This essay contains descriptions and images of violence, and thus may be emotionally challenging for certain viewers and readers.

Unknown, 2019. Delta Park, Blairgowrie.

And here, your eye glides across frosted grass, bare limbed trees, the ash-grey skyline. In the distance, the tiled roof of a suburban home. Nothing holds your attention, except the cold. He must have circled the park a few times before getting out. Or maybe he chose to wait in the car, blowing warm air into his cupped hands. Six years ago, at eight a.m. on a weekday, a man dumped the body of a woman at this location. Security patrolling the area are too late to give chase, and the man disappears into the fog. The deceased woman is entered into the police data base as Unknown.  The story is reported in the city’s main broadsheet the following day, but no next of kin comes forward. The woman’s identity is never established. After the allotted thirty day waiting period, she is given a pauper’s burial. The case is still unsolved, and the killer somewhere out there, in a sedan or hatchback, heading east on a suburban road in late day sun.

Tanya Kelly Flowerdale, 2023. Durham Street, Darrenwood.

And here, scattered across my desk are printouts of recent images made by the South African photographer, writer and filmmaker, Lidudumalingani. They sit alongside annotated newspaper clippings, academic monographs, notebook pages scribbled in black ink. A collection of false starts. Paths followed that soon veered into cul-de-sacs. For weeks, I have tried and failed to write about the subject of these images. A woman died here (“…she had been shot four times.”) And here (“…preliminary investigations revealed that the deceased was strangled.”) And here (“…the 34-year-old mother of three was killed by her lover following a domestic dispute.”) The particulars of the story may vary — a .38 calibre handgun pressed into the sternum of a sex worker in a hotel room; an ex-husband breaking the terms of a protection order and brandishing a knife outside the front door — but not the ending. The ending is always the same. A woman’s life is extinguished.

What is this sickness, the poet Sarah Lubala asks, that eats the bones of daughters?[i]

Mahlako Malebo Rabalao, 2024. President Park, Midrand.

Sites of Mourning is a photographic study of the alarmingly high levels of femicide in South Africa; this sickness that demands the slaughter of daughters. According to a longitudinal study conducted by the South African Medical Research Council’s Gender and Health Unit, the country has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world. Nearly seven women a day were killed in 2020/21, and 60% of those murdered died at the hands of men they knew[ii].  Sometimes there are a few lines written about in the press, but for the most part, there is nothing. The death is a nothingness. And yet the question remains: beyond the impossible task of creating “an elaborate encyclopaedia of the dead, telling precisely how each killing happened, and what the consequences were,”[iii] how does one begin to write about a catastrophe of this scale? And what are the ethics of doing so?

Lidudumalingani pondered these questions in "The Grief of Strangers," an essay published during the Covid-19 pandemic. The essay hangs on this question, ‘But is it possible to grieve the lives of strangers?’ Reflecting on this question, Lidudumalingani returns to his childhood in Zikhovane, a small village “that stands on a mound between two valleys”[iv] in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. His mother, Lidudumalingani recalls, was a devout listener of a radio show that read out death notices on the air. And much like in “The Art of Suspense,” an older essay about football commentators on radio published in the Pan-African quarterly, Chimurenga Chronic, Lidudumalingani pays attention to the language usage of the announcers. How carefully words were chosen, and the details the announcers elected to include or discard. ‘The listener, a stranger to the dead,’ Lidudumalingani tells us, “was spared the harrowing details.”[v] The entire enterprise of the show, it seems, guarded against making a spectacle out of pain, an ethic that has informed the making of Sites of Mourning.

Lidudumalingani’s father worked as a mine worker all his life, and he briefly comes into view as the essay heads towards its conclusion. “The Grief of Strangers” ends with a description of how Lidudumalingani’s mother responded to the horrifying television footage of South African police opening fire on striking rock drill operators at Marikana platinum mine in 2012, killing 34 of them. The footage of the massacre is available on YouTube, and with a movement of the cursor, the miners can be resurrected only to be shot down again. And again. This, perhaps, is the main subject of the essay: in a world surrounded by screens, “where the image of a lifeless body lying on the streets can be shared on social media even before loved ones hear of it,”[vi] how do we narrate histories of violence in ways that open possibilities for keeping vigil with the dead? Of mourning.

Kirsten Kluyts, 2023. George Lea Park, Sandton.

And here, your eye follows a dirt trail arcing through the veld until it is out of sight. I play football here, on Saturdays, Lidudumalingani said in the first letter he wrote me. Behind the football field is the running path where the body was found. In October 2023, a 34-year-old high school teacher, in the first trimester of her pregnancy, registered for an event called “My Run” at George Lea Recreation Park in the north of Johannesburg. In one of the last pictures taken of her, she is captured mid-stride, smiling, in a cap and sunglasses, listening to a podcast or playlist through wired earphones. It is not easy to look at this photo because we know all that is to come. The man hiding in tall high grasses…

                                                                   and the birds, startled suddenly into flight.

There are no people in Lidudumalingani’s images, but there are ghosts everywhere. The dead haunt suburban sidewalks, highways, city parks, rivers, bridges, dams, illegal dumpsites, hotel rooms, all where human lives collide. Sites of Mourning is primarily shot in Johannesburg and follows the trail of South African newspaper reports. In each of the locations Lidudumalingani photographed, a woman’s life ended at the hands of an intimate partner, an ex, or a male stranger. The ensemble cast of first responders — police officers, crime scene experts, coroners etc — summoned to the scene have long departed, but like shoots of grass growing over an unmarked grave, the memory of the violence remains embedded in the landscape.

•••

And here, your eye follows the motion of light on water. These images encourage your eye to drift, to move on. No detail keeps you in place. Much of Lidudumalingani’s early work a writer, including his Caine Prize-winning short story, “Memories We Lost,” is filled with incantatory descriptions of the rural landscape of his youth, “its walking paths, its indentations, its rivers, its mountains, its holes where ghosts lived.”[vii] Although Sites of Mourning is an urban project, there is the same attentiveness to landscape, but a striking feature of these photographs is how they evade or resist the imposition of story. Lidudumalingani is a brilliant architect of narrative, but these images are almost anti-story. There are no disclosures about what happened here, or what you’re looking at. Are these crime scenes or memorials? These images are still, and for most part, opaque. The forward motion of story — its movement towards resolution — has been abandoned. Perhaps the indeterminacy of these images reflects how violence disfigures story, shatters its coordinates of beginning, middle and end.

In her book, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon says haunting “alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future.”[viii] In April 2017, a man drove here, to this field, with the body of a dead woman concealed in the trunk of a Mercedes-Benz. Several days later, when the woman’s charred remains are discovered by a passerby walking through the veld, the man will admit to having used pool acid and petrol to destroy the evidence of what his hands had done. “I’m failing to get the correct word to describe him,” a prosecutor will say after a high court finds the man guilty of murder. “Maybe the judge interpreted his persona as a disguised evil.” When a resident from across the street notices Lidudumalingani’s car idling in the vicinity of the same field with its hazards on, she emerges from behind a tall electrical gate. “What are you doing here?” The air is suddenly charged with accusation. “Oh,” she says, after receiving an explanation. She retreats back behind the gate. Doesn’t look again in the direction of the burnt grass, or say anything about how the sedan idling in the street reminded her of a disguised evil.

Karabo Mokoena, 2017. Corlet Drive, Lyndhurst.

Langston Hughes’ 1925 poem, “Johannesburg Mines,” grapples with the question of art and violence on seismic scales. “In the Johannesburg Mines,” the poem opens, “There are 240,000 / Native Africans working. / What kind of poem / Would you / Make out of that?”[ix] There is the recognition of the limit of art as antidote to violence, but there is also an adjoining question here: why make art at all from of this dark horror? One answer maybe that the desire of violence is to be the last word. The extermination of thousands, the dead left to rot in shallow graves.  “Another word out of your mouth…,” a man says to his wife, as he cracks his knuckles. All this art-making is not only about bearing witness, or the desire to respond imaginatively to violent events. Perhaps, what all this amounts to is a refusal to let violence have the last say. A body discarded in a field of burning grass.

What kind of poem would you make out of that?

Moses Sithole victims, 1995. 10 bodies dug up.

The near-illegible inscription of a memorial plaque built into the paving on a traffic island in Spin Street in Cape Town’s central business district reads: “On this spot stood the old slave tree.” The South African anthropologist, William Ellis, who can trace one branch of his family to an enslaved ancestor brought to the Cape from present-day Mozambique, determines that the old slave tree that once stood here was a stone pine. More than the identity of the tree, what holds my attention is what Ellis says about trees as keepers of memory. It might be impossible for him to recuperate the life of his great-great-great-grandmother from fragments of archival records, but some trace of her has survived. “The tears of slaves, their spit, sweat, effluvia and blood at the base of this tree means that this tree literally holds parts of the people - their lives, their stories, their atoms - and is in fact now an ancestor, connected because it is imbued with the essences of my forebears.”[x] Trees are abundant in this series. Sometimes they are the last known witnesses. What would the trees say if they were tasked with providing evidence in court? Likely, they would graph the violence of the present onto a much longer timeline, stretching across centuries and regimes of power. In one of the press clippings Lidudumalingani assembled for this project (the earliest dates back to 1999), a high court judge is so appalled by the evidence presented in a murder case involving a man who whipped a 24-year-old woman to death that he stumbles over his words, and delivers a verdict that lacerates the skin. “He beat her like a master would a slave.”

Unknown, 2021. Vaal River R59, Viljoensdrift.

The 5Ws (what, why, when, where, who) and 1H (how) are a standard organising principle of newspaper reporting. The working assumption is that the average reader is too busy to read every word in the paper, so all the important details have to be conveyed upfront. Meaning arrived at by the shortest route possible. Simply by scanning the headline, accompanying image and first paragraph, the reader should be able to sum up what is at stake: which politician is in hot water, and which football manager is facing the sack. The same demand to distil the story’s most essential elements, by a kind of visual shorthand, are placed on photojournalism. The images that appear on the front page rarely leave you questioning what you’re look at looking at, whereas Lidudumalingani’s photographs are of no value as news, and this is a deliberate aesthetic choice. Although Sites of Mourning is a project reprised from newspaper headlines, it does not keep pace with the relentless march of the news cycle, nor abide by its norms. The killings linked to each of these locations have nearly all receded from the front pages, and the photographs in this series are old news in that regard. But Sites of Mourning jeopardises the “status of the event,” to paraphrase Saidiya Hartman, “by throwing into crisis ‘what happened when.’”[xi] The violence these images contend with ripples beyond the temporal order of news cycles: it is ongoing and ever present.

Two bodies, 2025. Dennebom Train Station, Pretoria.

•••

And here, your eye follows a footpath as it threads through an informal dumpsite littered with all manner of rubbish. Red and white barrier tape, old shoes, polystyrene containers commonly usedfor fast food. Only now does the thought enter your mind. You see what the murderers see, a secluded location. There are no people, except there, in the distance, dots on the landscape, two figures clad in white robes, making their way towards you. Like other images in the series, this photograph is captioned with the year (“2025”) and the location (“Dennebom Train Station, Pretoria.”)  The bodies of two women were found here, but the victims are unnamed. The question of how to represent violence is central to Sites of Mourning. Adjacent to it are other questions about appropriation: whose suffering is conscripted, by whom, and to what ends. The resort to anonymity, on the one hand, risks repeating the total negation of personhood that underscores these killings. Yet naming the dead risks circumscribing what can be said about these lives to the violent manner of their deaths. There are no easy answers, but in a country where the femicide rate is four times higher than the global average, it is better to stumble over one’s words. To remain silent, as the dead multiply in our midst, is to aid and abet. It protects no one.

Unknown, 2015. Newtown and 3rd Avenue, Killarney Nielson Drive.

The block had eight units, and faced the Southern rail line. S_. was 19, all those years ago, and lived in a ground floor flat with her grandmother. She was undocumented, and subsisted on piece jobs where she was paid in cash. The grandmother had had a stroke some years earlier, and walked with a cane that made a soft rattling noise every time she entered and exited the building. S_. was her primary caregiver.  The two women had only each other. We were on good terms, but nothing more. I’d moved into the bachelor flat upstairs, and we made small talk in the corridors, sometimes. It surprised me, then, when I got a call from the grandmother while I was at work. She spoke without pausing for breath. S_. had hidden the pregnancy. She’d gone into labour that morning, and had nearly given birth right there in the flat. The ambulance had come in time. S_. was at the maternity hospital in Hornsey Road. Would I go and fetch her? And the baby? I asked. And here, her words seemed to stumble on something, momentarily. S_. had made arrangements with a social worker to give the baby away for adoption. I told my line manager and rushed to the maternity hospital. The Uber driver talked non-stop about his family on the way there. All three of his daughters had been delivered at the same hospital. S_. had been discharged by the time we pulled into the parking at midday. She sat on a bench in the crowded waiting room tinged the faint smell of cleaning fluid. She got up without speaking. She’d brought along a maroon backpack, which sat between us on the backseat, during the quiet drive home. The driver, too, kept silent. In apartment blocks, you sometimes know your neighbours best by the sounds that travel through walls. Flat No.2 became a quiet house. I slipped back into the pattern of my days. The mad scramble for the train in the morning, the scrape home in the gathering dusk. Months passed. I was preparing to move again when S_. told mewhat had happened. She’d met the man on a dating app. He had used a fictitious name, and rented an overnight apartment. When S_. returned to the high-rise building two days later, the security guard on duty looked at her like she was hallucinating. She must be mistaken, he said, shaking his head. No one by that name lived there. Are you sure, this is where you were raped?

•••

Firoze Peer, the narrator of Imraan Coovadia’s 2006 novel, The Green-Eyed Thieves, confides in another character that there is no more terrifying thought than the idea that “all men are brothers.” The men who stand trial for these murders are pictured standing alone in the dock, faces blank and expressionless, showing no signs of remorse. “I found I had my hands round her throat,’ one man says, ‘my fingers were clenched.” Two men tell the police that the woman stretchered out of their hotel room in a body bag shot herself, even though the only gun in the room belonged to them. There is a temptation to place the guilty in category of their own, split off from the rest of us as men. But such claims to innocence rest on a rickety defence.

As if it wasn’t you, who just yesterday let slide a friend’s “joke” about the so-called declining moral standards of today’s women. As if it wasn’t you who pretended not to know. All those times you visited their house, you asked about the kids and the weather, but never about the bruises you pretended not to see.

Rhea Lily White, 2025. Sandton Hotel, Sandton.

“Anthropologist Rita Segato has reminded us that behind the relentless war against women, which is being waged with equal ferocity inside homes and on public grounds, lies the ‘mandate of masculinity,’ which negatively affects women and men alike, albeit in different forms and with different lethal risks,” writes Cristina Rivera Garza. “Defined as men’s perceived duty to dominate in order to belong to a brotherhood whose main aim is control over women’s bodies, the ‘mandate of masculinity’ helps us understand that while violence against women may appear to be sexual, it is, above all, a matter of power. The domination of female bodies brings a lesson with it: a pedagogy that promotes the normalisation of cruelty, which in turn contributes to the perpetuation of the predatory system we know as patriarchy. Femicide is therefore a hate crime, one committed against women because they are women.”[xii]

Ipelegeng Mogolane, 2015. Kruger Road, President Park, Midrand.

Last night, I attended the 10th anniversary performance of Gabrielle Goliath’s ELEGY.  Each iteration of ELEGY is dedicated to an individual “lost to a normative crisis of rape culture and femicide in South Africa and globally.” The performance at the Hiddingh Hall in Cape Town commemorated the life of a nineteen-year-old journalism student who was raped and murdered in Johannesburg in 2015, Ipeleng Christine Moholane, and found at this location. The performance, enacted as “an ongoing labour of remembrance, repair and black feminist love,”[xiii] begins with a group of seven opera singers standing in a line in a darkened hall. Over the course of an hour, the singers take turns to step onto the spotlit rectangular platform, and each sings the same haunting note. Then one by one the women begin disappear into the dark of the hall, until there is only one woman left on the platform holding the same note. I hear an echo of that note as I look closely again at these images:

ENDNOTES

[i] Sarah Lubala, "The Women," A History of Disappearance, Botsotso Publishing, 2022

[ii] "Research Brief: 20 Years of Femicide Research in South Africa," Gender and Health Research Unit South African Medical Research Council, September 2024, source: https://www.samrc.ac.za/policy-briefs/20-years-femicide-research-south-africa

[iii] Colm Tóibín, "Return to Catalonia," New York Review of Books, October 7, 2004 issue

[iv] Lidudumalingani, "The Art of Suspense," Chimurenga Chronic, April 7, 2016.

[v] Lidudumalingani, "The Grief of Strangers," Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories of Death and Dying, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2021

[vi] Lidudumalingani, "The Grief of Strangers," Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories of Death and Dying, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2021

[vii] Lidudumalingani, "Memories We Lost," Incredible Journey: Stories that Move You, Burnet Media, 2016)

[viii] Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2008

[ix] Langston Hughes, "Johannesburg Mines," Published in The Messenger, February 1925

[x] William Ellis, Opinion: Trees can tell stories of our cultural history: https://www.uwc.ac.za/news-and-announcements/news/opinion-trees-can-tell-stories-of-our-cultural-history-dr-william-ellis

[xi] Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, Number 26 (Volume 12, Number 2), June 2008

[xii] Christina Rivera Garza, Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice, Hogarth, 2023

[xiii] Gabrielle Goliath, ELEGY, source: https://www.gabriellegoliath.com/elegy-2015-

[xiv] Brian Turner, "Here, Bullet," Here, Bullet, Alice James Books, 2005. (I owe a great debt to Rory Bester and Jo Ractliffe for introducing me to Mike Nicol’s 1996 Mail & Guardian article and the poem "Here, Bullet" by Brian Turner in their forthcoming photobook, The Photograph in My Mind and Other Forensic Gestures.) 

Bongani Kona is a PhD candidate and lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape. He worked for many years as a contributing editor at Chimurenga, a pan-African journal of arts culture and politics, and was part of the curatorial team for the Archive of Forgetfulness project. His writing has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction, The Baffler, Redemption Song and Other Stories, and Doek magazine. His work has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize (2016) and the True Story Award (2021). Kona is also the editor of Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying.  'Time, Paper, Bone', a long-term collaboration with Catherine Boulle, is scheduled to air on BBC Radio in July 2025.