Episode 223 - The Calliper and the Lens: Gustav Fritsch in the Southern Light (1863–1865)
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Show notes
This is episode 223, the calliper and the lens Gustav Fritsch in the southern Light.
A very quick thank you to Professor Johan Fourie at Stellenbosch Department of Economics who invited me to be part of a workshop about improving the visibility of economic history. What an amazing experience.
This episode of our series is following on from 1863, into 1864, where the movement of people became as demographic phenomenon — driven by economics and innovations.
Let’s swing our attention to Robben Island, it’s a warm morning in November 1863 and a bearded German arrived armed with various photographic apparatus and guns, he was on an expedition. German tourists can be found on Robben Island these days, but they don’t carry guns and their cameras are Canons.
Gustav Fritsch had arrived with many other accoutrements - because he was on a scientific mission.
He was an anthropologist, and part of a curious genre now largely forgotten — the “racial type” photographer — men who believed the camera could capture the science of human difference, stamping evolution’s hierarchy onto paper.
In their lens, the body became data.
A century and a half later, modern influencers use images to shape a kind of social order — their self-curated faces, botox-bright and algorithm-approved offer a new kind of taxonomy, no less performative, and perhaps no less pseudoscientific.
So as our friend Gustav Fritsch set up his apparatus and guns, there on the windy but warm Robben Island of November 1863, he became part of what would be the field of criminology and .. eugenics.
In this period, the use of photography was part of a privileged administrative practice, part of medical anatomy, anthropology, psychiatry, part of the professionalised emerging social sciences, tying in public health, urban planning, sanitation.
It was at this point that the two divergencies in the science began to take shape, one was honorific, honouring the differences, noting the diversity, exciting the senses with these truly stunning pictures of South Africans in 1863, versus the other, the repressive, the oppressive. Stamping people with their racial characteristics.
Unlike today, each picture took at least 20 seconds to complete. Imagine asking your contemporary subject to sit dead still for 20 seconds while you point your iPhone at their noggin. 20 seconds is longer than an entire TikTok video that explains the meaning of life.
But there is not doubt, that the most remarkable thing about Fritsch’s photos were the diversity. He photographed many chiefs and their families, capturing African nobility at the time. His image of amaThemba chief Stokwe ka-Ndlela is slightly blurred, Stokwe refused to sit still. Other images of the incarcerated on Robben Island are historic, folkloric and well, just stunning. These include Xoxo on of Ngqika, brother of Sandile, Siyolo kaMdushane, one of the Gcaleka chiefs, Dilima, son of Phato of the Gqunukhwebe.
This strange German was doing South African history a favour, recording the regal faces of amaXhosa royalty for posterity. After Robben Island, Gustav Fritsch and his apparatus rolled along in an oxwagon to Cathcart in the eastern Cape where he took more photos of Anta kaNgqika the 3rd paramount chief of the amaRharhabe, whereupon Fritsch continued to Stutterheim, where he set up his stool and massive tripod and took remarkable photos of Sandile kaNgqika.Not satisfied, this 19th century paparazzi, this collector of images set off northwards to Bechuanaland. He photographed Bakwena chief Sechele I a Motswasele or "Rra Mokonopi" as well as his son Sibelo. Bamagwatho chief Kama was next, grand old man of Botswana. The ancestor of the famous Khama family of the twentieth century.
And while Gustav Fritsch wandered the veld with his camera and his paraphernalia, convinced he was capturing some scientific truth, the people he encountered were being absorbed into a global archive — not as individuals, but as specimens, artefacts.
