Hlonipha Mokoena’s The Nightwatchman compels a return to the colonial archive to reconsider the visual and aesthetic agency of African policemen and nightwatchmen. On 28 November at 18:00, Lit.Culture, in collaboration with Lapa Project Space, hosts a discussion of the book at Breezeblock in Brixton with Nondumiso Msimanga of VIAD’s Radical Others, Khwezi Gule of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and a musical prelude and outtake by Lunga Mkila, a jazz cat with a love for art, literature, and sartorial histories.
Mokoena shows that the black male figure, even under the constraints of uniform and institutional duty, participates in aesthetic world-making. As she writes, the question is not only whether the colonised can express “dignity, fortitude, resilience and prowess” but also whether “the photographs of the colonized… can also be beautiful.” To consider the Zulu policeman “as a beautiful subject whose war-ready body was aestheticized and admired” challenges the idea that photography functioned purely as a tool of subjugation.
The discussion unfolds within Lit.Culture, which currently hosts Slovo Mamphaga’s (In)Layers. His exhibition layers design, experimentation, colour, texture, and form to reveal the process of making itself, mirroring the book’s concern with layering, presence, and agency. Within this space, Mkila will play music before and after the discussion, threading sound through the exhibition and conversation.
The evening at 29 Chiswick Street, Brixton, offers a chance to explore how bodies, representations, and layered histories shape the ways we see and interpret the world. RSVP via DM or email
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