Developing a Politically Conscious Photographic Practice in Apartheid South Africa: Rafique Mayet's Images of Natal

Abstract: This article follows Rafique Mayet, a photographer from Durban, Natal Province, and a member of Afrapix, a photographers' collective in South Africa. Mayet was classified as "Cape Malay"—an in-between category often pitted against "African" and "white" racial groups. Staunchly antiapartheid, he was spurred on by the collective spirit undergirding the political philosophy of activists, artists, and "cultural workers" in the 1980s. These generative ruptures in the social and political landscape of Natal's "plantation" helped him propagate an identity based on his opposition to injustice and his commitment to mutuality, rather than race. His photographic projects evidence marginalized communities' exercises of self-assertion, agency, and care, as well as their overt and more subversive methodologies for resisting apartheid—essential to the political practices of the oppressed in Natal.