Nicola Brandt grew up in Namibia in a largely white community and The Distance Within, the result of a return to the country, is a questioning of her heritage and of ‘the pictorial and romantic views of whiteness’. Her photography touches on the historical reality of German colonialism, Nazism and apartheid.
Germany’s first genocide unfolded in Namibia between 1904 and 1908 when tens of thousands of the indigenous population were killed through forced labour, relocations and mass killings. Today, Brandt informs her readers, 6% of the population are white Namibians – of German, Afrikaans or British descent – and they own about two-thirds of commercial farmland. Visiting Namibia eight years ago and walking around the town of Swakopmund, it was surprising to encounter so many shops run by descendants of the colonizers; expect to find bratwurst with sauerkraut on restaurant menus.
The Distance Within is not a small book – 27.94 x 31.75 cm and almost 400 pages – and its heft is metaphorical testimony to the weight of history bearing down on the country and Brandt’s lineage. One image, spread across two pages, shows the bottom half of an equestrian statue, erected as a victory monument and a memorial to German soldiers who died in the genocidal campaign of 1904-1908. The shot is taken close to and between the legs of the horse, making the animal statue seem more colossal than it really is and, like the solid foot in one of the stirrups, announces the inflexible power of brute domination. The booted foot points towards a quaint-looking colonial-era church, close to the old colonial fort in the centre of the capital, Windhoek. An ideology is writ large, rendered in stone, bricks and mortar. On the next page, the same statue is shown before its removal to the courtyard of the fort where it is out of public view, its size and impact now diminished by the towering presence of the Independence Memorial Museum. A woman in traditional Namibian dress looks up at the statue on its plinth, a reminder of the patriarchy that was built into colonial rule. Brandt writes in her book of conversations with her German grandmother, ‘stubbornly unaware of Namibia’s history of dispossession’, who spoke of women being sent from Germany to foster relationships with soldiers and settlers and ‘create a German society and centre of life with good Christian values’. A photograph of the bookcase in her grandmother’s house indicates a cultured sophistication – Stefan Zweig, James A Michener, Walter Bauer take their place on the shelves – but one that also has a place for an edition of Mein Kampf.
Shots like those of the equestrian statue are indicative of a strong documentary dimension to Brandt’s book but it would be a disservice to present her work as obligingly genre-compliant. There is another image of the woman, Katuvangua Maendo, seen looking up at the equestrian statue but this time she is photographed more closely and she stands looking directly at the writing on its plinth, the spectacle confronted by spectator. No longer dwarfed by the memorial, unawed by the plaque, she inserts her presence as living witness to the countless thousands who lost their lives but whose loss is unrecorded in the inscription.
Katuvangua Maendo, one of the women who accompanied Brandt when she was not travelling alone, is also photographed on her way to her homestead in the Ovitoto Communal Area. Another companion was Uakondjisa Kakuekuee Mbari and she is shown in traditional dress, bright red in colour outside Swakopmund. The shots may bring to mind Graciela Iturbide’s Mujer Angel although the tonal differences are significant. Both women are situated in historical landscapes that place them ethereally between the present and the past: Mexico and California for Iturbide’s Seri people, contemporary Namibia and the mountain where a battle took place between the Ovaherero and the Germans for Brandt’s companion. What makes them different is contained in the contrast between the kinesis of the Seri woman’s stride and the contemplative stillness of Katuvangua Maendo.
Brandt writes in her preface to The Distance Within of being driven by ‘an anti-documentary impulse to make “non-landscapes” and to illuminate what was not visible’. Brandt’s photography possesses an energy that arises from her self-positioning between the personal and the public, mourning and memory, silence and stigmata. The hauntology informing her work, creating the sense of an irredeemable interregnum in the continuum of history, is borne of composted memories in the people and places of a country that suffered a genocide and the book in her grandmother’s house that evokes the second one that arose from its ashes.
Sean Sheehan
The book, The Distance Within by Nicola Brandt is published by Steidl
