Johannesburg - Growing up, Farrell Mpumelelo Ngilima learnt many things at the knee of his late grandmother, Sarah. Among these tales was the legend of his grandfather, an accomplished photographer in his heyday.
One day in 1999, bored out of his wits after a family gathering, the grandson found himself rummaging through the family heirlooms, in search of what … he wasn’t exactly sure. This was a hallowed space, sacrosanct, that his grandmother guarded jealously and wouldn’t allow anyone access to.
That was the day Farrell discovered gold, in the form of undeveloped film totalling around 6 000 frames. Thus began the arduous task of developing the rolls of film and digitising them in order to conserve the legacy of Ronald Ngilima, a self-taught 1950s photographer who shot in black and white.
Ronald, who would later be assisted by one of his sons, Torrence, plied his trade in the mixed-race Benoni of old, before the forced removals.
The subjects of his social photography are Africans, coloureds and Indians who used to live together peacefully in Sophiatown before apartheid sought to end this co-existence.
Today, Ngilima’s works comprise a solo photo exhibition at the Bensusan Museum of Photography housed inside the Museum Africa, in the Market Theatre precinct in downtown Joburg. It will run until October 24 at the Museum, where entrance is free.
The photographic exhibition couldn’t have found a better home than the Bensusan.
Historian and curator, Dudu Madonsela says: “The Bensusan Museum of Photography boasts an extensive collection of photographic and other visual material, which was donated to the City of Johannesburg by Dr Arthur David Bensusan, in 1968.
“Dr Bensusan, an avid photographer, was born in 1921 would have been 100 years old in 201. He is my hero and influencer.”
Dr Bensusan was the 69th mayor of the City of Johannesburg.
Madonsela is visibly excited by the father and son works of the Ngilimas.
“The analogue type of photography was social about others,” he says. “This is what you pick up as you examine the exhibition. Digital photography these days is about the self.”
That much is clear. Even when they lived through the worst of apartheid repression, the Ngilimas showed the social side of people going about their everyday life.
“None but one of the portraits here are about politics,” Madonsela says excitedly.
Farrell appreciates the significance of his discovery: “I’m aware of their historical value in terms of the country’s heritage and past. I just think that they are an important link to the past era of old Benoni, early Wattville.”
His biggest task has been to try to identify the people in the photographs. He could find only one, a coloured woman, Kobi Joseph, who is now 85.
Among the children captured in the photographs was one Ronnie Welile Kuta, who would grow up to become the first black post-1994 mayor of Benoni. Kuta died in 2011.
Such is their cultural value that Sophie Feyder, a Dutch national, did a PhD on the Ngilima photograph stash!
The bulk of the work is stored at the Historical Papers division at Wits University.
It is pleasing to note the respect given to these self-taught photographers who, as Madonsela says, were never recognised, and are now eventually getting the recognition that eluded them in their lifetime.
“The bathroom of their house in Wattville was turned into a darkroom,” Farrell says.
This particular house is now owned by his aunt, Nozengazi. Together with Farrell’s father, Mxolisi, Nozengazi comprises the last two surviving siblings of Ngilima’s children.
The exhibition is a kaleidoscope of South African life in the 1950s/1960s. You find the subjects reading copies of “Zonk” and “Drum” magazines, at weddings, women doing washing, lovers looking into each other’s eyes. It is the whole shebang about life during a difficult political period for blacks, but they still found time to live and make merry.
There are pictures of subjects at the gravesite of loved ones.
“Everywhere they went, the Ngilimas could find a studio,” Madonsela says.
Just as those who lived there and loved such places as District Six and Sophiatown, the old Benoni is surely mourned by those who lost it. But it comes to life through this exhibition.
When he died, Torrence, a product of the famed Wilberforce Institute, that features in the works, was a political activist, a member of the SACP.
If you want to experience a taste of African life before the bulldozers of apartheid were unleashed on these communities, make time to go and see the Ngilima photographic exhibition.