Reframing the Archive: A Conversation on The Nightwatchman at Lit.Culture
By City Life Arts Writer
Lit.Culture, in collaboration with Lapa Project Space, will host a discussion of Hlonipha Mokoena’s The Nightwatchman: Representing Black Men in Colonial South Africa on Friday, 28 November at 18:00 at Breezeblock, 29 Chiswick Street in Brixton. The event features Nondumiso Msimanga of VIAD’s Radical Others and Khwezi Gule, chief curator of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, with musical interludes by Lunga Mkila, jazz musician and observer of art, literature, and sartorial histories.
Mokoena’s book reanimates the colonial photographic archive by turning attention to African policemen and nightwatchmen whose portraits disrupt familiar readings of power. These men, often framed as functionaries of the colonial state, emerge here as aesthetic subjects who actively shaped how they were seen.
Mokoena writes in the book that “the photographs of the colonized” can communicate not only duty or endurance but beauty, and that to see the Zulu policeman “as a beautiful subject whose war-ready body was aestheticized and admired” unsettles assumptions about photography as a purely oppressive tool.
The conversation takes place inside Lit.Culture’s current exhibition, (In)Layers by Slovo Mamphaga. His work moves through experimentation, colour, pattern, and fragmentation, revealing a process-driven practice where meaning appears through accumulation rather than declaration. The layered nature of the exhibition echoes Mokoena’s insistence that the archive is not fixed but shifts each time a viewer returns to it. Mamphaga’s imaginary terrains open a parallel inquiry into the surfaces on which history and interpretation rest.
“Bringing Mokoena’s work into a space surrounded by Mamphaga’s visual language allows us to think across mediums,” says Lit.Culture co-founder Kulani Nkuna.
“Both the book and the exhibition insist that the archive is not static. It shifts when we look again, when we listen differently, and when we allow the past to speak through new forms.”
Carolyn Hamilton of the University of Cape Town notes that in The Nightwatchman, “Mokoena invokes the figure of the nightwatchmen to drive a project of moving through and beyond colonial abjection,” a reading that resonates strongly with Mamphaga’s interest in transformation and reinvention. Both the book and the exhibition demonstrate that the visual field contains unexpected traces of agency, desire, curiosity, and self-fashioning.
Lunga Mkila’s performance will thread sound through this environment, offering musical responses before and after the discussion. His presence creates a dialogue between text, image, and atmosphere, bringing another form of interpretation into the space.
The evening invites readers, researchers, and the broader public to consider how uniforms, bodies, and photographic practices continue to shape the ways we interpret the visual histories around us. It is an occasion where the archival past meets contemporary artistic practice and critical conversation.
RSVP to attend via email at kulani.nkuna@hotmail.com
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