On a balmy Johannesburg morning, we meet South African photographer and activist Zanele Muholi at the Stevenson Studios in Braamfontein, a colorful cultural hub north of the city. Here, we are surrounded by her collection of self-portraits. Everywhere you look is Muholi, each image stark in mood and meaning.
You turn to the real Muholi – the award-winning photographer known for her work exploring gender, race and sexuality – in flesh and blood, lost in thought, just like her portraits.
Incidentally, blood has been a prevailing topic in some of Muholi’s works.
For her collection, Visual Sexuality: Only Half the Picture, she photographed herself in front of the mirror, portraying her first experience of puberty, trying to figure out what it meant to be a woman. Understandably, it was a difficult shoot.
“It was perceived as taboo to talk about periods, whereas people could easily speak about rape and other issues affecting women,” says Muholi.
“Before I am anything in the world, I am a woman.”
The last of five children, Muholi, 43, was only a few months old when her father died. Born and schooled in Durban in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, those initial years were difficult.
Muholi earned her first salary at a factory producing linen in KwaZulu-Natal. Destiny tempted her in the form of a camera. She left the factory job hoping to bus it to the city of Johannesburg to study film and videography at the Film and Allied Workers Organization.
<div id="attachment_31550" style="width: 899px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31550" class="wp-image-31550 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1-889x1024.jpg" alt="" width="889" height="1024" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1.jpg 889w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1-300x346.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1-600x691.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1-260x300.jpg 260w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1-768x885.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 889px) 100vw, 889px" />Somnyama-Ngonyama-II</div>
Unfortunately, her interview was unsuccessful and she wasn’t admitted to the program.
She ended up braiding hair at her tiny flat in Century Plaza, Johannesburg, to make ends meet. She realized she was quite creative at it.
But braid after braid, she was getting closer to her dream.
In 2003, she completed an Advanced Photography course at the famed Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, only three kilometers from the Stevenson Studios, where she now displays her self-portraits. In Newtown, she held a camera for the first time.
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“I have always wanted to tell human stories like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex [stories]. I noticed there was a lack of visual material that spoke to our needs and I wanted to capture that,” says Muholi.
In 2009, she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in documentary media at Ryerson University in Toronto.
One of her portraits, Hlengiwe (pictured below) is a tell-all on hate crime and discrimination.
“It refers to the number of cases that I have heard, especially from hate crime victims and survivors who didn’t have the courage to report it to the police because they were going to lose it [the case] anyway. As much as it’s a beautiful image, it’s one of those painful and exhausting stories,” says Muholi.
Passionate about “visual history” and women, Muholi says photography is her life. And she has always wondered why there were few female photographers – especially in history.
“There were so many historic moments and stories around us, but I didn’t see any woman capturing those` moments… I asked myself why women are not drawn to this career. If we could have female bus drivers, why would it be difficult for women to carry cameras? I mean a camera is not too heavy,” says Muholi.
In 2012, she faced a serious setback in her career when intruders broke into her flat in Cape Town and made off with her hard drives containing five years of unpublished photographic work. She believes it was sabotage.
<div id="attachment_31549" style="width: 693px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31549" class="wp-image-31549 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-I-Paris-2014-1-683x1024.jpg" alt="" width="683" height="1024" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-I-Paris-2014-1.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-I-Paris-2014-1-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-I-Paris-2014-1-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-I-Paris-2014-1-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-I-Paris-2014-1-768x1152.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 683px) 100vw, 683px" />Somnyama-I-Paris-2</div>
“Those people knew what they were doing, they’re were trying to slow me down,” she says.
Calling herself the first black lesbian to tell her life stories through a series of black and white self- portraits, the highlight of her career she says was displaying these portraits at a solo exhibition in Brooklyn, New York, in 2015.
“I felt I had arrived, I couldn’t slow down and that only death would stop me from doing what I love,” she says.
“One thing that people don’t know about me, I cry a lot and get really frustrated when I cannot be creative. So, I guess photography makes me happy.”
Currently busy with a new collection of photographs, Somnyama Ngonyama, meaning ‘hail, the dark lioness’, she has four published books and hopes to have at least 10 publications under her belt by 2020. And she wants to leave a legacy, like some of South Africa’s icons.
“I want to leave a mark just like the legendary Brenda Fassie and Miriam Makeba did with their music,” she says.
Life taught her resilience. Photography taught her about connecting. With the world. And herself.

Ndivile-II-Malmo-2014-9924-1

‘Only Death Would  Stop Me’

Acentury ago, the Governor of the Hunan province famously began a censorship trend in China, that later reached its nadir under Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution, when he banned Lewis Carrol’s allegedly subversive literary waltz around the garden: Alice In Wonderland.
A few years ago, I found myself on the ragged borders of Hunan on an investigative trail that had taken me from rural Malawi to an obscure corner of China where 100 billion counterfeit cigarettes are mass-produced, literally underground, each year.
As I arrived to dig for tobacco, China’s pre-occupation with censorship continued to focus on the surreal in the present not just the past. Afraid that the so-called Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia would inspire similar insurgence in Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party had, as I drove across Hunan, declared an unlikely war on the small white flower, even banning its utterance from social media.
China likes to outlaw symbols of resistance. It regularly bans people too. Richard Gere and Brad Pitt, not exactly the most threatening of civil rights campaigners, will be unlikely to ever walk along the Great Wall of China thanks to their personal association with a humble Buddhist monk who has become the world’s most high profile blacklistee: the Dalai Lama.
The latest storm of controversy swirls around the South African government’s refusal to grant the Dalai Lama a visa to attend the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Cape Town in mid-October.
In 2014, as they have for much of the last 50 years, Beijing views Buddhism’s Yellow Hat as a meddlesome separatist trying to establish an independent Tibet. But he&#8217;s also a very effective tool that China uses to incrementally assert control in international affairs.
As far as Pretoria is concerned, we are in familiar territory. In 2009, Tibet&#8217;s exiled spiritual leader tried unsuccessfully to visit South Africa to attend a peace conference. Before then he had visited the country three times under Presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.
Two years later, in 2011, the Dalai Lama hoped to attend the 80th birthday celebration of his friend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but withdrew his request after not receiving a response from Pretoria. An angry archbishop later described his government&#8217;s handling of the visa application as mind-blowing.
A year later, South Africa&#8217;s Supreme Court of Appeal found that the country&#8217;s home minister at the time unreasonably delayed her decision on the Dalai Lama&#8217;s visa application and acted unlawfully in doing so.
Of course it is beyond dispute that the Rainbow Nation’s most recent point-blank refusal to grant entry to one of the world’s holiest figures has more to do with Beijing than Pretoria.
The furore around the rejection promoted the Dalai Lama’s fellow peace laureates, including Poland&#8217;s Lech Walesa, Bangladeshi entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus, Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and Northern Irish peacemakers David Trimble and John Hume, to write a letter directly to President Jacob Zuma calling for a reversal of the decision. When the reversal didn’t come, the laureates cancelled their trip to South Africa.
What is most surprising to me is the low-key reaction to the latest rebuke in Asia. It speaks of a wider truth. Since China’s emergence as an economic superpower, the Dalai Lama is increasingly becoming the last person presidents and prime ministers would ever want to ‘Like’ on Facebook. As a consequence South Africa is far from the only nation in the world to ‘unfriend’ the 14th incarnation of the Buddhist holy seat.
Around the world, governments are increasingly limiting their contact with the Dalai Lama’s office. Most recently, Russia refused him entry. Those who refuse to kow-tow often feel the muscle of China. After the British Prime Minister David Cameron met with the Dalai Lama in 2013, after Beijing warned him not to, China effectively cut off diplomatic relations. Cameron’s administration then spent a year working to get back in Beijing’s good books.
A more startling row over the Dalai Lama’s presence took place in the last place you would expect. Norway. A nation that has shaped a reputation for tolerance. When the Dalai Lama visited Norway in May, government officials allowed him to enter the country but refused to meet him face to face. Norway had previously found itself in the cold and its salmon exports to China decimated after it had chosen the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo as the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. History wasn’t about to repeat itself.
In the midst of the latest scandal, South Africa&#8217;s foreign ministry has, of course, stressed its visa decisions were taken independently of a desire to cultivate closer ties with China, its largest trading partner and co-member of the BRICS club of emerging economies.
Regardless, the country’s economic relationship with China deepens. In late 2007, China made the largest single foreign investment in South Africa since the end of apartheid, a deal for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the biggest lending bank in Asia, to take a 20% stake in South Africa’s Standard Bank, the country’s largest by assets. Last year, China emerged as South Africa’s foremost trading partner.
The deeper truth to the Dalai Lama’s exile and predicament can be found between the lines of academic study. According to a study by two European scholars, Andreas Fuchs and Nils-Hendrik Klann, inviting the Buddhist leader for dinner could ultimately end up costing you the earth.
In their study ‘Paying a Visit: The Dalai Lama Effect on International Trade’, they found that when a top leader meets with the Dalai Lama, that country&#8217;s exports to China will drop by at least 8.1% for roughly two years, and then return to normal – in the interim costing economies linked to China billions of dollars.
Perhaps it&#8217;s not surprising, then, that in 2001, the Dalai Lama met with 11 top leaders yet in 2013 met with only two. This trend of avoiding the Tibetan spiritual leader has been especially pronounced in northern Europe, not just in Africa.
But a greater reality in the modern world is the Dalai Lama’s political influence, like the strength of his tenure, spent entirely in exile, is fading fast. A man of compromise and dignity, he has long said he’d settle for autonomy within the Chinese state, but this has about as much chance of happening as China recognising Korea&#8217;s right to re-unification. Today, as China’s economy grows, Tibet’s state-supporters will continue to diminish.
Tibet has changed dramatically in recent years. On the political front, tension is still very much present but the wave of self-immolations that once dominated world headlines has diminished. Even the soldiers who were blocking most of the streets of old-Lhasa in 2008 are now gone.
Money seems to be having an impact on Tibet for better or worse. After having invested $15 billion on infrastructure in 20 years, and committing further $15 billion in the years to come, China has equipped Tibet with a reliable road network, five airports and a railway line anchoring it firmly to the nation. Greenhouse agriculture is developing, allowing a constant outflow of highly prized fruit and vegetables throughout the year. This year, 12 million, mostly Chinese, tourists made the trip, turning Lhasa into a tourist hotspot.
This, in itself, sadly lends a rather hollow ring to the words of the Dalai Lama himself: “Money and power facilitate, but it is clear that they are not the primary causes of happiness and solving the world’s problems.”

Why A Hello To The Dalai Lama Costs Billions

When her father first glimpsed her, he said, ‘Bogaletch’, meaning ‘flash of light’. And so it would be. In her relentless fight against female genital mutilation and gender-based violence, Ethiopian physician and human rights activist Bogaletch Gebre carries the torch for women around the world.
She was born in rural Ethiopia in the 1950s. It was a time when Ethiopian women had limited aspirations and their experiences were restricted to their villages. Like 125 million girls across 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East, Gebre went under the knife, not for medical reasons, but for the ancient practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). Thirty million girls worldwide are at risk of being cut in the next decade. Gebre wants that number to be zero.
FGM is the cutting away of part or all of the external female genitalia. The procedure is usually performed on girls from infancy to the age of 15. The painful practice has no health benefits and can cause fatal infections. Gebre points out that FGM may also have long-term consequences, such as infertility, damage to adjacent organs and birth complications.
“Women should not be mutilated alive for the pleasure of men. Basically, there is no other reason [for FGM] but to control women’s sexuality. The FGM practice is to cut female genitalia; the inner labia, the outer labia, and then sew it together … And then you reopen that which you have sewn when she marries. And after she gives birth, let’s say she has multiple births, you sew her up like she is some kind of object, to reduce the size of her vaginal hole, because it is widened through her giving birth,” says Gebre.
When Gebre became the first girl from her village to attend school further than the fourth grade, later receiving a scholarship to study in Israel and the United States, she promised she would be back, and that she would make a difference.
During her studies, Gebre realized FGM had no cultural or religious roots.
“Culture, according to the United Nations, is man-made. It is not ethnic, it is tangible, nobody belongs to one culture… Whenever we talk about human rights issues in Africa, it’s always about culture, so culture is being used as a scapegoat. If it is not in our religion, if it is not in the Bible, if it is not in the Koran, why are we using this culture as our culture?”
When she returned to Ethiopia in 1997, Gebre co-founded KMG—Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma-Tope, which means ‘women of Kembatta working together’—with her younger sister, Fikirte. The non-profit organization promotes communication and dialogue between communities and their leaders.
“We brought together representatives of the community: the young, the old, the educated, religious leaders, even government officials and police. They sit and discuss together, learn about each other and analyze the problems in the community together. And find a way to solve it, to reach a consensus and create their own social contract to abide by,” she explains.
With funding from USAID, international organizations and embassies, KMG promotes women’s education and increased economic opportunities for women. The organization also focuses on demystifying taboos about HIV/Aids and other cultural practices, such as widow inheritance and bridal abduction. Seventy percent of KMG’s three million beneficiaries are women. A measure of the organization’s achievements is the change in mindset on FGM. In 1998, every single woman in Ethiopia’s Kembatta Tembaro region had undergone FGM. A decade later, 97% of people living in the area opposed the practice. But Gebre is not satisfied yet; at 74%, Ethiopia’s national prevalence remains high.
In May 2013, Gebre accepted the King Baudouin African Development Prize on behalf of KMG. The award, which is worth $200,000, provides recipients with a platform to address international aid agencies.
Despite everything she has achieved, Gebre remains humble, describing herself as an ordinary person who works for the betterment of humanity.
And her efforts appear to be bearing fruit. In December, the UN General Assembly called for the complete elimination of FGM. Around 1,775 African communities heeded the call and publicly declared their commitment to end the practice.  ,
When her father first glimpsed her, he said, ‘Bogaletch’, meaning ‘flash of light’. And so it would be. In her relentless fight against female genital mutilation and gender-based violence, Ethiopian physician and human rights activist Bogaletch Gebre carries the torch for women around the world.
She was born in rural Ethiopia in the 1950s. It was a time when Ethiopian women had limited aspirations and their experiences were restricted to their villages. Like 125 million girls across 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East, Gebre went under the knife, not for medical reasons, but for the ancient practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). Thirty million girls worldwide are at risk of being cut in the next decade. Gebre wants that number to be zero.
FGM is the cutting away of part or all of the external female genitalia. The procedure is usually performed on girls from infancy to the age of 15. The painful practice has no health benefits and can cause fatal infections. Gebre points out that FGM may also have long-term consequences, such as infertility, damage to adjacent organs and birth complications.
“Women should not be mutilated alive for the pleasure of men. Basically, there is no other reason [for FGM] but to control women’s sexuality. The FGM practice is to cut female genitalia; the inner labia, the outer labia, and then sew it together … And then you reopen that which you have sewn when she marries. And after she gives birth, let’s say she has multiple births, you sew her up like she is some kind of object, to reduce the size of her vaginal hole, because it is widened through her giving birth,” says Gebre.
When Gebre became the first girl from her village to attend school further than the fourth grade, later receiving a scholarship to study in Israel and the United States, she promised she would be back, and that she would make a difference.
During her studies, Gebre realized FGM had no cultural or religious roots.
“Culture, according to the United Nations, is man-made. It is not ethnic, it is tangible, nobody belongs to one culture… Whenever we talk about human rights issues in Africa, it’s always about culture, so culture is being used as a scapegoat. If it is not in our religion, if it is not in the Bible, if it is not in the Koran, why are we using this culture as our culture?”
When she returned to Ethiopia in 1997, Gebre co-founded KMG—Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma-Tope, which means ‘women of Kembatta working together’—with her younger sister, Fikirte. The non-profit organization promotes communication and dialogue between communities and their leaders.
“We brought together representatives of the community: the young, the old, the educated, religious leaders, even government officials and police. They sit and discuss together, learn about each other and analyze the problems in the community together. And find a way to solve it, to reach a consensus and create their own social contract to abide by,” she explains.
With funding from USAID, international organizations and embassies, KMG promotes women’s education and increased economic opportunities for women. The organization also focuses on demystifying taboos about HIV/Aids and other cultural practices, such as widow inheritance and bridal abduction. Seventy percent of KMG’s three million beneficiaries are women. A measure of the organization’s achievements is the change in mindset on FGM. In 1998, every single woman in Ethiopia’s Kembatta Tembaro region had undergone FGM. A decade later, 97% of people living in the area opposed the practice. But Gebre is not satisfied yet; at 74%, Ethiopia’s national prevalence remains high.
In May 2013, Gebre accepted the King Baudouin African Development Prize on behalf of KMG. The award, which is worth $200,000, provides recipients with a platform to address international aid agencies.
Despite everything she has achieved, Gebre remains humble, describing herself as an ordinary person who works for the betterment of humanity.
And her efforts appear to be bearing fruit. In December, the UN General Assembly called for the complete elimination of FGM. Around 1,775 African communities heeded the call and publicly declared their commitment to end the practice.

Tag: Cultural

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

‘Only Death Would Stop Me’

Why A Hello To The Dalai Lama Costs Billions

Bogaletch Gebre: The Light Bearer