When we imagine South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s, the most indelible images depicted the violent struggle against apartheid. They are epitomized by Sam Nzima’s iconic photograph of Umbiswa Makhubo carrying Hector Pieterson’s limp body during the Soweto Uprising on June 16, 1976, when police opened fire on schoolchildren protesting forced instruction in Afrikaans. The photo sparked international outrage and more protests, helping to galvanize a resistance movement that eventually vanquished apartheid.
The viciousness of that struggle is well documented. Such flash points of history, however, are like blips on radar sweeping across an unsettled calm. For there existed in South Africa — just as anywhere else — a parallel world beyond the news media spotlight, one of mundane daily routines. And for the country’s white middle class — the group that thrived under apartheid — that existence was captured in David Goldblatt’s seminal 1982 book, “In Boksburg,” which is being republished this month by Steidl. “In Boksburg” offers a sober view of a bygone era of legislated white privilege, depicting what Mr. Goldblatt called the “wholly uneventful flow of commonplace, orderly life.” The photographs reveal that life for small-town, middle-class whites in South Africa was much as it was elsewhere, only with apartheid looming behind it.
“You could exchange what you might see in Boksburg — a dance or a boxing tournament or a rugby match, the everyday life of Boksburg — with what you might see in Minneapolis or a small town outside New York or a town in Italy,” said Mr. Goldblatt, 85, who grew up in a community much like Boksburg. “I didn’t want to make the people concerned grotesque, or hateful, or monstrous. I wanted to show them as I saw them and as I knew them, because I come from that.”
The photographs, including several omitted from the 1982 edition, are taken from a deliberate middle distance, allowing entry without intrusion.
“I wanted to put you, the viewer, into the position where you could feel what it was like to be in that place at that time,” Mr. Goldblatt said in a phone interview from Johannesburg. “I didn’t want to impose myself as photographer in that equation. So I avoided the use of any kind photographic dramatization.”
The result is quiet indictment of an immoral and exploitative system. Black South Africans are featured in his photographs, but their presence is by permission, not by right. Under the 1950 Group Areas Act, nonwhites had to carry documents allowing movement within “white” areas. As a teenager, Mr. Goldblatt sometimes had to write authorization notes for the black nanny who helped raise him.
“It’s one of the most disgusting aspects of what I had to do in South Africa as a white person,” he recalled. “These are the insane aspects that we were taking for granted and living with. And so I hoped by showing the normality of our lives, I was at the same time demonstrating the insanity of our lives because we never stopped to question it, or very few of us did.”
Such willful blindness is not unique to South Africa. European countries plundered their colonies in pursuit of wealth and power, and America was built upon slavery. The only difference is that apartheid’s brutal system was in the present. Apartheid has since passed into history, but, as the writer Sean O’Toole points out in the essay “White’s Folly” that ends the book: “ ‘In Boksburg’ is not solely a historical document of a lapsed ideological programme. To read it as such is limiting. It is also a subtly written autobiography rendered in photographs.”
Despite having his work in major collections and international exhibitions, Mr. Goldblatt considers himself a “parochial” photographer who holds a mirror to his compatriots. And he feels “In Boksburg” remains as relevant today as it was in 1982: South Africa faces rampant unemployment and inflation, vast income inequality, corruption, violent xenophobia, poor basic services, and rising anger among students protesting not only high tuition, but also deeper issues of race and class rooted in apartheid.
“The book speaks about our complicity in a terrible system and we are, at the moment in South Africa, on a knife edge where we could become a society in which we tolerate — I don’t want to use the word evils, it’s too strong perhaps — but a society in which we tolerate things that should not be tolerated,” Mr. Goldblatt said.
As a critical observer of life under apartheid, Mr. Goldblatt refused to align his work with political resistance. He valued his independence and avoided becoming a propagandist for any group, no matter the moral weight of their cause.
“That doesn’t mean you don’t make penetrating inquiries into the ways in which the system and its immorality operated and how these things played out,” he said. “On the contrary, you make sure that you’re free enough to see them and to penetrate them and expose them for what they are, whether they are promoted by the forces for good or for the forces for evil, if I’m putting things in very broad terms.”
One of Mr. Goldblatt’s friends joked that his book was actually about legs, and there are plenty on display, which he said reflected a muted sensuality often present in Boksburg. In one picture, a young ballerina stands on point in her new tutu. Her crooked teeth offset her elegant pose, while jagged shadows behind her speak to the rigidities of life.
“She’s a sensual being, the body is that of a young woman in formation,” Mr. Goldblatt said. “For me she speaks of the probably inevitable life that she’s going to lead as a middle-class white South African woman: rigid in many ways, and formulaic in the sense that the dance itself is formulaic. She’s not a free spirit, this girl.”
Correction: An earlier version of the article rendered incorrectly the name of the person carrying Hector Pieterson in Sam Nzima’s photograph. He is Mbuyisa Makhubu, not Umbiswa Makhubo. The post has been updated to reflect this change.
Some of David Goldblatt’s work will be shown at the Pace/MacGill Gallery from Sept. 14 to Oct. 29.
Finbarr O’Reilly is a co-author of the forthcoming book “Shooting Ghosts,” about the psychological costs of war, to be published in 2017 by the Viking imprint Penguin Random House. He lived and worked in Africa as a photographer and journalist from 2001 through 2014 and is a 2016 writer in residence at the Carey Institute for Global Good. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.
