The Bantu Education Act of 1953 did for the prospects of most Black pupils in the apartheid system.

Intrigued by photography as a child, he became hooked in his teens.

The brute work is done by Africans.’ His photos of mining recruits came to international attention in House of Bondage, a study of life – and lives – in apartheid South Africa, published in the US in 1967 and subtitled ‘A South African Black man exposes in his own pictures and words the bitter life of his homeland today.’ An impressive new edition includes an additional sequence of photographs and a set of critical essays on Cole’s work.Įrnest Cole’s ‘During group medical examination, the nude men are herded through a string of doctors’ offices’ (c.1965)Įrnest Levi Tsoloane Kole was born in a Black township on the edge of Pretoria to a tailor and a laundress he was one of six siblings. White employees in the mines, he noted, ‘even those working underground, and designated as miners, never touch pick or shovel or drilling machines. Cole’s politics were opaque, he didn’t give much away, but his photographs suggest that he saw racism as a more decisive force in South Africa than the structural injustices of capitalism, even though the ANC – which read racism back onto class struggle – used his work to publicise their cause. Unlike the children in Kollar’s picture, Cole’s adults are doubly vulnerable, as labouring poor and racialised inferiors. In Cole’s picture a dozen naked men stand with their faces to the wall, arms raised.

1940) recorded a medical examination of adult males in the gold mines on the Witwatersrand. In the 1960s, the Black South African photographer Ernest Cole (b. ‘Cours de natation’ by François Kollar (1930)

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