Somnyama Ngonyama
Hail the Dark Lioness
Zanele Muholi
The highly anticipated second volume to the widely acclaimed and celebrated self-portrait series by Zanele Muholi, Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness has been published. Reason to review the first volume, published in 2018.
South African visual artist, activist and photographer Zanele Muholi (born 1972) took 365 self-portraits for her series called Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, to bring to attention the injustice faced by South African people of colour. Muholi’s work focuses on race, gender and sexuality.
Muholi began working on the series in 2014, taking the portraits to represent each day of the year. The portraits are her alter egos. For most of the pictures Muholi exaggerated the darkness of her skin tone to show contrast in her images. Muholi wears different clothing and adornments in each black and white frame. In doing so she transforms into the different characters she creates, whose titles are often Zulu names. The images chanel her experience as a queer woman in today’s society. And are a direct response to racism, sexism and homophobia.
The book features hundred of Muholi’s self-portraits, each image drafted from material props in Muholi’s immediate environment. More than twenty curators, poets, and authors offer written contributions that draw out the layers of meaning and possible readings to accompany selected images. The pictures pay hommage to the history of black women in Africa and beyond. The dark lioness of the book’s title.
A self-portrait bears the title Bester V named after Bester Muholi (1936 – 2009), mother of Zanele. The head is crwoned by a collection of metallic pot scourers, made for scrubbin and cleaning off dirt. For Bester Muholi worked all her adult life in the kitchens of others, raising their children and cleaning their stuff. The picture speaks about a child who must deal with separation from her mother. After all as a result of apartheid policy. if you as a black woman, wanted to work for a white family, you had to say goodbye to your own family. Ernst Cole’s House of Bondage gives a good picture of the atrocities of apartheid.
Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
Photographer: Zanele Muholi
Publisher: Aperture
Published in 2018
Hardback, 212 pages, 100 images, 26,7 x 35,6 cm
Winner of the Best Photography Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation in 2019
Shortlisted for the Author Book Award 2019 at the Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles