These represent a literal picturing of African history that in its time was completely imagined, and involved stripping subjects of all western artifacts. African hunters too are removed from the landscape - exceptionally they remain, in subordinate positions to white men. The ostensible reason for destruction put forward therefore is the alterity, the savagery, the difference, as if these were hardboiled and irreducible. Thus, just as savagery is assigned to closeness with nature, so a number of the mortuary photographs of the dead king are, we find, in a natural setting. I want to suggest that camera technology in colonial hands at times produces a hyperfocalisation which arouses certain senses and deadens others, recovers memory but more importantly represses it at other possible historical nerve points.
Photographic visualisation can become the only route to 'memory' or the past.
This can go even further. The tropological force of one picture, for instance of Mandume's dead body, can result in reproductions in which the original image becomes separated from its context and the very texts that might go with it to identify its specificity are lost. Reports are that this is not the only case. The reworking of the artifact may go in other directions. Potent examples appear in the artist John Muafangejo's work based on photographs, especially one of Mandume published in the SWA Annual.