The portfolio offers a wide-ranging visual history of the internecine conflicts and violent strife that engulfed large parts of South Africa in the 1990s. This followed the unbanning of 33 political parties and release of political prisoners, in the protracted lead-up to non-racial elections in 1994. The photographs bear unflinching witness to the painful becoming of a nation.
In Ratanda, the broader political conflict between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom party had spread to the unions that aligned with these parties. The unions represented meat processing workers of Enterprise and other factories where they made bacon, polony and other very pink meat-like stuff. While the politics inflamed things, it was really about getting rid of opposing unions to get your friends, cousins, brothers into the jobs.
In the same neighbourhood, in the same year, 14 people were killed at a protest march. Later, sprawling informal settlements mushroomed into a place called Orange Farm, where even today the same struggles for economic equality, water, security and justice continue to be fought. But the Vaal is best known for the Boipatong massacre, where 45 people were hacked and shot to death in the night. The youngest was a nine-month-old baby boy called Aaron Mathope.
What on earth is happening in this photo?