Patricia Hayes engages with an archive of interviews with Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020) who posed critical questions about environmental activism in South Africa. Mofokeng argued that wide-ranging photographs of land and its development – actual and projected – might help to determine what the actual questions might be. He insisted that no one would pressure him to think “like other people” and interrogated the activities of anti-fracking groups as a symptom of a pre-existing white liberal problem. As a participant in an international project on “social landscapes” (2013), Mofokeng held back a number of images that in his view needed other kinds of unravelling and pointed to far deeper and older problems around race and exclusion.
Patricia Hayes is National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory at
the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. In 2023-
24 she held a FIAS (French Institutes for Advanced Study) fellowship at IEA-Nantes with a
project on colonial photographic archives. She is co-editor of several recent volumes,
including Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (2019), a special issue
of the journal Kronos 46 (2020) on ‘Other Lives of the Image,’ and also Love and Revolution
in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and
Southern Africa (2021).
Recommended Reading:
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Friday, April 4, 2025 at 10.00 EDT • 15.00 BST
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Image credit: Santu Mofokeng, Exposed Toxic-spewing Holes Left after Mine Was Closed. Penge. 2010