Kewpie’s District Six: Queer South African Memory in GALA’s Photographic Archives

In a personal collection of photographs hosted by GALA Queer Archive, Kewpie, a queer, gender-fluid South African hairdresser and drag performer, poses with friends in the streets of District Six in Cape Town, shares intimate moments with lovers at parties, poses at the beach, works on styling clients in her salon, and dances at the Ambassador Club, dressed according to theme. The array of photographs of Kewpie among lovers, friends, and co-workers in the 60s, 70s, and 80s has come to serve as an archive of remembrance that attests to the lives and experiences of queer communities in apartheid South Africa, all the more important given the forced removal of tens of thousands of District Six’s residents of color throughout the 60s and 70s to make way for a whites-only neighborhood. Based at the University of Witwatersrand and founded in 1997, GALA Queer Archive, formerly known as Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action, started with the mission to preserve the memory of queer southern Africans like Kewpie and her community in response to the absence of LGBTIQ+ histories in the dominant cultural narratives that emerged following the end of apartheid. Kewpie’s photographs, which formed the basis of an exhibition created by GALA in partnership with the District Six Museum in 2018, attest to the affordances of unconventional archives that work to preserve queer African history as a history as yet in the making. 

Various methods and approaches emerge in studies of African and Afro-Diasporic archives that seek to recuperate disappeared subjectivities and account for the violence of the historical processes that often create such archives. Sadiya Hartman and Tina Campt offer alternative approaches to Afro-Diasporic archives variously amassed in service of surveillance, government documentation, and social science research. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman analyzes reformist, sociological, and “scientific” photography of early 20th century slum life in Philadelphia and New York, demonstrating the limitations of the camera’s ability to capture the dynamic lives of the black urban poor while analyzing the violence of forms of visibility instrumentalized in service of policing, surveillance, and dispossession (Hartman 32). Importantly, Hartman attempts to recreate “the radical imagination and wayward practices of these young women by describing the world through their eyes,” finding a way into the violence of this photographic archive that seeks to recuperate the complex subjectivities of the oppressed (Hartman 7). Campt’s Listening to Images considers photographic archives gathered during processes of state management in Uganda and among the Afro-Caribbean community in Birmingham, England. She proposes her titular approach as an alternative route into these archives associated with restrictive institutions, a way to attend to the “lower frequencies” of images and the more quotidian registers contained within them, incorporating a definition of sound that exceeds listening with the ears and attends to embodied feelings of vibration and contact (Campt 7).    

Queer African archives present a complex of unique challenges to conventional theories and methods. In “Querying Queer African Archives: Methods and Movements,” Thérèse Migraine-George and Ashley Currier consider specific approaches to queer African archives and encourage a conceptual and theoretical shift that centers the movements and processes that inhere in archives and in which activist archival work takes part. If Campt and Hartman are interested in considering non-standard ways of engaging with archives built-up in service of state exigencies and regimes of control, Migraine-George and Currier are interested in turning to sources of historical and cultural memory that are not conventionally archival in terms of the disciplinary protocols of history. With Migraine-George and Currier’s assertion that “literary and visual productions constitute alternate ways of archiving queer experience,” we move from attending to standard archives differently to attending to different archives entirely (200). Migraine-George and Currier also move away from the problematics of the archive as method or repository, a conceptualization that frames queer African life as a site of knowledge extraction and production. Instead, the pair consider queer African archives in terms of movements and processes, attending to the activist histories of queer archival work on the continent. They root their proposition in a queer understanding of time wherein various pasts, presents, and possible futures are entwined, foregrounding the role archives play in the “entangled temporalities” that Mbembe deems characteristic of African societies (195). Migrain-George and Currier’s interventions provide useful analytical tools for approaching the terrain of queer African archives in which Kewpie’s photographic collection finds its place. 

Migraine-George and Currier parse the limitations of queer archive theory produced in the West in terms of its applicability to the African context. Theorists like Ann Cvetkovitch and Jack Halberstam have taken an interest in the affective traces of queer subjectivities to be recuperated in the archive (190). As Migraine-George and Currier point out, this privileging of the affective subject stands at odds with the facts of collective organization that structured many pre-colonial African societies, whose heteropatriarchal systems of social organization sometimes accommodated non-heteronomative marital arrangements in service of the status quo (Migraine-George and Currier 197). What’s more, an emphasis on affective traces and individual subjects runs the risk of depoliticizing queer life and identity in national and regional contexts where homophobia poses a clear and urgent threat to queer life (Migraine-George and Currier 198-199). In the case of Kewpie’s collection of photographs, one could view the range of intimacies, moments of exuberance, and spirit of humorous play within the images in terms of the documentation of queer African joy, framing the collection in terms of the recovery of affective subjectivities. However, when viewed in relation to the apartheid government’s bid to tear down District Six, remove its residents, and construct a whites only area in the wake of the destruction, the images begin to resonate with the history of a community doubly displaced, and the joy shared among the members of Kewpie’s community begins to convey a form of solidarity forged in the face of severe social, political, and material pressures. As Linda Chernis, GALA archivist, put in an interview via email correspondence:

[Kewpie’s photographs] show us the changing physical and political landscape of District Six amidst the atrocity of the apartheid government’s campaign of forced removals of the 1960s and 70s. Kewpie’s photographs show the value of personal archives to tell potentially lost stories, and to insert queer lives into the relatively well-known history of District Six and forced removals. (Chernis 2023)

This is most clearly depicted in “Kewpie, Brigitte, Margaret, and the Seapoint Girls Outside a Demolished Building,” in which demolition is literally the backdrop of their togetherness, with some in the photo posing quite puckishly in the midst of ruin.   

Kewpie’s photographs map a geography of a District Six that no longer exists, marked by recurring street names and traversed by familiar faces throughout the collection. Several photographs are located, by their captions, in relation to Rutgers Street, where parties are hosted, photos of Kewpie and her partner Brian Armino are snapped, and community members are captured in group photos. One of the latter such images entitled “Group Photo in the Yard on Rutgers Street” displays six or seven people in what looks like a narrow outdoor space between homes constructed next to each other on Rutgers. The members of the group stand near the side of the house, where one gathers water from a faucet in a bucket. The group stands in front of a coop where at least two birds can be seen behind wire doors. The one who holds the bucket beneath the tap bends over with exaggerated suggestiveness, with another group member leaning in from behind, a scene which causes several of the other group members to look on with grinning faces. The camera appears to have captured, and encouraged with its attention, a moment of humor and levity within the group’s routines of quotidian chores and domestic tasks. Such stills of domesticity speak to dynamics of queer kinship in late 20th century District Six.

The group photo in Kewpie’s collection brings to mind Hartman’s consideration of the transient spaces in black urban life in Philadelphia at the beginning of the 20th century. Out of the way, in between, and overlooked spaces like the hallway of a tenement and the yard on Rutgers Street become complex, active spaces under scrutiny. In Hartman’s study, the hallway is a place of surveillance and restriction, where “the police enter without warrants” and “the authorities post the tenement house laws and project rules, and the guidelines might as well says, Negro, don’t even try to live” (33). At the same time, the hallway is a pathway into the home, the domestic space. It is “inside but public,” the inverse of the streets on which private exchanges of intimacy take place, forming an important part of the alternative geographies of public and private life found in the communities that Hartman analyzes (33). In several of Kewpie’s photographs, community members gather and pose in the road or on sidewalks, remaking these shared spaces by inhabiting them in ways that deviate from the expectations that inhere in their planning, design, and construction. In one image, Kewpie lay on the sidewalk with one leg extended upward and both feet pointed, a position that visually and tonally echoes another image of Kewpie performing in drag with a leg outstretched presumably mid-strut on stage. In other photos, Kewpie and friends gather on a concrete road divider in front of the Ambassador Club and pose, Kewpie centered in her sun hat with floral adornments and outstretched arms. In these images, Kewpie and her community members queer public spaces both literally and figuratively, animating them with the energies of drag performance and queer culture while disrupting the normative forms of movement, positioning, and bodily expression that the spaces encode.

 

Many queer Africans face the dual violence of societies that are hostile to sexualities and gender expressions deemed “un-African” and the omission of their lives, histories, and contributions in dominant cultural narratives. These conditions make the work of building and preserving queer African archives urgent and necessary, and they provide the touchpoints for theoretical reflections on such work. The photographic collection submitted and captioned by Kewpie and hosted by GALA Queer Archive animates the history of queer of color life in apartheid South Africa in District Six and demonstrates the possibilities of turning toward non-traditional aesthetic objects as archives of queer culture.  

Works Cited 

Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Duke University Press, 2017. 

Chernis, Linda. Interview. Conducted by Yeukai Zimbwa. March 2023.

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019. 

Kewpie Photographs, GALA Queer Archive, Digital Transgender Archive, c. 1950-1990: https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/catalog?f%5Bcollection_name_ssim%5D%5B%5D=Kewpie+Photographs