Framing A New Liberated AfricaFeeding the desire to construct new African worlds through apertures and shutter speeds.
Liberation politics produced new African leaders and personalities, new role models and new responsibilities. This series of images from two private archives at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien depicts a bygone Africa—then, new, and renewing itself.
At a first glance, archive collections from journalists or press officers suggest the dominance of the camera. However, some journalists’ audio and manuscript collections point to various approaches—not all journalists worked with a camera, not all with a tape recorder.
“I focused on what interview partners said,” Ruth Weiss recalled. The South African journalist covered liberation and early post-colonial politics in southern Africa between the late 1960s and the 1980s, in Lusaka, Luanda, Dar Es Salaam, and Harare. For her, the tape recorder, the pencil, and the notebook were crucial in order to produce newspaper articles and radio features. “I could not handle both a recorder and a camera”, she said. Her archives are principally an audio and manuscript archive and the images in her collection were randomly acquired, at times handed over to her by press officers, fellow journalists or state presidents themselves.
Other journalists worked with a photographer or worked mainly as photojournalists, producing vast image archives. Their negative archives can be read as visual diaries of liberation, independence, and post-colonial politics in progress. Guests at social events, in turn, had their private cameras ready for snapshots, all feeding the desire to construct new African worlds through apertures and shutter speeds.
A new car for Ghana’s Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. A representative of the Convention People’s Party is driven to the parliament for the handover of the car, Accra, mid-1950s. BAB Archives, PA. 140, Hans Buser Collections.
Party on the roof of the Ambassador Hotel in Accra, 30 May 1963. BAB Archives, PA. 140, Hans Buser Collections.
Genoveva Marais, the (later) South African confidant of Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah, participating in a fashion show at the Ambassador Hotel in Accra, October 1957. BAB Archives, PA. 140, Hans Buser Collections.
Shortly before Zamibian independence, Kenneth Kaunda at work. 1963/4. By Northern Rhodesia Information Department Photographer. BAB Archives, PA. 43, Ruth Weiss Collections.
Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda and Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere inspect the TAZARA Railways Project, ca 1973. Zambia Information Services. BAB Archives, PA. 43, Ruth Weiss Collections.
The representative of Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko, Kithima Bin-Ramazani, (left) reads a dedication to the TAZARA Railway Project at an event in Tunduma, the Tanzanian-Zambian border town, in August 1973. BAB Archives, PA. 43, Ruth Weiss Collections.
Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko (right) and Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda (left) in ca 1975. BAB Archives, PA. 43, Ruth Weiss Collections.
Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda (left) as referee of the Zambian parliamentary football team, with politicians Tom Mboya and the captain of the team, Reuben Kamanga (right). BAB Archives, PA. 43, Ruth Weiss Collections.
Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda and his wife Betty, State House, Lusaka, 11 May 1978, with a dedication: “We value your commitment to the cause of man the world over. Fight on. God’s blessings”. BAB Archives, PA. 43, Ruth Weiss Collections.
Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda and South African singer Miriam Makeba, Lusaka, ca 1975. BAB Archives, PA. 43, Ruth Weiss Collections.
Journalist Ruth Weiss interviewing the Zimbabwean politician Ndabaningi Sithole during the Rhodesia Constitutional Conference in Geneva, 1976. By Günter Wolff. BAB Archives, PA. 43, Ruth Weiss Collections.
Journalist Ruth Weiss and South African writer Nadine Gordimer during an appointment with Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe shortly after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. BAB Archives, PA. 43, Ruth Weiss Collections.
Curated by Heidi Brunner, Dag Henrichsen, Susanne Hubler Baier, and Lisa Roulet from the Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB) Archives Team. BAB is the largest Namibia documentation centre outside Namibia. Its vast Southern Africa library and archive holdings are mainly used by scholars working on Namibian historical topics with its website providing information ranging from catalogues, books, comics, posters, photographs, and audio-visual recordings from Namibia.
