of the photographers – another, rather drastic sort of punishment for tardy customers. In addition, it offered the possibility to get back the lost money. At the same time, from the perspective of the customers, trading the photographs to a stranger was a double transgression, because the private picture, destined for private exchange and consumption, was not only turned into a commodity but also sold to an unrelated person completely outside of their domain

1 When color photography reached Kenya, many photographers in Mombasa would go to the lab called “Fotofast 2000” near the main post office; this lab owned a big printing machine, a Japanese Noritsu Auto Processor, standing more or less publicly in the window so that every passer-by could see the pictures coming out of the machine like in a slow motion film. However, if customers told the man who ran the printing machine that there were private pictures to be expected he would draw a white curtain, close the window and so produce some privacy. The delicate boundary between private and public was even sustained to a certain extent in the process of the photograph’s development.

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of social control. My more or less naive attempt to buy photographic portraits and to build up an archive thus opened up a conflicting field in which the (unspoken) boundaries of the categories public/private, commodity/gift, and trusted/stranger were negotiated. In addition, leftover photographs thus formed a substantial part of my archive and entered my research as objects. This, in fact, confirms James Clifford’s thesis that the subjects of ethnography inscribe themselves into the version of culture that they offer and present to the ethnographer.

Photography, Magic, and Witchcraft Islam forbids practicing witchcraft, and allegations of suffering or death through witchcraft are most often kept in the private domain, seldom reaching the public realm. Since all Muslims (should) believe that God predestines a person’s death, acts of sorcery or witchcraft appear as hubris, as usurpation of God’s power. While in many narratives the blame for misfortune, disease, and death may be traced to human agency, religious discourse should have the last word in all that happens: death, in particular, is God’s will (compare AbuLughod 1993:200). Yet, in spite of this prohibition to practice witchcraft, along the East African coast (and in other parts of Kenya) photographic portraits have become widely inserted into all sorts of practices of harming, healing, and, especially, love magic (Fuglesang 1994; Behrend 2003b). Whereas the name or body substance of a person – blood, saliva, hair, etc. – would formerly have been “treated” to attain certain positive or negative effects, now also photographic portraits are “doctored.” Since the colonial state has claimed a relationship of truth and identity between a person and his or her (I.D.) photograph, photographs have appeared suitable to “stand for a person” and, as part of a person, have entered practices of healing and harming. Thus, the magic of the state and governmental practices of power and “truth” on the macro-level have been translated and remediated into new micro-politics of magic. Yet, not only Kenyan “witchdoctors” have recognized and made use of the magic potential in photographic portraits; Western scholars,

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too, have noticed the magic or fetishistic qualities of photographs. Walter Benjamin remarked that the most exact technique of reproduction can give its product a magical value (Benjamin 1974). He noted that those depicted in a photo gain power and can return the viewer’s gaze. He extensively quoted Dauthendey, who described the uncanniness of photography in the following words: “At first, people did not dare look for a long time at the pictures. They shied away from the clarity of the people’s images and believed that the tiny faces of the people in the picture could see the viewers...”. And Christian Metz discovered a quality in photographs that he called “fetishistic.” Yet, contradicting Benjamin, a photograph’s smallness, portability, silence, and immobility means that its “magical” power no longer remains with the photographed persons looking at the spectator, but instead is shifted to the spectator, who is empowered as the “master of the look.” According to Metz, thanks to these two features – smallness and the possibility of a lingering look – photography is able to work as a fetish (Metz 1990:155). Some Africans and Westerners thus share the conviction of the mediums’ magical, uncanny aspects. Photographs are “doctored” in various ways: by reciting or writing verses of the Quran on them, by rubbing medicine on their surface, or by cutting them with a knife or piercing them with a needle. As “love magic,” photographs are also put between certain pages of a book or pinned to the roof of the house. As Maina Hatchison has suggested, it is rather common for people to fear that their photograph may be given to a mganga, a “traditional healer,” locally also called witchdoctor. Many people fear the exploitation of the photographed individual’s vulnerability not only by ritual experts. In fact, for example, some young women told me that, after a divorce, they would cut or burn the photographs of their ex-husband. This act was called ukoroti, “to make life short” and considered a dangerous act that might have consequences. Although photos circulate in various states of possession, dispossession, and repossession and as gifts and counter-gifts, photographers and their customers emphasized that women and men do not give away their portraits carelessly and in particular claim ownership of the negatives. Inspite of photography’s routinization, commercialization, and integration into everyday life, negatives, as uncanny doubles, seem to be even more appropriate for harming practices than ordinary prints.

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The “Sick” Negative Most Kenyan studio photographers I met during my research had no archive where they would store the negatives of the photographs they had made.2 Instead they sold the prints and the negative to the customer. And many customers insisted on having the negative. As Maina Hatchison informed me, most people claim the negatives as the most essential part. This is why, for example, after a divorce, rather often an ex-husband will send the wedding photographs together with the negatives to his former wife. This, so he said, marks the bitter end of the marriage. While some photographers and studio owners suggested that giving the negative to the customers was some sort of “tradition” or convention, others explained that they did not keep the negative of their clients because they did not want to be held responsible if something happened to the depicted person. When I visited Mombasa at the beginning of the 1990s, I happened to meet the owner of an ambulant photo studio named “Photo Doctor”. This photographer had specialized in black-and-white photography. In a conversation about his studio’s name, he explained to me with a big smile that just as there were also “car doctors,” “watch doctors,” and “plant doctors,” he saw himself as a “photo doctor.” He took the photographic negative literally as something negative, being in a state of vulnerability, weakness, and sickness that had to be treated and doctored to become “healthy” and “positive.” This photographer saw the photographic negative – a transparent double whose information is intelligible though reversed – as the vulnerable side of the image, holding possibilities to violate and turn against the depicted person. In the photographic process, the negative is an intermediate stage, a sort of liminal phase, in which the “positive” is inverted, waiting to be transformed into a positive. The technical process of transformation of the photographed person from a negative to a positive image equals the transformation of a person from a liminal state to a “healthy,” reintegrated status, as performed in rites de passage.

2 As an exception, the photographer of the Indian Diaspora and owner of the Parekh Studio (see chapter 5) had set up an archive. For him, as he explained to me, the archive with the negatives “was business” because it forced people who wanted more prints of their photographs to come back to him.

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Street photographer „Photo Doctor“, Mombasa 1993 (photographed by Heike Behrend)

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It is important to note that the negative is the essence of the photograph; it is always singular and unique, because there can be only one negative, while the photographic prints are pictures of a second order that give proof of photography as a medium of re-production (Dubois 1998:74). Thus, the indexicality of photography is, above all, based on the negative’s singularity. 3 It is the negative that is worked on or “doctored” by retouching. With a graphite pencil, the aspect of graphein, of writing, also inherent in the photo-graph comes to the fore. Yet, the practice of retouching is concealed; the photographers who retouched the negative in the darkroom tried to do so in a way that masked or concealed their work, in order to profit from its effects. This secrecy in the darkroom contributed even more to the negative’s liminal status. In addition, as Maina Hatchison and the Indian photographer Salyani explained to me, while colors are seen as the sign of life and liveliness, the darkness and the different shades in a negative are associated with death. In the local aesthetics of photographic portraits, shadows are shunned. Photographers have to pay great attention to prevent shadows from appearing on the surface of the picture. If it happens, the customer has the right to give back the photograph. Thus, in the local aesthetics, shadows are associated with some sort of defacement, a wound in the transparency that should be prevented. In many African languages, the word for “negative” is the same as for “ghost” or “spirit” (Wendl 1998:47). Yet, in Mombasa photographers told me that the negative was termed “negative” and that only some saw it as “negative” in the sense of potentially dangerous and weak, as mentioned above. When – actually very few – photographers sold me photographs together with the negative, they sold me a sensitive object, at least from the perspective of some people. In fact, after I had come to understand the negative meanings associated with the negative, I only ever bought the print and left the negative with the photographer.

3 I deliberately avoid the use of “original” (for the negative) and “copy” (for the print) because these terms strongly derive from the very specific Western art history and the Western art market and do not make much sense in Africa and other parts of the world (cf. Roberts and Roberts 2003:27).

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Photography as a Social Contract In Kenya, photographic print and negative belong to the person photographed. The photographer is seen as some sort of technical expert who offers his service by providing the camera and who pushes the button to produce the picture. His authorship is admitted in a rather restricted sense that does not give him the right to claim the picture. In Europe in the early days of photography, too, the photographs belonged to the photographed. Only when photographers started to define themselves as artists and increasingly found acceptance as authors could they maintain that the photographs belonged to them and not to the people photographed. But the relationship between person and picture and the question of whom the photograph belongs to is still contested right up to the present, as various legal proceedings demonstrate (Steinhauer 2009). In fact, portrait photography in Kenya as well as in Europe is a “polemical situation” (Steinhauer) and the conflict between authorship (Urheberschaft) and personal rights (Persönlichkeitsrecht) can flare up again, in particular, when the photographer defines himself as artist. In Kenya, many people see photographic portraits as part of a person and, as mentioned before, would not give away their pictures at random. Nearly all photographers sold pictures to me only after we had established some sort of relationship – when I had stopped being a stranger and instead had transformed into a friend. In addition, often they only sold me photographs after they had taken a picture of me – when we had established a relationship of exchange. Photographs not only give evidence of a past presence (“this person was here”), they also actively prove the existence of social relations between the persons depicted and the owner of the photograph. As Richard Vokes suggested, photographs have become marked as vital substance in their own right and their exchange is today commonly used to establish relations of substance (Vokes 2012:224). During the long period of my field research, many people with whom I was involved asked me to go to a photographer with them and have a picture taken together. It was as if through the shared photograph some sort of social contract was established that bound all participants to each other. The joint and collective photograph converted social distance into closeness and shared photographic space. My agreement to be photographed was an agreement to make this relationship

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visible. A refusal to do so would have led to a significant disturbance and perhaps to a rupture and breaking off of the relationship. While sharing the same photographic space may produce substantial relations, cutting and ending relations may be expressed in the act of cutting or burning photographs. Maina Hatchison, who accompanied my research for many years, told me recently that he had produced a whole series of photographs documenting our relationship. When I gave him and his family good-bye presents, he took a picture of this event. When we met other photographers or customers or saw friends, he took a picture. When I was taking (ethnographic) notes, he took a picture. He actually created a photographic record of the research process and our relationship and thereby gave me an example of the highly reflexive ways people deal with photography in their everyday life. Yet, as he explained, the photographs not only documented the relationship but also actively reinforced the connection and confirmed social closeness. In the course of our cooperation, Maina Hatchison thus became a kind of meta-ethnographer who, in the series of photographs, documented not only my ethnographic practices but also our social relationship. He thereby produced a transcultural feedback that inverted the perspective and made me the object of his photography. He engaged me in the fragile reciprocity of taking and giving photographs and allowed me to gain insights into the conflicts and collisions between local photographic conventions and my ethnographic methods. Maina Hatchison gave me prints of the photographs he had taken, but he kept the negatives. He said that he would retain the negatives to affirm and strengthen our relationship as part of an economy of sharing. It would help him to keep our contact alive when I had gone back to Germany. Yet, as we had extensively discussed the ways photographic portraits are used to gain power over certain persons, he admitted – with a big smile – that the negatives also had formed a sort of pawn in his hands that empowered him and reassured him of our friendship. As extensions of my social person, the photos – and negatives – thus served as a source and target of social agency. In fact, photographs have created a new sphere of relations that is made visible permanently and can function as some sort of social contract in a field of unequal power.

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Photograph of Henrike Grohs and the author by photographer Maina Hatchison, Mombasa 1995

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To come back to the main theme at the beginning of this chapter, in the center of the intercultural conflict between ethnographic method and local media practices stood not so much a contested interpretation of what the photos “meant,” but, above all, the specific quality of the interactions and social relations between photographer, photographed person, and the owner of the photograph or spectator. As photographs themselves have become marked as one of the constituent objects of personhood, they are made and exchanged today commonly to establish “relations of substance” (Vokes 2012:224). Inscribed into the surface of the photographs are the traces of social relations, of encounters and friendships, but also of betrayal and rupture. The reading of these traces opens up a social and political space that Ariella Azoulay has called the “civil contract of photography”: photographs not so much as aesthetic objects but instead as a political instrument that ties all persons involved in the production, circulation, and consumption of photographs – including the ethnographer and all viewers of the pictures – into a contract. In this way, photographs come to function more like a tribunal that makes the violations of the contract visible, as well (Azoulay 2008).

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Chapter 4

Textiles and Images: Photography as Unveiling This chapter presents fragments of a media history of photography on the East African coast that attempts to decenter Western versions. While the Western history of photography rather often has been told in terms of a confrontation and interaction with the older medium of painting, along the Islamic East African coast, what preceded and strongly shaped photography was not painting, but rather the media of textiles, scripture1 and spirit mediumship. The media history I will trace here takes its beginning with textiles and explores how the materiality and functions of textiles were translated into the medium of photography and how photography, when adopted into existing modes of mediation, also transformed the production and uses of textiles. Along the East African coast, the relationship between photography and textiles has gained a negative connotation, however, particularly among pious (reformed) Muslims. In conversations, Muslim women and men in Mombasa often associated portrait photography with unveiling. The boundaries and divides such as inside/outside, female/ male, private/public and exclusion/inclusion that are created by the veil were troubled and disturbed by the camera. Photography potentially violated the secluded domain of women and conventions of female modesty and invisibility in the public domain. The tensions arising between the global medium of photography that “unveils” and always gives something “more” to see, on the one hand, and local understandings of the appropriate use of women’s visibility and the various attempts to withdraw women from visibility through textiles and veils, on the other, are also the subject of this chapter.

The Coast and its Media Africa is often seen as the continent of figurative icons, of masks, sculptures, bronze castings, and “fetishes,” yet, as Jack Goody has

1 I explore some aspects of the relationship between scripture and photography in chapter 7 and deal with photography and spirit mediumship in chapter 10.

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suggested, there are large gaps in their distribution. There were and are regions where little or no figurative art was produced, or where it was produced only in restricted contexts (1997:35). Sometimes people with rich sculptural traditions and those without lived as neighbors, had access to the same resources, and were in intense contact with each other on various levels. Obviously, in certain historical contexts, some people may decide against certain images, maybe in more or less conscious opposition to those who do produce these representations (Kramer 2001). It seems that the East African coast was such an area where, even in pre-Islamic times, we have no evidence of a strong pictorial tradition. According to the scanty archaeological findings, before the spread of Islam, figurative painting, drawing, and sculpture seem to have been largely absent. Textiles, pots, mats, and woodcarvings were decorated with aniconic patterns. In fact, as Jack Goody has suggested, the rejection, suppression, and absence of figurative representations are a more widespread feature and are found not only in monotheistic but also in polytheistic religions (Goody 1997:56ff). When Islam started to spread along the coast in the 8th century, the afore mentioned (assumed) absence of figurative representations may have matched well with Islam’s (highly complicated) attitude toward images. While in other parts of Africa the process of Islamization was inimical to African artistry and material culture because Islam (like Christianity) could and would not tolerate “idols” and other figurative representations, it seems highly probable that along the East African coast Islam established itself without iconoclastic acts and without radical rupture. This even more so because Islam’s hostility toward and rejection of figurative images seems to have developed later than its spread here. Ludwig Krapf, the first CMS missionary to evangelize the coastal people, mentioned the absence of “idolatry” in his diary (15 December 1848): “In Great Rabbai there is said to be a Kisuka, a little devil, i.e., an image, probably of a saint which the Portuguese left behind them after their expulsion from Mombaz, which is now reverenced by the Wanika as a kind of war-god, and is borne round in procession before the outbreak of a war to rouse the warriors to heroic deeds. This is the only idol I have heard of in Eastern Africa, and it remarkably enough comes from an idolatrous Christian church” (Krapf 1968:202).

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With the exception of the afore mentioned kisuka “idol,” the statue of Holy Mary, left behind by the Portuguese, we do not know whether the arrival of the Portuguese with their Christian imagery transformed the indifference towards images into a more conscious rejection or whether images still did not preoccupy Muslim minds. In any case, the material culture that archaeologists have found, such as ceramics, glass, and porcelain, locally produced and imported from China, India, Persia, and Arabia, seems to have followed the aniconic tradition. And coins, most of them probably minted on the coast, were all non-figurative and, with their inscriptions in the Arabic language, can be classified as Islamic (Brown 1993). While the production of figurative images (on material support) probably did not take place along the coast, there was another tradition of visualization that centered on the production of inner images that were given expression in performances of spirit possession. Alien spirits embodied themselves as “living images” in their mediums during possession rituals. In performative visualizations of spirit possession, “living images” of strangers were (and still are) communicated in institutionalized forms. In fact, the absence or marginalization of visual media such as sculpture or figurative painting coincided with complex imaginative practices that centered on the embodiment and the production of “inner” images that were externalized in the context of spirit possession rituals so that they could be shared by other people (Kramer 2001). Beside rituals of spirit possession, the media of scripture and textiles also preceded the medium of photography and intensely shaped the visual economies of recording and processing of visibility, performance, social status, and meaning in photographs.

God as Weaver In Islamic literature, God himself appears as the master weaver and tailor. He makes the night into a cloak and he weaves the history of the universe on the loom of days and nights. He can be approached only through the garments that he has put over his unfathomable essence – the 70,000 veils of days and nights hide him as the garment hides the body and as the body hides the soul (Schimmel 1994:40). The Kaaba in Mecca, for example, was veiled in black velvet with gold-

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en embroidery, a textile named kiswa that was renewed every year during the Middle Ages and sent by sovereigns to Mecca who thereby claimed their rights over the holy place. In addition, when renewed, the old kiswa was cut into pieces and distributed to pilgrims to take home as a blessing. Visitors to the tombs of saints also brought covers, which they placed on the sarcophagus, which they touched and kissed; for the length of a fatiha, they often placed their heads under the cover to obtain blessings. Later the cover was taken away and either distributed as a whole or again cut into pieces to be used as an additional head cover or veil of a woman (ibid.:35). Thus, in many ways textiles serve as a sort of screen to withhold certain objects and persons from visibility while likewise making their invisibility visible. In addition, textiles act as the main mediators of baraka, a holy substance, providing blessing, healing, and protection, generated through physical contact with a holy object, a saint, or God.

Textiles on the East African Coast On the coast, as well as in other parts of Africa, textiles have intensely shaped techniques of codifying, recording, temporalizing, and processing (in-)visibility, social status, authority, and meaning. Here and also in other parts of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, women make use of matched pairs of rectangular cotton cloths to cover themselves, the two pieces bearing a central pattern together with a written “name,” proverb, or saying printed on the textile. This cloth is known as kanga or leso, kanga meaning guineafowl, a black-and-white speckled bird; perhaps this referred originally to an early pattern of white spots on a dark background. The term leso is derived from the Portuguese word for handkerchief. Cotton handkerchiefs, if sewn together, made the rectangular shape of the kanga. As part of the Indian Ocean trade, probably Indian cotton cloth called kaniki was brought to the coast, gradually replacing indigenous products such as bark cloth and eventually dominating production and distribution in the 1700s (Parkin 2005:47). Originally, wooden printing blocks similar to those used in India were employed to create patterns on the imported cotton cloth (Hilger 1995). However, foreign manufacturers from Britain, the Netherlands, India, China, and Japan started to produce large quantities for export to East Africa. Only after independence, in the later 1960s or early 1970s, did locally man-

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Three women wearing kangas, photographer E. C. Dias or Coutinho, Zanzibar c. 1880 (Winterton Collection)

ufactured kanga succeed in replacing these foreign imports (ibid.). Kangas have been integral to realms of signification that extend beyond mere clothing. In the 19th century, these pieces of cloth served not only as an important trade good but also as a kind of currency; pieces of cloth became a standard of value, circulating as money. They also entered into spirit possession cults as “named” gifts to appease a named spirit that had taken possession of a woman (Parkin 2005:47). Kangas – together with other textiles – served as a marker of status and were brought as gifts to be distributed during competitive feasting, for example at weddings (see chapter 8). While the phenomenon of men’s and women’s clothing bearing symbols and icons and having specific references to status, gender, quality, or event is well known also from West Africa, the adoption of scripture on the surface of the kanga marks it as strongly distinctive, if not unique. In fact, the written texts on kangas connect to the long tradition of scripture on the East African coast, where Islamic (religious) texts, poetry, and chronicles were produced in various media for centuries. As Parkin has suggested, the first inscriptions on kan-

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gas around the late 1880s seem to have been in Arabic script (ibid.:49). Arabic, the language of Islam and the Quran, is a sacred language; the religious inscription transformed the textile not only into a kind of praise of God, but also into a source of baraka, of blessing, healing, and protection. By using Arabic writing, women borrowed from the aesthetic and religious legitimacy of calligraphy; they were able to participate not only in the aesthetic display of sacred scripture, but also in mediating the baraka that inhabits this scripture. In fact, with the holy texts written on kangas, women wrapped their bodies in Holy Scripture. After the colonial government imposed the Romanization of Swahili orthography between 1904 and 1906, an important shift occurred, leading to the emergence of erotic sayings printed on kangas. Although, as Parkin has suggested, sayings in Arabic continued to appear until the 1930s, it is highly improbable that any could be erotic. No such use of the sacred language would have been tolerated, while erotic or even obscene use of the infidel Roman lettering might not only be tolerated, but also express the contempt in which both the script and the (Christian) colonial government were held (ibid.:50). Today kangas have also inscriptions in English, targeting the tourist market (Hilger 1995). Because of the proverbs and sayings printed on the fabric, kangas became the site of indirect communication, particularly among women. The widespread use of riddles, proverbs, and sayings in everyday life allowed them to circumscribe and conceal the message in a more general way and even to express contradictory meanings. The poetry often inherent in these jokes, proverbs, and riddles provided the raw material to make implicit statements and powerful connections while at the same time denying them, as part of the high art of avowal and disavowal, the art of recognizing a charged absence and denying it at the same time (Taussig 1999:68). The texts were much more secretive in their insinuations than the slogans nowadays found on Western-style T-shirts. Although the kangas’ inscriptions were topical, the frequent ambiguity of the sayings made them opaque, created uncertainties, and provoked debates and sometimes even quarrels (Parkin 2005:54,56). There is also a long tradition of so-called commemorative kangas, referring not only to specific events but sometimes even a concrete

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place and date would be given in the „name“ or text printed on the material. For example, to commemorate the Mombasa Exhibition Show in 1939, a special kanga with the imprint „Mombasa Exhibition Show 1939“ was produced (Beck 2001:185). Some kangas were explicitly made to commemorate the founding of institutions or political parties, elections or the harvest celebration that took place every August. Sayings, proverbs, or specific motifs on the kangas would not be repeated in successive years. Nor would a woman normally wear a kanga again whose „name“ was regarded as being in some way outdated. A sense of datedness through the design as well as the text strongly characterized this clothing (Parkin 2005:52). Obviously, the interdiction against repeating turned kangas into mnemotechnical devices. Like photographs, as a sensitive medium, textiles served as the material support of memory. Besides transmitting purity or pollution, a piece of cloth is, like a photograph, an object of remembrance. In photographic portraits, women‘s outfits were doubled and stored and the pictures often widely distributed and circulated also to relatives and friends living far away. While the garments were worn out and finally disappeared, in photographs women possessed durable photographic documentation of their own appearances and those of other women, which they often commented on, praised, or criticized without mercy. Although photographs are „cuts“ in time and space (Dubois 1998:155ff), they have the power to prolong the depicted event that took place in the past and to extend and renew it in the present. Wearing beautiful clothes is just as much a form of praise as being photographed (Pinther 2007:110). In spite of competition and rivalry, women sometimes decide to “share the same material” and dress alike to express their desire to identify with each other and to celebrate their unity and solidarity. Textiles function as social fabric, weaving and binding people together. As I have suggested in chapter 3, not only textiles, but also photographs are relational. The act of sharing the same material and of having a picture taken together not only expresses, but also creates substantial relations. It is as if through shared textiles and shared photographs a social contract is established that binds the participants to each other. And photographs preserve this interrelatedness in order to be displayed before the eyes of others as well.

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Parekh Studio, 1964

Parekh Studio, c. 1970

Not only textiles – as a technique of codifying, recording, and processing visibility, social status, and meaning – have shaped photographic practices, but with new printing facilities photography, too, has transformed the production and uses of textiles. Since the 1980s, photographs have been printed on textiles that now make it possible to carry photographs on the body – as a second skin – and move and dance with them through public spaces. In addition, photographs printed on textiles offer new possibilities to express political views, affiliations, and desires.

Veiling, Rank, and (In-)Visibility In the 19th century along the East African coast, origin and descent, social class and status were expressed through the quality and social value of (imported) textiles and by the amount of clothing a person used to cover his or her body. While slaves wore only the slightest of clothing, usually made of the crudest and cheapest material, Omani aristocrats were distinguished by their sophisticated headdress, composed of several yards of cloth elaborately wrapped around their heads, and by the gold and silver embroidery on their long jackets and the silk cloths that they tied around their waists (Fair 1998).

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Photograph of Barack Obama printed on a kanga, Kenya, 2009

Photograph of Pope Benedict XVI. printed on a kanga, Kongo, 2000

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In the 19th century, only wealthy families could afford to seclude their women. High-ranking women who were privileged to stay in seclusion had to cover their whole bodies in public, including their faces, behind masks, veils, and portable walls, so-called shiraa (see opposite page and page 76) carried by slaves and later forbidden by the British (Middleton 1992:150). A complex technology of veiling and concealing was made available for extending women’s physical seclusion outside the home. Veils in these different forms were movable, flexible, and unstable; as shiraa, the wall-like textiles would hide a woman completely while the other forms of veil could take the shape of what they covered, thus remaining suggestive of what they were hiding. It is important to note that a veiled person, too, provides something to see by creating a secondary image of defacement, thereby challenging the simple binary opposition between revealing and concealing. In fact, the veil makes invisibility very visible; it makes an overt and visual point out of concealment, in the process transforming the private, individual women into her public representation of a more general kind (Dudley 2011:65). The visual power of the veil seems to be rooted in this tension between invisibility and visibility and its intimate relationship with the body. The visible screen that is provided by the veil, hiding and protecting the “inside” from view, produces a strange surplus of desire and energy and lies at the heart of a vast range of social powers and different forms of knowledge (Taussig 1999). The veil was a sign of respectability, but also of a lifestyle that did not require the performance of labor. Veils and seclusion formed part of a Muslim concept of female purity and modesty, purdah that is associated with women’s (partial) invisibility in the public domain. It allowed high-ranking women the privilege to see but not to be seen in public. Yet, when confronted with local authorities such as the chief or jumbe, a woman of high rank would greet him by removing her veil so that he could see her face. By unveiling herself, a patrician woman ritually reduced her status to the level of the jumbe’s wife or to the level of a slave, expressing that he, the jumbe, was the “husband and the land was his wife and those who were in this land were his children” (Glassman 1995:156f).

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Women carrying shiraa, unidentified photographer, c. 1900

In contrast to high-ranking women and men, slaves went “naked,” uncovered, slave women wrapped only in a simple dark piece of cotton cloth named kaniki, a “badge of poverty and servility” (Fair 1998) or the afore mentioned brightly colored kanga imported from abroad. In Zanzibar, even slaves who had converted to Islam were not allowed to cover their heads with caps or veils, suggesting that the interest of the dominant class to differentiate itself from the “lower classes” overrode religious prescription (ibid.:74). But there was a certain category of slaves called wapambe – deriving from the Swahili verb kupamba, to adorn – that were dressed in their owner’s precious clothing and jewels when walking in town. As their master’s extensions, these slaves paraded in public to display his wealth and increase his prestige (personal communication from John Middleton). The (general) dress code was inverted during times of mourning. In particular, after a jumbe’s death, when his turban and his umbrella – both imported commodities that served as signs of chiefly authority – were buried with his body, all mourners went bareheaded, including women, and sometimes all the men would shave their heads to display an even more radical “nakedness.” Again, the social hierarchy

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Woman with face mask, unidentified photographer, Zanzibar, 1905 (Winterton Collection)

was expressed in the amount of clothing men were allowed to wear during the mourning period. While important chiefs removed only their coats and wore the kanzu, holders of lesser rank were not allowed to wear the kanzu, and untitled youths and male slaves were required to bare their chests, wearing only loincloths or kikoi. The social ranking was again revealed by the order in which men were allowed to resume wearing their clothes when the mourning period was over (Glassman 1995:157). Thus, a complex dress code existed that, by the various degrees of (un-)covering the head and the body, served to mark gender, inequality, liminality, and differences in social status.

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After the abolition of slavery, covering their heads and bodies was one of the first ways men and women of slave origin could show their “freedom” and new status (Fair 1998:93). When around the 1930s the buibui, a loose black garment that covered the entire body except for face, hands, and feet, was introduced, first as a new dress of elite women, it was quickly adopted by women of the lower classes and of slave origin to show their respectability, their adherence to Islam, and their modesty (ibid.:82f). The black color and shape of the buibui were designed to cover a woman’s beauty in public and to avert the attention of unrelated men. The uniformity of the buibui removed all individuality and, as I was told, reminded women that all people are equal before God. In fact, the buibui was a new form of dress that attempted to homogenize difference in the public domain and to transcend and negate associations with slavery, hierarchy, and inequality among Muslim women. But some women started adding small decorations to the buibui, such as embroidered flowers or shiny buttons. Apparently, they could not resist the desire to give a few attention-getting sparkles to the garment intended to guard them against attention in public. Now tiny differences marked them as being not quite as equal as others. The adoption of the veil and the increased seclusion of former slave women was part of their attempts to move up the social hierarchy and indicated their increasing empowerment (ibid.:81). Along the coast, sexual difference and status manifested themselves within the field of vision by withdrawing women from visibility in the public domain. Respectable femininity demanded the veil as a kind of shield against the gaze of unrelated men in public spaces.

Islamic Attitudes toward Images Islam holds that the divine essence or ultimate reality cannot be visually represented or mediated in any way. It is inaccessible, completely out of reach; it is the negation of mixture, division, and refraction, a “fortress without doors and windows” (Besancon 1994:150f). The nature of God can be known only through His words, His names, and His actions. While the God of the Old Testament found it necessary to present the Ten Commandments and among them the interdiction against making images of Himself, this is not necessary in the Quran due to the metaphysical concept of the Islamic God

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who is impenetrable and “nothing is like Him” (ibid.:151). The God of Islam does not reveal himself in flesh but conceals himself – with the exception of the revelation – and remains constant in form (Safaian 2009:69). In fact, Muhammad radicalized monotheism by abolishing its pictorial multiplication, purified godliness from symbolic practice, and claimed the position of consistent unity in contrast to Trinitarian Christianity (ibid.). Although of the three monotheistic religions Islam seems to be the most unfavorable towards images, Muslim theologians have hardly shown much interest in images. The Quran only tells how Abraham broke the idols of his father Azar. And when the Prophet conquered Mecca in 630, he cleansed the building of idols, whose number is given as 360 (Schimmel 1994:57). Here obviously, three-dimensional objects that throw a shadow are refused while flat, two-dimensional images are not mentioned at all. It is, above all, idol worship that is interdicted, not images as such. In fact, the Islamic interdiction of images is based much more on the tradition of the sayings and doings of the Prophet called the Hadith (Paret 1960:36ff) than on the Quran. In the texts of the Hadith – whether of the Sunni or of the Shia – images are described as impure, like dogs, and therefore should not be present during prayer (Naef 2004:17f). Whereas aniconic images are allowed, images that depict human beings and animals – creatures with ruh, breath or life force – are forbidden because their representation implies an act of hubris, an attempt to do what only God, the Almighty, can do. It follows from the synonymous use of the Arabic word for “to represent” and “to create” that a human being who dares to represent another person is challenging God’s privilege and therefore deserves to be punished. On the day of resurrection, God will demand that artists who create human beings or animals in pictures or statues bring to life what they have created. Because they will not be able to give ruh (breath) to their fabrication, they will be punished in the fires of hell (Almir 2004:60f). Besides challenging the power of God, the representation of human beings and animals endangers monotheism by paving the way to idolatry, the veneration of other gods. As in Judaism and early Christianity, representations of human beings and animals are forbidden in order to counter the danger of a reversion to polytheism. Yet, rep-

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resentations of human beings were allowed by some Islamic scholars if the images were not hung on the wall but placed on the ground, for example, on rugs or cushions (Paret 1960:45; Naef 2004:18). Also, images depicting decapitated humans or animals lose the status of being an image and are not forbidden (Naef 2004:21). “If the head of the image (of a human being) is separated, the abjectness is invalid.” An image is like a head. If the head is cut off, it is no longer an image (Paret 1960:46). This is why some figures were represented with lines separating their heads from the rest of the body to decapitate them and so take their lives (Almir 2004:95). Through these acts, artists made clear that they were not attempting to rival God. Figures that threw no shadows because they formed part of a two-dimensional space were also understood as already “bereft of life” and were therefore not interdicted (ibid.). As Hans Belting has suggested, the Islamic image concept is strongly based on the body. It identifies body and image in such a way that the fatal damaging of a depicted person, for example, by decapitation, makes the image acceptable, because it is no longer an image. It is the negation of a magical concept, while likewise recognizing its magical potential in the iconoclastic act through which the power of images is destroyed (Belting 2005:149). It is important to note that Islam’s favoring of aniconism did not exclude engagement with images. As Oleg Grabar has shown, several Arabic texts dated as early as the 10th century mention the existence of painted portraits of Muhammad, as well as Jesus and other figures of the Old Testament (Grabar 2003:19). Yet, interestingly, these portraits were “originally from Christian lands,” thus made by (or for) non-Muslims (ibid.:35). When in one of these narratives the Chinese emperor invites Muhammad to China and the Prophet instead sends a portrait of himself, this portrait, so the story goes, is painted so as to disappear after a certain time, providing a wonderful example of the “aesthetics of withdrawal”; this precaution is said to have been inspired by the Prophet’s fear that the emperor might be tempted to worship the image (ibid.:26). In contrast to Christian theology, no explicit image theory has been formulated in the Hadith, and for a long time the question of images seems not to have preoccupied Muslim minds (Naef 2004:26). Indeed, the aversion to pictures as expressed in the Hadith may have developed only in the late Umayyad period, probably under Jewish

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and Christian influence. Perhaps only the confrontation with Christian images made Muslim theologians feel it necessary to mark their own difference and, in opposition to Christian iconography, begin to problematize figurative representations in the Hadith (Naef 2004:31; Grabar 1977:101). Yet, even then the interdiction of images was never absolute. In the more profane domain of palaces and castles of the elites, there were wall paintings and pictorial decorations, especially in Anatolia, where even statues were used. Representations of birds and quadrupeds, as well as of scenes from courtly life or illustrations of various tales, are found on many metal and ceramic objects (Schimmel 1994:34). Since the 9th century, book illuminations were produced in manuscripts on paper, and these also included portraits of persons (Naef 2004:51); and calligraphy often explored the boundaries between scripture and figurative images by composing a human or animal figure out of letters (ibid.:58).It was, above all, images in sacred spaces that were prohibited, while they were occasionally tolerated in profane buildings. Thus, to speak of an absence of figurative images in the Islamic world before the introduction of modern visual media would be wrong, although in some regions, probably including the East African coast, these images may have been rare or even nonexistent. Considering the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, Christianity seems to be an exception because – although never uncontested – it allowed images to become the center of its cult. Yet, interestingly, this happened only after the 5th century, when Christianity had gained the status of a state religion and the images of the emperor had been substituted by the images of Christ (Naef 2004:28). I would therefore agree with Oleg Grabar that there is nothing inherent in Islam that necessarily rejects or prohibits images. The interdiction of figurative images was formulated due to specific historical conditions. An attitude of indifference toward images was transformed into a prohibition when Islam had to define its difference from Christianity, which strongly made use of images as a political and religious weapon. The rejection of certain images in certain contexts was then legalized and gained a moral quality through jurisprudence (Grabar 1977:104). However, as the proliferation of technical images and all-pervasive image-making in the Islamic world – in particular, in the popular religious domain – for about a hundred years has shown,

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the interdiction of images was never absolute and may be completely suspended when images are turned into a weapon to serve the cause of Islam. Rather than proclaiming an Islamic prohibition of images, it seems more appropriate to speak of an underlying aniconism in Islamic religious art that, however, in times of religious revival may be actualized into the more radical form of an interdiction of figurative representation. When photography and painting arrived in the coastal towns, the two foreign media met a whole range of different forms of resistance as well as acceptance among Muslims when used for figurative representations.

The Sultan’s Portrait Around the same time when photography was introduced along the East African coast, paintings also started to be made and to circulate. Following the Western and Eastern tradition of producing painted portraits of rulers, the sultans in Zanzibar were the first to be invited to have their portraits painted. Before that, imported coins were the earliest medium that circulated the faces of rulers. While local coins, as mentioned before, had Arabic inscriptions, following Islam’s preference for aniconism, the British and German colonial powers introduced Rupees and Maria-Theresia Thaler depicting the faces of rulers. The faces on coins functioned as elements of a strategy of representing kings and queens in their absence, circulating their image throughout the colony and even abroad, and thereby claiming a territory. To circulate the image of a ruler was one of the rituals of (colonial) power. Likewise, stamps were introduced showing, for example, Queen Victoria, thereby also violating local aniconism. Today, the painted portraits of the Sultans are part of the National Museum’s collection at Fort Jesus in Mombasa. While most of the pictures are stored in an archive, the portrait of Sultan Sayyid Said is exhibited in Fort Jesus and can be seen hanging on the wall in a small room for display to local and foreign tourists. As Athman Omar Lali, a well-known anthropologist and archeologist who also worked as a researcher at the Fort Jesus Museum in Mombasa, told me, the following narrative circulates in Mombasa about this portrait: Although the sultan is said to have agreed to be

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portrayed, the artist did not represent Sayyid Said’s face but substituted for it an imaginary person. While officially complying with the demand to provide a portrait of himself as a ruler, he sabotaged the demand by having the artist hide his face behind the face of another – perhaps to avoid transgressing against Islam’s “prohibition” of figurative representations. Thus, this story gives evidence of a rather ambivalent attitude toward portraits. It gives an example of some sort of “soft” iconoclasm by masking the face of the ruler through the face of another.

Painting of Sultan Sayyid Said, Fort Jesus, Mombasa (photographed by Heike Behrend)

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The “First” Photographic Portrait: The Liwali In 1996, I met Mwalimu Saggat Alawy, a former teacher, well-known Islamic scholar and historian in his home in Old Town of Mombasa. He was the proud owner of an archive of various photographs and newspaper clippings that related to the history of the coast. He showed me a photograph taken in Mombasa depicting the liwali or governors who had been inaugurated by the Sultan of Zanzibar – but had been confirmed by the British colonial administration. The photograph was taken by the colonial official A.C. Hollis, secretary of Sir Charles Eliot, Commissioner for the Protectorate from 1901 to 1904 (Eliot 1905:vi). Saggat Alawy’s father had worked for Hollis.

The Liwali, c. 1900 (photographed by A. C. Hollis, Saggat Alawy Collection)

This photograph, so Saggat Alawy, was the first made of African rulers to be sent to Queen Victoria. The queen, said Saggat Alawy, already had lots of photographs, mainly from India. When Kenya became a British colony, she wanted to know what Kenya and its people looked like. While other people refused to be photographed, said Saggat Alawy, the liwali, because they were working as part of the government, allowed Hollis to take their pictures. They recognized that their portrait had the capacity to extend the domain of their in-

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fluence. By sending their photograph to England, they could solicit recognition from those abroad, and this recognition would itself testify to their power. At the same time, their photographic portraiture could assert the equivalence between them as local governors and the British institutions of monarchy (cf. Morris 2009:124f). While Saggat Alawy saw the exchange of images as a privilege among rulers, he likewise recognized the connection between these photographs, hegemonic knowledge, and domination. This was why he started to build up his own photographic collection as a sort of counter-archive to official representations. Copies – prints, paintings, and photocopies – of the photograph of the liwali have widely circulated through complex and shifting visual economies and have gained new inscriptions. Up to now, a few copies are publicly displayed in various shops and restaurants in Old Town of Mombasa either to give visual expression to the owner’s descent from one of the depicted liwali or to refer to a past many people are proud of and identify with. While the liwali seem to have consented to the production and circulation of their photographic portrait, many more ordinary Muslim men and in particular Muslim women experienced being photographed by agents of the colonial state as a violent and humiliating act.

Photography as Unveiling At the beginning of colonial times in Kenya, a registration system was introduced based on a certificate known as kipande. It was a means to control and survey African labor, mobility, and access to reserves and towns. The certificate recorded a man’s name, district, location, registration number, the name of his employer, the date and nature of employment, the rate of wages last paid, the date of discharge, and the employer’s signature. Sufficient space was given to record a whole employment history and a man’s fingerprints. Every African man had to carry this certificate in a numbered metal case worn around his neck – like the badge of a dog collar, as some Africans observed. Penalties of a fine or a maximum of three months imprisonment were prescribed for people who destroyed, damaged, or disposed of their certificates (Clayton and Savage 1974:131ff). The kipande system made desertion difficult and turned the workers into virtual prisoners until their contract came to an end and they were discharged (Kanogo 1987:38).

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The abolition of the kipande system was a principal goal of African protests. But only after World War II was this system finally abolished and identity registration and labor records separated (ibid.:171). Then, in the late 1940s, the colonial state of Kenya demanded photographs – cropped, frontal headshots – for I.D. cards to better identify and control its subjects (Brielmayer 2003:131). If somebody wanted to travel, open a bank account or get a driver’s license, an I.D. picture was needed. Especially in the rural areas, having one’s face captured for an I.D. was often a person’s first encounter with photography as a gesture of subjection by the (colonial) state (Werner 2001). Along the Kenyan coast, Muslim women’s veils formed an obstacle to the sight of the colonial government and its cameras. Women veiled and dressed in a buibui reinforced the impression of inaccessibility. The veil discouraged the colonial photographer’s scopic desire and more or less clearly intimated a refusal. Veiling and, in particular, veiling the face was considered the equivalent of resistance. And just as, for Christians and Westerners, the face marked the identity of a person, the veil was not only (mis-)understood as a symbol of the oppressed status of women, but also as a potentially subversive attempt to hide one’s identity. Especially in towns like Mombasa, the colonial administration as well as colonized husbands and fathers shared the concern about control over women, who when wearing the veil could get “lost” and were hard for the government or relatives to trace (Willis 1993:108). Thus, the veil had to fall, and faces, including those of women, had to offer themselves to the bold and impatient glances of the photographers working for the state. Muslims in particular experienced the imposition of I.D. photography as a violent and humiliating act. In colonial as well as postcolonial times, the central government in Kenya lay in the hands of Christians; so measures were interpreted as deliberate infringements of Islam’s “interdiction of figurative representations” and as anti-Muslim. I was told many stories about resistance to photography, particularly by pious Muslims who wanted to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca and therefore needed a passport. In particular, Muslim women associated I.D. photographs not only with foreignness, Christianity, and colonization, but also and especially with the act of being forced to unveil their face and thereby violate conventions of piety and modesty.

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Thus, I.D. photography gained a negative connotation among pious (reformed) Muslims. Photography troubled and disturbed the boundaries and divides such as inside/outside, private/public, female/male and exclusion/inclusion that are created by the veil. As the proliferation of mass media has strongly favored public visuality, it conflicted with the already existing boundaries. In fact, photographs were conceived as the opposite of the veil, because the camera intruded into a domain conceived as private and female and because the camera recorded an “excess” of visible details and surfaces that could not be controlled. The mobile medium also provoked anxieties about the easy reproduction, mobility, and circulation of portraits of women, particularly among men who were not supposed to see them. While veils were used to cover and conceal women’s bodies and faces, photographs revealed what should have remained concealed. Strong tensions arose between the global medium of photography that “unveils” and always gives something “more” to see, on the one hand, and local understandings of the appropriate use of women’s visibility, on the other; this led to various attempts to withdraw women from visibility and create new opacities. Obviously, because the colonial and postcolonial government’s visual politics was bent on unveiling Islamic women, it actualized and reinforced what now is seen as an essential part of local tradition, culture, and religion, the veil, purdah, and the “interdiction of figurative images.” When Muslim women today critically associate photography and unveiling, they refer to their experiences of forced unveiling in front of a photographer working for the post-colonial administration and a state that insists on a visual regime of transparency. In fact, many Muslims conceive photography in relation to textiles as the opposite of the covering and protecting veil, because (un-related) camera men penetrate the private (female) domain and record an “excess” of visible details and surfaces that cannot be controlled. Yet, inspite of rejection and a highly ambivalent attitude toward the new medium, photography strongly intruded into everyday life and radically transformed local economies of representation, also among Muslims. While photography by the state remained highly contested, through the institution of the photo studio the new medium was able to gain more social acceptance.

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Chapter 5

Creating Spectacles: Studio Photographers of the Indian Diaspora Against the constraint of state photography, the studio provided a space of playfulness, experimentation, and transformational capacities, though not situated outside of (colonial) state governance. As Liam Buckley (2010) has suggested, it is impossible to clearly separate administrative photography from studio photography as some sort of vernacular photography. Rather often, photographers in studios also provided passport or other forms of I.D. photographs or travelled into the rural areas as ambulant photographers and agents of the state. Conversely, studio photography is embedded in bureaucratic procedures such as stamping, giving receipts, billing, building up an archive, and so forth. All these factors have contributed to the local understanding of photography. Although (colonial) hegemonic powers have shaped the studio, we can also observe conscious moments of opposition and subversion to state photography, its formats, and its aesthetics; I will explore these in the following chapter. As the South African artist Santu Mofokeng suggested, studio photography has also to be seen as a criticism of the stolen images of reportages, documentations, and identification procedures of the (colonial) state. In addition, the studio provided means to escape fixed identities.

The Studio The Western history of photography has been characterized by an epistemological and aesthetic split: staging and enactment versus document; art versus contingency; fantasy and imagination versus truth (Stiegler 2009). Already in 1839, when presenting the new medium to the Academie Francaise, Dominique Francois Arago praised photography’s exactness, its capability to faithfully record monuments such as the pyramids of Egypt for sciences such as Egyptology. He privileged an alliance between photography, the state, and sciences, providing the new medium a space situated in the realm of truth and objectivity (see Trachtenberg 1980:15ff).

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Studio photography, associated with popular culture, staging, desire, imagination, and manipulation, then emerged as the opposite of “straight” photography, which was not modified by handwork and stood for the real and truth. Yet, as various scholars have shown, not only many (scientific) anthropological photographs have been staged and re-enacted (see Edwards 1998:113ff), but also icons of documentary photography such as, for example, Yevgeni Khaldei’s Flag on the Reichstag of May 2, 1945 and Joe Rosenthal’s raising the flag on Iwo Jima (which became the subject of Clint Eastwood’s film “Flags of our Fathers”) were mise en scène (Stiegler 2009:15ff). But the fact that these pictures have been re-enacted or staged by photographers does not diminish their historical truth. From the beginning, fiction explicitly presided in the medium’s history, thanks to Hippolyte Bayard’s odd self-pitying impulses1 or a bit later thanks to studio photography. As the recent debate about digital photography and indexicality has made clear, procedures of truth and evidence seem to be based not so much on photography as a technical process but much more on the institutions and epistemological fields into which the camera is inserted. The split between “straight” photography, associated with truth and objectivity and studio photography as the space of “beautiful lies” appears to be a specific characteristic trait of the European history of photography and, as I attempt to show in the following, does not hold for the East African coast, where an alliance between science, truth, and photography neither gained such importance nor strongly entered the popular imaginary. Although the colonial state created a field of photography situated in “truth,” studio photography as such never came to be positioned as the opposite of “truth.” Instead, studios participated in the production and circulation of a whole range of different pictures that, through various strategies of persuasion, could gain a truth value (or not). As there are no singular or stable meanings in a photograph, even if the picture is produced in a studio as part of a play of make-believe, the pragmatic configurations of production inscribed into the photograph and the multiple conditions of reception open up a space that allows a whole range of interpretations in between the realm of truth and (true) fiction.

1 To protest against the politics of the Academie Francaise, he produced several explicitly fictional photographs that depicted him as a drowned man (see Brunet 2009:88f).

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In the following I intend not only to bridge the afore mentioned divide, but also to ask about the “truths” that can be found in studio photography. As suggested before, in Kenya (and other parts of the world) studio photography is not conceptualized so much as the opposite of reportage or documentary photography, but as a way to improve the real and to give real wishes and desires a space for expression. I will take the institution of the photo studio in Kenya as a productive site for rethinking concepts of photographic presence, reality, and imagination, as a site of the transfer, transformation, circulation, and mobility of pictures and intersecting and contested histories, intentions, and inscriptions. To understand the complex constructions and re-mediations of photographs in studios on the Kenyan coast, we have to question our concept of realism, which itself was strongly informed by the medium of photography (Daston and Galison 2002).

The Photo Studio as a Site of Inter-Mediality The photo studio, as it evolved in the 19th century, was a hybrid space in which not only the camera but also other media such as theater, painting, drawing, and scripture combined in complex ways to produce photographic images. In Europe, studio photographers followed closely the tradition of portrait painting; they took over the atelier or studio of the artist as a space for photographic creativity and production. At the same time, they turned the camera obscura, the dark chamber, into a room of light, with roof and walls made out of glass to allow daylight (together with large reflectors) to illuminate the inner space of the studio (to reduce the long exposure time). In contrast, more or less set apart, the darkroom provided another site of intervention: here the photographic negative was developed, manipulated in a number of ways, and transformed into a positive image. When photographers from Goa and Europe transferred the institution of the photo studio to the East African coast, it did not have to compete with an already existing tradition of painted portraiture. Instead, photography occupied an empty space and had no rival in painting. In contrast to Europe, popular photography and popular painting became established in their foreignness at the same time and mutually shaped each other. In Kiswahili, photographs as well as painted pictures are called “picha,” (derived from the English word “picture”) and, as I will show later, some popular photographers conceptualized photography and painting not so much as distinctive media and genres, but as different phases in the production of “pichas.” Also in Africa, studios formed interfaces of mediation between var89

ious public media: newspapers, journals, cinema, TV, radio, and theater. Images of film stars or VIPs displayed in other mass media often provided models for customers and photographers. There was a constant recycling of public images and more private ones from various media, merging with and informing each other.

The Studio as a Site of Liminality As in other parts of the world, also along the East African coast the photo studio provided a sort of social laboratory in which various forms of spectacular visibility were experimented with. At the same time, it provided a space in which attentive behavior in front of the camera formed part of a continuous process of feedback and adjustment that Foucault called “a network of permanent observation” (Foucault cit. Crary 1999:76). Although the photo studio emerged as an attempt to domesticate and control the unpredictability, inclusiveness, and excess of photography, it became an exercise in self-discovery and the cultivation of the self. In a society in which only rulers had owned portraits of themselves, photographic portraits evolved as a new technique of the self that would be available also for the common people. As a new mode of self-creation, it offered a new way of relating to the self as well as to others. Whereas mirrors and surfaces of water reflect only fleeting images, photography is able to produce permanent pictures that can be stored, re-viewed, and used to remember persons and certain events. Thus, photographic portraits became a “technique of the self”; they made it possible to objectify as well as subjectify the photographed person in a new way. They created a new sort of critical self-awareness and radically changed the economies of memory and the construction of biographies. In the studios, photographers and their customers playfully experimented with new configurations and new modes of expression of the body and foreign images of femininity and masculinity – the dandy, the gentleman, the lady, the housewife, the romantic couple – that sometimes overlapped with representations in other media, for example, in spirit possession cults. There are good reasons to describe the studio’s transformative capacity as liminal (see Behrend and Wendl 1998). First of all, the complex technical and chemical processes of photography, the different

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phases of taking a picture, of development, and of printing have been interpreted as a ritual process in which the production of the negative through its transformation into a positive can be associated with the liminal phase (Tomas 1982). Yet, not only the technical/chemical processes, but also the different stages of transformation of the photographed subject strongly resemble the liminal phase of rites de passage as Arnold van Gennep and, in particular, Victor Turner conceptualized them. In the liminal phase of the photographic process, the photographer creates another “existence.” Even a kind of social death is experienced when the photographed person is turned into an object, frozen in a pose, dispossessed of himself or herself, and changed into an image (cf. Barthes 1981:14). Then, after having gone through the liminal phase of social death, an image of a “new” person is born by an antipathetic or sympathetic photographer.

The Photo Studio as Part of an African Modernity While early colonial (and anthropological) photography used to show Africans as “deviant,” as “savages” and “primitives,” and established hierarchical tribal and ethnic visual categories, in popular studios Africans displayed themselves as modern, appropriating Western clothing and other emblems of modernity to mark the rupture with their own past, which during colonial times had been stigmatized as the Other of modernity. In conversations, various photographers and their customers pointed out that they saw photography as a modern way of dealing with the world and a way to improve one’s standing in it. Thus, media technology introduced under colonial rule coexisted with the modernist ideology of progress. In the studios, splendid visions of modernity were created that sometimes also included modern “inventions of tradition,” fictitious images of a more or less idealized past. Yet, while in West Africa the display of traditions seems to have been substantial in early studio photography, in colonial Kenya, perhaps because of its implicit apartheid system, Western hegemony seems to have been particularly strong in creating a more intense desire, at least up to the 1960s, to appear modern. Later, in postcolonial times, photographic visions of modernity in Kenya oscillated between the construction of bounded local traditions and globalizing cosmopolitan views that transcended local identities, ethnicity, and even the nation state.

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The studios provided a space where the public and the private interacted in complex ways. As Liam Buckley has shown for Gambia, also in Kenya studios looked like parlors and parlors looked like studios (Buckley 2006:61; Behrend 2000). Beauty and elegance were constructed in a way that made photographed persons and surrounding space (as parlor or sitting room) mutually praise each other. New concepts of domestic space merged with the more public stage of studios in elegant settings to provide the surroundings for a photograph. Moreover, studios served as a social meeting place. Customers were divided into two categories: strangers and regulars. All the photographers I talked to had built up an extensive network with various people from the neighborhood and from their Diaspora. Relations based on ethnicity were important, yet never exclusive. People would come and gather in the studios, talk and exchange views and discuss the latest rumors. Some photographers had known their customers for many years and had substantial insight into their lives. Sometimes the photographer would be asked to come to their customers’ home to take pictures of birthday parties, weddings, or funerals. The photographer Maina Hatchison, for example, defined his relationship to some of his customers as “CBI” that is “close binding intimate.” He saw himself as somebody who accompanied people through the different stages of their lives, acting as a trusted person and sometimes comforting his customers when they were in trouble. Customers would talk to him and ask to be photographed in order to feel better again, so he said. Sometimes taking pictures became an attempt to escape the misery of everyday life and, as he called it, a “phototherapy.” The space of studios I visited was organized and functionally equipped in strikingly similar ways. They all had an open storefront where photos, frames, films, etc. were ordered and sold. Adjoined to this there was the actual studio, often a separate room, sometimes including a little cubicle where a mirror, a comb, and a tie, dress, or jacket were kept, which the customers could borrow. In the studio itself there were spotlights, usually directed toward some sort of stage against a wall that was decorated with either diverse painted backdrops or variously colored curtains.

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Painted backdrops with landscapes, gardens, clouds, and Victorian living room interiors were originally introduced by Europeans. They were first copied by local artists, and then gradually adapted to the tastes of African customers. Each decade developed its own favorite motifs, such as urban scenes with multi-storey buildings, city avenues lined with streetlights, skyscrapers, airports and airplanes, parks and benches, waterfalls and national tourist sites (Wendl and Prussat 1998). All studios had props in the form of pillars, the afore mentioned curtains, chairs or a bench, a small table with a tablecloth, and various plastic flower arrangements. In addition, the studios tried to offer the latest fashionable and technical accessories, such as hats, watches, umbrellas, radios (ghetto blasters), cassette recorders, TVs, telephones and later mobile phones, and so forth to create modern identities, preferably displayed in alliance with other technical media. In Africa – as well as in India – studio photography could become successful not so much because of the medium’s indexicality, but rather because of its creative transformational capacities that permitted its subjects to come out other and better. In studios, backdrops and props were used to create incongruous locations and utopias of consumption and, by adopting fancy clothes and poses, people would change into VIPs or persons with a higher status and would appropriate some sort of globalized glamor (Pinney 2003:13). While the world outside the studio could be a world of scarcity, poverty, and exclusion, photo studios provided a space for taking possession of authorized Western and Eastern models of romance, leisure, travel, tourism, beauty, fashion, and fitness, and their aestheticization in the spectacle. Studio photography counteracted the documentary practices of the (colonial) state and resisted, subverted, and parodied the realist claims of photography, while at the same time profiting from and playing with its “truth value.”

Studio Photographers of the Indian Diaspora As mentioned before, for many centuries, the East African coast has been part of the extended space surrounding the Indian Ocean that

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has been considered a zone – geographically, socially, politically, and economically – where various people, objects, and ideas circulated, transcending local, regional, and continental boundaries. In fact, this space could be considered a sort of “image world” (Poole 1997) in which a multitude of visual representations and media were produced, exchanged, consumed, transformed, and sometimes also refused. In this extended space of the Indian Ocean, an intense exchange of people, objects, and ideas took place, in particular between India and the East African coast. Ibn Battuta, the great Arab traveler who visited the East African coast in the 13th century, noted Indians as well as Arabs trading there (Salvadori 1989:7). When they reached the East African coast, the early Portuguese found Indian trading communities living in Malindi, Mombasa, Kilwa, and Pate (Horton and Middleton 2000:82). A Dutch traveler noted people from Goa along with Portuguese in Mombasa in the 1580s (Salvadori 1989:ibid.). Indian merchants traded rice, wheat, soap, indigo, butter, oil, carnelians, pottery, and, above all, cloth. Cloth was the most important trade good, and the industrial production of textiles in western India, many of them printed, led the inhabitants of the coast to give up their own production, using Indian cloth for trading with the hinterland (Horton and Middleton 2000:ibid.). While links with Arab trading partners were strengthened through marriage, marriages with Indian trading partners seem to have been rare (ibid.:107). At the end of the 19th century, Kenya became a white settler colony like Rhodesia, a characteristic that deeply shaped its history. However, in its colonial beginnings, Kenya had the appearance of an Indian frontier, adopting India’s currency, penal and civil codes, bureaucratic structures and personnel, and much else. Indians, often from Goa filled all of the lower echelon and a number of the higher posts in the Protectorate administration. The Protectorate was, for all practical purposes, a province of British India, administered from Bombay until the 1920s, when the last official links with India were severed and the Protectorate was transformed into the Kenya Colony (Salvadori 1989:9f). In addition to the already existing Indian Diaspora along the coast, the colony drew a large influx of immigrants from India, while European settlement began slowly and hesitantly (Kennedy 1988:11,22). The British used some 32,000 Indian laborers to construct the rail-

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way from Mombasa to Kampala in Uganda. With the completion of the railway in 1904, hundreds of Indian clerks, artisans, and shopkeepers were drawn into the interior. With very few exceptions, Indians were forbidden by law from owning farmland and therefore settled in townships – in many cases they built the towns – and became increasingly urbanized (Salvadori 1989:10). A highly segregated society emerged, the upper stratum being white settlers from Britain and southern Africa, 2 Indians forming a middle class of artisans, shopkeepers, and traders, while Africans were largely excluded from business. The latter were dispossessed of large parts of their land; they lived in reserves and formed a labor force reservoir for the plantations of the white settlers. By 1911, the Indian community of Kenya totaled approximately 12,000, nearly four times the number of Europeans (ibid.:50). Rivalry between Europeans and Indians escalated during the “Indian Crisis” of 1923, when white settlers organized a boycott against Indian shopkeepers in an effort to ruin them and drive them out of the colony (ibid.:68). The so-called “poor whites” in particular saw Indians as competitors who blocked their economic progress. While the highlands were mainly occupied by white settlers, the urban centers became an important habitat for Indians, and Indians opened up photo studios in the towns along the coast. In fact, the first generation of photographers brings into focus the Indian Ocean as a crucial space of visual and technological transfer. In the following, I will trace a very selective and fragmentary history of studio photography along the coast that offers insights into the contradictory processes of “visual decolonization” (Pinney 2003:219). I take as examples three studios in Mombasa: the early studio of C.D. Patel (around 1920-1960); the Parekh Studio, one of the most fashionable elite studios in town from the 1950s up to the early 1980s; and the Mwembe Tayari Studio, which caters mainly to migrant workers from the 1930s to the present.

2 In contrast to Rhodesia, many of the white settlers in Kenya came from the old British landed elite, an “anachronistic gentlemanly contingent of refugees from capitalism and industrialism” (Kennedy 1988:47). There was a rift between the British majority and the Afrikaaner minority in the colony of Kenya (ibid.:48).

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The First Studios Highly mobile photographers from India, and in particular from Goa, founded the first photo studios. Indians from Goa were mostly Roman Catholics because Goa had been a Portuguese colony, and when the British took over toward the end of the 19th century, they took advantage of these often well-educated inhabitants and began employing English-speaking Goans in a variety of capacities. Once the Imperial British East Africa Company turned to Bombay to recruit staff, they found Goans both qualified and willing to come out to Kenya and also to Zanzibar, where they served, for example, as court musicians of the Sultan (Salvadori 1989:311) and as photographers. As Portuguese nationals, they were given special non-Indian status that entailed legal advantages pertaining to education and taxation. During the early colonial days, Goans were the backbone of colonial administration. Besides working as clerks, medical doctors, merchants, musicians, cooks, and photographers, they also provided good tailors and two of them, Edward Diaz and St. Rose de Souza, started a chemist shop – “Edward St. Rose & Co.” – in Mombasa (ibid.) that also provided the necessary chemicals to photographers.

Swahili woman, Gomes Studio, Zanzibar c. 1900 (Winterton Collection)

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Swahili women carrying clay pots, Gomes Studio, Zanzibar c. 1890 (Winterton Collection)

Portrait of the famous slave trader Tipu Tip, photographer E. C. Dias or J. B. Coutinho, Zanzibar c. 1890 (Winterton Collection)

In 1868, A.C. Gomez, from Goa, opened the first studio in Zanzibar. He also catered to the steamship tourism in the port town by producing and marketing postcards (Brielmaier 2003). Around 1890, Gomez was followed by A.R.P. de Lord, C.A.W. Grün, E.C. Dias, and J.B. Coutinho, the last two again from Goa. C. Fernandez and C. Vincenti settled down in Dar-es-salaam, while Grün and Coutinho opened up branches in Mombasa. In addition, T.A. Costa and D.V. Figueira from Goa, C.D. Patel from Gujarat, and A.H. Firmin built studios in Mombasa, and William D. Young3 founded the Dempster Studio (Monti 1987). 3 Young also worked as the official photographer of the Uganda Railways and documented the railway’s construction from Mombasa to Kampala. Around 1905, he established another studio in Nairobi, then a new colonial town in the “hinterland” that later became the capital of Kenya.

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From the beginning, photographers from India deeply shaped the photographic conventions along the coast. In India, photography had already become an established practice, both as part of government policy and as court art, at almost the same time as in Europe (Pinney 1997a). Indians brought their own photographic traditions to East Africa and from the beginning countered Western hegemony. Photography as a global medium not only was structured around the dichotomy between the West and the “rest”; it also opened up a third space: Indian photography mediating between the reified poles of local Islamic traditions and Western modernity (cf. Larkin 2003:172f). It is important to stress that it was, above all, “foreigners” – Christian photographers from India (Goa) and Europe – who established the first studios in coastal towns. They aligned with the logic of modern mass media and embraced photography with all its inherent possibilities without reservations, while Muslim inhabitants of Mombasa and Lamu seem to have been much more skeptical and hesitant. Yet the different practices and attitudes of Muslims, Hindus, and Christians toward the camera cannot be understood in isolation, but must be seen in their oppositions to and interactions with each other, and also in relation to the different positions of power in the public arena of the colonial Kenyan state and to the West.

C.D. Patel In October 1996 in Mombasa, I met Dr. Rasik Patel, whose father C.D. Patel had been a famous photographer there. C.D. Patel, born in Gujarati in 1886, worked in a school teaching children painting and drawing before he reached Mombasa in a dhow in 1918. He was the youngest of three sons; the eldest became a farmer, while the second migrated to South Africa. Originally, C.D. Patel wanted to join his brother in South Africa but he realized that there was good business in Mombasa and opened a photo studio in Old Town, as his son explained to me. In 1928, he shifted the studio to Nkrumah Road and, in 1933/4, established another, bigger studio opposite the road that was even visited by the governor.

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C. D. Patel Studio, Mombasa around 1930

In 1942, he retired and went back to India to join his two brothers, who had meanwhile built up a firm named Bombay Photo Stores. This firm not only produced photographs, but also films, especially advertising films. It closed down around 1960. C.D. Patel died on27 January 1975 in India. Because the studio had closed down already in the 1960s and unfortunately no archive survived, Rasik Patel advised me to write to his brother Jayant Patel in India to get a few photographs. Jayant kindly send me the following pictures for publication.

Parekh Studio Narandas Vinod Parekh belonged to the second generation of Indian photographers on the East African coast. He was born in 1923 in Kenya. His father had migrated from India to Kenya in 1905 and settled in Mombasa. During World War II, an uncle taught him the

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Portrait of two ladies, Mombasa, C. D. Patel Studio c. 1930

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Soccer club, Mombasa, C. D. Patel Studio c. 1930

“photographic business” and in 1942, he was able to open his own studio in Mombasa, which he named “Victory Studio” because World War II was still raging. This studio had been owned by the Indian photographer and artist K.T.H. Surani, who had gained fame for his photographs overpainted with oil paint or watercolors. Surani, so Parekh told me, taught him many “tricks” in coloring as well as in retouching photographs. Parekh opened his Victory Studio when early urban African photography underwent a period that many photographers refer to as the “Golden Age” of black-and-white studio photography. Electrification had reached Mombasa, permitting artificial studio lighting. European, American, and Asian companies introduced medium-size cameras (for roll film) and low-cost enlargers. Parekh’s Victory Studio was so successful that he later established a bigger studio named after himself: the Parekh Studio. This studio became one of the most fashionable ones in Mombasa. Parekh won several awards and traveled widely in Europe and the USA. He was invited to provide still photographs in the 1960s when Howard

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Hawks shot the film “Hatari” with John Wayne; and he was an active member of the “Mombasa Photographic Society,” serving as a juror for photographic competitions. After he had left Kenya at the beginning of the 1980s to join his children in Birmingham, England, his studio was taken over by a Muslim photographer from Tanzania who renamed it “Mohammedan Studio.” In 1990, it was bought by the present owner, Ramesh Patel, who a few years ago sold Parekh’s photographic archive to an Italian collector and gallery owner. Whereas most African photographers saw themselves as skilled technicians, Parekh – following his teacher Surani – saw himself as an artist. He connected to the 19th-century Indian as well as Western tradition of art that centered on a creative subject, a sort of genius, producing unique works of art. He went even further by naturalizing his creative power, explaining that he had an “innate photographic eye,” a gift a person is born with (Brielmaier 2003:104). Connecting to the art traditions of painting in India and Europe, he presented himself in self-portraits not only as a photographer, but also as a painter, thereby alluding to the numerous connections between photography and painting in the Indian as well as the European tradition. But he displayed himself also as a fashionable tennis player in front of a dramatic sky. In the beginning it was, above all, the coastal elite who frequented his studio in search of portraits. The early portraits from the mid1950s are carefully framed by curtains opening up a space that, like a window, leads the gaze into a perspectival background, a romantic garden with a staircase and columns. The curtains not only mark the boundaries of the visual field, providing a firm demarcation between spectacle and spectator, but also serve as a reference to the theatrical stage, a site where, as Parekh explained, illusions are produced. The viewer is made to realize that he or she is seeing a predefined spectacle. The always problematic transition between the actual stage of the studio and the perspectival backdrop is elegantly hidden by the use of lighting, which makes this delicate zone more or less disappear in darkness (see page 105).

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Self-portraits of N. V. Parekh Mombasa, c. 1955

Mombasa, c. 1955

Mombasa, c. 1955

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Romantic couple, Parekh Studio, 1956

In this photograph, a couple is meticulously arranged on the stage in front of the backdrop. The light is set carefully in accordance with the standards of European portrait photography, producing spatial depth, a third dimension, thus sharply setting the couple off against the

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Parekh Studio, 1956

background. The woman and the man are positioned in the center. There is an attempt to give the impression of being casual, the man generously leaving the chair for her while sitting on the armrest. His gentlemanly generosity, however, elevates him in relation to her. He

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possessively puts his arm around her shoulder, indicating their love relationship, while she sits with her legs crossed and flowers in her hand. Woman and man in the photograph are both wearing Western clothes; he also displays a watch, while she is embellished by a pearl necklace (provided by the studio – we will encounter the same necklace again in other photos –) and a bangle, the two of them giving the impression of a young, well-to-do, middle-class couple.

Parekh Studio, 1954

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In most of the early photographs produced by Parekh, women, men, and the objects that surround them are in a delicate balance and enhance each other in their mutual praise. The poses of the subjects’ bodies are perfectly fixed and frozen, imitative of preexisting images and visual tropes such as the “romantic couple” or the “dandy.” Indeed, here the subjects offer themselves as an ideal “picture.” There is a perfection in these early photographs due to the artful arrangements by the photographer Parekh, but also to the fact that more than one photograph was taken in a session, rough proofs were printed, and the negatives were carefully retouched. Especially the faces were made lighter and smooth, and idiosyncrasies were erased. They were turned into “masks of the cool” that kept a delicate balance between individual features and abstraction. If it is correct to assume that photography, as opposed to painting, is characterized by a certain inclusiveness, contingency, and coincidence, then the main feature of photographed portraits is the tension that arises between this contingency and the intended representation. Although photographic portraits often allow contingencies to creep in, signaling the disparity between the desire to look good and the end result, in Parekh’s early portraits ideal images are produced that are not sabotaged by accidents. The ensemble of poses, props, lighting, mise-en-scène, and costumes does not fall short of the hegemonic ideal of a hybrid colonial modernity. Photographed people and props are positioned with certainty in places on stage that correspond to the dominant order of (colonial) representation. In the 1960s, after independence, when photographs became available also to common people and customers diversified, Parekh started to discard the Victorian backdrops and instead asked local carpenters and painters to build a stage with columns, table, flowers, and other props. He also put up red and blue curtains. During this time, in Parekh’s studio a process of “Africanization” began that increasingly distanced itself from the Western photographic conventions. In the 1960s and 1970s, curtains and locally painted backdrops provided a plainer and flatter background, although an occasional column still evoked the past.

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Parekh Studio, 1968

At this time, the surface of images started to become a site of refusal of the depth that characterized colonial representational regimes (Pinney 2003:202).

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“Film-Style” Photography When I visited Parekh in Birmingham, England in August 1998, where he had retired early in the 1980s, he told me that he had always been very fond of cinema. While living in Mombasa, he had enjoyed attending Tivoli and Majestic Cinema, where films from Bollywood as well as Hollywood were shown. There had been times, he said, when he saw three or even four films a week. He watched the movies attentively, keeping a lookout for techniques and ideas of setting light, props, and poses, which he then tried to import into his photographic work. Indian films with their illusionist song-and-dance scenes inspired Parekh to create fancy backdrops with lofty clouds or a shining moon. At Christmas, he would use cotton wool to produce artificial snow and create a fancy Father Christmas and a wonderful Christmas tree. He ordered special decorations with colored light bulbs, and music would be played in the studio. In his studio, he thus created an aesthetic environment that linked the visual to other sensory registers, including the haptic and the audible. Parekh told me that photographers, like filmmakers, have to create illusion. This also corresponds, so he explained, to Hindu religion, which teaches that life is an illusion. Thus, by transforming photography into an art of illusion, he saw himself connecting to his religious tradition. While in its early phase cinema had been an extension of photography, Parekh adopted certain aspects of the Indian “filmi” style and (re-)transferred them to photography, thereby creating the hybrid form of “film-style photography,” as he called it. The photographs of Indian couples that were taken in the 1960s form part of his series of “film-style photography” in which romantic love was staged in accordance with Hollywood and Bombay film ideals. Here, woman and man are not depicted frontally, but in profile or half-profile. Although they are separated by a column, they bridge this separation by touching each other’s hands, allowing their bodies a transgressive closeness, and by smiling at each other in the American keep-smiling fashion. In addition, since both embrace the same column, the separation of their bodies produces a tension referring even more strongly to their potential intimate union.

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Film style photos, Parekh Studio, 1963/64

Film style photos, Parekh Studio, 1963/64

While in most of Parekh’s portraits the photographed persons look directly into the camera, thereby positioning the spectator subject in identification with the apparatus, his film-style photographs observe the taboo against looking into the camera. Here man and woman look at each other, evoking the illusion that that there is no camera and nothing outside of the fictitious space. Parekh’s film-style photographs thus follow the conventions of fiction film, in which actors are forbidden to look into the camera in order to create a spectacle that attempts to conceal the means of its production. While the men are dressed in Western fashion with suit, tie, and sunglasses, the women wear the Indian sari, thus marking their national identity. In addition, their jewelry and the henna painting of their hands ethnicize their female beauty. Thus, we find here a genderization of ethnicity, the women becoming the prime bearers of tradition and national and ethnic values, while the men are staged as belonging to the modern Western world.

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Film style photos, Parekh Studio, 1963/64

Film style photos, Parekh Studio, 1963/64

Mwembe Tayari Studio The Mwembe Tayari Studio – mwembe tayari meaning “ripe mango” – was named after an area in Mombasa where three huge mango trees used to grow and where in precolonial and early colonial times the up-country caravans would muster (Jewell 1976:60). Today the studio is located in a very lively area near the central bus station where lots of people arrive or leave town. In fact, many of the studio’s customers are strangers who come to Mombasa as migrant workers. The Mwembe Tayari Studio was also started in 1929 by the aforementioned photographer K.T.H. Surani. He sold it to Narankara Mistry, who had come from Junagadh in India to Kenya aboard a dhow in early 1922 (see next page). After having worked as a building contractor, he met Surani, who persuaded him to join the photographic profession. Surani thoroughly trained and then finally left the business to Mistry. In 1967, Mistry’s

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Passport photograph of Naran Kara Mistry, 1931 (Courtesy of Purshotam Mistry)

son Purshotam Mistry joined in the studio, and, when Narankara Mistry finally retired in 1974, the son took full responsibility. After having run the studio for 28 years, he went to Leicester in England in 1998, where one of his brothers had established a photo studio. But he returned and I saw him in his studio in September 2011. When I visited the Mwembe Tayari Studio in 1996, the studio had already seen its best days. Although it was still functioning, Purshotam Mistry deplored the increasing decline. At that time, numerous photographs of policemen were displayed in the showcases as well as in the selling room. Mistry told me that the studio was frequented by policemen, some of whom would be photographed free of charge. The area in which the studio is situated being rather insecure, the studio owner used the photographs to show his power and connection to the police in order to protect the studio from thieves and burglars. The exhibited photographs of policemen thus served as a kind of “surveillance camera,” so he said, warning potential perpetrators against intruding. In contrast to the Parekh Studio, the customers of the Mwembe Tayari Studio were mainly poor people from the central and western provinces who tried to make a living in Mombasa as migrant work-

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Photographs of policemen, displayed in the Mwembe Tayari Studio, c. 1996

ers. Unfortunately, all the early photographs of the studio were lost and I was only able to discuss a few photographs from the 1970s and 1980s with P. Mistry. During this time, fancy painted backdrops had completely disappeared and the studios had become rather puritan. A few pieces of furniture, a table, chairs, and plastic flowers were used to suggest an urban, non-gendered, abstract space arranged in a form of synecdochic representation that reduced the appropriated vision of modernity to a few characteristics. While in many studios at that time there was no reference at all to the locality, the Mwembe Tayari studio unmistakably identified the place by referring in a double way to Mombasa: with the big letter “M” painted on the table and with the tablecloth displaying the town’s name. Maybe because the customers were mainly migrant workers and strangers in Mombasa, they wanted the place of their exile to be named and confirmed in writing. Yet the “M” referred also to the initial of the Mwembe Tayari Studio and thereby also served as a sort of advertisement for the studio. In contrast to the early photographs taken in the Parekh Studio in the 1950s, the photographer of the Mwembe Tayari Studio in the 1980s did not use light or perspectival backdrops to create spatial depth. The studio lighting was usually strictly frontal. Side and frontal lights, as they had been used in the Parekh Studio to create the

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impression of depth – typical of Western photographic portraiture – were absent in the Mwembe Tayari Studio. Instead, the light and the plain background stressed the flatness of the image and served to de-perspectivalize the space. In addition, the background no longer formed a window onto a field of spatial and temporal correlations encoding colonial representations and rationality. Instead, the shallow, flat picture space undermined the perspectival program inherent in the photographic apparatus. In a way, this renunciation of spatial depth is appropriate, since, in and of themselves, photos are two-dimensional, flat, and it is this flatness that many Western perspectival paintings and photographs deny.4 Furthermore, the poses no longer conformed to Western standards. Instead, photographers and their customers had obviously emancipated themselves from (some) Western conventions, such as the supporting leg/free leg pose, and had instead invented their own repertoire of representations, which they explored in a playful and creative way. The composition was mostly formal, characterized by the desire for centrality, frontality, balance, and completeness. Frontality, I was told by Mr. Mistry, was preferred over representations in profile or half-profile, because it corresponded to rules of greeting and politeness. Addressing another person is always done in a frontal way, and this rule, so he said, also applied to photographic portraits, which addressed the camera/photographer and the spectator/viewer. Frontal deportment is the key to communication because the photographer with his camera is included as an extension in the photographic space. Image and viewer recognize each other by exchanging gazes. Frontality was preferred because photographic portraits were taken as a medium that initiated a dialogue with the spectator (compare Jhala 1997). The stage of the Mwembe Tayari Studio served not only to explore individual modern identities but also to experiment with the social entity of the “couple”.

4 Western photographers since the early 20th century, too, have challenged the linear perspective inscribed into the camera, but they did this as artists and not as popular commercial photographers.

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Couples, Mwembe Tayari Studio, c. 1975

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In various poses, couples display various degrees of social distance, closeness, and intimacy. While among the elder generation displaying romantic love and intimacy between man and woman in the public domain was seen as shameful or even obscene and woman and man preferred to occupy clearly separated spaces, the younger generation – within the context of Bollywood and Hollywood film cultures – have started to play with different poses that express “romantic love”, intimacy, and hints of sexual relations. With the less-affluent clientele, the practice of printing rough proofs and retouching negatives declined. The photographer took only one “snap” and thereby opened up a photographic space in which accidents, flaws, and imperfections inscribed themselves into the surfaces that previously would have been corrected in the darkroom. As many of these photos show, the intended praise of the photographed person – trying to create an atmosphere of celebration – has been sabotaged in the very moment the picture is taken. Without retouchings and a whole series of shots, the photographic representations seem to approximate less an ideal than to partially fail and turn into something simply “good enough” (Silverman 1996:220). They form part of a creative process of “deformation of mastery,” thereby freeing themselves from the photographic conventions of the colonial world (Baker 1986:49 cit. Pinney 2003:202). It is this tension between the intended praise and its subsequent sabotage that gives these photos a special biographical and historical quality. They are, in a way, triumphant in exact proportion to the adversities they overcome (Silverman 1996:225).

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Mwembe Tayari Studio, c. 1975

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Photographic series, couples, Mwembe Tayari Studio, c. 1975

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Chapter 6

Ambulant Photographers As mentioned in the introduction, from the beginning of photography, highly mobile photographers travelled all over the world and globalized the new medium. Some of them established studios, mainly in coastal towns; and from there photography spread into the hinterland and the rural areas. Others who neither built up a studio nor settled continued their itinerary, sometimes riding a bicycle or a zebra, carrying cameras and backdrops made out of local textiles – sometimes bed sheets – looking for spaces they could turn into an ambulant studio. In Kenya, mobile and adventurous photographers strongly came back on the stage when photo studios began to decline in the 1980s. At that time, an important structural change in the history of photography occurred: Manual black-and-white photography was gradually replaced by quasi-industrial color photography. The new laboratories, mostly run by men of Asian or European background and supported by substantial capital, took over the market in developing and printing. With the separation of shooting and processing, not only did photographers lose their former monopoly and privilege to be the “master of images,” but also many studios were forced to close down or were replaced by automats named Photo-me. The few studios that managed to survive specialized in developing black-and-white photographs, producing passport photos, reproducing or colorizing old photos, producing videos, and selling films, cameras, frames, and other utensils. A similar situation had existed in post-war Europe. Yet, instead of leading to large-scale amateur photography, as in Europe, in Africa the “street” or ambulant photographer re-emerged.1 Although cameras had become rather cheap, most common people still could not afford to have their own camera and instead relied on the services of (professional) street photographers.

1 Since 2006/7 in Mombasa (and other parts of Kenya), with the introduction of digital cameras, in particular camera phones, amateur photographers are establishing themselves, and this will have bitter consequences for the street photographers whose services may not be demanded anymore.

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The aforementioned crisis of the photo studio and the more general economic crisis that started in the 1980s have led many young men and a few young women to work as street photographers, i.e., without the greater investment a studio would require. They usually congregate in small groups at more or less touristy sites and photograph primarily African tourists who come to Mombasa to see the Indian Ocean and other splendid sites. But these photographers also take pictures of people in the neighbourhood, for example women who want to be photographed with a new coiffure, a new dress, or a new lover; or they are invited to festivities in the homes of customers, where they capture a wedding or birthday on film. Many saw working as roving photographers as a way of earning enough money to set up their own studio later. Up to 2007, when digital photography was introduced in Mombasa, street photographers worked with simple 35 mm cameras, almost always using a flashbulb, and took the film to be developed and printed in a laboratory, usually one established by Kodak, with which they work closely and from whom they receive correspondingly good terms; but they are also obligated to photograph using Kodak film. A strong tension arose between ambulant photographers and the labs, which tried to impose their prices. Maina Hatchison told me in 1998 that the laboratories in Mombasa had once again increased their rates; the street photographers reacted by boycotting the labs in Mombasa and sent their films to Nairobi to be processed and developed there. Through this action, they succeeded in pressuring the labs to lower their prices and came out as economic winners in the struggle. From the 1990s until the end of the corrupt regime of arap Moi, ambulant photographers suffered greatly in Mombasa. Their position was extremely insecure because they were not given licenses and were thereby made illegal. They were criminalized, and policemen would harass them and demand a fine of at least 100 shillings. Sometimes police officers would demand that their picture be taken without paying the fee or they would even confiscate the photographer’s camera if he was not willing to give money. As Maina Hatchison informed me, there were times when business would boom and other times when street photographers had very little to do and would starve. At the end of a month, when people

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got their salaries, many would come to take pictures. Sometimes, to show that they had earned money, they would ask to be photographed while holding a banknote in their hands.

Customer showing money note, Likoni Studio, 2000

During Christian and Moslem feasts, many customers asked for pictures and the photographers would earn a lot of money.2 2 Some photographers also worked at night. At night, the prices of photographic pictures doubled: while normally one photo costs 30 or 40 shillings, at night the photographers took 80 to 120 shillings. Often they collaborated with sex workers in certain bars who cajoled their customers to ask for photographs “to remember the night.” At night, photographers always asked their customers to pay in advance. Pornographic photographs and videos seem to have become a big business on the coast. Western tourists and American sailors, in particular, are interested in buying them.

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Mutokaa Studio, Mombasa 1999

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Sammy Big 7 Studio, Mombasa, Bombolulu, 2006

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Nanga Studio, Mombasa, 2003

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Compared with the highly stylized and often enlarged black-andwhite photographs of earlier decades, the production of color photographs was more heterogeneous, without retouching, smaller, and impressive in volume. Most customers I talked to greatly welcomed color photography; and photographers, as I will show in the following, did all they could to make colors explode in their photographs.

E xcursion: Studio and Street In the history of Western photography, two central sites of photographic practice have emerged: the street and the studio. While the two apparently divided image-worlds came from opposite perspectives and created the “realism of the street” and the “idealization of the studio,” they likewise engaged in a continual exchange, dialogue, and crossover. It was the city that formed the social milieu in which the studio, followed by the street, became a prospering site for taking photographs of people. Yet, studio and street revealed contrary aspects of the city: while the studio offered a representational facade for the bourgeois subject, in the street the common face of the man or woman of the crowd was photographed (Eskildsen 2008:9). Although itinerant and improvised studios also appeared in the streets and marketplaces of the West, the streets at the end of the 19th century offered the possibility of observing people in unexpected, fleeting, even intimate moments. It was, above all, the snapshot that became associated with street life, mobility, and social change, while the studio primarily served to create representational portraits. In Kenya, however, snapshot photography never evolved as a popular genre. The snapshot, “this instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world” (Metz 1990:158), was associated, as various photographers told me, with stealing, with taking a likeness without the consent of the photographed person. In Kenya, because the snapshot is immediate and definite, it contradicted the pleasures of presenting oneself as an ideal, as a (more or less) perfect social person. Street photographers, too, followed this ideal and attempted to create, above all, representational portraits of their customers. Because the alliance between a scientific world view and photography never became very strong in Kenya, the desire to reveal and unmask the identity of a person through the snapshot never entered popular

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discourses to the extent it did in Europe. Photographers in Mombasa had neither the conviction that only surprise could produce a glimpse of truth nor the idea that a secret is hidden within a person that may be revealed in a small fraction of a second caught in a photograph. Snapshot photography – although technically possible for a long time – has not established itself as a popular genre (outside of photojournalism).3 Instead, as the example of the Likoni Photographers shows, street photographers turned sites of the street into ambulant studios in order to produce idealized representations of people in a seemingly improved world.

The Likoni Ferr y Photographers 4 As mentioned before, the general economic decline in many parts of Africa led many young men and a few young women to leave home and, as migrants, to work as street photographers – without the greater investment a studio would require. While Patel, Parekh, and Mistry were owners of a respected institution – the photo studio – the practices of street photographers fall more into the category of what de Certeau named “scattered practices,” which remain largely “silent” but survive, dominated but not erased by the more triumphal practices of the studios (de Certeau 1988:48). At the beginning of the 1990s, a group of migrant street photographers originating from the central and western provinces of Kenya became (illegal) squatters in Mombasa. They occupied a steep bluff directly on the shore of the mainland, an area called Likoni, where the ferry connects the mainland with the island of Mombasa. This site is an important traffic junction where thousands of people come to use the ferry, in particular in the morning and the evening, and where lots of small commercial shops have opened up to serve the travelers and commuters.

3 This may change now with the spread of amateur photography through the introduction of camera phones on a mass scale (see chapter 11). 4 See also my articles on the Likoni photographers (Behrend 2000 and 2003b).

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Wandera Photo Studio, Likoni c. 1998

Having originally worked as street photographers at the docks and – though forbidden – also on the ferry, the Likoni photographers started to build up small kiosks, more or less ambulant studios, with little equipment and without electricity, appropriate lamps, or running water. Sammy Njuguna, the proud owner of the Sammy Big 7 Studio, began, as he told me, to attract customers by setting up a “Christmas umbrella” decorated with balloons and flowers, which he placed in front of the sea. Then he added a “Christmas chair”; but because only one person was able to sit, he exchanged the chair for a sofa and from there started to build a simple studio that could be locked to safeguard the various props and decorations. The Likoni Photographers defined themselves as jua kali, “hot or sharp sun” in Kiswahili, a term that designates people who work in the so-called informal sector. In fact, the informal and illegal status of the space the Likoni Ferry Photographers occupied has contributed substantially to the particular aesthetic of these studios. The postcolonial state rigidly prevents street photographers who work on public squares from creatively altering these sites; as one street photographer put it, these sites must remain “natural.” But the Likoni Photographers were not subject to this degree of state restriction and sanctions. Their existence was repeatedly threatened and they had to

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fear eviction (and finally were evicted in 2006); yet for a while their studios enjoyed “artistic freedom.” In postcolonial Kenya, they were able to occupy a space that eluded the state authorities. In fact, the Likoni Photographers and their productions initiated a unique local development that made use of a great variety of global elements. Together, the Likoni Photographers invented a singular photographic style nowadays well known as “the Likoni style” that has spread to other areas along the coast, to the hinterland, to Nairobi, and even to Tanzania. As Jay Ngao proudly put it, “we, the Likoni Photographers, were the pioneers.” In their ambulant studios, these photographers created a splendid world out of heterogeneous elements from various parts of the world, including tapestries from Turkey that reached Mombasa via Dubai, balloons, plastic flowers, and the glittery decorations from Bombay that adorn Mombasa’s Hindu temples during religious festivities. Moreover, they asked the painter Samuel Chakua Masada to provide fancy backdrops to attract customers. Generally, as one of the photographers told me, what was staged in the studio was not mundane, but constructed in opposition to everyday life. The scenarios the photographers created in their studios praised, above all, the absent, the foreign, and the global that they gave presence to. In contrast to the puritanism of the Mwembe Tayari Studio, the decor of the Likoni studios adhered to an aesthetic of bricolage, pastiche, plenitude, luxury, and festivity. The pictures – and the depicted individuals – so I was told, should look shiny, glamorous, bright, and colorful. In fact, the Likoni Photographers consciously made use of color photography and did their best to turn their studios into a site where colors exploded. They took great pains to prevent shadows from appearing on the photographs, thereby producing a pictorial surface with constant and solid colors. Moreover, they carefully arranged customers, backdrops, and props in symmetrical compositions of different colors, producing spectacular aesthetic effects (cf. Brinckmann 2006).

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The “Migrant Archive” 5 As Sammy Njuguna explained, the photos not only created a festive mood, they were themselves part of the festivity. “We crown the celebration with a photo,” he said. Against the background of poverty, financial hardship, exile, and discrimination that the photographers and most of their customers experience, the studios were wish-fulfilling machines, visions of spectacle, and an instant utopia. It is as if the photos were employed to create a richer, cosmopolitan world, permitting the illusion that it is at one’s disposal. And perhaps the constant festivity celebrated in the studios and in the photos is the anticipated, large, obligatory feast of the return of the migrant workers that, under current economic conditions, the Likoni photographers and their customers will never celebrate at home. Out of the many global elements, the photographers in their studios established a semblance of a Kenyan middle-class sitting room. In the center of every studio stood a sofa, sometimes decorated with a protective doily (unlike the usual studio with simple chairs or stools); over the sofa there usually hung a tapestry, showing sublime Alpine landscapes, playful horses in splashing water, or bellowing stags. Sometimes, paintings displaying touristy sights of the Indian Ocean, a beach with palm trees, steamship or airplanes and highways were mounted on the wall. The studios, with their heterogeneous elements from different social spheres and various parts of the world, thus attempted to represent a more or less luxurious living room or home the migrant worker seemed to inhabit. Bonifaz Wandera, the owner of the Wandera Studio, told me that many customers had their pictures taken in order to send them home and convey to those at home where and how they lived. “When you are not at home, photos tell more,” said Maina Hatchison. As talks with customers and photographers revealed, many photos were taken to be sent home. At home, relatives displayed them in the sitting room or mounted them in a photo album, to be shown to visitors and to members of the family. Maina Hatchison said, “When people visit

5 I take this term from Appadurai (2003:23). See also McKay (2012:128ff).

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Likoni Studio, 1999

Jay Studio, Likoni, 1999

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Sammy Big 7 Studio, Likoni, 1999

Omalla Studio, Likoni, 1999

home, the first thing they see is the photo album.” Thus, photos were used to connect and to compensate for the absence of the migrant workers by giving them a photographic presence. Especially on festive days like Christmas, when this absence was even more painful for the family, many migrant workers had their pictures taken on this very day and sent home. Photographs not only reminded those at home of their migrant and absent relatives or friends, they also depicted social status and economic success and thereby gave evidence of the social pressure to be successful to which migrant workers were strongly exposed. Often, the migrants’ travel was funded by their people at home to whom they had become deeply indebted and who waited for the migrant to repay. In a way, these photographs then substantially shaped translocal subjectivities by producing an idealized, successful photographic subject that anticipated in the photograph what might not be attained in real life. Likewise, these photographs of success inspired a kind of faith in migration as a “remedy” to local poverty, exclusion, and struggles for livelihood (cf. McKay 2008). It is as if these men and women deployed the photographs of an enriched and ameliorated home as a technology to bring into being their desired future selves. It is as if they made use of photographs to reinvent themselves the way they would like to be seen. In fact, the portraits seem to invite their subjects to become the person depicted in the image (ibid.: 381f). While Western scholars of photography have connected the temporality of photography, above all, with the past, the medium providing an uncanny interface between that past that is frozen in the image and the present time of the viewer (see Barthes 1981), in the case of the Likoni Photographers the photographs not only retain the past but stretch into the future. In fact, there is a prophetic potential in the photographs that is anticipated in the fancy and rich decors of the ambulant studios.

Collapsing Photographic Space In the Likoni studios, the tapestries, paintings, and signboards sometimes depicted various places simultaneously, for example, the Kaaba in Mecca and a view from Mombasa, juxtaposing variable localities in one image.

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This “wild” assemblage of places and sites collapses the geometry of space. Obviously, in these cases the Likoni Photographers detached themselves from the logic of a fixed place or home. In their photos they succeeded in bypassing the opposition between home and exile and between rootedness and displacement (Clifford 1994:309). They invented a specific translocal cosmopolitanism incorporating many different signs of various parts of the world, dissolving the separation between “here” and “there” by “being global.”

Omalla Studio, Likoni, c. 1999

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In contrast to the more puritan style of the Mwembe Tayari Studio in the 1970s and 1980s, the Likoni Photographers aligned themselves more with the baroque style of Victorian studio photography. And like the Victorian backdrops with windows into gardens or landscapes, the Likoni Photographers created complex spatial topographies. In their backdrops they integrated open windows that functioned as a kind of liminal zone between reality and imagination, foreground and background, external and internal worlds. With the paintings of the painter Samuel Chakua Masada, they offered additional framed spaces that provided views not only onto the sea, passing ships, the beach, and touristy wildlife sites, but also onto airports and airplanes. But the addition of “windows” did not attempt to create spatial depth; instead, the montage of images within images collapsed perspectival space and played with their dislocations. It is a sort of palimpsest, images forming different layers on a flat surface, and while they reveal certain sights they obscure others. In their studios, the Likoni Photographers thus celebrated the dazzling, disorienting, ecstatic

Omalla Studio, Likoni 2000

Sheba Oganda Studio, Likoni, 2000

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surplus of images, dethroning Cartesian perspectivalism and challenging a specific Western “realism” of three-dimensionality. In addition, unlike Parekh, the photographers did not attempt to use light to separate the depicted person from the background. Instead, the portrayed men and women sometimes almost disappear in or merge with the heterogeneous backdrop.

Omalla Studio, c. 1999

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It is as if the various objects of the decoration form part of the depicted social person, enhancing his or her status. Instead of being arrested in a geometrical space, people and objects – as each other’s extensions – float on the surface of the photograph, escaping stable identities in place and time. By exploring the relationship between photographic space and subject in this way, they give evidence of a heterotopic space that clearly transcends stable post-colonial identities and a panoptic viewpoint.

Aftermath From 2000 on, the area of Likoni underwent radical changes. As the photographers told me, “development started” and a new structure was established to accommodate the increasing traffic. The whole site was rebuilt, and in November 2006 the Likoni Ferry Photographers were sent away and their studios destroyed. At first they tried to negotiate with the officials of the Ferry and were offered studios for rent. But the rent was much too high (12,000 KSH per month). When they tried to return, the police evicted them for good. Only Bonifaz Wandera and Simon Expert succeeded in legalizing their studios in Likoni. Sammy Njuguna established a new studio in Bombolulu, another area of northern Mombasa and then traveled to the USA, while most of the other Likoni Photographers had to begin working in the streets again. Jay Ngao, the previous owner of the Global Studio, turned into a driver of a tuktuk, a three-wheeled car that has recently been introduced from India and become very successful as a means of transport in addition to matatu and taxis. Yet, on weekends he still comes to Likoni and works as a street photographer for his old customers and some new ones. Mutokaa, the former owner of the Mutokaa Studio, fell very sick, went home, and passed away in May 2007; Haroun Oundo from the former Oundo Studio also went home to do business in Busia; and John Kariuki, who had worked with Sammy, opened a new studio in Kiambu, near Nairobi, introducing the Likoni style to Central Province and, according to Sammy, becoming very successful.

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The Likoni Photographers, 9/11 and the Art Market A few weeks after 9/11, in October 2001, two Likoni photographers, Bonifaz Wandera and Sammy Njuguna, together with the artist Samuel Chakua Masada who had painted most of their backdrops, were invited to attend the international art festival “Steirischer Herbst” in Graz, Austria.6 This festival was founded in 1968 and is one of the oldest avant-gardist events in Europe, striving to connect theater, painting, film, literature, dance, music, and architecture with new media and theoretical debates. The festival became notorious for its “scandals”: The works of Bill Fontana provoked aggression and controversies, and Hans Haacke’s “Victory Column” was destroyed in an iconoclastic attack, his “reworked” monument being burned by neo-Nazis (see Gamboni 1997:169). In Graz, the curators of the “Steirischer Herbst” asked the three Kenyans to build a studio in the “Likoni style” and to offer their services to the visitors. Thus, the curators created an ambiguous space where the production of art, the performative act of taking pictures, was exhibited rather than the photographs themselves as artworks. In this space, the photographs taken by the Likoni photographers – although part of an art exhibition – were not clearly given the status of art. They were redefined as popular commodities that could be bought “as if in a studio.” Yet, in this space, agency was given to the photographers who not only staged the spectacle of their studio but also freely interacted with their “customers.” Integrated into the art world, the photographers were at the same time excluded and their status problematized. Since “the day that shook the world,” the terrorist attack on and destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, had happened only a month before, Sammy Njuguna, Bonifaz Wandera, and Samuel 6 After Tobias Wendl and I had curated the exhibition “Snap me One” and published a catalogue (Wendl and Behrend 1998) with photographs of the Likoni Photographers, the curator of the Steirischer Herbst contacted me and then invited the three Kenyans to participate in the art festival. With the kind assistance of Henrike Grohs, they made it to Graz. Unfortunately, I was not able to participate in the exhibition. However, back in Mombasa in 2005, 2007, and 2011, I had the chance to talk to Sammy Njuguna, Bonifaz Wandera and the painter Masada about their experiences in Graz.

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Chakua Masada decided to make this event the subject matter of their studio backdrop. Sammy Njuguna told me that during the flight (sic) with Swiss Air to Europe, the idea of representing the destruction of the World Trade Center had already entered his mind, especially since two Kenyans who had lived in New York had been among the victims. In addition, 9/11 had a strong emotional impact on the three Kenyans because they took it as a repetition of the Embassy Bombing in 1998 that had injured and killed thousands of people in Nairobi. When Masada painted the backdrop of the World Trade Center in Graz, he reformulated the “absolute event” of 9/11 and its global mediation in the images produced by the mass media. In a way he digested the already existing pictures of this globalized event, thereby also tapping into the specific traumatic power of the (original) iconoclastic act.

Self-portrait of photographer Sammy Njuguna, Graz 2001

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Interestingly, by painting the icon of the already burning Twin Towers with two (sic) nearing planes, he brought in a narrative structure that juxtaposed the approach of the two aircraft and the final result of their attack, the burning Twin Towers, thereby transforming the chronology of the event into simultaneity. In the painted backdrop, he distanced himself from the photographic model and its “realism” and took the risk of collapsing photographic space and time. By painting this backdrop, Masada participated in the “war of images” that ushered in a New World Order defined by terrorism; yet, likewise, he subjected this icon to the aesthetics of studio backdrops. As part of a Likoni studio, the backdrop functioned as a window or screen giving a view onto the burning World Trade Center while the customers could sit in front on a chair or sofa in a nicely decorated sitting room.

Portrait of painter Masada and photographer Sammy Njuguna, Graz 2001

In their studio, the Kenyan photographers offered their European customers the chance to participate in 9/11 as a spectacle for local consumption.

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To create a festive atmosphere in the “Likoni style,” the three Kenyans adorned the backdrop with various plastic flowers, Christmas tree decoration, and a huge stuffed lion. In addition, a signboard with the message “God bless America” was placed above the backdrop, decorated with red plastic roses. A second signboard “Welcome to Kenya” was put on the ground to invite Western visitors to Kenya, as Sammy Njuguna explained. In the photographic practice of the Likoni photographers, as mentioned before, signboards played an important part. The photographed sites were often marked with signboards and thereby actually doubled. It is as if the indexicality of the photographs needed the written texts to additionally authenticate space and time. Sammy

Portrait of painter Masada and photographer Boniface Wandera, Graz 2001

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Njuguna explained: “The signboard is the message.” The representation of the burning Twin Towers in the studio and the resulting aesthetic impulse or shock was thus anchored in the dominant message “God Bless America.” Moreover, the photographers set up a soundscape in the studio by playing Gospel music in Kiswahili on a ghetto blaster that, as Sammy Njuguna suggested, made them feel at home. However, after they had finished constructing and decorating the studio, the director of the “Steirischer Herbst” arrived, greatly upset. He felt alarmed because he feared the studio and its props could be (mis-)understood as a gesture of anti-Americanism. In spite of or perhaps even because of the festival’s iconoclastic reputation, he was afraid of creating a scandal. But the Likoni Photographers assured him of their political (or politically correct) perspective and their allegiance to unmistakable support for the USA; and this is why he refrained from any sort of censorship. The Likoni Photographers and their studio were very successful. Visitors had to line up to have their pictures taken in various poses and arrangements in front of the burning Twin Towers. Not only photographs, but also backdrops painted by Masada were in high demand. Masada had to hurry to replenish the ones he sold, his main patron being an Italian gallery owner. The reasons for the photographers’ success seem highly ambiguous and clearly surpass their own intentions and the meaning they themselves attributed to the scenario in their studio. Many visitors, so I was told, took the studio as a popular site where the catastrophe of 9/11 was transformed into downright popular commercial entertainment and some sort of disaster tourism. The customers continued the processes of commodification, museumization, and trivialization of 9/11 that took place in various media in many parts of the world, particularly in the United States (see Heller 2005). Indeed, the studio allowed visitors to relate in a playful, more or less trivial way to the event that changed the world and to continue on a local level – pro- or anti-America – the war of images that followed after 9/11 with unprecedented force. The studio and its props thereby raised important questions about catastrophes, violence, mediation, and commodification. Artists and visitors were confronted with their (reflexive and reflective) responses and with the ways they resonated with others and were asked to contemplate the possibility of complicity (cf. Spivak 2004:87).

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In a way, the Likoni photographers repeated the paradoxical act that turned Al Qaida’s original iconoclastic gesture into a flow of secondary images of defacement or annihilation for local consumption in the Western art world (cf. Mitchell 2005:18). Their studio in Graz became a controversial space in which several series of photographs with often overlapping, diverging interpretations of 9/11 were produced. It allowed the photographers (and their customers) – against the background of a history of exclusion and discrepant globalization – to articulate their specific response to a global event and included their empowerment and the participation in a wider public sphere. And it allowed some of the visitors to express a critical perspective on American politics (in opposition to the photographers) that otherwise would have remained silent. By selling photographs and backdrops, the photographers made a substantial amount of money that allowed them to build up a more secure living back in Mombasa. Sammy Njuguna and Bonifaz Wandera diversified their business by buying a video camera. They now offer the production not only of photographs but also of videos. And Bonifaz Wandera started using digital photography.

Entering the Art Market and Photographic Authorship The Likoni Photographers’ stay in Graz became their entry into the world of Western art. As Sammy Njuguna told me in Mombasa in 2005, in Graz he started to see himself as an artist and to sign his photographs. Back in Kenya, he stopped doing so. Studio photographers in Kenya – with the exception of those originating from India – had not defined their photographs as works of art until they became part of the international art market. They saw themselves as professional producers and retailers of photographs, not as artists in the Western sense (see also Ouedraogo 1996:28,42). They never signed the pictures, but would stamp the studio’s name and address on the back as a means of advertisement. Although sometimes the studio bore the name of its owner/photographer – as in the case of the Parekh Studio in Mombasa and the Bakor Studio in Lamu – stamping the photographs was mainly a bureaucratic act, an act of official authentification. The prestige of a studio also added to

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the social value of the photograph and the photographed person (and vice versa). In combination with the date of production, the stamp positioned the photograph within the field of the photographer’s work and within his life history. But to this day, the names of the customers constitute the primary means of identifying the portraits, and the dates stamped on the back of the photograph also situate it in the customer’s lifetime. In Europe, signing works of art emerged in the context of the progressive commercialization of art, signifying a new concept of authorship and a growing cult of personality. The signature’s function is to identify the artist as such and in the same act to declare the oeuvre as the object of the artist. This practice increased the singularity of the work as that of the subject-creator while at the same time introducing his oeuvre as a series (Baudrillard 1981:104). In European art history, the style, position, and wording of the written signature became a kind of subtext and offered various opportunities to the artists to comment on the occasion, content, mode, and formation of the representation without explicitly stating the facts (Gludovatz 2005:315). With the “invention” of photography, European discourses of the nineteenth century introduced a distinction between the “mechanical” and the “fine” arts. While the latter needed a subject endowed with a special creativity, sometimes called a “genius,” the practitioner of the former was seen as a technician merely reproducing “what was there” (Plumpe 1990: 12). Thus, in Europe, the introduction of photography deeply challenged the artistic concepts of authorship and oeuvre. Photography intensely questioned the distinctions and categories that had evolved in the history of the arts, especially in the art of painting. In the struggle to gain the status of art, photographers in the nineteenth century attempted to emphasize their subjective and creative input in the production of photographs and would sometimes imitate the conventions of painted portraits to an absurd degree. Already in the 1840s, a few daguerreotypists signed the back of the plates. For example, E. Thiesson signed daguerreotypes on the recto of the picture and also dated it as early as 1844 and 1845 (Bajac and Planchon-de-Font-Réaulx 2003:380f). And in the 1850s, the negatives of salted-paper prints were sometimes signed by hand, especially when the photographers were professionals (Timm Starl, personal communication).

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This practice contradicted to some extent the earlier notions concerning the ownership of a photograph. In Europe at the beginning of photography, as mentioned before, the photographed person owned the picture, and it was only later, when photography flourished and became commercialized and the photographer-artist gained status and power as an author, that he became the owner of the photograph. As Bernard Edelman has suggested, the photographer had to gain recognition as a creative artist in order to gain legal ownership of photographic images. His creativity is a legal fiction, devised to secure property rights (Edelman 1979 cit. Mitchell 1987:184). In contrast, as I have shown in chapter 3, in Kenya the photograph and the negative belong to the depicted person, and photographers take great care to hand them over to their customers. Actually, photographers are paid more for the act of photographing than for the product, photographs thereby – at least partially – escaping the political economy of capitalism (ibid.:185). When I asked Sammy Njugunda why he had started to sign his photographs in Graz, he explained that he and Wandera had not only signed their names in the form of a signature but also added their mobile phone numbers and e-mail addresses. They did so with the aim “of getting connected to new friends and building up a network.” Sammy Njugunda did not interpret the signature primarily as an act of claiming authorship, but gave the act of signing an alternative meaning. For him, signing, giving one’s name and phone number, was above all an act of building up potential relationships. He proudly stated that signing brought him new friends who complimented him by e-mail or phone on his photographs and requested to be informed about the next exhibitions of his work. At home in Mombasa, he said, he stopped signing his name because his daily customers needed no signing, “as we are together most of the time.” Michel de Certeau has characterized Western authorship as a kind of abstraction that removes the traces of contributors other than the artist – traces that always compromise the author’s right. Authorship means “forgetting” the debt to others (de Certeau 1988:44). In contrast, instead of cutting the relationships with others to claim individual authorship, the Likoni Photographers considered the act of photography and their signature as a way of connecting to other people, thereby acknowledging their indebtedness to others. This, in fact,

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confirms again that photography is regarded, above all, as a relational practice, a practice that establishes a new sphere of social relations that is substantiated through the production, circulation and, consumption of photographs (see also Edwards and Hart 2004:4; Vokes 2012:209).

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Chapter 7

The Bakor Studio and the “Aesthetics of Withdrawal”1 As shown in chapter 4, photography opened up a radical new field that had to gain acceptance against Islamic aniconism and a strongly gendered visual regime that sought to conceal (free) women’s bodies and faces in the public domain. Yet, in spite of strong resistance in the beginning, Muslims, too, appropriated the new medium and inserted it into various domains of life, although not without contestation. Muslim photographers, too, opened photo studios. In the following, I will give the example of the Bakor Studio in Lamu.

Debating the Medium of Photography As already mentioned, since the 1980s, within the context of a new Islamic revival, pious Muslim men and women have increasingly attempted to control and reduce the visibility of women in the public domain.2 Since 1988 in Nairobi and since the 1990s also in Mombasa, new Islamic schools called mahad have been established especially for women to teach them what is haram (forbidden) and what is halal (allowed). In these schools, the visibility of women in photographs and other visual media is problematized and discussed. What used to be a theological debate among scholars has become an increasingly popularized theme nowadays. In fact, interactions and oppositions between different Islamic traditions as well as interactions with the (Christian) West created a more intense awareness of the ways that images (of women) intruded into everyday life, opening up various debates on the “Islamic interdiction of figurative images” in relation to visual media.

1 This chapter is a revised and expanded version of Behrend 2009. 2 When in 2011 I visited the town of Kwale to the south of Mombasa, which has a strong Muslim presence, I realized that the impact of reformed Islam centers on the big cities such as Mombasa (and Nairobi). Thus, it seems that the gendered withdrawal from (photographic) visibility is mainly an urban phenomenon and has not (yet?) reached the rural areas.

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Among Muslims in Lamu (and Mombasa), the prohibition to represent human beings and animals is widely accepted, but the reasons given vary considerably. I met some Islamic scholars who resented photographic portraits because they feared image-worship – especially when the picture was hung on a wall – and saw Islamic monotheism endangered, but they accepted video because of its fleeting images that would not allow idolatry. For example, Sharif Said Hassan of Lamu, who kindly gave me an interview in October 1996, narrated the well-known story of the Prophet Mohammed, who wanted to visit a house where a picture was hanging on the wall. When he saw the picture he refused to enter. Sharif Said Hassan explained that especially photographs of dead relatives, of ancestors, encourage idol worship, which the Prophet forbade. Their representation, he said, poses a threat to monotheism. In contrast, other Muslims claimed that photography, as a picture medium, should not be prohibited because it does not create what it depicts but only reproduces or represents what is already there and therefore photographers do not violate God’s singular capacity of creation. Another scholar argued that only three-dimensional things can become objects of idol worship, while two-dimensional pictures of human beings or animals such as photographs cannot, because they have lost already their life-like quality. Other scholars maintained that the photographic picture is already lifeless; because photography freezes and immobilizes all it captures, an iconoclastic gesture is inherent in it. As vitality is already annihilated in the photographic image, it cannot be considered as imitating God’s creation. In addition, in the context of the Islamic revival, purdah, the ideal of (gendered) modesty, purity, and seclusion that does not allow women to expose themselves in public, has been redefined to include photographs of women as well as videos, tape recordings, and paintings. Pious Muslims have drawn attention to the complementary effects of unveiling and women’s exposure in photographs and videos, both violating purdah. This is why photographs of Muslim women have disappeared completely from public spaces in Mombasa’s Old Town and Lamu. In addition, in the private domain of many homes, photographs of (male and female) relatives or friends have been removed from the sitting room and either put up in the more private domain of the bedroom or stored in albums. However, I heard of only one case in which a pious woman destroyed all her photographs in order

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to comply with Islam’s aniconism. The other women I talked to kept their photographs – more or less hidden – in albums or boxes in order to control access to them. It is not only that photographs may reveal women’s faces and bodies to unrelated men, it is also the quality of photography as a mass medium that poses special problems. When a photographer takes a picture of women dancing at a wedding, for example, he or she can produce many copies and publish them so that they may appear at a distance in time, space, and context from the original event. Photographs can be displayed in contexts beyond the control of the photographed women, and this poses complex and worrying problems. In fact, since 2007, with the appropriation of digital camera phones on a mass scale, these predicaments have become ever more vexing, as I will show in the last chapter. A female Islamic scholar and midwife, Asya Sunkar Salim, held in a conversation in September 2007 that, since there is no mention in the Quran of photographs, the Prophet did not say that photographs should not be taken. For her, photographs of women were, first and foremost, a question of modesty. As long as the photographed women cover their body according to Islamic rules, she had no objections to photographs. For her, the degree of exposure was at issue rather than the portrayal per se (see Roberts and Nooter Roberts 2008:8). She showed me her I.D. card that depicted her in passport format with her veil, her face not hidden. She said that nothing was wrong with photographs that enabled you to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, the pilgrimage being one of the five pillars of Islam. She saw no humiliation in being photographed and exposing her face because in Islam, so she said, the face of women is not hidden. However, when praying in a room with photographic portraits on display, she saw the danger of distraction and usually turned the pictures to the wall to better concentrate on her prayers. Thus, there were a multitude of competing voices accepting or questioning photographic portraits, covering a spectrum that at one extreme totally rejected all photographic portraits and at the other included more pragmatic attitudes that allowed the production of photographs in a controlled way. Against this background I will explore some of the photographic experiments of the Bakor Studio in Lamu as an example of the “aesthetics of withdrawal.” I attempt to show how local notions of (female)

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propriety and piety have translated into new strategies to theatricalize the surface of the photograph by veiling, masking, concealing, and creating new opacities.

The Bakor Studio in Lamu In contrast to the cosmopolitan character of Mombasa, at the end of the 19th century, the old town elite of Lamu not only tried to keep strangers out of town but also to maintain “traditions.” However, in the 1880s, when the old elite already started to decline, a Jamalilil Sharif named Habib Saleh reached Lamu. His family originated in the Hadramaut (Lienhardt 1959:230). He succeeded in building up an alliance with freed slaves and slowly gained power. He founded a new mosque named “Reiyadah,” meaning “sacred meadows” and “paradise.” In addition, he built up the famous Mosque College, a center for Islamic scholarship and theology (Lienhardt 1959). This college and its yearly celebration of the Maulidi attract thousands of participating believers from many countries. The Bakor Studio in Lamu, situated in one of the main streets of the Old Town, was established in the 1960s. The founder, Omar Said Bakor, born in 1932, was a self-made man and brilliant bricoleur who never went to school. His family originated in Yemen. Before opening the studio, he worked for ten years as a street photographer. He was taught by Mohammed Achmed Jahadhmy, 3 who claimed to have been the first photographer in Lamu.

3 In Lamu in October 1996, I had a long conversation with Mohamed A. Jahadhmy, who at the age of 14 already began experimenting with photography. He was the first photographer in Lamu, and he told me his story of trial and error in a highly amusing and ironic way. At that time – it must have been in the 1940s or 1950s – there was no one who could teach him, so he taught himself using Pear’s Encyclopedia. His father was the owner of a bus company and had brought a camera to Lamu and had given it to his son. At this time they did not have electricity in Lamu and so he worked with flashlight batteries. Mohamed A. Jahadhmy experimented in various ways and worked together with a tinsmith to construct an enlarger; yet they failed and he finally went to Mombasa where he bought one. Because he had no flash he took a big bulb, gunpowder, and pepper and then lit it and thereby created a flash; he produced more or less powerful explosions (to the dismay of his family and neighbors, as he told me with a big smile) and had to realize how difficult it was to time the exposure and to control the lighting of the flash.

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Bakor experimented with various techniques of montage “to make strange things possible and for fun” as Najid Omar Said Bakor, one of his sons, explained to me in 1996. He also recorded the history of Lamu in photographs and sold some of them as postcards to tourists. He died in 1993, and his sons continue to work in his studio up to the present.

Photomontages Various photographers in Kenya told me that, during the times of black-and-white photography, customers were very fond of photomontages. Veritable “montage fashions” had emerged. During the struggle for independence, for instance, people had a portrait of themselves (or others) montaged onto a map representing Kenya or Africa to express their anti-colonial and nationalistic sentiments. In the 1970s, the film “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” spurred the desire of many customers to see themselves captured like a spirit in a bottle, preferably a whisky bottle, as the owner of a photo studio in Malindi told me with a big smile. While many photographers experimented with montage techniques, it was Bakor who developed them to a kind of mastery. Comparable to the Magic Realists and the Surrealists in Europe, Bakor in his collages undercut the temporal instantaneity of the photograph and destroyed the surface of the seemingly intact, undoctored image. He played with the transformation of the relationship between human beings and things, thereby blurring boundaries and radically transforming photographic “reality” by producing uncanny denaturalizations of space. In relation to the code of “straight photography” – which puts its truth value in the objectivity of the lens, in the “straightness” with which it sees the world – Bakor’s photographs are a scandal, as is all photography that resorts to construction, darkroom manipulations, and manipulations with scissors and paste (Krauss 1985:91). HowIn fact, the explosion of light he produced sometimes pushed the illumination to a point where light became its obverse, a blinding nullity with the indeterminacy of darkness. Not all light enlightened; in fact, as he realized, light is a complicated and delicate matter of scale. He said that he taught Bakor and then changed to some other business. If I remember correctly, he was the first to bring a photocopy machine to Lamu.

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Malindi Studio, c. 1970

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Bakor Studio, c. 1970

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ever, when seen in relation to already established art traditions on the East African coast, his photomontages do not appear strange or scandalous. On the contrary, they link with diverse, long-established genres, such as the art of ornamental wood carvings, plasterworks in local architecture, embroidery, and calligraphy.

Ornamentalizing Photographs While prohibiting figurative representations, Islamic arts have been described as favoring and concentrating on the ornament. Vegetable and geometrical ornaments are used to embellish the walls of buildings and the surfaces of objects. Highly complex mathematics, in particular, geometry, provided the basis for the calculations necessary for this purpose. And the ornament was not only decoration but – sometimes – became semantically loaded and a medium of messages (Belting 2008: 127f). Many motifs, even inscriptions were ornamentalized. And ornaments were permanently transposed from one medium into another, for example, from textiles and rugs to plaster walls or wooden doors and vice versa (Grabar 1977: 236,265). While ornaments decorate and beautify surfaces, they also produce a sort of shutter or veil that conceals the objects and buildings they cover and they thereby raise questions about the relationship between the visible and the invisible. By integrating photographic portraits into floral ornaments and arabesques, Bakor transposed the tradition of ornamentalization into the medium of photography. Bakor’s photomontages thereby give proof of the tendency inherent in Islamic art to ornamentalize whatever comes into its realm (Grabar 1977:262). On the East African coast, floral motifs like waridi, rose, yungi-yungi, water lily, shoki-shoki, a kind of lychee, kilua, a flower with a strong sweet aphrodisiac smell (uvaria kirkii), and leaves of various plants like kulabu are well-established named patterns, some of which are widely used as ornaments in textiles – on kangas – plasterworks, wood carvings, and, of course, Bakor’s photomontages.4

4 I am grateful to Rose-Marie Beck who kindly gave me the Swahili names of some of the motifs she found on kangas.

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Series of ornamentalized portraits, Bakor Studio, Lamu, c. 1970

When photographic portraits are integrated in ornaments, the portraits become part of surface decoration and are combined with more general principles of Islamic aesthetics, for example the anti-naturalistic tendency verging on abstraction, consisting in making the relationship between forms more important than the forms themselves. In this way, the surface decoration averts the viewer’s risk of becoming absorbed by the photographic portrait and in this way serves as an obstacle to image worship. Thus, the ornamentalization can be considered an attempt to reduce the importance of the photographic portrait in deference to Islam’s preference for aniconism. Although the artist is not allowed to imitate God’s creation, through ornaments he or she gains the freedom to experiment with various parts of God’s world in their abstraction and to recombine them in new ensembles. Fragmentation and recomposition of the surface conjoin decorative practice with a mediation of the photographed portrait that does not stand for itself but acts as a “relay” or point of connection with other more abstract entities.

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The ornament in Islamic arts has been interpreted as a symbolic form that strongly resists Western perspectival conventions (Belting 2008:42). While, as mentioned before, linear perspective – via the camera obscura – is inscribed into the photographic apparatus, the ornamentalization of the photographic portraits largely collapses three-dimensionality, reducing the picture to a flat surface. Thus, the ornamentalization can be interpreted not only as an attempt to diminish the importance of the photographic portrait in deference to the interdiction of figurative representations, but also as a sort of resistance, as an attempt to betray or trick the technical apparatus and subvert the inherent linear perspective. Here visibility as such is not contested, but a certain Western “realism” or three-dimensionality

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is challenged. As mentioned before, some Muslim scholars saw the reduction to two dimensions, to a flat surface, as an obstacle to image worship, since the depicted person in the image had lost his or her vitality.

Image-Texts 5 With the spread of Islam along the East African coast, the Quran and scripture became the center of religion. Reading, reciting, and writing became central practices to communicate with God, and this is why scripture left the narrow space of the book and spread to the walls of mosques or mausoleums and other objects (Belting 2008:81). Instead of figural representations, often ornaments and inscriptions decorated walls and the surfaces of objects. Scripture mediated the words of an invisible God who refused to become represented or embodied. The abstractness of scripture guaranteed that the world of bodies was left behind, thereby preventing – in contrast to Christianity – the reduction of an almighty, incomparable God to human dimensions. Scripture as the dominant medium evolved as an art and was ornamentalized. The proportions of verses, words, and letters produced an aesthetic quality of their own, perhaps compensating for the absence of images (ibid.:80ff). With the help of mathematical calculations, a geometrical style was developed that produced the beautiful proportions of calligraphy. The art of calligraphy may have emerged largely owing to the wish to write the divine word as beautifully as possible. Calligraphers belonged to the highest rank of artists. While sacral architecture could also be executed by non-Muslims, God’s word had to be written by a pious Muslim in a state of ritual purity. Not only the book, but also the letters and the very act of writing are considered sacred. Wherever Islam spread to become the dominant religion, the Arabic letters formed a strong bond. Mystical philosophers and poets never ceased alluding to the letters or inventing fascinating relations between letters and events, between the shape of letters and the shape of humans, thereby exploring the boundary between figurative representation and scripture (Schimmel 1994: 151ff). 5 I use the term “image-text”, as Mitchell calls the composite, synthetic works that combine image and text (Mitchell 1994:89,95).

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Self-portrait of Omar Said Bakor montaged into a view of Lamu town with an inscription “Eid Mubarak”, Bakor Studio, c. 1970

Scripture and ornaments joined to produce a unique way of mediating the words of God. Both positioned themselves at the threshold between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, thereby using visual means to point to unrepresentability or, better, the limits of representation (Grabar cit. Belting 2008: 88). When copying the Quran, letters were not only given numerical value but also considered filled with baraka. Writing was accorded a materiality beyond signification and a magical power that emanated from the script itself. As in other parts of the Islamic world, along the East African coast texts and letters were used for divination and protection; and they were woven into fabrics such as prayer mats, repeated on tiles, and also found in charms or talismans. Scripture was not only a system of representation, but also loaded with powers that could be used for divination, protection, healing, and harming. Bakor, too, inserted Arabic scripture into his montages and thereby transformed the medium of photography – with its potential to be designated un-Islamic – into the service of Islam. In his collages, he entwined the power of letters with the power of photographic images. In this collage (see above), Bakor played with the design of greeting cards. He juxtaposed a “typical” view of Lamu town that is often

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reproduced on postcards with his portrait, thereby connecting to a common tradition in Arab countries of personalizing business cards with the portrait of their bearer. To this he added the inscription “Eid Mubarak,” a phrase of greeting exchanged among Muslims to congratulate each other on religious holidays. The text literally means “Blessed Festival!” and calls for the appropriate answer “Allah yubarak feek,” “Allah bless it for you also!” It characterizes Lamu as a place of religious festivals, and indeed, as already mentioned, Lamu is known worldwide for its famous Maulidi celebrations. The text initiates a dialogue with the viewer, an exchange of greetings and glances between the depicted Bakor and his onlooker. In a way, the written word is transformed into a spoken word, as it demands an answer from the viewer. A photograph is thus given a voice. In the collage, image and text open up an intriguing potential to blur literary and visual genres and their (non-) negotiable juxtapositions (Roberts and Roberts 2003: 86f). However, despite this dialectic play, the scripture provides an anchoring message that informs the viewers which of the collage’s many signifiers are most acceptable. In a way, Bakor partially thwarted his picture by inscribing its surface with holy scripture that collapses pictorial space and announces that what we see is only a visual quotation, an image of an image (cf. Koerner 2002: 209). In addition, through the integration of scripture, this image-text limits the harmful effects of the transgression of Islamic aniconism (Roberts and Roberts 2003:92). Furthermore, the religious inscription not only transforms the montage into a sort of advertisement for God but also turns it into a potential source of baraka, a form of blessing and power that can provide protection and healing. Holy persons have baraka, the Kaaba radiates it; baraka fills the Holy Scripture and can be mediated through touch, drinking, reading, hearing, copying, and even through photographic montages.

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Photomontages and Baraka During Maulidi festival, Bakor’s sons6 sold pilgrims photomontages made out of an old picture of the famous Sheik Ahmed Badawi – the son of Habib Saleh, the founder of the Riadha mosque – juxtaposed with a passport photograph of the pilgrim. Alif Omar Said Bakor said: “If you keep such a photo at home, your house will be good.” The picture obviously “presenced” the holy man, thereby providing baraka for the person displayed and his house. Thus, photomontages facilitated the mediation of baraka of holy men to believers, media technologies carrying within themselves the potential of extending the spiritual experience and workings of this spiritual essence into an array of mundane domains. While Alif Omar Said Bakor sold photomontages to pilgrims and other people that – like the photographs of Sheik Amadou Bamba in Senegal (see Roberts and Roberts 2003) – transferred baraka, other people I talked to denied the possibility of a transfer of baraka through photographs. In fact, in contrast to Senegal, where religious pictures of sheiks and other holy men abound in the private and public domain, as far as I could find out, Muslims along the Kenyan coast rely much more on scripture and are much more hesitant about integrating figurative images into their religious practices. Although some people owned photographs of important sheiks and sharifs, these were not openly displayed, mass-produced, or sold in the market or shops.7 The Bakor Studio, like many others, also offered to customers a backdrop that showed the Kaaba of Mecca (see next page). While pilgrims in Mecca are not allowed to take pictures in front of the Kaaba, they could do so in Bakor’s studio. Alif Omar Said Bakor said, “If you want to be in Mecca, you come to the studio. We have a backdrop of the Kaaba on the wall and so you can pretend you are there.” In these ways, Bakor and his sons “made strange things possible” and, although sometimes infringing upon Islamic aniconism, they did so in the service of Islam and as part of visual piety.

6 I owe this information to Patrick Desplat, who interviewed Alif Omar Said Bakor in May 1999 and kindly gave me a copy of the script. I am very grateful to him. 7 I did not visit the graves of famous sharifs in Lamu or Mombasa, however.

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Pilgrim in front of a backdrop showing the Kaaba of Mecca, Bakor Studio, c. 1960

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Proverbs and Icons of Love Along the coast there is a long tradition of passionate, romantic love poetry. Poems are recited and sung. They are produced in an endless variety, each version cannibalizing bits and pieces from older pieces to suit their own ends (Knappert 1972:6). For centuries, they have been written down carefully, the manuscripts scrupulously illuminated with highly complex ornaments; nowadays, they are recorded with tape recorders and videos, and Bakor has given visual form to a few of them in his photomontages. These two photomontages (see below) give visual form to the proverb and also a line from a stanza of a love poem “umenikaa moyoni,” “you live in my heart,” and the saying “kua mkononi mwako,” “you are in my hand.” To show the palm of the right hand with the fingers slightly apart refers to a well-known Arabic curse “five fingers into your eye,” meaning to blind an aggressor. The belief in the gesture’s power has turned the open hand into one of the best-loved amulets in

“You live in my heart”, Bakor Studio, c. 1975 “You are in my hand”, Bakor Studio, c. 1975

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the Islamic world, the so-called “hand of Fatima,” Fatima being the youngest daughter of the Prophet (Schimmel 1994:92). The five fingers of the “hand of Fatima” are not only believed to protect, but also to symbolize the five different family members of the Prophet, as well as the five pillars of Islam: the profession of faith, ritual prayer, alms tax, fasting during Ramadan, and pilgrimage to Mecca (ibid.:78). Thus, Bakor’s montage not only gives visual expression to a local proverb, but also takes recourse to a popular Islamic icon that adds an apotropaic dimension to the photograph, turning it into a kind of charm. By making use of the “hand of Fatima,” Bakor likewise connects to the multitude of mass-produced popular images that circulate and are consumed all over the Islamic world (see Centrelivres 1997:35,2). In Bakor’s montages, the proverbs are not only given visual form but also, in a certain sense, a voice. Their visuality is enriched with the sense of hearing, the auditory, and this enforces a dialogical quality of the photograph. Against the discorporation, desensualization, and silence inherent in the photographic image, Bakor attempted to give corporeality and a voice to the photographic copy.

Modern Love, Purdah, and Seclusion As mentioned before, since the 1980s, purdah restrictions and veiling have become very important again. Many women with whom I talked preferred to cover themselves in public and to use the advantages of being concealed while they were able to see. In particular, after the Christian President of Kenya arap Moi in a public speech had admonished Muslim women to remove the veil in 1985, veiling became even more of a political act, a protest against a state discriminating against its Muslim minority (Fuglesang 1994:209). Many Islamic women in Lamu told me that they took great pains to prevent their image from being seen by unrelated men. Their photographic portraits and their unveiled faces were reserved for their husbands, close relatives, and women friends. These women regarded the idea of other men looking at them – even in a photograph – as shameful. Thus, the highly gendered concept of purdah was expanded to include the photographs of women. Because Muslim women in Lamu were increasingly hesitant to allow themselves to be photographed with a man, men who wanted to be

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photographed with a woman had to look for a substitute. The Bakor Studio, with its tradition of trick and montage techniques, offered the Indian actress Sri Devi as an alternative for girlfriends who did not allow their pictures to be taken. In his photomontages, Bakor fulfilled the erotic desires of his (male) clients by bringing them together with the famous Indian actress Sri Devi, uniting them as loving couples. In the pictures, Sri Devi, the Bollywood superstar and unreachable icon of the seductive, ideal woman in movies, became available, at a man’s disposal.

Photomontage with Indian actress Sri Devi, Bakor Studio, c. 1980

This picture would have intrigued the Surrealists. The head of the young man has not only been montaged into the heart of the famous actress, but below his head, like a shadow, there is a picture of another woman, smiling. This photo appears to suggest some kind of love magic that not only brings the loved ones together, but does so in connection with an ideal woman. A dream has come true in double form against the background of a (more or less) sublime mountainous landscape. Sri Devi’s insertion into the photographic surface gives evidence of the increasing influence of Indian films in shaping gender relations and the ideal of romantic love as early as the 1960s in Lamu (Fugle-

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sang 1994). Bakor’s montages play with themes of presence and absence, desire and imagination; they mix the fantasy space of Indian films with the indexicality of photography. And they intensify the play between transgression and conformity by using the technical medium of photography to allow imaginative transgressions through disembodied representation. Under Islamic law, montages work because they keep the sexes apart physically by uniting them (Larkin 2003:176f).

Photomontage with Sri Devi and two men, Bakor Studio, 1975

In this montage, Sri Devi’s head is surrounded by a shining halo like that of a Christian or Muslim saint, merging African/Indian aesthetic ideals with Christian/Muslim iconography. Here, obviously, Bakor created an idol, if only in the more secular sphere of the cinematic star system. While he may be seen as infringing the Islamic interdiction of idolatry with these collages, he kept to the concept of purdah, the preservation of female purity and modesty, by substituting the Indian actress Sri Devi for local Muslim women. When I inspected the photographs shown in the Bakor Studio in 2005, I realized that there were no images of Muslim women on public display; only pictures of men and a few female Europeans were exhibited. While the withdrawal of women’s visibility mainly took place

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in the public domain, in the private space most women continue to enhance their visibility and beauty with photographs, though this is not uncontested.

Photographic Genealogies Along the East African coast, as in many other areas of the world, genealogies play an important part in defining a social person. In Islam, genealogical closeness to or distance from the Prophet is of central importance and sharifs, “nobles,” are those who can claim a more or less direct descent from Mohammed and who therefore carry baraka. In Islamic popular arts, images abound that depict the Prophet’s family tree (see Centrelivres 1997:30f). In his montages, Bakor took up genealogical traditions to give playful expression to relations of descent and translated them into the medium of photography. He constructed family trees with photographs, thereby representing personhood in the form of patrilineal genealogy. In this montage (see next page), one of Bakor’s sons is holding the heads of his father and his elder brother in his hands. Succession is transformed here into simultaneity. The montage visualizes the notion of personhood as the aggregate of external relations, a familiar theme in African art (c. Gell 1998:139). In addition, the ambivalence inherent in the relationship between father and sons is nicely displayed: father and elder brother are upheld, elevated, maybe even glorified, by their son/younger brother, but at the same time they have been dismembered, their heads having been cut from their bodies. The correspondence between a tree or plant and genealogy is found worldwide. It rests on the analogy of plant propagation and the notion of human birth from budding (Schuster and Carpenter 1996). In this montage (see page 169), a genealogical tree is transformed into a plant growing out of a flowerpot. However, the image does not show various people related to each other by descent, but the same person six times. This photographic multiplication is found in other regions of Africa as well. Here the picture itself displays the capacity of technical reproduction as such. Moreover, the multiplication of

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Bakor Studio, c. 1970

the portrait destroys the depicted person’s singularity. Not so much the Western unique, self-contained individual, but the “dividuum” (Strathern 1988), the divisible, multiple person is montaged in many of the images, sometimes as a doubling of the same portrait, sometimes with different identities. The notion of genealogy, as Alfred Gell (1998) and Marilyn Strathern (1988) have observed, is the key trope for making plurality singular and singularity plural. Any individual is “multiple” in the sense of being part of a network of genealogical relations, an enchainment of people; and conversely, an aggregate of persons, forming a lineage or family, is “one person” (Gell 1998:140). And indeed, in Bakor’s montages, people are seen budding out of one another or out of flowerpots, always in a male line, thus appropriating female reproduction.

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Photomontages of a genealogical plant, Bakor Studio, c. 1975

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Iconoclastic Icons Bakor produced his collages by cutting images into pieces and especially by severing the heads of the depicted persons from their bodies and transferring them into other contexts: to montage the heads into genealogies, into ornaments, flowerpots, or playing cards. The act of cutting, and even more so of decapitation, is deeply iconoclastic. As mentioned before, in Islamic arts images depicting persons or animals without heads or bodies lose the status of an image and are no longer forbidden. Artists thus make clear that they are not attempting to rival God by creating human beings. The playful way of dealing with severed heads in Bakor’s collages may thus be seen as an attempt to observe Islam’s aniconism. By inserting an iconoclastic gesture into his photomontages, the portraits lose their status as images. Thus, some of Bakor’s collages can be seen as “icons as iconoclash” (Koerner 2002), icons that are made and at the same time destroyed. Iconoclash and icon, two mutually incompatible absolutes, become deeply engaged with each other (ibid.:166). In his photomontages, as I have tried to show, Bakor playfully and often ironically explored the medium of photography and linked it to a whole range of local artistic traditions. In the pictures, he not only transposed objects and people into a different register, but also attempted to transcend the hegemonic visuality of photographic images into a more synaesthetic modality. By giving visual form to proverbs and sayings, he gave a voice to the silent photograph, and by montaging people with roses, he also alluded to the flower’s scent. In correspondence to the multi-sensory concept of the person, his portraits attempted to complete the depicted person by also including vocal and olfactory allusions. In addition, by integrating photographic portraits in ornaments, he created not only a new technique of decorating photographic portraits, but also “enchanted” them. We are accustomed to speak of decorated surfaces as “animated” (Gell 1998:76). The contemplation of decorated surfaces can lead to meditation and thereby to God, but it can also produce hallucinations and deceptions; this confirms the skeptical and ambivalent attitude toward images held by many Muslims (Grabar 1977:102).

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While on the one hand the imposed ban on the representation of living beings seems to have inspired Bakor to ever more effective inducements to captivation by visual artifice, on the other hand, in a subversive way, he also reinstated aniconism by producing new opacities and maskings. In his montages he experimented with various strategies to withdraw the photographic portraits from (partial) visibility and succeeded in acknowledging the interdiction of figurative representations while at the same time undermining it.

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Chapter 8

Weddings, Photography, and the Aura of Modernity 1 In this chapter, I will explore how Muslims of Mombasa and Lamu have inserted photography into their wedding rituals in a fragmented historical perspective. I will look again at the local “aesthetics of withdrawal” as they have emerged in weddings and focus on two aspects. First, the “spaces of refusal” that have been created in the ritual process of weddings to control the making of pictures of women. Second, I will focus on a specific quality of wedding photographs that could be called “auratic.” In spite of mass production, reproducibility, and a globalized wedding industry, wedding photographs have become “cult objects” that radiate an aura. I attempt to show how this aura is produced in wedding rituals through the interactions of camera, light, and bride as a specific brightness and glare that presents to view while blinding and dazzling at the same time. “Auratic” wedding photographs, too, participate in the “aesthetics of withdrawal” by giving to see in a particular form that, however, insists on (partial) concealment and blinding. By focusing on the contradictory aspects in processes of mediation such as revealing and concealing, visibility and withdrawal, presence and absence, immediacy and distance, and idolatry and iconoclasm, I hope to complicate the concept of (religious) mediation a bit more than scholars have done up to now.

Coastal Potlatches Feasts mark and interrupt the flow of time. As liminal space and time, they offer the opportunity to break the rules of everyday life, turn the world upside down, distribute or waste large amounts of food and prestige goods, and indulge in drunkenness, ecstasy, or

1 This chapter is a revised and extended version of Behrend (2012), including new reflections on aura as well as the ethnographic material I was able to generate in September 2011.

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orgies. On the one hand, they serve to enforce the solidarity of the participants; but on the other hand, they can also become the site of fervent competition, conflict, terror, and even open fighting. Along the East African coast, festive occasions constituted what Marcel Mauss has termed “total social phenomena” in which the social, kinship, economics, politics, and rituals became deeply entangled. Rites de passage, in particular weddings, and religious festivities offered a stage for ambitious men to reconfirm or claim positions of rank and prestige. Chiefs and other Muslim men of rank could raise their status by presiding over rituals or other festivities. High rank was – and to a certain extent still is – intimately linked with generosity and waste, qualities that a man’s relatives, clients, and followers demanded he display if he wanted to retain their respect and allegiance (Glassman 1995:147). Ostentation in dress and adornment, competitive dance and recital of verses by rival poets, and the lavish distribution of food and other gifts were parts of a feast that often led to debt, sometimes even to the host’s financial ruin. Gifts of imported luxury commodities were manipulated to challenge a rival who, when humiliated, had to organize another feast and display an even more aggressive generosity to outdo his opponent. On certain festive occasions, as Jonathan Glassman has shown, social restraints were loosened and members of youth groups took the chance to engage in public mockery of authority. Such carnival license to deride could turn into real fighting and rebellion (ibid.:164). Competitive feasting in which hosts and guests were provoked and humiliated to outdo one another was a widespread feature on the East African coast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (ibid.:167). The temptation to affirm or enhance one’s rank coincided with the temporary possession of relatively huge amounts of money or trade goods earned in the then highly profitable caravan trade. Extravagant feasting and rivalry went so far that, for example, ngoma or dance associations in 1937 started to drop kangas, highly valued pieces of fabric, by airplane – named “kanga bombing” – to enhance their own prestige and to incite the envy of a rival (Loimeier 2006:113f). Not only extravagant feasting, but at times even the ostentatious destruction of wealth, comparable to the North American potlatch, took place, as money and other valuables were thrown into the Pagani River. This would lead to a spiral of ever-increasing conspicuous con-

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sumption and destruction (Glassman 1995: 173,167). Expenditure, defined as unproductive and non-utilitarian, clearly accented loss, had to be as great as possible in order to take on its true meaning (Bataille cit. Taussig 1995:387). As Hyder Kindy has mentioned in his biography, in Mombasa in the 1920s the actual marriage ceremony was preceded by various ngoma, celebrations that included dancing and that lasted about a month and resulted in exorbitant expenses. The poor, in particular, suffered, because they always wanted to show that they could do better than the well-to-do; to get money for the festivities they often mortgaged their land, eventually losing it to Indian and Arab moneylenders when not able to repay their debts and so ruining their lives and those of their families (Kindy 1972:63). However, the values of “exaggerated” generosity, expenditure, and redistribution clashed with the imperatives of the international market, and the site of the clash was the feast, “where those seeking to gain prestige through the dispensation of largess found the demands of creditors, clients and competitors increasingly difficult to satisfy” (Glassman 1995:168). Not only the colonial government but also some Muslim scholars tried to curb these conspicuous acts of feasting and uneconomical expenditure (Loimeier 2006:114ff). Yet, although competitive feasting declined during colonial and post-colonial times, it never disappeared completely and traces of excessive expenditure are still to be found in today’s wedding celebrations. For instance, around 1995 in Zanzibar at a wedding of high-ranking people, male relatives of the bride burned banknotes to demonstrate conspicuous consumption, loss, and destruction (personal communication from Anne Storch). Although the general economic decline since the 1980s has led to a great reduction of conspicuous feasting, even today some families ruin themselves with lavish expenditure at weddings.

Weddings, Women, and Competition Along the East African coast, a wide range of different male-female unions is recognized. Besides the “official” marriage, there are various forms of concubinage and “secret marriages.” Against the background of high divorce rates, the first “official” marriage is celebrated also as an initiation marking the passage from girl to married woman

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in a costly and elaborate feast while later marriages do not take place in such splendor (Middleton 1992:120f). Thus, wedding celebrations are a key rite de passage for a woman, and the drama of transformation unfolds around them. Today most marriages are not arranged anymore. Although endogamous marriages (between cousins) are preferred, women rather often insist on their own choice. Frequently the future husband and wife already know each other and consent to marry before negotiations between the two families start. While weddings used to offer men a stage to reconfirm or claim positions of rank and prestige, since the 1970s and perhaps even earlier it has been primarily women who in gender-segregated Mombasa and Lamu have taken over this task (Strobel 1975:36). Whereas men meet in the public domain of the neighborhood mosque and in political associations or social clubs from which women are excluded, weddings offer women a chance for celebration, gossip, discussion, entertainment, and competition. While the legal and religious aspects of a wedding were the purview of men, women were and are primarily responsible for the wedding festivities (ibid.). Whereas men no longer indulge in lavish expenditure and thus have appropriated the capitalist spirit of economic accumulation, it is women who follow “tradition.” They very often decide to hold a festive event; they are occupied with cooking great quantities of delicious food, assisted by female relatives and neighbors. They invite relatives and friends, thereby renewing or confirming some alliances while at the same time discarding others. They arrange the decoration of the house, organize music, and, above all, choose their clothing, hairstyles, and jewelry. Women attending a wedding will be closely examined by others after they have removed their veils, and over the next weeks friends and rivals will discuss in detail what they wear (Swartz 1991:244f). A wedding was and is mainly a fashion show, with women showing off their connection to the modern world, their class, beauty, and style to other women. Thus, women stand under great pressure to conform to certain standards of prestige, beauty, and status. They have precise ideas about what is fashionable and what is not. 2 2 I can confirm this from my own experience. Although I tried hard to fulfill the local standards, I committed a terrible “faux pas” at the first wedding I attended

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There are two important rules guiding the individual display during a wedding: A woman should never wear mitumbe, second-hand clothing that is associated with coming from “dead people”; and she should never be dressed in a garment she has worn on a previous occasion. Dresses, shoes, and jewelry should not be worn more than once. The repetitive wearing of the same clothes is considered a disgrace and is associated with the mourning period after the death of a relative when women should not change their dress (Middleton 1992:158). Thus, the constraint to always wear something new can only partially be related to modern, quickly-changing fashion and capitalist consumption practices. In fact, the singularity and uniqueness of women’s appearances is most important, and women who cannot afford to buy new jewelry for each wedding take their bangles and necklaces to the gold- or silversmith to be melted and reworked into a fashionable new design. If a woman participates in a wedding dressed in clothes and jewelry she has worn on a previous occasion, the other women guests may say “repeat!”; this statement marks not only her own social death, but also strongly weakens the prestige of her husband. His wife’s poor outfit expresses either that he does not love her or that he is too poor to dress her properly. Indeed, a man’s love and praise for his wife are made publicly visible by her expensive outfit. A woman not loved by her husband is taken to be a pitiful, disgraced creature and will often be despised (Swartz 1991:246). Thus, women’s bodies adorned with jewelry, expensive clothes, perfume, and henna designs also become a statement of their husbands’ status, thereby reproducing the structural dependency of (married) women on men. Simultaneously, the woman’s dependence on the man allows her to demand the supply of expensive material and jewelry for public display. Since his status is tied to hers, it is difficult for him to refuse. For a wedding, a husband is supposed to buy at least two to four new dresses for his wife.3 Whereas most men do not share women’s enthusiasm for spending money on clothing and jewelry, they nevertheless provide the necessary funding, because “a wife is clothes” (ibid.:242ff). in Mombasa in August 2007 and succeeded in being a simple “failure” at the second. At the next wedding, although I remained far from meeting the local standard, at least my efforts were appreciated and this time I received more than a reluctant smile. 3 August being the month of weddings, some women in Mombasa and Lamu attended a wedding nearly every evening for a whole month!

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In the 1990s, however, women made attempts to reduce the “terror” of weddings as fashion shows. Because of the economic crisis and the increasing reticence to spend large amounts of money on clothes when they could not afford the school fees for their children, women in Lamu and Mombasa started to form groups to reduce individual pressure on them. As a wedding group, they decided together which material to buy and which style the dress should have, so that during the wedding they were dressed uniformly, thereby minimizing rivalry among them. Dressing alike and sharing the same textile expressed their desire to identify with each other and to celebrate the unity and commonality of women. While previously women had attempted to outdo each other, they now openly demonstrated their solidarity by sharing the “same material.” However, competition did not disappear completely, but was shifted to another, more collective level. By creating wedding groups, the women not only expressed their solidarity and unity, but also furthered a certain detachment and independence from their husbands, because their clothing no longer reflected their men’s status but was now the result of the group’s decision. Yet, in Mombasa in 2007, women told me that individual rivalry had returned to weddings and that women took great pains to be as stylish as possible and to outdo each other. There were, however, exceptions. As I observed during the weddings I attended in August of the same year, a few women consciously chose to dress in a simple, more puritanical way in order to express their religious objection to the profane splendor of others. They did not form a group but acted individually, and as far as I could find out, their religious asceticism was largely accepted.

Photography’s Insertion into Spectacular Weddings As a cosmopolitan society, women and men of the stone towns have for centuries enriched their material culture and rituals by turning foreign influences into their own way of living to differentiate themselves from other people. They took over, adapted, and transformed aspects of the cultures of those who colonized them and with whom they traded. In fact, to this day the weddings rituals are characterized

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by the assimilation of many foreign elements. While the Arab hegemony of the 19th century was (and still is) given expression in the clothing of bridegroom and bride, the Western impact has also left its traces, the bride on one occasion during the wedding process wearing a Western style white wedding dress. During colonial times, Western clothing was seen as the utmost of elegance, but since the 1980s the latest fashion comes from Oman, Dubai, and India, thus de-hegemonizing the West. In fact, India’s “Bollywood” films and Egyptian and Mexican soap operas provide the ideals that are followed and reworked by local women in their wedding outfits. At weddings, bride and groom are pictured in various foreign spaces and times, thereby giving proof of their upward mobility and cosmopolitanism. Like other imported luxury commodities that are turned into prestige goods to be displayed, manipulated, and circulated as gifts to challenge a rival, photography, too – as act and object – entered the wedding rituals and became part of the expenditure and conspicuous display of wealth, prestige, and battles of status. Even before a wedding is arranged, photographs may play an important role. Against the background of increasing labor migration, many a young men who works in Oman, Dubai, or Qatar and want to marry asks his mother and sisters to look for a wife for him at home. While the potential bride is often invited to have a look into the photo album of the young man, the mother and sister send a photograph of the woman to him. The female photographer and video maker Husna Sheeali Omar told me that on such occasions she would take a close-up photograph of the woman’s face and another showing her whole body so that the potential groom would get an idea of what she looked like. Sometimes the exchange of photographs and, of course, the positive opinions of mother and sisters may lead to the beginning of marriage negotiations between the two families. In the 1950s, when photography was introduced into the wedding rituals on a mass scale, people readily understood the camera as a medium that created not only images to remember the event but also a theatrical space of performance that could be connected to the theatricality and spectacle inherent in wedding rituals. Even before the introduction of the camera, at weddings and other festivities, people displayed themselves and their wealth in spectacu-

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lar theatrical scenes. The architecture of the famous stone houses was such that it provided, on the one hand, the possibility to keep certain spaces hidden and inaccessible while, on the other hand, offering a sort of stage where people could present themselves “as a picture” to be seen and admired. Contrary to claims that only modern (capitalist) societies have produced the spectacle (Debord 1967), I suggest that it was already constitutive of local subjectivities long before the introduction of photography (cf. Silverman 1996:91). Thus, photography’s insertion into weddings followed, first of all, the logic of the already existing ritual choreography that decided when, where, and what was displayed and made visible, and what not. Photography, above all, heightened the already existing choreography of visibility and the spectacle of certain moments in the ritual process. But as performance, photographic acts themselves soon gained the repetitive fixity of rites and were inserted as “photo sessions” into the ritual procedure of weddings. Since the 1950s, the presence of the camera has essentially restructured the ritual process. The photographic act as a cut in time and space, as a sudden freezing of a “now” and “here” (Dubois 1998) isolates certain moments out of the continuity of ritual space and time; and through their actions and image making, photographers greatly heighten and intensify certain spectacular instants of the wedding ritual. Today, at Muslim weddings, there are two moments of the utmost beauty and visibility of the bride that have to be recorded in photographs. The first takes place after the ritual called nikkah, in which a khadi declares the legal existence of the wedding, has been performed. Then the bride is presented to her husband in his home before the marriage is completed. This part of the marriage process is called kutoa mukono (“to give hand”) and happens in the private domain of the husband’s house. At one of the weddings I was invited in August 2007 to participate in, the bride had been prepared in the “Saloon of Brides,” a beauty parlor and hairdresser in the Old Town of Mombasa that has specialized in the decoration of brides. Covered by a buibui, she was brought to the house of the groom, where she was unveiled and displayed in her splendid beauty. Her outfit consisted in a light green dress – green being the color of Islam – lots of gold jewelry, heavy mask-like make-up, and her hair in a big knot at the back of her head shining in two different colors. It was at this moment of revelation that she was photographed in various positions,

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sometimes with, sometimes without the veil, sometimes as a couple together with the groom, sometimes without him. Her splendid clothes were just as much a form of praise as the act of being repeatedly photographed. The second moment of utmost visibility that “is crowned by photography (and video)” occurred after the marriage had been completed. On the last evening of the wedding ritual, a “reception,” in Swahili kupamba, is held and female relatives, friends, neighbors, and workmates gathered in a large hall, ate, drank (non-alcoholic) sodas, and danced. A stage had been built at the end of the hall, decorated with various textiles, strands of glitter, sparkling lights, paper flowers, and a festive sofa and chairs, clearly inspired by the glamorous wedding scenes of Oman and in Bollywood films. In fact, in wedding halls in Mombasa and Lamu, ritual space and photo studio merge. When the music4 started to play, the women began to dance and to enjoy the festive occasion. After a few hours, the bride arrived in a shiny white dress, holding a bouquet of white flowers; she entered the hall (alone, without the groom)5 and then slowly – as if in slow motion – walked towards the stage. She climbed the steps and, visible to all, stood there and later sat down to be seen and admired by the other women, her face unveiled. While her walk through the hall was captured on video, photographers took her picture in various poses on the stage, first alone and then in different arrangements with relatives and friends. Whereas in Taiwan, as Bonnie Adrian (2003) has suggested, bridal photography depicts the bride alone or the couple without other family members, thereby intentionally obliterating

4 Prior to the 1980s, male musicians played taraab music, but nowadays their presence has been condemned by religious reformists, also because of the waste of money that could be better spent on education and development. In all the weddings I attended, only cassette or DVD recordings were played (cf. Fuglesang 1994:111). In addition, there is now a tendency among reformed Muslims to allow at weddings only religious music, so-called kasida, Islamic poetry that is sung and that can be danced to in a modest way. 5 There are three possibilities, as I was informed by the female photographer and video producer Husna Shee Ali Omar: First, the bride marches in alone (because women prefer to stay among themselves) and this is called “Swahili style;” second, “English style,” in which bride and bridegroom march in together; and third, “half-English style,” in which the bride is escorted by a brother.

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intergenerational ties in their representations of marriage, this is not the case in Mombasa or Lamu. Although romantic and intimate poses of bride and groom may sometimes be staged in opposition to the older generation, weddings are mostly seen as a ritual that connects two families, and this is also demonstrated in the photographs showing bride and groom embedded in a complex network of social relations. Yet, like in Taiwan, weddings have become, above all, a celebration of femininity, female beauty, and a ritual of transformation of the bride from girl to woman and wife. In particular, the heavy make-up turns the brides’ face into a mask that transforms their individual characteristics into generic look-alike beauties. The difference between bridal beauty and everyday looks is extreme; it is as if a new person is created for the new life of a married woman (cf. Adrian 2003:155f). In fact, on the days before the wedding, the future bride often takes care to hide herself with the veil even from friends and relatives so that when she is then revealed to them during the wedding they see her as different. This practice is called kutawa, meaning “to hide.” The cameras captured, intensified, and froze for the future these two moments of heightened visibility. The moments of singularity, cut out of time and space by the camera, were thus transferred into another temporality that potentially lasts and endures. The two moments caught and fixed by the camera formed part of a complex ritual visual regime of concealing, veiling, and revealing; and the camera produced, preserved, expanded, and celebrated these moments of heightened visibility as part of the bride’s transformation. Photographs “before” and “after” the completion of marriage also gave evidence of the radical change the bride underwent during the wedding. And like the clothes, so also the photographs not only symbolized the newly acquired status, but also formed an essential component of the woman’s transformation. In fact, at weddings, the presence of the camera has become one of the principal devices for experiencing the event, for giving the appearance of participation and transformation. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests the importance of the event and of the people present (see Sontag 1977:10f). The acts of photography as performance “crown the celebration,” as a photographer in Mombasa put it.

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Photographs as Gifts During weddings, photographs also served as gifts to be distributed among relatives and guests. They entered a process of communication and circulation safeguarding against the individual’s propensity to “keep to oneself” (Mauss). As at a potlatch, during weddings photographs were part of the exchange of gifts and counter-gifts, and the quantity and quality of photographs distributed affirmed and added to the host’s social standing. As various people told me, hired photographers would take pictures of “everything and everybody.” “People are crazy,” one Indian photographer remarked, “they want 400 to 600 pictures for one wedding.”6 Besides the two moments already mentioned, photographers were invited to take pictures of each and every action, he said. Sometimes the host spent so much money that he could not pay for the developing and printing and thus ruined himself and his family. With photographs, a form of gift was established that functioned in a double way: as an object that was given as part of and as an extension of the host; and as a picture that represented the participants. In these “wars of wealth” (Mauss), of excess, laughter, and dance, photographs as gifts played a highly ambivalent role because they recorded either the victory or the defeat of the host and his guests, storing memories of happy and disastrous moments of life. Photographs (and videos) were not only distributed as gifts to guests but also sent to relatives and friends living abroad in the Diaspora who had not been able to attend the feast. Thanks to the new technology, people separated in space were able to maintain relations, share the experience of festivities and rituals, and form one community (Clifford 1997:246f). In fact, photographs (and videos) constitute new spaces of connection and interaction. They allow people to animate, replicate, and extend the experience and sensations in the Diaspora as well as at home when reviewing the pictures, because photographic inscriptions can mobilize information, sensation, and experience across time and space; they stay immutable though they are displaced

6 As Husna Sheeali Omar told me, today 50 photographs are the minimum. At weddings of people who are not reformed Muslims, 300 to 400 photographs may be shot, developed, and distributed.

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(Latour 1986:8). At home or in the Diaspora, family members and friends meet together with neighbors in front of a TV set to view the videos and photographic images of a wedding, sometimes actually repeating the feast and participating in the status struggles that the technical media not only record, but have also become part of. Though commodities, wedding photographs defy the commodity/ gift binary; they are unique in the world of commodities in that the consumers actively take part in their production (Adrian 2003:19). In addition, after being produced they turn into a gift in personal networks of relatives and friends. When I visited the reception (kupamba) of a wedding in September 2011, I noticed that during the dancing the mother of the bride was receiving presents, mostly in the form of money. While she danced, women – also dancing – advanced towards her, greeted her and either affixed envelopes filled with money to her dress or put a crown or necklaces made out of money notes on her head or around her neck. After a short time, her whole body was covered with bank notes and she actually “danced” the money. Most of these gifts, I was told later, were counter-gifts of money she had expended at previous weddings. While it was possible to give back the same amount or more, one could not give less. Obviously, here – as in the old potlatch-like festivities – an agonistic aspect was celebrated and women made use of the wedding to gain a stage to reconfirm or claim positions of rank and prestige. Here, by giving money, women could show and express their generosity and demand respect, allegiance, and solidarity, while at the same time they could challenge a rival who had to respond and to display an even more aggressive generosity to outdo her opponent. Jonathan Crary and John Tagg have stressed the homologies between money and photography. Not only money but also photographs serve as a “visual currency” and are distributed, circulated, and consumed within a given set of social relations; both are pieces of paper that change hands and find use, a meaning, and a value in agonistic wedding rituals.

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Weddings, Visual Media, and Purdah While before the 1980s, photographs were “a must” and “everything and everybody was photographed” during weddings, at the present time, many Muslim women (and men) prefer regulations that allow them to control picture taking. In such a context, not photographing becomes as much of a statement as photographing (cf. Michaels 1991:270). During Muslim weddings, nowadays announcements are often made asking the guests to keep their camera phones closed and leave the picture taking to the official photographers and video makers. And indeed, at most of the weddings I attended in 2011, women guests made no use of their individual camera phones and the image recording was done by (female) professional photographers and video makers. While before the 1980s, the audience too was photographed, nowadays a special decorated stage is reserved for taking pictures.

Decorated Stage designed by Husna Sheeali Omar, 2011

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Decorated Stages designed by Husna Sheeali Omar, 2011

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Only those who want to be photographed (together with the bride), climb the stage, while the others remain seated in a space where cameras are excluded. At some weddings, women use their veils even inside the room to protect their faces from being photographed. Furthermore, at a few weddings, no videos were taken. I was informed that some pious families preferred not to record weddings anymore. Videocassettes (and DVDs) showing women dancing chacacha, a special dance full of sexual allusions, had been sent to relatives living in the Diaspora and had been seen by unrelated men, creating domestic tensions even to the extent that a few marriages split up. This, I was told, was one reason why the video camera was banned from (some) weddings. While several families continued to send “modest” photographs and videos to relatives, others stopped doing so. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of photographs were produced as part of the ostentatious display of wealth and status and given as gifts to the guests, nowadays, at least in pious families, only photographs of the two main moments of heightened visibility are printed for the wedding album of the bride. Thus, the exchange and circulation of photographs (of women) as a gift and counter-gift and as a kind of “family currency” has been greatly restricted, sometimes even halted. Pious families dispensed with one of the most important qualities of photography, its capacity to celebrate the extended family as a unit and, at the same time, its role as an instrument and tool to effect that unity (Bourdieu 1981). They have also dispensed with the specific qualities of photographs as gifts, as a possibility to give oneself to another by offering oneself in a picture. To assure purdah, they renounced the binding and relational quality of photographs and videos and the chance to “repeat” the feast and enjoy again the “special moments” of heightened social density that a wedding provides when reviewing the wedding video or the wedding photographs. The role of new media is not only to expand transnational Muslim networks and to increase visibilities, as scholars such as Eickelman and Anderson (2003:XIV) have assumed in a rather general way, but there are also counter-attempts to withdraw from visibility and to interrupt the flow of images, in particular the images of women, and to create new opacities.

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Yet, there were also Muslim women who did not mind being photographed at all as long as they were “modestly dressed.” In addition, some Muslim families seemed to be indifferent to reformed Islamic tendencies and continued to celebrate their weddings in the manner of the 1970s. I attended one such wedding in 2007, where a range of female and male photographers and also affluent women guests took hundreds of pictures, some with their own digital cameras or camera phones. A woman also recorded the (female) audience and the dancing on video. But some guests were not happy about the way women had been photographed by male photographers. They also objected to the fact that the bridegroom was accompanied by other men when he entered the hall to take the bride home.

Women Photographers Because of the reinforced separation of women and men and because many women prefer to be photographed by other women, a new professional field has opened up for women. In the private domain of the house and during festivities, female photographers started to take pictures of women for women and their close relatives and friends. While photographers everywhere in Africa are predominantly male,7 on the East African coast female photographers as well as female video producers emerged and occupied a professional space that formerly belonged to men. I visited some women in Mombasa and Lamu who had become professional photographers and video producers and specialized in taking pictures and videos of women at weddings and other celebrations. The first woman to start producing videos in Mombasa was Esha, the daughter of Nabhani, the famous poet and “Swahili cultural consultant,” as he called himself, in the early 1990s. She trained the next 7 According to the research of Erika Nimis, in southwestern Nigeria women photographers have multiplied since the 1990s and can boast the highest number of women photographers in West Africa (Nimis 2006:427). But the reason for this rise seems to be above all that the training of female photographers has become a substantial source of profit for some (male) photographers in this region (ibid.:431). Unfortunately, Nimis’ article celebrates the feminization of the photographic profession without exploring in detail the conditions for this specific local development.

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generation of female video makers, women who today have established a highly efficient network, helping each other. “There is no rivalry among us,” explained the young video maker and photographer Husna Sheeali Omar from “Halike Video Production,” a studio that she herself built up after having been taught by Esha, in a conversation in September 2011. Husna offers not only digital and video shooting of weddings, birthday parties, seminars, etc. but also highly skillful editing and stage decoration. Thus, in the restricted female domain and because of the actualization of female purdah and the extension of the veil to include photography, women have made use of the segregation of the sexes to control and author the production of their own images. Here, relatively independent of the male gaze, they invent their own representations. Although they reproduce a femininity that, as always, derives from elsewhere, I remember the complaint of a few husbands who realized that the money (they gave) as well as the enormous amount of energy their wives spent to look beautiful and fashionable was not so much directed at them but to please and impress other women. In a way, the gaze women fixed upon themselves in photographs could be understood as a partial expropriation, as a theft of the former closed relay between the camera, the male photographer, and the male viewer.

Photography, Video, and the Wedding Album In addition to photography, video became part of festivities and, in particular, weddings since the 1980s. The first to start wedding videos was Mr. Salim from Kuze in Mombasa. He began as an artist and designer of wedding decorations, in particular of the wedding stage, and, as he told me in a conversation in September 2011, when he received a video camera he established himself as the first wedding video maker in the 1980s. He became famous not only for his splendid and spectacular decorations – in Hindi, Arab, Baluchi, and Swahili style – but also for the musical arrangements he produced for the weddings. In fact, he created weddings as a sort of “Gesamtkunstwerk” that he then recorded and edited on video. Mr. Salim also experimented with new media in a highly innovative way. He told me that he had introduced to the women’s wedding halls big screens on which he showed the women the wedding rituals that

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the men performed and from which women were excluded. He recorded on video, for example, Nikkah in the mosque, an exclusively male ritual through which the marriage is legalized, and transmitted the event to the women’s site so that they could see what normally they are excluded from seeing. Whereas women were enabled to see what the men did, men were not given the same privilege. Men were not allowed to see (on the screen) what women did. Thus, Salim made use of technical media such as video to bridge the gender segregation (in one way only) and to create a new female audience while at the same time keeping up the appropriate physical separation of women and men. He initiated a new form of co-temporality that allowed women – separated from men – to participate in the rituals of men. It is important to note that in spite of video’s high prestige, it has not replaced photography. Instead, the two media occupy different spaces and fulfill different functions. While photographs can be easily distributed, can always be looked at, can be used individually as souvenirs, and can be carried in a briefcase or purse, video cassettes and DVDs need a rather complex technical apparatus to be watched. Some families nowadays possess their own recorder (often brought by migrant workers from Dubai or Oman); but because the images produced by video are fleeting, they do not have the fetishistic qualities of photographs (Metz 1990). In addition, as Husna Shee Ali Omar suggested, many people appreciate photos as the representation that reaches out to an ideal of beauty that is difficult to achieve in video. While photographs – when carefully arranged – tend to capture a perfected world, video is seen by many people as too real and realistic, a medium that reveals “too much,” including accidents, failures, and all the imperfections and ugliness that should be excluded in a wedding process. When viewing some of the wedding DVDs produced by women, I was surprised to see how strongly the videos interacted with photography. As Husna explained to me, when she goes to produce a wedding video, she always includes a female photographer in her team because photographs form an important part of the videos’ narrative. In fact, all the videos I watched begin and end with photographs that are carefully framed so as to resemble the pictures in an album. A few years ago, the photographs in videos were organized following the model of the slide show, but nowadays various digital image programs such as

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Adobe Photo Shop or Pinnacle are used to zoom in on photographic portraits adorned with hearts, roses, weddings rings, and other symbols of romantic love or to split them into many small pictures, or to turn them around on the screen. While the photographs in the videos present the depicted persons as ideal frozen images, the pictures themselves are moved on the screen, thereby marking the difference between the two media. In fact, the videos play with the fascination of the boundary between mechanical/digital animation and the inanimate that is thereby animated, as is inherent in the two media. The video makers animate framed still photographs while framing and halting video images. Besides exploring the intermediality of video and photography, the wedding videos bring in and play with another medium that is central, in particular for women: the wedding album. In the wedding videos, special effects simulate not only the pages of a photo album, but also the movement of turning over a page, the video thus imitating the viewing of a wedding album, one of the most important devices of a wedding. In Mombasa, since the 1960s a wedding photo album has become a “must,” Husna and her mother suggested. Although men, too, may own a wedding album, it is mainly women who keep one and who indulge in looking at photographs, remembering the event, and critically discussing the outfit and appearance of participant women. In the album, photographs double and store women’s outfits. While the garments wear out and finally disappear, in their albums women possess durable photographic documentation of their own appearances and those of other women, which they often comment on, praise, or criticize mercilessly. For some women the albums serve as a type of visual diary in which the photographs give durable evidence of a rival’s victory or defeat, thereby continuously feeding the social memory that, without the photographs, might more easily forget some women’s catastrophic defeats. Although photographs are “cuts” in time and space (Dubois 1998:155ff), they have the power to prolong the depicted past event and extend and renew it in the present. And they can prolong the shame of having been defeated as well as the joy and pleasure of success. To put it in more general terms, photographs create new forms of self-awareness and self-shaping and thereby radically transform the ways people understand themselves.

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Yet, in the album, also the moments of sharing the same material were permanently fixed in photographs. Cloth and photographic space function as great connectors, binding people to each other. Both highlight their capacity to mediate between past and present. Photographs, like textiles, are “relational” in the sense that they do not just stage settings for human actions and meaning, but also integrate them (Edwards and Hart 2004:4). Photographs of people sharing the same textiles may gain an agency of their own, exerting a binding quality on the people depicted. For example, a woman told me that she wanted to divorce her husband; but when she looked at the wedding photograph displaying her and him as a splendid romantic couple, she decided to stay. The materiality of textiles and of photographs nurtures, forms, and transforms social relationships. Like food, photographs and textiles in their complex interactions also form the material stuff of social life and “nurture” social relations. Wedding photographers and video makers sell not only photographs and videos of the event, but also the “once in a lifetime” experience of making them, when brides are treated as celebrities, stars, and the princesses of late capitalism (Adrian 2003:21). Far from merely giving proof that a marriage has taken place, they transport and transfer the ideal of the “couple” in a strongly gender-segregated community and of passionate romantic love, as if marriage were about affect, intimacy, and personal pleasure and not about kinship and reproduction (cf. ibid.:66). Passionate love and romance are constructed as imports from Bollywood and Hollywood in defiance of Swahili family values, and this adds to their “transgressive” character. In fact, in some videos and albums I could see also pictures of the wedding bed showing the bride and groom sitting or resting on it, thus referring rather overtly to the sexual act that will take place there. Sometimes a honeymoon album was produced in addition to the wedding album to remember the various places that were visited. While in old wedding pictures men and women were carefully separated by empty space or a column, table, or flowerpot and looked directly into the camera, in videos and photographs they now interact intimately with each other. Although bride and groom may still be strangers to each other, in front of the camera they follow the photographic conventions and pose as an intimate, romantic couple, passionately in love (cf. Kendall 2006).

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As Husna explained, while wedding videos may be shown, distributed, and circulated among relatives and friends, the wedding album remains at home. Thus, the two media occupy different spaces; in addition, photographic conventions have strongly shaped wedding videos and both media interact in complex ways (at least up to 2011). In the wedding videos, photographs have a central place; it is in the space between the photographs inserted at the beginning and the end of the video that the different rituals of the wedding process recorded by the video camera unfold as the clients have chosen them.

“Glittering Women” There is a proverb in Swahili that “a woman without glittering is no good, though all that glitters is not gold” (mwanamke ni angarae japo mngaro si dhahabu). As Husna and other women confirmed, along the coast, women love to wear glittering and sparkling textiles to gain attention; even nowadays when many women are dressed with buibui and hijab in the public, the black dress is decorated with glittering pearls and buttons fixed at the back, the neck, or the sleeves. In addition, colored sparkling hijabs have recently been introduced from Dubai and Bangkok as the latest fashion; they strongly add to the impression of women moving through the streets as a glittering surface that seeks attention while irritating and blinding the viewer. At Muslim weddings, this preference for the glitzy is even more intensified, and women not only wear flashing dresses but also decorate with silver or gold jewelry. In fact, at the Muslim weddings I participated in, the glittering decoration, the radiance of the bride’s face, her jewelry and silky dress, the festive illumination, and the flashbulbs of the cameras created a fascinating tapestry of light, displaying the bride as the “star of the show” and surrounding her with a sort of “divine quality.” In addition, nowadays digital picture programs such as Pinnacle 12 offer the possibility to rework the bride’s photograph with special effects, providing her face, her dress, and the background with additional glittering, sparkles, and other forms of decoration. In Mombasa, Muslim (and Christian) photographers are making use of these options to add even more spectacular sparkles to the deeply embedded “aesthetic of shininess” (Picton 1995:12).

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Photography, Aura, and the “Aesthetics of Withdrawal” In many religions, light has served as a transcendent mediator par excellence, representing and presencing gods, prophets, spirits, and saints. Not only Christianity (and Buddhism) has a theology of light; so does Islam. “God is the light of the heavens and of the earth” (Sura 24:35). The Hadith has Mohammad say, “I am the sun and my companions are like stars” (Schimmel 1994:14). Divine light radiates through Mohammad, the Prophet, and the Quran calls him “a shining lamp.” He is seen as in charge of leading people from the darkness of infidelity and error towards the light (ibid.: 12). The symbolism of light was and is widely used by Muslim scholars. Certain Sufi masters elaborated a theory of the development of the human soul, so that, through long ascetic practices, an individual may grow into a true “man of light” whose heart is an unstained mirror to reflect the Divine light and reveal it to others (ibid.:13). The central role of the concept of light is also suggested by the considerable number of religious works whose titles allude to light and luminosity, such as “The Lamps of the Sunna,” “Book of Brilliant Sparks,” “Glitterings,” and “Flashes,” each of them, as Schimmel suggests, intended to offer a small fraction of the Divine or the Prophetic light to guide their readers out of darkness (ibid.). Photography, too, is a medium of light; Henry Fox Talbot, for example, conceptualized the analogue medium as a drawing by means of light. But it was Walter Benjamin who connected photography, a medium of light and of technical reproduction, with the decline of aura. He defined aura as “a strange web of time and space; a unique appearance of a distance, however close at hand” (Trachtenberg 1980:209). According to him, the invention of photography enabled technology to outdo artists at their own task and undermine the uniqueness and aura of the (painted) masterpiece by allowing the mass production of images. Aura, which he called an appearance of breath, light, and distance, belonged to a world of tradition, religion, and arts. With the increasing mechanization of reproduction techniques, aura was progressively eliminated, constituting a tremendous shattering of tradition, a historical shock (Weber 1996:83). Yet, as Samuel Weber has suggested, despite all its withering away, aura has never fully disappeared even in the era of technical reproduction. Instead, it has

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returned with a vengeance. There is the very real possibility that aura is reproduced in and by the very media responsible for its decline (ibid.:87,101). As “cult objects,” the act of photography and the photograph as object, when (re-)inserted into the wedding ritual, can (re-) gain aura. Wedding photographs are inextricably tied to the ritual work of weddings, creating an “artifactual aura,” as Laurel Kendall has suggested (Kendall 2006). Instead of destroying aura, the insertion of photography into the wedding ritual produces what Benjamin called “cult value” that gives back to the photographs some auratic quality. In particular, the contradictory effects inherent in the aura as “a unique appearance of a distance, however close at hand” easily translate into wedding photography along the East African coast (as part of a more global wedding industry). While the bride is enveloped in radiant luminosity that highlights her appearance, she is also withdrawn from visibility by blinding and dazzling the spectators. Although she is displayed to be seen and admired by the audience, she nevertheless also disappears behind the dazzling flashes of the cameras, thereby creating “a distance, however close she may be.” Inscribed into this distance is the power (of the aura) that emanates from the bride and dazzles and captures the spectators. The bride: “before the eyes, but out of sight” (Didi-Huberman 1999:136). In fact, the bride becomes also an indication of absence and loss that is visually produced. Although she is brought into proximity, a distance is created. I would propose to see this contradictory outcome as part of the “aesthetics of withdrawal,” theatricalizing the bride in new ways by bringing in effects of light that keep viewers at a distance and blind. This double effect of lighting and glittering and at the same time blinding and distancing corresponds to local interpretation. Some women took the glittering and radiant luminosity surrounding the bride as creating a distance and thereby protecting her vulnerable exposure against the evil eye (cf. Fuglesang 1994:135). Like mirrors that reflect and reject evil spirits or the evil eye, so, too, the aura of the bride was interpreted as an apotropaic device that shielded her against evil forces. I hold that the concept of mediation, as Bolter and Grusin (2000), for example, developed it, taking its model from technical media such as TV or radio and focusing on flow, immediacy, and presence, has

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failed to take into account the much more complicated processes of religious mediation characterized by ruptures, blockings, blinding, and highly contradictory movements. At Muslim weddings as part of a global wedding industry, the flashbulbs of cameras present the bride to view while at the same time withdrawing her from visibility. As a “star,” she is offered a small fraction of the Divine light that, however, blinds her as well as the other spectators. Not only the flashes of the cameras, but also the glitter and sparkling of jewelry and shining textiles shift the glance, reduce details, and partially eliminate what is presented to view. It is as if it is allowed to create an image, on the condition of its partial destruction, idolatry and iconoclasm thereby fusing in an uneasy unity. The gesture of giving to see and the annihilation of what is presented to view are brought together in a photograph that at the same time problematizes representation. What Heidegger anticipated as the essence of modern technology – that total availability of being placed and displaced at will – is undermined here in a subtle way: The excess of light designates what escapes and eludes the calculating plans of total representation (Weber 1996:79ff).

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Chapter 9

Withdrawal of Life: Photography and Death In an article published in 1893, E.F. Im Thurn, a travelling anthropologist who had struggled and experimented in various ways with the photographic camera “in the field,” suggested that the mere bodies of primitive folk “might indeed be more accurately measured and photographed for such purposes dead than alive, could they be conveniently obtained when in this state” (Thurn 1893:184). Although Thurn favored the use of the camera to take pictures “of these folk regarded as living” and to document them in social activities in their surroundings, he drastically named one of the predicaments of early photography: the necessity to fix and immobilize the photographed subject in the photographic act “as if dead” because of the long exposure time. It is no coincidence that the first photographs – or, more precisely, daguerreotypes – were taken of immobile things and corpses. In 1840, Hippolyte Bayard, the unlucky rival inventor who tried in vain to interest the academies in his paper process and who was quite literally muffled by Francois Arago, took a photograph of himself as if dead by drowning; in this way he chose to comment visually and silently on his eviction and thereby produced the first fictional photograph in the history of photography (Brunet 2009:88). As Walter Benjamin remarked, many early photographs of David Octavius Hill were taken at the Edinburgh cemetery of Greyfriars; and the models seemed perfectly at home in this cemetery (Benjamin 1980:204). And even later, when exposure time was reduced to a few seconds and snapshots had become common, associations between photography, immobility, freezing, silence, and death continued to occupy the imaginations of (Western) scholars exploring the medium of photography. As various writers have suggested, in contrast to film and video, photography – as act and object – is drained of movement, the commonly accepted sign of life. Like death, photography silences and arrests a person in an image, freezing his or her motion, liveliness, and transformational capacities. Like death, photography produces a radical discontinuity, a cut in time and space (Dubois 1998). Similar to the blade of the guillotine, the shutter of the camera cuts temporal duration and freezes a “here” and “now” (ibid.). Thus, photographs articulate an irrecoverable loss, a cut that – like death – radically separates what it shows as something of the past. 199

Because of these analogies, death and photography have been described as similar procedures to produce an image. Maurice Blanchot (1951) perceived the dead body as a sort of first image, a subject becoming an object that is an image through death. The corpse is its own image, a negation of life that, like the photographic act, turns a subject into an object, thereby forcing him or her to experience a “small death.” In fact, these analogies open up the possibility to deal with a corpse and a photograph (of a dead person) as synonyms in various cultural contexts. Corpse and photograph can be mutually exchanged and substituted for each other (cf. Sykora 2010:24). Because they share motionlessness and silence, the dead seem to have found in photographs an adequate and yet uncanny medium that not only is capable of representing the dead as dead, but also allows their resurrection. On the one hand, photographs subdue the depicted person and withdraw his or her life; on the other hand, they are able to bring back the dead (Barthes 1981:9). Photographs help to keep “alive” not only the dead, but also contacts with (dead) people through space and time. They preclude the “fading away” of the dead, and have, not only in the Western world, provided the medium for the re-emergence of modern ancestor cults.

Photography and Death in (Post-) Colonial Encounters Not only in the West, but also in other parts of the world, photography was related in various ways to death. In fact, against the background of photography’s present global success and ubiquity, the panics and disturbances created by the introduction of the new medium seem to have been largely forgotten. It is difficult to capture the shock, amazement, fright, and rejection that accompanied the new medium as it entered, transformed, and displaced already existing visual economies (see Morris 2009:1). In many parts of the world, for example in Japan (Kohara 2010:230f), on the Western Solomon Islands (Wright 2008), and in Africa (Behrend 2003a), in popular discourses many people who were subjected to the camera’s gaze and its (visual) violence connected photography with death and misfortune. As a “devil’s engine,” a machine “to capture a person’s spirit” or subtract bodily substance, photography was associated with death, theft, and sorcery and strongly rejected. It seems that the nature of photography itself – freezing its subjects in the act and in the picture – integrally provoked both indigenous resistance to it and concerns about it (Edwards 2003:84).

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Yet, paradoxically, it was by mediating death and dealing with the dead that photography gained special authority and approval. In many parts of the world in times of war, despair, and violent death – when too many young people died – photography was increasingly accepted and “democratized.” In the United States after the Civil War (1861-65), the idea of photographs as a way of preserving the memory of the dead came gradually more to the fore; at the same time, photography entered Spiritualism and became a tool to penetrate and reveal the invisible aspects of the spirit world and in particular, the spirits of the dead. In fact, legal issues and cultural practices around death, mourning, and bereavement figured into the success of spirit photography at this particularly divisive moment in American history marked by the Civil War (Kaplan 2008:4). In Japan during the wars with China and Russia, Samurai and later also ordinary soldiers developed a desire to leave a photographic picture behind before going to the battle. Portraits of soldiers who had died an honorable death circulated widely through the nation as something that could be shared. When the relatives at home possessed no body of the war dead, a photographic portrait was put into the grave as if it were the deceased himself (Kohara 2010:237ff). Among Aborigines from Arnhem Land in Australia who strongly rejected photography at the beginning, in particular photographs of the dead, recently a turning away from the images of the dead seemed no longer appropriate or even bearable; instead, there emerged a consensus that young people who had lived only half-lives required attention and response through photographs, which on the one hand marked loss while, on the other hand, creating continuity (Deger 2008:304). In many parts of the world, not only photographs of the dead (as living) entered and radically changed the cult of the dead, but also postmortem photography mediated the relation with death and the dead in a new way. While the exposure and public showing of a corpse had been, above all, an act of humiliation inflicted on an enemy, now, in the private domain of a family, post-mortem photographs of a dead relative were produced to remember him or her (as dead) (Sontag 2004). Thus, although intensely debated and often rejected in the beginning, photography became accepted in many parts of the world as a practice and object mediating between life and death, between the living and the dead.

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Photography, Death, and Mourning among Muslims on the Kenyan Coast “Official” Islam regards the cult of ancestors in itself as problematic, as potentially leading to idolatry and thereby to a violation of monotheism. This is why before the introduction of photography, among Muslims of the East African coast the dead were not remembered and represented in images, sculptures, or spirit mediums but in their (written) names and gravesites. Stone towns had cemeteries, usually one at each end, outside the town proper. In addition, there were tombs of holy men, built of stone, often with a thatched roof, scattered within the settlement or around mosques (Horton and Middleton 2000:124). While graves of ordinary people were temporary sites and ceased to be a form of visual inscription, since the dead would stay there only until their resurrection, the more permanent tombs of famous holy men were also places of pilgrimages where believers prayed and hoped to receive baraka, a holy substance that would provide blessings, healing, and protection. Against the background of the promise of resurrection after death, the more or less complete disappearance of individuals from the earth without much regard for memoralization seems to have found wide acceptance. When photography was introduced, it met resistance, in particular from Muslims. The new medium was introduced, above all, by Christians (from Goa in India and Europe) at a time when the (Christian) British started to colonize Kenya and had succeeded in abolishing the colonial domination of the (Muslim) Omani rulers. With their image policies, the colonial state and commercial photo studios often aggressively disturbed and undermined local preferences for aniconism, Muslim concepts of (female) purity, modesty, and (in-) visibility, the “interdiction” of figurative representations, and the fear of idolatry. In fact, maybe because of the (unspoken) alliance between Christianity and photography, Muslims in particular reacted to photography with more precaution and rejection; and it took some time before photography’s potential for self-representation, the presentation of others, and remembrance of the dead was hesitantly realized, though never uncontested. It seems that after World War II, photographic portraits, most often ID pictures, started mediating between the living and the dead; then photographic portraits of the dead became a visual equivalent of the

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name of a deceased relative. But even then, some pious Muslims continued to reject photographs because they feared image worship. Up to now, the camera has not entered Muslim funeral rites, at least not of ordinary people. Some old Muslim ladies in Mombasa told me that in the old days, if there was a passport photograph of a deceased relative, during the time of mourning1 – called eda in Swahili – this photograph of the deceased would be destroyed. Most often, this ID photograph had been taken under constraint. It was taken, of course, when the person photographed was still alive (often when men and women needed a passport photograph for the pilgrimage to Mecca). When the person died, the photograph changed into a representation of a dead person and had to be obliterated. In fact, the end of life was marked by an iconoclastic act and with the end of visual representation. Death was the beginning of a process of visually fading away until the deceased’s complete disappearance. A transformation took place allowing the fading away of the individual appearance of the dead while likewise reducing the dead person to a sign and a site: a name and a grave. The destruction of the photographic portrait as part of the mourning ritual was contradictory: on the one hand, this promoted forgetting the visual traits of the deceased, while on the other hand, it furthered his or her remembrance in the name and the site of the grave. The concrete, embodied individual was abstracted to his or her name and the gravesite. The invisibility of the deceased corresponded to the utmost invisibility of the (female) mourners. To ritually display the liminal state of humility, grief, and bereavement, female relatives stayed in their homes; mirrors were covered or made blind with chalk, and the deceased’s photograph was torn into pieces or burned, as mentioned before. The iconoclasm took place, so the women explained, because the picture would remind them of the deceased relative and stir up strong emotions that could hardly be controlled. In fact, the display of a photograph of the deceased strongly opposed and counteracted the necessary processes of emotional distancing from and “forgetting” the dead that the mourners had to undergo. 1 Not only after the death of a relative but also after a divorce, a woman has to undergo a phase of “mourning” for four months and ten days to find out if she is pregnant.

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Today, so the women said, the destruction of photographs of the dead is seen as “backward.” During the time of mourning, photographs of the deceased are turned to the wall or put out of sight, yet they are no longer destroyed as part of the mourning rituals. Nowadays, when the period of eda is officially ended, mourning shifts to memoria and people start to look at and cherish the photographs of the deceased, highly valued as a source of comfort and connection with the dead. Yet, while photographs of the deceased are no longer destroyed, the liminal phase of mourning still includes a “photo taboo”: it is not allowed to photograph people who are in the liminal state of mourning. Thus, photography as a medium that provides additional visibility has been ex negativo integrated into eda as one of the many interdictions – to eat certain food, to use perfume, to cut hair, etc. – that lead mourners through the uncertainties and dangers associated with liminality, brought by the impurity of death. At the same time, the interdiction against taking pictures of mourners in the liminal state – as an inversion of ordinary life – confirms how strongly the medium of photography has intruded into most domains of life. Nowadays, even among pious (reformed) Muslims, photographs of the deceased have come to occupy a central place in personal albums and are appreciated as a means to remember the dead. While before the introduction of photography, the remembered appearances of the dead would fade away and become effaced, photographs now open up a space for the dead in the world of the living in which they regain a very concrete visual form of representation. Even though photographs of the dead attest to a loss, they also offer the very grounds of continuity and a connection between the living and the dead (cf. Deger 2008:300ff). But interestingly, in many narratives that were told to me Muslim women stressed that the photographed person – now deceased but represented in the photograph – originally had refused to be photographed; only because he or she wanted to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca and therefore needed a passport photograph had he or she finally agreed to have a picture taken. For example, Ahmed Badawy (1898-1939), son of the famous Sheik Habib Saleh (1844-1935), the reformer and founder of the Riyadha mosque in Lamu, refused to be photographed because he did not want to violate the Islamic interdiction of figurative images, as his great-granddaughter Muzna Ahmed told me. Yet, to be able to go to Mecca he finally allowed a passport

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photograph to be taken. His cousin, who was an artist, secretly painted a full body portrait of him. This together with the passport photograph was brought to the Bakor Studio at Lamu where the owner and photographer Omar Said Bakor produced a wonderful collage out of the passport photograph and the painting. Saleh’s descendants still cherish it today. In another conversation I was told about Fatma, the daughter of Sheik Habib Saleh, who also needed a passport photograph to go to Mecca. As a woman, she was even more anxious about unveiling her face to the photographer, because she would thereby violate not only the interdiction of figurative representation, but also purdah, women’s purity and modesty, that is associated with their (partial) invisibility in the public domain. This is why she burned the photograph after her pilgrimage; but fortunately, as Muzna Ahmed told me, the negative was saved. It was enlarged in the Bakor Studio and her descendants are happy to be able to remember her in the photograph. Photographs originally produced within the colonial relationship could thus assume new purposes and meanings representing highly treasured ancestors who provided a connection between the past and the present (cf. Lydon 2005: 225,237). Although Muslims are allowed photographs in cases of necessity – darûra – for example, to get a visa for the pilgrimage (Naef 2004:104), the interdiction of photographic representation figures strongly in these narratives. In addition, it is stressed that the photographed persons did not intend that the photographs be preserved, but that this happened more or less accidentally.

Photography in Christian Funeral Rites In contrast to Muslims, who inserted photography negatively, as an interdiction, into the liminal state of mourning and did not make use of it during funerals (with the exception of important people), 2 (Christian) migrants from western and central Kenya not only took

2 Funerals of important Muslim sheiks or scholars were recorded on photographs as well as on video.

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post mortem photographs,3 but also transformed the photographic act into a special ritual that became itself an important part of the funeral rites. Among Christian migrants, a “body viewing” session was held before the burial, allowing those who had not yet seen the corpse to do so and, by taking a last glance, to acknowledge their loss and bid a final good-bye. The exposure of the corpse, as various photographers in Nairobi and Mombasa told me, used to elicit highly emotional reactions from the mourners, especially from women who would cry, scream, and throw themselves on the ground in their grief. While men were supposed to control their grief, desperation, and rage about (the obscenity of) death, women were assigned a limited space and time during the funeral rites to give way to their emotions: the place where and moment when the corpse was exposed for a last time to be seen by the living. It is here that women ritually lamented, moaned, wailed, and cried. As Maina Hatchison explained to me, in the old days, when the coffin was opened a last time, the sight of the deceased would strongly upset close kin, stir up emotions, and lead to violent outbursts, especially among women. While women carried the burden of mourning in public during the funeral ritual, from a male perspective they gave evidence of their inability to control their emotions. This was seen as “backward” and “primitive.” In fact, there are strong attempts among reformed Muslims as well as among Christians to condemn lamentation and the excessive display of grief (cf. Abu-Lughod 1993:193). This is why some people no longer open the coffin and instead put a photograph of the deceased on the closed coffin, the photograph substituting for the corpse, thereby reducing the emotional outbursts of the mourning women, so I was told. Obviously, the photograph of

3 Various Christian photographers in Mombasa and Nairobi told me that sometimes customers – mostly Christians – asked them to go into hospitals or into homes to take a picture of a dying person or a corpse. This was done, they explained, because the relatives wanted to have a visual record of the deceased. As in the USA and many parts of Europe, also in East Africa many people made use of post mortem photographs not to keep the dead alive, but to enable mourners to acknowledge their loss and to remember the deceased in the photograph (cf. Ruby 1995:43). For funeral and post mortem photographs in Benin, see van Gelder 2005.

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the deceased in this context is part of a distancing, disciplining, and modernizing project that attempts to control the emotions and passions (of women) by means of modern media (cf. Loraux 1992). However, rather than aspiring to this (male) ideal, many women continue to embrace their identification as “passionate” mourners and remain ambiguous toward the project of disciplining. Nowadays, a photograph of the deceased (while still alive) is put on the coffin and carried from the morgue or the home to the grave. While the (mostly) invisible corpse (in the coffin) is increasingly separated from the home, the deceased is made visible (as living) in the photograph and thereby doubled. Presence and absence, life and death, visibility and invisibility are made to co-exist during the funeral procession. In the ritual process of funerals of Kenyan Christians, more or less fixed time segments and spaces have become reserved for photography. In Central Province, for example, as Maina Hatchison explained to me in Mombasa, invitation cards for Christian funerals – often showing the deceased in a photograph taken when still alive – are given out to guests. These cards already list the various locations and phases of the ritual, including the special sessions for photographs. In addition, the ritual being so complex, a “master of ceremonies” regulates the various phases of the event and organizes the corresponding photo sessions. “There is a specific way we program photos during funerals,” Maina Hatchison said. A ritual passage is established from the mortuary to the grave, with various stops to take pictures. At the stops, relatives, friends, neighbors, and colleagues arrange themselves in groups to be photographed in front of the coffin while the master of ceremonies calls out: “The next photo: Relatives from the father’s side,” followed by “relatives from the mother’s side,” “brothers and sisters alone,” “brothers with wives,” “grandchildren,” and so forth. To save time and speed up the procedure, people line up according to the arrangements of the master of ceremonies’ protocol. It is important to note that sometimes certain categories of kin that are characterized by avoidance are not allowed to be photographed together. For example, along the coast, a son-in-law is forbidden to take pictures of his mother-in-law, whom he must avoid (also in a picture), while in Western Kenya grandparents and grandchildren can be photographed in one picture and the grandfather is allowed to see

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his granddaughter on a photograph but he is not allowed to touch the picture; touching her would be considered a highly immoral act and a curse might follow. Thus, certain relations of avoidance are extended to photographic representations in complex ways and the photographers attempt not to violate them. At the various stops, the living relatives organized into different categories of kin, according to generation and gender, etc. arrange themselves around the coffin. Not only the deceased person – doubled in the coffin and the photograph – is photographed on his way to the grave, but the mourners, too, share the pictorial space with the deceased. The deceased is thus shown not separated, but rather deeply connected to his or her living relatives, neighbors, and friends, thereby transforming individual death into a collective and social experience. Through the photographic act, the very discontinuity, loss, and gap created by death is recognized and simultaneously denied in the strong representations of the solidarity between the living and the deceased sharing the same ritual and the pictorial space. In fact, the whole series of photographs fixes the changing presences of living and dead. While increasingly separating the deceased from the living, the photographs counteract visually his or her final disappearance by giving “immortality” to the living as well as the dead. As Bourdieu has suggested, the functions of photography are connected to the structure of the extended family, the many family photographs taken with the coffin, although divided into certain subgroups of kinship, serving as a proof of (extended) family unity and, at the same time, as an instrument and tool to effect that unity (cf. Bourdieu 1981: 31ff). Photographs not only represent, but also reinforce relations of kinship. Yet, all these photographs, so Maina Hatchison, are also statements about difference, expressions of social distinction and hierarchy of the various family members. The person positioned in the center of the photograph, he explained, has the highest social status, while those at the margins occupy more peripheral positions. In the middle of the photograph, a social density prevails that weakens towards the edges. The photographs can be read as a social map, giving information about people’s networks, shifting power relations, and hierarchy, Maina Hatchison said. And of course, sometimes they cause debates and even conflicts. They also mark a boundary, giving evidence of who belongs to the family and who is excluded.

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At the end of the funeral, when all participants gather at the grave decorated with flowers, a final photo is taken to reconfirm the solidarity and unity of the living with the deceased one last time before the coffin is buried. Death as a loss and crack in the social community is symbolically repaired by taking photographs that show the deceased (in the coffin and in his photograph) in the center of a complex network of social relations. A multifaceted exchange takes place between the deceased and the living in which the medium of photography plays a central role. While the dead is losing his bodily presence, in the photographs he is given the gift of a new pictorial presence that allows his relatives to remember him in a specific form. As a medium of storage, retaining, and saving, photography is able to resurrect the deceased and give him or her visual immortality. While the dead body disappears in the grave and, through the ritual, is slowly dismissed from the community of the living, the deceased is re-integrated in his or her photographic image. In fact, photographs of the deceased may have the potential to act as a form of therapy, a possibility to hold the experience of sorrow and loss as a “separate memory” before one’s eyes (Pinther 2007:109). After the funeral, the photographs taken by the professional photographer are distributed among relatives, friends, and other participants. As a gift, the deceased in his or her photograph gains another form of existence. The photograph may be placed in the album as a visual record of family history or in a box (as another sort of “grave”) or more visibly positioned on the wall as part of the family altar (of Christians) in the more public domain of the salon or sitting room. In a conversation in September 2011, the last time I visited Mombasa, Maina Hatchison informed me that the spread of digital cameras in recent years (since 2006) had radically changed funeral invitation cards, programs, and also the procession of the coffin from home to the graveyard. Some families – and their number seems to be growing – have eliminated the photo sessions from the ritual procession, because now everybody takes pictures when and of whatever he or she likes. Thus, taking pictures, formerly performed by a professional photographer and giving evidence of family relations and solidarity, has now shifted to an individual level. Photo sessions that were part of the ritual process have become de-ritualized and a question more of individual aspiration. Yet, while now nearly “everybody has his or her own digital photographic archive,” individual photographs

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are shared and circulated among relatives and friends, maybe more intensively then before. In addition, a biography constructed from photographs has now become part of the invitation card. Because photography has been inserted into rites de passage and everyday life for nearly 60 years, for about three generations, many people have built up personal archives that include photographs of their parents, sometimes even grandparents, their marriage, their brothers, sisters, and children, their property and working place, and so forth. From these personal archives, a biography is constructed by integrating those events of life that have been photographed. Through these pictures, life is not only reduced to a chronological series of photographs but also to those events that have been photographed.

Funeral invitation card of the late father of Maina Hatchison (courtesy of Maina Hatchison)

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This invitation card focuses on celebrating the life of the deceased, rather than on his or her funeral. Probably in the context of the strong Christian revival that has also seized Kenya, a redefinition of funeral rites has taken place, shifting the center of attention to the life of the deceased and away from the loss through death. Furthermore, the program with the photographic life history of the deceased (see next pages) is more than a temporary guide to the funeral rites, as Maina Hatchison explained. It is distributed to be taken home and kept as a visual memorial of the deceased. In the last years, these invitation cards with photographic biographies have proliferated widely; they are produced in different sizes, qualities, and colors, marking the status and the wealth of the deceased. Through photographs, the past of many people’s lives is now re-covered as a visual biography, recovered in the double sense of retrieving and of covering again or reburying (Rojas 2009:209). Obviously, a radical transformation occurred in the history of representational practice when photography succeeded in profoundly altering the sense of the past. Photographs with their definite certainty have not only replaced the fleeting uncertainty and instability of subjective memories, but remembering the past through photographs has also displaced other forms of memory and understanding. While photographs allow people to have a past and a biography, the past is thereby reduced to what can be photographed. As in other parts of the world, along the East African coast, too, photography has had an immense impact in producing new ways of dealing with and remembering the dead. In fact, photography has revolutionized memory; it has multiplied and democratized it and given it not only a certain stability and durability, but also a precision and truth never before attained in visual memory (cf. Edwards 2012:6). Yet, while Christians, as I have tried to show, have enthusiastically embraced the new medium and integrated it into their funeral rites, Muslims have been more hesitant. As among Protestants in Germany, no photographs are taken at funerals of (ordinary) Muslims. Although the dead are remembered in photographs also among Muslims nowadays, these pictures often are kept in the private domain to avoid violating “the interdiction of figurative images.” Thus, in contrast to Kenyan Christians, in funeral rites a Muslim subject is formed that is defined by an aversion to excesses of ritual and idola-

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Photographic biography as part of the funeral card (courtesy of Maina Hatchison)

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try. Yet, while this holds for rituals related to death, Muslim weddings involve very different aspects of a representational economy, as I have shown in chapter 8.

Reworkings of Photographs of the Dead It is important to note that photographs (of the dead) are not fixed and stable entities, but continue to be the subject and object of agency. As mentioned before, for example, a humiliating colonial or anthropological photograph may gain a different meaning when the living celebrate it as the image of an ancestor (Lydon 2005). Yet, photographs not only get new meanings when framed in new ways, some of them are also constantly reworked. To thwart decay and processes of destruction, especially treasured photographs of the dead, for example, were re-photographed to recreate those images. In addition, photographers from the Indian Diaspora in Mombasa told me that in the 1980s, when black-and-white photography was largely replaced by color photography, customers brought old black-and-white photographs of their dead relatives, most often fathers and mothers, to be colored. By retouching and especially by coloring or overpainting the black and white photographs, Indian as well as (Christian) African photographers “gave life back” to photographs, as the Indian photographer Salyany, owner of the Salyany Studio, told me in 1993. He said that watercolors made the depicted person look livelier and the photographs “more real.” While he regarded black-and-white photography as “artificial” and “dramatic,” painting, and coloring were attempts to resuscitate the silent, immobile, and colorless photographs. Besides coloring and re-photographing, photographers and customers would crop images, for example removing the figure of a former husband or wife or scratching out the faces of certain persons not liked very much. More recently, photographs would also be photocopied, enlarged, or scanned and reworked with Photoshop. It seems that photographs charged with special emotions, in particular, were constantly transformed. There was no emphasis on “original” or “vintage” photographs; and aside from idiosyncratic preferences, photographs had no fixed status (Haney 2012:135).

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Hand-colored photographs, by photographer Yusuf Salyany, Mombasa, 1996

Photographer Salyani and the colorated photograph of the author, 1996

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The painter and photographer Samuel Chakua Masada, who provided the backdrops for the Likoni Photographers, told me about a man who had brought to him an old photograph of his late father that depicted the father in short trousers, as a “colonial boy,” that is in a rather humiliating fashion. The man asked Masada to “update” the father and to beautify him by painting him in a nice modern suit and with a tie. Masada made a painting of the father in a fashionable suit and the son took it to a photographer who then turned the painting into a photograph again. The “modernized” photograph was reproduced and sent to relatives and friends. In this way, the indexicality of the photograph was subverted and likewise reinstated, in that what was originally a painting gained additional truth value as a photograph. The attempt to “modernize” the deceased father by putting him into a fashionable suit both acknowledges and negates the past in which the father had lived. Instead of showing him “as he had been,” he was “updated” and made part of the present. These manipulations not only updated the father in time, but also in his social status. As ancestor, his new modern suit gave evidence of his formerly denied dignity. Other photographers and painters also told me about customers who brought old photographs they “updated.” In all these cases, attempts were made to bring the dead, situated in a past, back into the present.

Photographic Time and the Return of the Dead Various Western writers have produced theories of photography that center on the specific structure of time and space produced by the medium of photography (for example, Barthes 1981, Dubois 1998). They have analyzed the paradoxical creation of photographic time as, on the one hand, presencing the depicted person in the present, while on the other hand, the photographic act, as a radical cut in time, separates the referent from the present and makes him or her part of a past that is lost forever. The presence and closeness of the referent are at the same time connected with a distancing in time.

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This construction of photography as the intersection of two different temporalities is based on a concept of linear time, time as inherently flowing and sequential.4 It also implies that the past is clearly separated from the present and the future. The viewer of a photograph is supposed to be safely grounded in the present over here, while the photograph is assumed to refer to a prior moment that can be kept safely apart over there (Baer 2005:2). It is true, Roland Barthes’ punctum is a disturbing element that may reach from the past into the present; but, since the punctum is based in the viewer’s subjective relationship to the photograph and not in the photograph as such, the secluded pastness of the referent stays intact. While in Roland Barthes’ (impossible) theory of photography all photographs are catastrophic because they assert the referent’s pastness and death, the hybridization of painting and photography and practices of “updating” in Mombasa and Lamu allow another way of dealing with the past. While the pastness and the death of a person are first of all acknowledged, they are also counteracted by the practice of “modernizing” a dead person in a photograph by means of painting and re-photographing. The paradoxical temporal difference between past and present that is created by the photograph is thereby transcended, the deceased reintegrated into the present. The past is conceptualized not as closed or secluded, but as flexible and open, as a sort of force or power that can be influenced in the present and opened for a crossover. This corresponds to the local concepts of (parallel) times and spaces, in which the (Christian) deceased – as spirit – may reside. As in spirit possession rituals, so also in local practices of reworking old photographs, the past is dissolved in favor of a shared present. Against Western notions of photographic time as an irrecoverable loss and a cut that radically separates what it shows as something of the past, spirits in rituals as well as the dead in “updated” photographs cross boundaries to create new forms of simultaneity.

4 Photography and the study of history emerged around the same time in the 19th century, as various authors have suggested, photography having “made history” and “become history” (Brunet 2009:92).

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Chapter 10

Iconoclastic Spirits It may seem surprising to include spirits and the practice of spirit possession in a media history of photography. But considering the hybridizations, alliances, and points of contact between a technical medium like photography and the human body as a medium, as well as the complex relationships between body and image, this inclusion makes a lot of sense. In fact, in the West,1 photography and spirit were, far from being opposites, peculiarly analogous and adapted to one another. Since the 1860s – the beginning of spirit photography – the camera, photographers, and spirits entered into various alliances. Photography’s double identity as an instrument of scientific enquiry and as an uncanny, almost magical process able to make visible what before had not been seen made photography and spirits turn into an association that would illuminate both photography’s field of competence and the perceived essence and modalities of spirits. As John Harvey suggests, photography is, “in essence, a medium of the spirit” (2007:8,157). From a Western perspective, spirit mediums and the medium of photography share various structural similarities. Both resurrect the dead. Both create a certain uncanniness by bringing into the present something that belongs to the past, thus disturbing simultaneity through the intersection of two different temporalities. And both spirit mediums and the person photographed experience a sort of radical dispossession and radical self-estrangement by becoming an Other. Yet, a trans-cultural history of photography that includes Africa and other places outside the West gives evidence of other relationships between photography and spirit, some of which are characterized by negativity and rejection. In spite of photography’s seemingly global success, ubiquity, and ability to intrude into nearly all domains of social life, along the East African coast not only reformed Muslims – as I have shown in the preceding chapters – but also so-called “traditional” spirit mediums have shunned the presence of the camera.

1 Japan, too, has a strong tradition of spirit photography to this day.

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They have rejected being reduced to a visible trace and the camera as an uncanny mode of representation. In the following I will explore the negative relationship between spirits, spirit mediums, and the technical medium of photography in Africa, in particular on the East African coast. Contradicting the rather simple suggestion that “the photograph and the ghost are never far apart” (Smith and Vokes 2008:283), 2 I will complicate and question the essentialized positive relationship between photography and spirits as a somewhat global established fact. In two fascinating articles, Patricia Spyer (2001, 2009) has explored the many interdictions against participating in, observing, describing, and photographing a ritual in Aru, Indonesia. She asks why the camera, as an uncanny mode of representation that inserts an elsewhere into the present, was seen as problematic. She analyzes the defensive performative logic of the ritual, something that issues from the political and historical specificity of Aru’s ambiguous position in modernity. As the ritual is set against the modernity of the surrounding (Malay) world, it is not destined for representation, reproduction, or serialization; the complicated play of absence and presence on which it turns makes the celebration incompatible with photography. At issue is the irreducible foreignness of the Aru in a modern world, as expressed in their ritual and the rejection of photography. In Aru, not only the camera is shunned at the ritual, but also the Malay language, the written signs of the national language such as books, notebooks, pencils, paper as well as wall hangings, calendars, film posters, and colored prints depicting religious (Catholic) scenes and clothes, all things associated with the outside Malay world. According to Spyer, the rejection of photography is only one of many prohibitions that form part of the more general objectification of the Malay under the rubric of the prohibited. In contrast to Aru, in rituals of spirit possession along the East African coast (and other parts of Africa), spirits and spirit mediums 2 This otherwise outstanding volume of Visual Anthropology contains quite a few examples, in particular from Australian Aborigines, that problematize the early relationship between photography and spirits as interdiction. Yet the two editors’ introduction neither took up nor theorized this complication.

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have established manifold alliances with modern media, such as scripture, telephone, TV, and video, and adopted them in their rituals and techniques of divination (see Behrend 2003; Böhme 2013) while rejecting photography. Here an interpretation that is based on the play of oppositional framings of an inside against an outside, of tradition against modernity, falls short of explaining why, during séances, spirits reject specifically photography. In fact, along the coast, photographic visibility is contested in various ways, thereby transcending the simple divide between appropriation and rejection. The defensive performative logic and the negative relation to photography are issues connected not only with the political and historical specificity of spirit mediums’ ambiguous position in relation to Islam and the post-colonial state, but also with certain characteristics of the photographic medium itself – freezing, fixation, and serialization – that seem to endanger the auratic power of spirits. Therefore, what I seek to trace in the following are some of the more structural relations between spirit mediums and the medium of photography at a specific time (maybe the longue durée) in an otherwise open-ended history of media.

Spirit Mediums along the East African Coast In Africa, spirit mediums – like textiles and scripture – preceded the medium of photography. They supplied important metaphors and imaginings for the interpretation and uses of the new medium – and vice versa. In many parts of Africa (and also in other regions of the world; see for example Wright 2007) photographs – like ancestors – were named “shadows,” “shades,” and “spirits” (Wendl 1998) and the subtleties of this understanding were brought out by considering photography in relation to practices of presencing the dead and other aspects of the past. Along the East African coast, long before the introduction of photography and painting, spirit mediums provided “living images” in an otherwise aniconic cultural milieu. As mentioned in chapter 4, the marginalization or absence of figurative images coincided with complex imaginative practices that centered on embodiment and the production of “inner” images that, in the context of spirit possession rituals, were externalized to be shared with others (Kramer 2002).

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“Official” Islam regards the cult of ancestors in itself as problematic, so in the spirit possession cults, not ancestors but various categories of foreigners who at different times had reached the Swahili coast were embodied. Along the coast, spirits formed not only the epitome of transformation, but in a dialectical process also constructed images of their own through opposition. The characteristics emphasized in spirit portrayals are those that differentiate the group in question most dramatically from the self-images of the Muslim elite (Giles 1999:148). The personalities and biographies of spirits often were those of the non-Islamic, the African, the stranger, and especially the slave who had remained silent, unarticulated, or at least devalued in the dominant discourses (ibid.:147). Expressing specific aspects of the coast’s history of colonization in spirit possession rituals, spirits embodied the Other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them. Embodied spirits were not so much representations of individual people, but rather articulated more abstract concepts. Spirits were grouped in makabila, often translated as “tribes,” that denote people originating from places such as Arabia, India, the Comoro Islands, Madagascar, and so forth (Larsen 2008:3). The spirits of Arabs, for example, denoted “Arabness,” the generalized power by virtue of which Arabs were thought to be what they were. As living portraits of strangers, the visualization of spirits in rituals thus followed the conventions of abstraction found also in sculptures as portraits in other parts of Africa. As images of passiones (Kramer 1987), the embodied spirits would intensely communicate with cult members and audiences and exchange views or partake of food and drink. Of all image-producing techniques, the practice of spirit possession may be seen as the one that, through embodiment, allows not only the spiritual return of someone absent, but also his or her maximum of animation and presence, involving all the senses. Yet, the ritual can create the physical presence of spirits only for a short time before the paradoxes of simultaneous absence and presence and of real unreality dissolve again in favor of an absence (Castel 1981:238). Along the coast – Islamized since the 8th century – spirit possession cults were more or less accepted as part of mila, usually translated as “traditional custom,” referring to “local knowledge and rituals,

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associated with non-Islamic or pre-Islamic practices” (Middleton 1992:162). Although Islam – as dini – and spirit possession cults – as mila – have emphasized their opposition in public representations, both appear to be part of one and the same religious field with a largely shared religious imaginary and overlapping practices and audiences (compare de Witte 2010:89). However, since the 1980s, more radical reformed Muslims defined spirit cults as a residue of primitive and animist belief and a false path to God that has to be barred. They feared idolatry and declared that spirits should not be worshiped as if they were gods. Spirit mediums were seen as indulging in secrecy and, often enough, in fraud and deception. As a monotheistic religion that claims to have not only an Almighty God, but also the only true God, in the long run Islam, like Christianity, has the moral obligation to destroy or convert “pagan” spirit possession cults. Yet, the Quran admits the existence of spirits. As opposed to angels that originated from light, spirits – majini or djinns, mischievous creatures that can be good or evil – were created from fire. The good ones have, of course, accepted Islam, while the evil ones are pagan and speak “tribal” languages (Middleton 1992:172). While Islam’s universal claim aims at the disappearance of “paganism,” “traditional” spirit mediums are continually borrowing aspects of the dominant religion that tries to marginalize them in order to strengthen their own powers and generate aspects of subversion (cf. Masquelier 2001). Also along the East African coast, Islamic practice and symbolism have been strongly incorporated into spirit possession cults. In fact, of special interest is the widespread assimilation into the cults of the very force that was dedicated to their destruction. Many spirit mediums have converted to Islam, although they continue to be possessed by “pagan” spirits. In addition, the class of Kiarabu spirits, which generally holds a rather dominant position in the spirit hierarchy, consists of pious Muslims who are greatly concerned with ritual purity. Kiarabu recite the Quran, are fond of rosewater and perfume, and frequently ask for kombe, a medicinal drink made from the ink of Quranic texts (Giles 1999:151), thus aligning themselves with scripture by also incorporating it as “medicine” and for protection. During rituals they sometimes make use of the Quran more as a prop and simulate reading Quranic verses, but do not write in the state of possession (personal communication by Linda Giles).

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They stand in strong opposition to pagan spirits who exhibit all the characteristics of the Other of Islam, being wild, uncivilized, without scripture, dirty, and smelly. Thus, in their long history, some spirit mediums – maybe to counter their ascribed primitiveness – have built up hybrid alliances with technical media, such as scripture. But while “traditional” spirit mediums under hegemonic Islam have been greatly marginalized and associated with the primitive Other of Islam, they have joined forces with Islam in their iconoclastic attitude toward images. Whereas most Christians aligned themselves with the logic of modern visual mass media without much reservation, some reformed Muslims and most “pagan” spirit mediums intensely oppose photography. Through the iconoclastic gesture that spirit mediums share with (reformed) Muslims, they deny the historical distance that separates them from the monotheistic religion of Islam. By sharing the negative attitude toward the camera, spirit mediums position themselves on the same “stage” of religious evolution and claim their “traditional” religion to be the equivalent of Islam. As mentioned in chapter 4, the rejection of figurative representations is a fairly widespread feature and not limited to monotheistic religions. As Jack Goody has suggested, the aniconic trend is but one facet of the more general process of visualizing and representing (Goody 1997: 56ff).

Photophobic Spirits Along the East African coast, different types of spirit mediums gave different reasons for rejecting photography. For example, alien, “primitive,” and “pagan” (kaffir in Swahili) Maasai spirits shunned the camera because they were said to be afraid of Western technology (personal communication from Linda Giles). The primitive’s refusal to be photographed is a well-elaborated trope in the ethnographic literature (Spyer 2001:305). Also here, in the hierarchical pantheon of alien spirits in which the Maasai occupy the space of the primitive and pagan, the local pervasive mythologization of the refusal to be photographed appears as tantamount to the ideological rejection of modernity. By rejecting the camera because they fear Western technology, the Maasai, on the one hand, affirm their own primitiveness while, on the other hand, establishing photography’s place in modernity, and thereby, as Spyer suggests, constituting photographic truth (ibid.:307).

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In contrast, kibuki spirits in Zanzibar town objected to cameras because they were black (personal communication from Linda Giles; Larsen 2008:69). In contrast to the Maasai spirits, who love the color black, kibuki spirits and high-ranking Arab ruhani spirits get furious when they see something black – the color black in contrast to white being associated with impurity, dirt, and pollution (Larsen 2008: ibid.). While the Maasai spirits form the primitive Other of Islam and are known to be wild, uncivilized, stinking, and also physically and ritually polluting, the kibuki spirits are strikingly non-African and non-Islamic; they show characteristics, such as a fondness for imported alcohol, in particular brandy, that account for their conceptualization as Christians and, more specifically, as French Catholic priests (Giles 1999:158). 3 Whereas colors such as red, green, and blue are associated with life – the (non-) colors black and white, as well as all the variations and gradations of shades of gray between them, are related to death and mourning. The association of the color black with death, impurity, and mourning could thus be responsible for the spirits’ rejection of black cameras. In addition, I was told by a few “traditional” spirit mediums that the flash of the camera is especially disturbing to the spirits and causes them to interdict photography. Linda Giles also confirmed this (personal communication). In other regions of Africa, too, for instance in Western Uganda, spirit possession cults do not allow the presence of the camera. In Western Uganda, “traditional” spirit mediums appropriated modern media such as scripture and the telephone, but they objected to the presence of the camera, explaining to me that “spirits do not like the camera.” Some mediums – like their counterparts along the Kenyan coast – also suggested that the flash of the camera strongly disturbs the spirits because spirits and their mediums work “at night,” hidden and in

3 This negative relation to the color black needs further research. Martin Zillinger, who studied spirit possession cults in Morocco and the Diaspora, informed me that spirits inducing the lions’ trance among adepts of the Isawa brotherhood also object to the camera because it is black. In order to accept its presence, the camera is wrapped in white cloth. In Morocco, the color black is associated with the (Christian-Jewish) Sabbath spirits that show an affinity to everything “European,” including alcohol; instead, the color white is conceptualized as the color of Islamic feast days.

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secrecy, as a former spirit medium who had converted to Catholicism informed me. The camera’s flashbulb was thus seen as a violent intrusion into the theater of concealment, the opacities and secrecies of spirit possession rituals through which spirits attempt to assert their power. In Kano in Northern Nigeria, bori priests and adepts told me stories of unsuccessful attempts to photograph spirits – in spite of the interdiction. I was told that, after the development of the film, the negatives showed no trace of the spirits; everything else in the picture showed up, but not the spirits. Here spirits claimed the power to elude the camera. In addition, I was told of a camera that exploded when pointed at the spirits. And one bori 4 knew of a European photographer who had violated the interdiction and taken some pictures. He fell sick shortly afterward and eventually died. These stories give evidence of the power of spirits to resist being represented by a photographic camera. The spirits also demonstrate their superior power over technical media by effacing the picture or destroying those who transgress the interdiction. In Brazilian Candomblé, too, embodied gods relentlessly burned the pictures that photographers hoped would preserve at least a trace of their fleeting passage during a trance. However, according to a recent study (Van de Port 2006), it seems that nowadays in Brazil, in spite of Candomblé’s constant emphasis on secrecy and media shyness, the taboos on the use of new media have been questioned and negotiated, some members using video and photography. Yet, interestingly, like Christian (Protestant) painters in Europe after the Reformation (Koerner 2002), in their videos they attempt to show above all absences, silences, deadened spaces, and shadows, revealing only surfaces that veil and conceal spiritual powers.

4 Surprisingly, in a photographic book on the bori cult by Caroline Alida and Adeline Masquelier published in 2010, the interdiction against taking pictures is not mentioned at all. In fact, the photographs seem to have been taken in the private domain of the spirit mediums when they were not possessed by a spirit. Unfortunately the photographer gives no further information about the interactions and negotiations between her and the photographed members of the bori cult. She only mentions that she allowed the photographed persons to determine how they wanted to show themselves and that she never used a flashbulb (Alida 2010:123).

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In Thailand, too, photographs of spirit possession seem to have been at least implicitly forbidden for nearly a century, but today, as Rosalind Morris has shown, all spirit mediums have photographs of themselves and some of them even possess a video library of their possession performances (Morris 2000:183). Thus, there was and still is a strange opposition between spirits and the medium of photography, also in other parts of the world. This opposition recently dissolved in Brazilian Candomblé and in Thailand, whereas in Africa it (still?) exists.

Spirit Photography in the West In contrast to Africa, in the West in the second half of the 19th century, the medium of photography entered into a strong alliance with science not only to document the visible world, but also to open up new fields of visibility. Eadweard J. Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, for example, succeeded in making visible the motion and movements of humans and animals in photographic images in a radical new way, while Roentgen made it possible to see the interior of (living) human bodies, the bones and the skeleton, stripped of skin and flesh. Moreover, invisible spirits, phantoms, thoughts, and auras of all sorts started to make their appearance on the surface of photographs – ironically at a moment in history that Walter Benjamin had declared would result in the destruction of aura through new media of technical reproduction. Photography mediated between the visible and the invisible world, shifted the boundaries between the two, and defined the categories of the visible and the invisible in a new way. It not only contributed substantially to a modern, positivistic “culture of the real,” but also created new fictions, specters, and phantoms. Spirit photography evolved in the context of a “renaissance of spirits” in the second half of the 19th century, named Spiritualism. Spiritualism became a global movement that started in the USA (with the famous Fox Sisters in 1848) and spread from there to Europe, Australia, and Japan (Gettings 1978:26). There was an older tradition, too, going back to the visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), whom the enlightened German philosopher Immanuel Kant scorned as the “Geisterseher” (one who sees ghosts). In Swedenborg’s ration-

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alized Christian cosmology, invisible spirits – the spirits of Africans being the purest and therefore closest to God – imprinted themselves in the visible world as figures of light. In séances, the spirits of the dead appeared in the form of illuminated pictures (Krauss 1998:28). In a way, Swedenborg anticipated photography, particularly spirit photography – spirits who presented themselves as images of light without a technical apparatus. But these images of light could not be fixed and stored on a material support; they vanished at the end of the séance. Spiritualism was an alternative religion that attempted to transcend the divide between religion and science by building up an intensive interface where new technical media and scientific experiments in laboratories tried to give proof of the existence of spirits. This positioning of Spiritualism marks a difference from African spirit possession cults, which existed outside the realm of science but not of modern technical media. As Harvey has suggested, in the West a double process took place: the simultaneous spiritualization of science and the scientification of Spiritualism. Many Spiritualists considered electricity or magnetism to be the physical basis of spiritual phenomena, and mediums were said to store up energy to produce materializations, like a battery (Harvey 2007:70). Against the opposition and rivalry among the established churches, Spiritualists emphasized more universal religious values and invited even those with an antipathy to them to pass over into their cosmic and cosmopolitan community (ibid.: 63). The séance was considered a religious activity that included prayers and blessings (also of the camera and the unexposed plates) (ibid.:54). Unlike the established churches, Spiritualists insisted on the possibility of direct contact and communication with the dead (Matheson 2006:37). This work of keeping the dead close may have affected people’s relationship to spirits themselves, as now the dangerous and evil aspects of spirits of the deceased were played down and reformulated as rather innocent and “harmless” – if not to say a bit “boring” when compared to, for example, African spirits (cf. Deger 2008:307). As various scholars have suggested, sin, evil spirits, demons, and the idea of damnation and perdition played only a marginal role in the cosmology of Spiritualists. Following Swedenborg, spirits were conceptualized as striving to advance and aspire toward greater enlightenment and moral perfection.

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Yet, besides spirits of dead relatives – who formed the majority of spirits – alien spirits, too, made their appearance during séances and on photographs, for example, Pocahontas, the spirit child of a Native American, Vashti, the daughter of a Native American chief, the spirit of chief Wapanaw, 5 also a Native American, Saadi, the spirit of a poet of Persia, and Yolande, the spirit of a beautiful Arab girl (Owen 1989: 57,101,223). With Spiritualism, a Western cosmology (re-) evolved in which not only was there a flux between the visible and the invisible world, but also things themselves proved to be modes of motion rather than stable identities (cf. Wright 2008:370). Through the power of spirits – including the Holy Spirit – tables, books, chairs, forks, and knives would lose their earthly gravity, elevate and fly through the salon during séances; and beautiful young women, acting as mediums, who were tied with ropes to their chairs miraculously were freed and moved through space. Spirits collapsed the stability of persons and things in various ways. The late German artist Sigmar Polke as well as Anna and Bernhard Blume, for example, have connected to this tradition in photographs. The Blumes produced staged photographs of “home sweet home” in which vases experience ecstasy, towers of cups sway, people fly around, and arrangements of furniture collapse. In photographs, they created a world set in flux and even “smashed up.” Their black-and-white photographs did not involve montage or digital manipulation; instead, the two artists really staged the depicted flying, crashing, and swirling, though with securing ropes, safety nets and mattresses rather than with the assistance of spirits. Spiritualism was also a mass movement that included members of all social classes. Even Queen Victoria used to communicate with her late husband Albert through her medium Brown. Séances took place in bourgeois parlors, in scientists’ laboratories, in Christian and proletarian homes, on fairgrounds, and in the entertainment business. The first spirit photographs are said to have been made by the Boston photographer William H. Mumler in 1861. After David Brewster had published a handbook in 1856 that described photographic 5 Vashti, the daughter of an American Indian chief, was said to have been slain with her father in 1861 at the Yellow Stone River massacre. Vashti and Wapanaw appeared in Mumler’s spirit photographs (Harvey 2007:63).

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tricks that produced uncanny appearances (Diekmann 2003:153), Mumler, when developing a self-portrait in the darkroom, discovered a second mysterious shape that he recognized as his cousin who had died some twelve years earlier (Gettings 1978:23). This first spiritual appearance was followed by others, among them no one less than the spirit of Abraham Lincoln himself. The mass media publicized Mumler’s discovery. The interest in spirit photography was so strong that Mumler opened a new studio in New York, specializing in spirit photography. However, in the same year, he was accused of fraud. But he was acquitted on grounds of insufficient evidence and because various important personalities testified in favor of him.

Spirit “E xtras” and the Predicaments of Spirits’ Visualizations In the terminology of Spiritualists, spirits “materialized” in the photograph. “Materialization” signified the capability of the spirit to become a picture, to gain a visible shape out of light, vapor, smoke, or ectoplasm. According to Spiritualist theory, these “materializations,” also called “extras,” emerged through the concentration or thickening of matter made visible and stored in the photograph. In the visual regime of spirit photography, the spirit was thus not only visualized in a personal medium – as is the case in Africa – but also in some additional, material “extra,” in a more or less foggy shape, cloud, or light that appeared in the photograph. Rather often, the “extra” emanating from the spirit adapted the convention of the aureole or aura and connected to earlier representations of apparitions in the form of fireballs, lights, mist, and clouds (Harvey 2007:10). It is, in fact, central for my argument that the spirit appeared not only in a personal medium – as is the case in Africa – but also in some additional, material “extra” during the séance and in the photograph. It is as if spirits had to produce this material “extra” because the body of the personal medium alone was not seen as satisfactory to give evidence of spiritual mediation and presence. Séances normally took place in darkness, a condition that seemed to invite fraud and trickery, at least from the perspective of some critical observers. Before the introduction of photography, spirits had manifested themselves mainly through sound or touch, in darkness. As spirits seemed to thrive best in the dark, it was thought that the strong light necessary for taking photographs could possibly hinder

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the materialization of spirits. Yet surprisingly, and in contrast to the case in Africa, neither magnesium flashes nor – a bit later – the photographic flashbulb greatly disturbed the production of “extras.” To expose themselves not only to scientists’ critical gaze but also to bright light and the photographer’s flashbulb, spirit mediums positioned themselves clearly within and not outside of modernity. In fact, mediums and “extras” acted in a highly photographic manner (Harvey 2007:125). They mimicked the photographic process by becoming a (still) picture either in the space of the séance or the photographer’s darkroom. With the camera entering the séance, two types of spirit photographs emerged. The first recorded the presence of a spirit – as a transparent figure of light, for example – who was not perceived by the participants of the séance and appeared only afterwards in the photographer’s darkroom, as was the case with Mumler. The other – which appeared historically later – captured the materialization of a spirit during the séance, visible to all participants (Fischer 2004:172). In both the photographer’s darkroom and the dark room of the séance, practitioners conducted their business. When the camera intruded upon the séance and brought to light what had not been seen before, another dark room, called the “spirit cabinet,” was established. In this cabinet, the medium – often tied up – rested, not seen by the sitters, while the materialized spirit appeared during the séance. In May 1873, eight pictures of the fully “materialized” spirit Kati King were produced in England. Kati King was the daughter or wife of John King, the well-known spirit of a buccaneer named Sir Henry Owen Morgan (Owen 1989:45). While her medium Florence Cook remained in bonds in the spirit cabinet, the “materialized” and rather solid spirit Katie King appeared among the participants of the séance, commenting on the preparations for taking the photographs and inspecting the camera. She not only posed but also held the lamp to better light her face (Fischer 2004:172). During one séance, however, a man among the sitters assailed her and claimed that she had a very human material consistency. The spirit put up a ferocious defense so that those present had to come to the man’s aid while the spirit was forced to retreat into the spirit cabinet. Although after five minutes, the cabinet was opened and the medium was found still bound as she had been at the beginning of the séance (Fischer 2004:183 n13), Florence Cook was suspected of fraud, of having played the role of the spirit Katie King rather than staying in her cabinet.

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It was the possible resemblance (or even identity) of medium and materialized spirit that became a predicament and occupied the minds of various scientists. In fact, there was always the danger that the photograph would capture the image of the medium, rather than the materialization of the spirit. In addition, many observers were surprised to find that in cases when the “extras” did not succeed in fully materializing on the photographs, they closely resembled rather profane materials such as wool, fur, cotton, or paper or were often derived from already existing reproductions of portraits, engravings, paintings, and even other photographs. This, however, was explained by the suggestion that these “extras” were some sort of residual images that were (re-) produced by the special powers of spirits, those of the medium, and/or those of the sitters. It was debated whether “extras” were the spirit or the representation of spirits and whether “extras” were produced by spirits or by the psyche/hallucination/imagination of the medium and/or the sitters, thereby shifting the focus of interest toward psychology. When spirit photographs did not provide sufficient interpretative clues, friendly spirit voices assisted the authentication of spiritual presence (Harvey 2007:85) or gave hints about the process of production. Spirit photographs, at least from the perspective of believers, were part of the tradition of images NOT made by human hands. As Harvey (2007:26) suggested, Spiritualism returned photography to its origin in occult science. Photography had grown out of the union of science and the supernatural in alchemy; with spirits and their “materializations” or “extras” made visible and being fixed on glass or paper, this union was confirmed and re-actualized. Although the “extra” of a spirit was made visible by means of the technical apparatus, the spirit as such remained invisible. The spirit itself stayed withdrawn from visibility, remained a “black box,” hidden, while the photographic plate gave something to see that had not shown itself before. Visualization is a process of creating new fictions, new images of something that remains hidden. The site of the invisible cannot be penetrated (Geimer 2006). “Extras” were thus not so much evidence that disincarnate spirits were successfully photographed, but that images of the deceased were obtained by or through a spiritual agency (Harvey 2007:97).

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During séances, agency was distributed and circulated in highly complex ways between the spirit, the camera, the photographer, the personal medium, and other participants. Sometimes the camera acted as a medium that captured or trapped the spirit. At other times, as in the case of Mumler, the photographer as a medium attracted the spirit. Most often, however, a personal medium, usually a young attractive woman, would call the spirit to materialize. During the séance, she would describe the spirit’s translucent body, which could not be seen by the ordinary participants but would later appear on the photograph. Thus, apparatus and personal medium formed a hybrid alliance and confirmed each other. Or, as in the aforementioned case of the spirit Katie King, her medium Florence Cook would fully materialize the spirit to be seen and photographed during the séance while resting (at least in theory) in the cabinet. And in the case of the English photographer John Beattie, spirits themselves provided the images that manifested themselves on the photographs while the camera and the personal medium only served as channels of transfer. Beattie produced photographs of spirits in series. In doing so, he added an element of movement to the spirits in photographs. Series of photographs have been described as “filmic” because they transform the “cut” of time between photographs into an illusion of flow and movement (Sykora 2010:556). Against the naturalization of death, spirit photography not only visualized spirits of the dead in a new way and thereby gave evidence of their “reality.” Spirit photographs also made possible the co-existence of living and dead, sharing the same medium, the same photographic space. Against this background, spirit photography appears as a vast enterprise of the West to dissolve the hardened and strict boundaries between the living and the dead and between this world and the other. As Harvey suggested, spirit photography added to the ritual and professionalization of bereavement. In particular after the Civil War in the USA and after World War I in Europe, for grieving relatives and friends, sitting for a spirit photographer was as customary as a visit to a “normal” photographer. “The photographer medium married heaven and earth, the dead and the living, on the surface of a glass plate” (Harvey 2007:58). There are many reasons why spirit photography and Spiritualism declined after the World War I. From the beginning, spirit mediums were suspected of being deceptive, manipulative, and a hoax. This,

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however, forced Spiritualists to rethink and refine their methods even more in order to prove the existence of spirits. And because the Spiritualists had never excluded the possibility of fraud, the spectacular discovery of a few faked cases did not destroy the credibility of the movement as a whole. Last but not least, the state took strong repressive measures against it, for example in Germany, where up to the 1920s even the police and detectives had used spirit mediums to find murderers and other criminals (Schellinger 2009). Yet, in private circles the practice of spirit mediumship continues up to today. Thus, while in Europe and the USA spirits and photography formed a hybrid alliance that produced a new photographic genre, spirit photography, in Africa, at least up to now, this genre has not evolved in popular practice. Instead, most spirit mediums shun the medium of photography.

Spirits, Visibility, and Motion In contrast to the West, where Spiritualists tried hard to dissolve the boundaries between the world of spirits and the world of human beings, spirits in Africa are deeply embedded in everyday life and constantly move from one world to the other. In fact, in Africa at the present, in the context of a spiritual/religious revival on a global scale, there is no need to prove the existence of spirits. In spirit possession rituals in Africa, the sheer excitement, motion, and art of transformation are practiced. In the public space of the spirit theater, the secrets of the force and powers of metamorphosis are revealed and at the same time concealed. The practice of spirit possession and the spirit theater form the high art of dis/avowal, the art of recognizing a charged absence and denying it at the same time, presencing a world in flux and confusing the boundaries that separate visible and invisible realms (Taussig 1999:68,155). In many parts of Africa, spirits are associated with movement and motion. This is expressed in various African languages in which spirits are conceptualized as “wind” or “breeze”, in Kiswahili pepo, or as something set in motion. Because spirits are present without presence and embodied spirits are not visible themselves but only in their mediums, they can gain visibility primarily in the effects of their special power. They show their presence, for example, in the break-

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ing of taboos and/or in extraordinary ritual movements and dance. In dance and motion they prove a strange surplus of energy, an excess of the body. In their vital aliveness, high intensity, speed, drive, and excess, spirits give evidence of their special powers (Thompson 1974). In their animated materiality, they evoke the wonder of a secret source of transformative power that generates astonishing public effects (Murphy 1998:564). Because spirits in Africa are, above all, movement and motion, rather than light, as in Europe, the medium of photography that freezes whatever it captures is unable to apprehend and express precisely this quality. Not only does the photographic act force the person photographed to freeze, but also the photograph as a still image is drained of movement, the commonly accepted sign of life. By arresting and freezing spirits in a photograph, they are trapped and bereft of motion, vitality, and transformational capacities. Photographs are not able to mediate the excess of movement, heat, and motion of spirits; instead, they deface the extraordinary energy that spirits produce and bring back the presence of death. In various parts of Africa, motionlessness and standstill are associated with death. Masks, for example, when “dead,” when not moved and danced with in a procession or ritual have to be concealed so that they cannot be seen by ordinary people; they are only allowed to be seen when they are “alive,” full of energy and in motion. Because a dead body is a motionless body, a stiffened and still body that has turned into a picture, death and photography appear as similar procedures to produce an image (Blanchot 2007). Both, death and photography, arrest and deface movement, motion, and “life.” As mentioned in chapter 9, this is why a corpse and a photographic image of a dead person are often treated as metonyms, as substitutes for each other. Thus, it is not only the freezing and arresting quality of photography, but also the association of immovableness and motionlessness with death – photography as mortification – that poses a threat to the representation of spirit mediums. Moreover, as one spirit medium explained, the photograph of a spirit would only show the immobile body of the spirit medium, which no longer gives evidence of the spirit’s presence. Because spirits in Africa do not produce “materializations” and “extras” like Western spirit mediums of the 19th century did, a photograph would only show the

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medium, a very human man or woman. Yet, media do function best when they succeed in making invisible the technical apparatus that produces mediation. But when spirits are photographed, the opposite is the case: because the spiritual power is not made visible in “extras,” it is the “apparatus,” the human body of the medium, that mediates spiritual power that is pictured. Indeed, the disjuncture between the medium and the spirit is accentuated in the photograph, for one does not see the spirit but the medium (Morris 2002). Thus, in contrast to the West, where spirits were eager to appear in photographs (as emanations of light or ectoplasm) to prove their existence in a “scientific” way, in Africa photography was understood as a medium capable of unmasking and exposing spirits in a dangerous way. Photographs threatened spirits’ auratic value (ibid.).

Spirit Mediums, Aura, and Flash In many religions, light has served as a transcendent mediator par excellence representing and presencing gods, prophets, spirits, and saints. Yet, (too much) light may also be experienced as intrusive and violent, as revealing what should be concealed and secret. As mentioned before, various spirit mediums on the East African coast (and in Western Uganda) told me that spirits rejected the presence of the camera because the flash disturbed them.6 The same argument was put forward by a bori spirit medium in Kano, Northern Nigeria in a conversation in 2003. Although the pantheon of bori spirits includes the spirit of lightning, who wears a red or black robe and bonnet and carries a hatchet adorned with bells symbolizing the spirit’s control over lightning and thunder (Masquelier 2010:16), the camera’s flashbulb seems to fall into a category of light that cannot easily be assimilated into the spirits’ aesthetics of illumination. In fact, the spirit of lightning gives evidence of its presence not through the production of effects of light, but through its snakelike, zigzag movements (sic!) on the ground.

6 Linda Giles informed me that she was able to photograph spirit ceremonies without too many problems except in some locations like Mombasa. Yet, it took her awhile to get permission to take flash photos.

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While in the context of Western Spiritualism and spirit photography, spirit mediums exposed themselves to the flash of the camera to reveal the truth of spirits,7 many spirit mediums in Africa prefer to perform their rituals in the realm of darkness. Interdicting the photographic flash during rituals of spirit possession can thus be seen as a protective gesture against a violent, discontinuous, and intrusive form of light that destroys secrets and opacities. By shunning the flash, spirit mediums participate in the construction of darkness as the literal trope of modernity’s other. In fact, here we are confronted with the defensive performative logic (described by Spyer) that issues from the political and historical specificity of spirit mediums’ ambiguous position in relation to the Kenyan nation state and (reformed) Islam. As mentioned before, at different times and in different places people have rejected, refused, or been disturbed by having their image taken. While in certain settings such a refusal provided evidence of the “primitivity” of the objects of photography, in other settings the interdiction bolstered the production of what Benjamin called aura, “aura as a unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be” (Benjamin 1974:479). By bringing (potential) enlightenment, the substantial powers of the photographic flash allegorize modernity’s aporia, revealing while at the same time blinding, giving something to see while at the same time withdrawing it. Whereas during Muslim weddings (see chapter 8) the flashes of the cameras are welcomed, contributing to a tapestry of light that envelops the bride as part of an aesthetic of shininess (Picton 1995), in the case of spirit possession rituals the photographic flash seems to endanger the aura of spirits. “Primitive” aura, if I may say so, attempts to escape photographic visuality. The trope of shunning the light, of secrecy and betrayal, also came up in the spirit photographer Mumler’s trial. Mumler admitted that he had been hiding in the closet when performing his secret and delicate art. The darkroom became the space in which the photographic conjurer avoided the light of day and lurked in the shadows, reanimating the photographic doubles (Kaplan 2008:219).

7 While Western spirit mediums allowed light to intrude upon their séances they shifted the (necessary) space of darkness into the “spirit cabinet”.

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Giving Visual E xpression to Spirits in Videos Since the end of the 1980s, African spirits have been visualized in another (post-) modern medium: in locally produced fictional videos. Spirits proliferate not only in Ghanaian and Nigerian videos, but also in recently produced videos from Tanzania and Kenya. Unlike photography, video is able to produce moving images and to give visual expression to movement and motion. 8 Not mediumistic photographers as in the West, but video makers made use of the medium to represent spirits in motion, dancing, flying, spending their energy in many creative ways (Meyer 2006; Behrend 2007). In fact, in the context of the Christian and Muslim revival, video makers became the medium of the Christian or Muslim God and made his messages visible. In videos, spirits regained their powers to move, dance, and fly and thereby denote their radical disjuncture from the world of ordinary appearances. In particular, in special effects, the transformational powers of spirits, too, could be visualized, for example by morphing from human to animal shapes (and back). And last, in videos, spirits have strongly connected to an aesthetic of light that goes back to the “theology of light” in Christian as well as Muslim traditions. In videos, spirits displayed their luminosity and aura by transforming into spectacular balls of light, fire, beams, flashes, sparkles, and rays to express their spiritual presence and power (of satanic or heavenly origin). In these videos, spirits also appear as hybrid phantoms, sometimes taking the shape of Western pin-ups or European witches with long wild hair, grotesque faces with scarifications, the marks of “pagan primitiveness,” and (nearly) naked bodies decorated with paint or animal skins and bones. Since many of these videos have been financed by Christian Churches or movements (and in Northern Nigeria by Muslims), spirits are demonized and made to appear as the primitive Other of Christianity (or Islam). In the video narratives, Christian pastors or priests, as heroes in terrible struggles of good against evil, often finally destroy the evil spirits or devils, as they are called. The exposure and final defeat of evil (spirits) is essential for the happy ending of many videos. 8 Of course, photography, although arresting what it depicts, is also able to give visibility to motion, for example by blurring the contours of the photographed object (by putting it out of focus) or by producing series of pictures.

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However, although the African videos make (satanic) spirits visible in a new way and reveal their intrigues, betrayals, and power, the videos do not give access to the spirits. It is not possible to communicate with spirits shown in video, as is done in rituals of spirit possession. Video technology therefore also epitomizes the failure to communicate with the spirits (Morris 2002). Yet, interestingly, the representation of spirits in locally produced feature videos has not destroyed the magic and power of (evil) spirits. Instead, the new visual manifestations of spiritual powers have contributed to a new merging of magic and mediality. Because visual expression is itself a mystery-mongering process whose main source of mystery is its being taken for granted, it provides the raw material for the new magic and new secrets that are so brilliantly exploited in the videos (cf. Taussig 1999:190). As Birgit Meyer (2003) has argued, the videos have contributed to a paradoxical recognition of the reality and power of occult forces in everyday experience. Not only in Europe but also in Africa, technology does not demystify the machinations of modernity, but instead becomes a new source of magic. Let me come back to African spirit mediums and their rejection of photography. In fact, their iconoclastic gesture objects to a violent visual economy that would convert spirits into frozen images. Spirits reject the possibility of fixation and serialization in photography. While insisting on embodiment, they also oppose encompassment by representation (Morris 2000:189). They object to being reduced to a visual trace that excludes all the other senses and a full sensory engagement. But maybe this impossibility will be soon transformed into a possibility of technologizing spirit possession in other new ways and of wrenching performances from context and distributing photographed versions of spirits and séances all over the world, as has been happening in Thailand and Brazil.

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Chapter 11

“Killer Panics” and Digital Photography In September 2010, Kenya was gripped by a panic1 after a rumor spread like wildfire warning that a red “killer number” was appearing on mobile phone screens and killing the receiver. People I talked to in 2011 when last visiting the Kenyan coast confirmed that the red “killer number” had caused widespread fear and had even forced the government to calm the situation by assuring the public that these warnings were a hoax generated by unscrupulous people bent on causing fear and despondency. As mentioned before, since 2006 in Mombasa, picture messaging using mobile phones with integrated cameras (and video) has established photographic images as a new genre in mobile communication. More and more photo studios have begun to provide the necessary infrastructure for digital photography to allow the processing, editing, and printing of digital photographs.2 Camera phones have created an increasingly instantaneous capacity for image making. They have ac-

1 A year later in Nigeria, in 2011, a text message spread a warning that people would die if they answer mobile phone calls from 09141. Other text-message panics in Nigeria included rumors of bombings and that acid rain from seasonal dust storms can burn people alive. The Nigerian government had to intervene and assure its people that a phone call cannot kill you (Standard, 16.9.11). 2 In a conversation with a photographer working in one of these studios, it became clear, however, that there are highly contradictory processes and forces involved. The studios are under contract with global actors such as Kodak, Fuji, or Konica (Korea), and they all provide processing, editing, and printing facilities for analogue as well as digital photographs. Yet, through some sort of silent agreement they keep the price for developing and printing analogue photos cheaper than for digital photograph – an analogue photo costs 8 Ksh while a digital costs 10 Ksh – thereby pressuring street photographers, for example, to continue with analogue photography although some of them already have digital cameras and would like to use them if the processing, editing, and printing were cheaper. The reason for this price policy is that there is still a large stock of analogue film that the multinationals want to sell. In addition, they also have an interest in using their expensive machinery as long as possible. While the manager of the studio deplored the conservatism of local photographers who were slow to adapt to new technological possibilities, it is rather the political economy of Kodak and Fuji that

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celerated the mobility of images; they allow instant viewing, sharing, sending, storing, and reworking. It is not by chance that ordinary people – and not professional journalists – have become real-time reporters who captured images of catastrophes such as 9/11 or the Tsunami, which were mass mediated on a global scale. In addition, ever-growing sensitivity to light increasingly enable camera phones to visually penetrate darkness, the night, and spaces of intimacy; and they have blurred the boundary between the photographic and the cinematic. In Kenya, on the one hand, with the spread of camera phones, finally a new actor has made an appearance on a mass scale: the amateur photographer. Now, also more common and poor people own a camera phone, and at long last a democratization of photography has ensued, so that everybody can not only own his or her picture, but also produce it. Yet, in contrast to the knipser (Starl 1995) or amateur of analogue photography at the end of the 19th century in Europe, digital cameras and programs like Photoshop now also enable the amateur to make high-quality photographs. In Kenya, people have no longer to make do with a unique snap and all its inherent contingencies and fallacies producing “good enough” pictures, as they did during the time of analogue color photography; instead, now the amateur, too, can critically view his or her pictures, delete and repeat until he or she is satisfied with the outcome. The new possibilities of reworking pictures actually connect digital photography to the old black-and-white photographic era, the “golden age” of analogue photography when interventions in the darkroom could give the images a perfection that was largely lost in popular analogue color photography. However, although many people in Mombasa – Muslims and Christians alike – own and use camera phones, the new possibilities have created powerful uncertainties, insecurities, and anxieties, as the aforementioned “killer telephone number” panic shows. As a new technology, digital camera phones incorporate larger and more complicated functions; they become increasingly unpredictable and unagain marginalize the already marginalized and thereby contribute to re-produce the technological gap between Africa and the West (and the East).

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stable, subjugating users to the imperatives of technological thinking that – as Heidegger put it – “only a god can save us” (Stolow 2013:11). Maybe the “killer number panic” gives expression not only to the apparent autonomy, imperiousness, and self-determining functionality of the new digital media but, also to the growing disjuncture between foreign “technical” and local “cultural” action and knowledge production (ibid.). Various people told me that the established boundaries between the public and the private had been greatly undermined. They worried about new forms of personal revelation, alienation, and indiscretion, and they expressed their concern that other people might take pictures of them in highly intimate situations without their knowledge and consent and maybe sell and circulate them or do other unwanted things with them. The increasing spread of digital media, in particular the camera phone, has thus intensified the problems of controlling the production, circulation, and consumption of (self-)images even more than before. In particular, the endless capacity to reproduce digital images (also in other media) has created worries among users. As mentioned in chapter 3, in photo studios customers regularly asked for the negative; today, when they are given only the prints or a disc, some men and women feel troubled and sometimes even angry, as Maina Hatchison told me. The concern about the absence of the negative affirms that owning the negative gave customers some sort of assurance that they were in control of their pictures. Ironically, while in the West (analogue) photography was celebrated as the medium of reproducibility, in Kenya the negative that guaranteed the possibility of reproduction obviously served more in assuring a restriction of reproduction and circulation, at least in some contexts. Especially among reformed Muslims, who have already used veils and other forms of covering and withdrawing from visibility to establish new ways of protecting women in particular from the gaze of (analogue) cameras, as I have tried to show in the preceding chapters, the new digital media offer even more the frightening possibility of “total” representation. While many Muslim women and men also make use of the camera phone to produce and store photographs of their children and other close relatives as a sort of (virtual) private photo album, they are hesitant to send these photos to other people.

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Against the compulsion to visibility, as seems to be generated by digital networks such as Facebook (see McKay 2010), they dispense with some of the more relational capacities of the new media and keep their camera phone to themselves, like a treasure or a piece of jewelry. Since photography (carried out by the state) was already associated with unveiling, as I have shown in chapter 4, the new revelatory capacities of digital media will call for new efforts to maintain the established norms of gendered (in-) visibility. But here more research needs to be done, especially among younger people, and what I have mentioned here is preliminary.

Visibility as a Trap As Orientalism construed it, the West claimed transparency and truth for itself, while attributing to the East deception, secrecy, and lying. In Europe, since the Renaissance, revealing and exposing secrets has become part of a hierarchical perspective affirming the superiority of scientific thinking. And the invention of visual media seemingly strengthened trust in the visual and its potentials to reveal ever more of the hidden, invisible, and secret. While it cannot be denied that the visual has been dominant in modern Western culture in a variety of ways, it is important to note that there was never a single unified scopic regime, but several competing ones, making the scopic regime a contested terrain (Jay 1988:4). In addition, there were strong anti-ocular subcurrents in religious thought, in artistic movements (for example, Surrealism), and in French and German philosophy that attempted to challenge the hegemony of vision (Jay 1994). Walter Benjamin saw the interdiction of figurative images as going far beyond warding off idolatry, so much feared by monotheistic religions. In its deepest sense, he suggested, the rejection of images attempts to take precautions against the error that man as a moral being can be represented. And it was the Hebrew iconoclastic attitude – and not the Islamic “interdiction of images” – that served as a counter-model for Emmanuel Levinas to construct a feminine mode of being that consisted in slipping away from the light, allowing mothers, wives, and daughters a secret presence, a hiding in modesty, depicting the dimensions of interiority itself and making the world habitable (Jay 1994:559f). There is thus some convergence between a few Western intellectuals, who in their critique

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of Western ocular-centrism take recourse to religious iconoclasm and constructions of femininity in the Old Testament, and the critique of images as formulated by Islamic scholars along the East African coast. Both understand visibility as a potential trap and think that, to escape it, (gendered) veils, obstacles, opacities, and domains of unsurveyability have to be (re-)created. Although along the East African coast the (colonial) state carved out a space in which the visible and “truth” were aligned, in many other domains, and despite the integration of new visual media, the relationship between the visible, truth, and evidence has remained rather loose and weak. In popular discourses, the visible seems to function more like a facade behind which the dominant but invisible forces act and partially determine the lives of people. In addition, the visible world is not so much perceived as stable, but rather as in flux, changing, and transformative; and sight is a central means to understanding that the visible world is full of potentials and deception (cf. Arnold 2003:53f). Along the coast, as elsewhere in Africa, the visible, in particular in rituals, even if photographed, functions much more to keep the invisible invisible (Ravenhill cit. Nooter 1993:24). It is as if by showing something, one is made aware that seeing does not mean that one sees (Nooter 1993:19). As photographs have been integrated into occult practices, in these contexts they provide but another layer of the surface of a visible world that remains highly deceptive. This ambivalent and skeptical attitude toward the visible corresponds to a local concept of truth that relies more on social consensus than on visual evidence. A person makes sure that he or she is perceiving things as others do as a way of checking up on his or her understanding of a situation (Arnold 2003:85). And instead of trusting the visible only, all the senses are activated to combine and unite that is perceived, as can be seen, for example, in the attempts to give photographs a voice (see chapter 7). Photography’s silence and visuality may be enriched by the sense of hearing, the auditory, thereby once more enforcing the dialogic quality of the photograph. Although some radical shifts and transformations have occurred through the introduction of photography and other visual media, it seems that this “optical skepticism” has largely prevailed among people of the East African coast up to today. This seems all the more probable, because in the complex mirror-like play of oppositions be-

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tween the West and the East, in particular after 9/11, Muslims from the East African coast nowadays seem to take recourse to the Orientalist stereotype that the West attributes to them and to use it as a weapon against Western politics of visibility. Against the potential dispossession that Muslim women in particular have endured when their images were stolen and circulated, for example in the Internet by Western tourists, the secrecy of the veil is strongly reinforced and new rules and new spaces are created to produce visual obstacles and opacities. To a certain extent, the reinforcement of what I have called the “aesthetics of withdrawal” has to be seen as a reaction to and critique of the West and of Western feminism, the veil serving also as a determined abrogation of Western values. While in the 19th century it was the “naked” slaves from the African “hinterland” whom respectable Muslim women and men considered their Other, it is now the “naked” Western tourist who poses a threat to local norms of modesty and civilization. When in the early 1990s the government of Zanzibar encouraged tourism, young Muslim men protested against it. As Parkin observed, they placed posters outside a few tourist hotels, showing two contrasting types of women. One was a very short-skirted European woman with long hair described as “the devil’s whore, an unbeliever who walks naked.” The other woman was covered by a veil and referred to as a pious woman whose clothes indicated self-respect (Parkin 1995:208). Against the “decadence” of the West and the immorality associated with Western tourism along the coast, 3 Muslim men and women attempt to vindicate the disfigured image of the Muslim women and by rescuing Muslim women to counter their

3 Not only in Mombasa and Lamu, but also in Zanzibar since the 1990s, Islam’s aniconism has been keenly and widely observed, perhaps more than ever before (Parkin 2006:90). As Parkin suggested, paintings by local Muslims showing places and narrow streets of Zanzibar Old Town that do not feature humans, and if (very seldom) women were included, then concealingly dressed in their black hijab or buibui, were accepted; but images painted by non-Muslim artists from the mainland depicting animals and female bodies have been attacked. By 2003, Muslim artists openly disparaged and expressed hostility toward non-Muslim newcomers. These attacks, however, were extensions of attacks on the decadence of tourism and Westernization as a whole. And the sensitivity to portraying women was – as in Mombasa – part of a more general concern to hide them from public view (ibid.:91,106).

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social, economic, and political marginalization in the Kenyan nation state as well as in a globalized world largely out of control. The struggle about the veil, Western forms of feminism, and the visibility of women seems to have gained additional dimensions since the Gulf War of 1991 and even more so after 9/11. Western (American) women have figured prominently in the “war on terrorism” (Spivak 2004:84). In the mass media, as soldiers, aircraft pilots, and prison guards at Abu Ghraib, American women gained a new global presence. Their visibility has functioned as part of the so-called “civilizing mission” that promoted the “liberation” of women as part of democracy. In the Western politics of images, the very vocal, fresh-faced female soldiers shown on CNN (ibid.), clearly pointed to their opposite, the veiled face of Muslim women. In the “war on terrorism,” the connected themes of gender and the veil strongly resurfaced in debates and visual regimes in the West and in the Muslim world in often opposed ways. By reviving the old colonial arguments against the image of the veiled women in a (Western) feminist context 4 in the “war against terror,” the USA and their allies – perhaps against their intentions – contributed to the local reinforcement of purdah and new attempts to control the visibility (of women) in various media. Although contradicting the logic of mass media, the attempts to withdrawal from (partial) visibility should, however, not be understood only as a loss, but also an act of empowerment. Defacement and other strategies to withdraw from visibility do not destroy value but instead exert a curious property of magnifying (Taussig 1999:54). As Michel Foucault (1977) has suggested, visibility is a trap and it seems that 4 In March 2006, the German journal “Der Spiegel” reported that people from non-Western countries who want to migrate to the Netherlands have to look not only at a photograph showing two men kissing each other but also at the photograph of a young woman showing her bare breasts (Wenk 2008:31). These photographs apparently have been chosen because they are considered as standing for the (sexual) liberality of Western democracy and against other (non-Western) cultures that interdict homosexuality and prefer to cover women. It is like a travesty and highly ironic that, while in the 19th century Western travelers took the bare-breastedness of African women as signs of their primitiveness or savagery, nowadays people from outside of Europe are forced to view images of “naked” European women as a sign of liberal civilization.

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some Muslims on the East African coast (and people elsewhere) are attempting to avoid this trap and to escape the calculating plans of ever more revelatory media.

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