South Africa: The Cordoned Heart
Photographs by twenty South African photographers with text by Dr. Francis Wilson, foreword by Bishop Desmund Tutu, edited by Omar Badsha. Associate editors, Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor.
Book and jacket design by Margaret Sartor.
W.W. Norton & Company and The Gallery Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, 1986
Essays by 20 South African photographers prepared for The Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa. It is crucial to remember that these 20 South African photographers are patriots in the best sense of that world. The photographs of South Africa: The Cordoned Heart were made as an impassioned plea for change to their own countrymen and women - to end Apartheid. Bishop Desmond Tutu, said “This Carnegie Inquiry is about such ordinary people and the pictures bring them very much to life. I commend South Africa: The Cordoned Heart very warmly”. The editor and one of the photographers, Omar Badsha, is one of South Africa’s foremost documentary photographers, artists, political and trade union activists and an historian. He is an award winning artist and photographer and has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally. Badsha is considered one of the early pioneers of “resistance art” in the early 1960s. He became an anti-apartheid activist during his high schools days and he went on to play a significant role in that country’s liberation history. He was one of the activists who revived the Natal Indian Congress in the 1970s and the independent left wing trade union movement that grew out of the famous 1973 Durban strikes. Badsha established and was the first secretary of the Chemical Workers Industrial Union. He was detained, harassed, and had a book of his “Letter To Farzanah” banned in the late seventies. He was one of those who was denied a passport and never allowed to travel outside the country until 1990. He is the author of a number of photographic books and was the co-founder of the famous South African photographers collective, Afrapix. Afrapix was a collective agency of amateur and professional photographers who opposed Apartheid in South Africa and documented South Africa in the 1980s. The group was established in 1982 and dissolved itself in 1991.
