28 STOP-START years in the making and as old as the New South Africa will culminate in the reveal of seasoned Pimville-based lensman, M Jacob Mawela’s monochromatic monograph of Soweto’s oldest township, Orlando East, titled, Easterly-lying of the Orlandos, in the form of an exhibition and accompanying catalogues, at the Donaldson Orlando Community Centre on March 4th.
A project Mawela embarked upon shortly after the watershed 1994 elections which heralded South Africa onto a democratic trajectory – it nearly wouldn’t see the light of day had an incident in which an assegai and knobkerrie-wielding Inkatha Freedom Party impi returning from a 1995 local government pre-election rally at Orlando Stadium turned against the then fledgling photojournalist on a platform of Orlando Station, turned awry!
“He wena, unga sa that’ izithombe!” (Hey you, cease snapping pictures.) The leader of a heavily-armed impi lost in song suddenly bellowed from an opposite platform the lonely photographer was snapping away at the menacing throng awaiting a train to various inner-city Johannesburg hostels.
Immediately complying with the source of the threat, Mawela calmly swayed to his left to behold from the corner of his eye, a warrior pointing a spear to his neck whilst his expression pleaded for understanding that he was merely performing his duty, to the agitator across the separating railway line.
With a tinge of a shudder at the memory all those years back, Mawela is convinced that the timeous arrival of a train which pulled in to ferry the aggressors to their destination probably diffused a moment in which he was forced to reckon with his mortality and thus saved his life!
Come to recall the moment of danger, it wasn’t the only one he had to reckon with pending his visual documenting of a neighbourhood he had always had a fascination with harking to his boyhood when, as a curious preteen, he used to spend weekends surfing trains between Nancefield Station for free with a Pimville homeboy en route to Orlando East to attend Saturday afternoon soccer matches featuring his hero, Kaizer Chiefs FC’s Zebulon “Sputla” Nhlapo at Orlando Stadium.
The duo’s weekend would invariably include, during Summer, an itinerary at the Huddleston Swimming Baths and indulging in video arcade games such upstairs at Lucky Michaels’ Pelican nightclub across the railway line.
Another encounter with discomfiture presented itself when a group of local thugs accosted him in a passage with the expressed intent of relieving him of his photographic equipment. With wits around him, he managed to evade their hostility by ducking into a nearby yard and proceeding to scale a fence leading into an opposite one – leaving the desperados rooted at the front gate he had entered into!
Other unsavoury incidents he witnessed involved coming across a grisly scene of a family of four burnt to death inside a backyard shack by a man who suspected his spouse of cheating on him and that of victims of a drive-by shooting attributed to simmering taxi wars. With one man lying dead in the back of a sedan, Mawela passed by in time to record medics attending to a bearded survivor writhing in pain whilst lying next to the vehicle.
Back then in the 1980s, Mawela had no inkling that his career or life’s destiny lay in photojournalism nor that he’d produce a visual documentary on a redbrick and rusty zinc roofed three-roomed neighbourhood with a rusty prism distinct from the matchbox houses comprising Greater Soweto!
An abiding memory from the period comprises a young him acting as a tour guide to a busload of pilgrims visiting a Soweto church who wanted to see Orlando Stadium. Taking them to the venue, he remembers beholding then Orlando Pirates player, Neo “City Late” Lichaba socializing with friends outside the turnstiles and thereafter proceeding with his tourists to the Jomo Sono co-owned Kentucky Fried Chicken kiosk at adjacent Dube Village where the soccer hero’s pretty wife Gail, was in attendance.
Easterly-lying of the Orlandos is Mawela’s visual chronicle of Soweto’s oldest neighbourhood named after an erstwhile mayor of the city of Johannesburg named Orlando Leake back in the early 1930s. A location of many firsts (first police station, post office, high school, library, et cetera) – it was brought into its own identity through the endeavours of James Sofasonke Mpanza, an imposing civil leader noted for commuting around the township on horseback.
A place which has a soccer club and a venue bearing its name (Orlando Pirates FC and Orlando Stadium, respectively) – Mawela’s presentation, recorded on black-&-white film lending it a rustic prism apt to its look will enable viewers beholding images of the ilk of mathematician TW Kambule at Orlando High School; Jomo Sono celebrating the Buccaneers becoming the country’s first victors of the CAF Champions Leagure in 1995, at a shindig at Orlando Stadium; the interior of Irene’s Place (a popular nightspot frequented by the who’s-who’s of society such as Club Pelican’s Lucky Michaels and yesteryear beauty queen, Charmaine Modjadji) and a donkey drawn coal-cart passing by the Donaldson Fish & Chips shop of a late wintry afternoon, among a vast tapestry of imagery!
The exhibition will also be accompanied by catalogues which will be distributed to the local library and schools.
Funded by the Presidential Economic Stimulus Programme 3, the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture and the National Arts Council – the display will be open for viewing from March 4th to March 31, 2023.
The DOCC is located on 6545 Rathebe Street, Orlando and enquiries regarding viewing arrangement can be lodged to (011) 935 5329
All images by Jacob MAWELA (Security personnel watch across the Orlando railway station as Inkatha Freedom Party Impi mass around whilst awaiting a train. No long after recording this images, the Impi turned on me pointing an assegai on my neck).
