Chasing shadows

Santu Mofokeng is one of South Africa’s most celebrated photographers, recognised for his work with the Afrapix collective and on the newspaper New Nation. In these photographs he records a country struggling to come to terms with its past and future

"Apartheid was a roof. And under this roof life was difficult; so many aspects of life were concealed, proscribed.

The demise of apartheid has brought to the fore a crisis of memory. The Chinese say that our body is the memory of our ancestors. This is an ominous proposition since apartheid is an impossible ancestor, inappropriate and unsuitable. One can’t travel far within this country before coming upon shadowed ground of negative memory, memories of violence and tragedy.

My journey which began at home in Soweto took me to places invested with spiritual meaning in the Free State – religious services, concentration camps from the Boer War, burial grounds in Middleburg, Greylingstad and Brandfort – in my effort to embody the South African landscape. In 1997 I started to visit the shadow grounds in Europe, like Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. I was looking for answers, but all I found were shadows." – Santu Mofokeng

Images used with permission of photographer and Rivington Place, London.