Johannesburg — Alf Kumalo occupied a singular space in South African photography. He was not merely a documenter but a visual archivist of dignity in an era engineered to strip it away. At FNB Art Joburg 2026, the exhibition THE WOMEN’S MARCH TO FREEDOM, presented by MBR Projects in collaboration with the Alf Kumalo Estate, offers a timely reckoning with his legacy on the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Women’s March.
Kumalo, who died in 2012, was born in Utrecht, KwaZulu-Natal. He was largely self-taught, beginning his career at Bantu World and the Golden City Post before becoming a major contributor to Drum magazine. Alongside Peter Magubane and Bob Gosani, he was a defining force in what theorist Ntongela Masilela called the “national school of photography” that emerged from the Drum era. Masilela observed that the structuring logic of their work was often the theme of womanhood, a sensibility that permeates the current exhibition.
But what makes Kumalo’s work resonate so profoundly in 2026 is not just its historical content but its method. In a state that weaponised appearance as a tool of subjugation, Kumalo’s lens became a site of defiance.
The politics of the “in-between”
The exhibition features twenty-six photographs, many of which are intimate, “in-between” moments. As Khanya Mashabela, the granddaughter of Kumalo’s friend and fellow journalist Harry Mashabela, writes in her accompanying exhibition essay: “Through this selection of Kumalo’s images, we see the big, historical events and the small gestures of resistance, and we witness the multiplicity of womanhood and the capacity of South Africans to laugh, dance, and make music amidst struggle.” This ability to find the non-formal amidst the “formal” is a form of political resistance.
Consider the image of Rahima Moosa, Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn approaching the Union Buildings in 1956. The women clutch petitions, their expressions unshaken by the Special Branch. Yet it is the detail of Williams-De Bruyn – only 18 years old – licking her lips nervously that humanises the moment. It is a detail that reminds us of Susan Sontag’s observation:
“The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”
The photograph is mute, yet it invites us to imagine the weight of that moment, the hopes of 20,000 women resting on four shoulders, the presence of the Special Branch just beyond the frame.
Sontag continues:
“Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.“
Kumalo’s photographs refuse the surface. They demand that we not accept the world as apartheid presented it. They invite us instead to feel, intuit, and understand what lay beneath the visible – the resilience, the grief, the defiance, the ordinary humanity of extraordinary women.
The politics of (ad)-dressing
This refusal of the surface is nowhere more evident than in Kumalo’s photographs of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – images that demand we read appearance itself as political.
One image, from the 1960s, shows her and Albertina Sisulu photographed outside the Rivonia Trial, both dressed in Xhosa attire. A third image from the 1980s shows Madikizela-Mandela playing with her grandson, a toy gun in her hand. In each frame, she is unapologetically herself – whether in Xhosa attire before the courts of the apartheid state, or in the intimacy of her own home.
To read these images of women in Xhosa attire as merely “traditional” is to miss the violence of the frame – the violence of an aesthetic order that relegated African modes of appearance to the margins. As decolonial thinker Rolando Vázquez argues, the modern/colonial order operates through an aesthetics that relegates non-Western ways of sensing and appearing to the periphery. The concept of decolonial aesthesis – a term Vázquez develops with Walter Mignolo – speaks to “the liberation of senses” from the regulatory gaze of Western aesthetics. It is a practice of resistance and healing. Under apartheid, this regulatory gaze was not merely academic; it was enforced through dress codes in schools, workplaces, and public spaces. What was considered “neat” and “professional” was determined by social views that excluded African modes of appearance.
To appear in Xhosa attire outside a courtroom – as Madikizela-Mandela and Sisulu did – was to refuse assimilation into that aesthetic order. It was to refuse the erasure of a mode of being that the state had deemed peripheral, backward, or illegal. This was an act of what Vázquez calls “re-existence”: not simply resistance against, but the enactment of a world otherwise. It was a demand that the aesthetic and epistemic territories of modernity not be the limit of what could be pictured, sensed, or ultimately comprehended.
Dr Christine Shaw-Checinska, Curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, writes that “fashion is part of the process by which the unequal distribution of power within society is constructed, maintained and experienced as legitimate; but fashion can also be used to contest one’s position within society.” The women in Kumalo’s photographs understood this intimately. They knew that the state’s attempt to control their appearance was an attempt to control their humanity. And they refused.
The apartheid state’s regulation of dress was not incidental; it was foundational. The Pass Laws of the 1950s extended control over Black women’s movements, dictating where they could live and work. But the control extended to appearance itself. Dress codes were a tool of what Vázquez identifies as the coloniality of sensibility – the systematic desensitisation to the humanity of the colonised. To be denied the right to appear as oneself was to be denied the right to exist as oneself.
This was true not only for women. Kumalo himself understood the stakes of appearance. He was known as “the quintessential Jozi guy,” carrying an unmistakable flair for stylish clothes. In the early 1960s, Drum magazine named him the best-dressed man in Johannesburg. This was not mere vanity. In a country where Black men were routinely stripped of dignity, Kumalo’s meticulous dress was a refusal to be diminished. His self-portrait, standing dapper in front of his camera, bears testament to his title as “Man About Town.”
The gaze of the “majority”
Kumalo was harassed, beaten, and arrested. In the 1970s, he received a suspended prison sentence on the condition that he give up photography. His response was defiance: he went out and shot more pictures. This is the testament of a man who understood that the camera was a weapon, and that image-making was a form of resistance.
The presentation of this archive at FNB Art Joburg is a deliberate act of reclamation – a demand that these images be seen not as relics of a closed past, but as living documents of a struggle that continues. In the hands of MBR Projects in collaboration with the Alf Kumalo Estate, Kumalo’s work is not merely archived but activated. To exhibit these photographs in 2026, in Sandton, at a commercial art fair, is to insist that the visibility of Black life under apartheid – and the dignity with which it was lived – remains urgent.
In one of the exhibition’s most moving images, a mother mourns – Noqaphi Nosekeni holds a picture of her imprisoned son, Nelson Mandela, in 1964. It is a portrait of grief, but also of resilience. Kumalo’s photographs do more than prove; they humanise. They remind us that the surface is never all there is. His genius lay in his ability to reveal that surface and invite us to feel what lay beneath. He did not just photograph history; he insisted that we intuit its human cost. And in doing so, he ensured that the women who marched on Pretoria, and the generations that followed, would not be forgotten.
Bongani Tau is a fashion researcher, writer, and creative consultant based in Johannesburg