The Darkness and the Light
In October 2004, a few months after a handful of his black-and-white street photographs were presented in an exhibition of South African photography in Tokyo, Santu Mofokeng agreed to meet me at his Johannesburg home. The plan was to pick up on our conversations in Japan, as well as to talk about an image he had recently taken of his older brother Ishmael, which he was showing at a local gallery. Titled Eyes-Wide-Shut, Motouleng Cave, Clarens (2004), the head-and-shoulders portrait presents an aging man, with a graying Colonel Sanders goatee, wrapped in winter clothes. Two figures pass behind him, blurs in the murk of a cave. His eyes, too, are distorted, but it is nonetheless possible to detect a slight deviation in his sight. Ishmael’s right eye peers straight into the lens, but his left eye does not. It looks elsewhere, at something beyond the conjecture of words. Call it a decisive finality.
When I arrived at Mofokeng’s house, the photographer was slumped on the pavement, crying. Ishmael, he said, was dying. He motioned me into his home, pointed to a seat, and handed me a stack of postcard-size photographs. “My children cried when I showed them these.” The photographs, cheap machine prints, offered a sequential record of a road trip Mofokeng had recently undertaken with his brother to Motouleng Cave, an immense sandstone overhang near South Africa’s border with the mountainous country of Lesotho. The caves there are popular with hikers and urbanites interested in ayahuasca—spiritual medicine—ceremonies. Motouleng, though, is different.
The cave, whose name in the central South African Sotho language loosely translates as “place of the beating drums,” has a special significance for followers of the country’s traditional animist religions. It is venerated as a place of salvation and healing. Ishmael had recently been diagnosed with tuberculosis, an opportunistic infection that is the leading cause of
