Available Light
Omar Badsha and the Struggle for Change in South Africa
Published on 8. October 2024
Book
Hardback
324 pages
978-0-8214-2561-9 (ISBN)
Description
Available Light tells the story of an activist, an artist, a uniquely South African individual, and his community and family across the second half of the twentieth century. Omar Badsha was born in Durban, on the country's southeastern coast in 1945. His was the third generation of his Gujarati family to call South Africa home. Before he turned five, the country's white electorate had voted to institute apartheid to strip the rights and privileges of citizenship from most of the population, including Badsha's Indian community and especially the country's Black majority. By the time he turned fifteen, nonviolent protest against apartheid had been quashed; by the time he turned twenty, so too had the armed struggle to dislodge white supremacy within the country. The ongoing, resilient, and oft-rebuffed struggle against apartheid was a definitive factor in Badsha's life.
Furthermore, Badsha was raised in a community where art-painting, carving, music, poetry, theater-was inseparable from other values, whether Islamic and conservative or radical and urgently committed. When Badsha struggled in school, he, like his father, turned to art to express what he otherwise had difficulty conveying. Art brought him into contact with people of disparate backgrounds from far beyond Durban. In time, his friendships with other artists helped him refine his voice, first in drawing and eventually in photography, and capture the political ethic by which he strove to live his life and which he shared with similarly committed artist-activists.
Daniel Magaziner chronicles how art and politics became intertwined in South Africa and explains what it takes to maintain a critical aesthetic approach to political crises in the past and present. The book tracks the personal and social costs that commitment can incur, while also appreciating how Badsha and others like him have maintained their vision of an equitable, transformed society even today, when the ideals that once animated the South African struggle are on the back foot worldwide.
Furthermore, Badsha was raised in a community where art-painting, carving, music, poetry, theater-was inseparable from other values, whether Islamic and conservative or radical and urgently committed. When Badsha struggled in school, he, like his father, turned to art to express what he otherwise had difficulty conveying. Art brought him into contact with people of disparate backgrounds from far beyond Durban. In time, his friendships with other artists helped him refine his voice, first in drawing and eventually in photography, and capture the political ethic by which he strove to live his life and which he shared with similarly committed artist-activists.
Daniel Magaziner chronicles how art and politics became intertwined in South Africa and explains what it takes to maintain a critical aesthetic approach to political crises in the past and present. The book tracks the personal and social costs that commitment can incur, while also appreciating how Badsha and others like him have maintained their vision of an equitable, transformed society even today, when the ideals that once animated the South African struggle are on the back foot worldwide.
Reviews / Votes
In this outstanding book, Dan Magaziner provides a riveting portrait of Omar Badsha, one of South Africa's great photographers and public historians, whose art and activism confronted racial oppression and forged non-racial realities. The book is a deep, sympathetic account of a complex, driven, and empathetic individual who was at the center of many of the major currents of South Africa's resistance history. Available Light brings Magaziner's formidable talents as a writer and historian to Badsha's compelling life and powerful art. - Sean Jacobs, The New School, founder and publisher of Africa Is a Country Available Light is the kind of book you get when an academically trained historian meets a self-conscious and self-assured historical subject. From the sparks and flares of an exchange of words, something unique and enigmatic arises that testifies to the art of making history. Daniel Magaziner's spirited and eloquently enthusiastic casting of Omar Badsha brings us to the brink of joy and sadness that preoccupied a generation of photographers, artists, and poets who indefatigably shaped and gave form to the struggle against apartheid. Guided by passion and politics, forged through networks that include luminaries such as Mafika Gwala and Dumile Feni, we encounter a weaving of an idea of non-racialism from strands of deep emotional ties and solidarities. In this page-turner of historical writing, filled as it is with historical meaning and evocative sentience, we learn that the struggle against apartheid necessitated foresight, desire, and insight. Apartheid was ultimately defeated because it proved no match for the intellectual prowess and aesthetic discernment of those who committed themselves to fighting a pernicious sensory order. - Premesh Lalu, University of the Western CapeMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Athens
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paper over boards
Illustrations
84 color illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 254 mm
Width: 178 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8214-2561-9 (9780821425619)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Daniel Magaziner teaches South African and nineteenth- and twentieth-century African history at Yale University. He is the author of The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977 and The Art of Life in South Africa.