The Nightwatchman: Essays on Portraiture and the Black Male Figure in Colonial South Africa
Aug 2025 · NYU Press
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About this ebook
Drawing on a rich archive of colonial photography, Mokoena explores how images of African policemen and nightwatchmen in colonial South Africa challenged traditional narratives of oppression, revealing how uniform and portraiture transformed the black male figure into an aesthetic subject worthy of admiration.
This illustrated collection of essays brings into focus African men in colonial uniforms as a subject of portraiture. It extends the literature on colonial ethnographic photography by creating a narrative of nightwatchman portraiture from the rich archive of images. While a genre of photography developed around images of the ‘Zulu warrior’ after the defeat of the English at Isandlwana, Hlonipha Mokoena argues that the spectacle of the Zulu male body was inaugurated after the last Zulu king, Cetshwayo, was photographed as a posing subject.
Much research has focussed on the African man as a functionary of settler power; these essays shift debates about how the body moves in history. Placed in uniform, the male subject becomes aestheticised and admired. Mokoena focuses on the sartorial selection processes and co-optation of colonial aesthetic culture that constructed the idea of the Nonqgqayi or nightwatchman as a fully formed photographic presence. The beauty captured in these images upends conceptions of colonial photography as a tool of oppression.
In its focus on the figure of the black and brown fighting man, The Nightwatchman offers an innovative work on the history of portraiture in colonial South Africa and new avenues for the interpretation of visual representations of the black male figure.
This illustrated collection of essays brings into focus African men in colonial uniforms as a subject of portraiture. It extends the literature on colonial ethnographic photography by creating a narrative of nightwatchman portraiture from the rich archive of images. While a genre of photography developed around images of the ‘Zulu warrior’ after the defeat of the English at Isandlwana, Hlonipha Mokoena argues that the spectacle of the Zulu male body was inaugurated after the last Zulu king, Cetshwayo, was photographed as a posing subject.
Much research has focussed on the African man as a functionary of settler power; these essays shift debates about how the body moves in history. Placed in uniform, the male subject becomes aestheticised and admired. Mokoena focuses on the sartorial selection processes and co-optation of colonial aesthetic culture that constructed the idea of the Nonqgqayi or nightwatchman as a fully formed photographic presence. The beauty captured in these images upends conceptions of colonial photography as a tool of oppression.
In its focus on the figure of the black and brown fighting man, The Nightwatchman offers an innovative work on the history of portraiture in colonial South Africa and new avenues for the interpretation of visual representations of the black male figure.
About the author
Hlonipha Mokoena is Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is the author of Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual.
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