The Nightwatchman: Essays on Portraiture and the Black Male Figure in Colonial South Africa

The Nightwatchman: Essays on Portraiture and the Black Male Figure in Colonial South Africa brings into focus the African policeman as a subject of portraiture. While colonial governments co-opted and conscripted Africans into military and policing services, it was after the Zulu defeat of the English in the battle of Isandlwana that a genre of photography developed around images of the ’Zulu warrior’ and ’Zulu policeman’.

In this illustrated book, Hlonipha Mokoena extends the literature on colonial ethnographic photography by creating a narrative of nightwatchman portraiture from the rich archive of images. Although the origins of this genre lay in the representation of ’Fingoes’ (amaMfengu) during the frontier wars, she argues that an ethnological spectacle of the Zulu male body was inaugurated after the last Zulu king, Cetshwayo, was photographed as a posing subject.

While much research has focussed on the African man employed in emasculating labour or as a functionary of settler power, this book shifts debates about how the body moves in history. Placed in uniform, the male subject becomes aestheticised and admired. Mokoena focuses less on the idiosyncrasies of the uniform than on the sartorial selection processes and co-optation of colonial aesthetic culture that constructed the idea of the Nonqgqayi or nightwatchman as a fully formed photographic presence. The beauty captured in these images upends conceptions of colonial photography as a tool of oppression.

In its focus on the figure of the black and brown fighting man, The Nightwatchman offers an innovative work on the history of portraiture and dress in colonial South Africa. Incorporating insights from African history, art history, anthropology and critical theory, it offers new insights about the use of men of colour in colonial warfare and new avenues for the interpretation of visual representations of the black male figure

Hlonipha Mokoena is Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is the author of Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual.