Raoul Peck’s “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” Is A Docu-Gallery of Apartheid Memories 

The British-led apartheid government in South Africa was a colonial system of racial separation and discrimination between 1948 and 1990. During this period, the Black majority of the country’s population were exposed to a range of segregationist policies that characterized them as second-class citizens while largely favouring the interests of the white minority in the country. This involved restrictions in movement and access to public resources, unfair treatment, and provision of substandard services to the Black community. In spite of the politically volatile atmosphere of the times, certain individuals and groups, including creatives, fiercely combated the administration with every tool at their disposal. One of the leading anti-apartheid figures was Nelson Mandela, a civil rights activist and revolutionary who, following twenty-seven years in incarceration, would later emerge as the first democratically elected Black president of South Africa.

But there were also creatives at the forefront of the anti- apartheid struggles, such as Ernest Cole, a photo-journalist who, through his mostly spontaneous shots, in defiance of the political climate, achieved a robust pictorial documentation of the horrors and nuances of  apartheid. Cole rose to prominence in the early 1960s during which he worked for Drum Magazine and other clients, becoming South Africa’s first black freelance photographer. Risking imprisonment in his homeland, he challenged the repressive government through his commitments to exposing the injustices of racial segregation. His life and legacy is the subject of Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, a documentary that synergizes ignominious sociopolitical history with transgenerational photographic footprints.

In dissecting the memories of Apartheid, the documentary, written by Raoul Peck and co-produced with Tamara Rosenberg, relies heavily on an assemblage of photos mostly from Cole’s oeuvre, testimonies from family, loved ones and witnesses of his brief existence, and other relevant footages. It is set between 1967, the year Cole published House of Bondage, a book about the horrors of apartheid, and 2017 when about 60,000 negatives were discovered in a Swedish bank vault. The documentary narrator, Lakeith Stanfield, takes on the voice and identity of the legendary photographer in his poignant account of Cole’s evolution. His presentation, a poetic mix of bird-eye precision and inferential depth, salvages and lends holistic justice to the genius of a photojournalist otherwise obscured by the pugnacious backdrop of his lived experience. Approaching Cole’s craft with analytical demeanour, the narrator provokes independent thoughts and reasoning around the possibilities and subtleties of his undertaking.

Early on, in the 106-minute-long documentary, we meet Ernest Cole in person through a clip from Rune Hassner’s 1969 film Bilder för Miljoner. Here, he talks about leaving high school in second year due to the poor educational standards for Africans, called the Bantu Education Act and opting for schooling by correspondence. This revelation introduces us to the photojournalist’s first act of defiance. He reveals his breakthrough working with a young German photographer Jürgen Schadeberg in the Johannesburg-based Drum Magazine, two hours from his hometown in Pretoria. But the inspiration behind the form of his work, he discloses, came from the first photographic book he saw, titled The People of Moscow by Henry Cartier-Bresson.

For much of the documentary, narrative legitimacy is bestowed on the mouthpiece whose voice expands and explores the biographical world of the subject, humanizing him and foregrounding his sociopolitical pursuits. “I am collecting evidence,” the unseen narrator says, “and sometimes the monster looks back at me.” Footages highlighting key moments in South Africa’s twentieth and twenty-first century history often slip in-between—the 1960 Sharpeville state-sponsored massacre of unarmed protesters, 1958-1966 colonial Prime Minister of South Africa Dr. Hendrick Verwoed’s speech where he offers a notoriously whitewashed description of  apartheid as “a policy of good neighbourliness”, 2017 Xenophobic violence against migrants, singer Miriam Makeba’s speech before the 1964 UN Special Committee on Apartheid, etc. Through these recollections, the filmmaker forges a connection between the country’s shattering past and contemporary paranoia.