The American photographer Anne Rearick took this picture in 2015 in the Western Cape of South Africa. By then she had been going back and forward to the country for a decade, often photographing in Langa, the oldest of Cape Town’s sprawling townships, alarmingly little changed since apartheid. She had first been invited to go to Langa by a woman she got to know, Sindi Mpontshane. The boy on the left of this photograph is Sindi’s son, Khuste.
The picture is part of Rearick’s “Township” series, currently on show at L’Oeil Urbain photography festival in France. “When I met Sindi,” Rearick says, “she was living in Langa in a hostel with about 10 other people, no indoor toilets and running water only in one central location. It was very bleak. In Langa, there’s murder every other day, and nobody cares about it. But Sindi was incredibly welcoming, a survivor, an amazing woman. She was among the first in the townships to have successfully prosecuted her husband for abuse she had suffered.”
Sindi had lived in Langa for maybe 20 years, but eventually she saved enough money to escape to the Western Cape, the countryside, where her children, including Khuste, lived with their grandparents. When Rearick visited her in 2015 she discovered that Sindi had married again and she and her husband had a neat compound with cows and sheep. They were loving life; Khuste and his friend were keen to show Rearick the spring lambs they looked after. “The picture was important for me, because it signified what a lot of my work in South Africa was trying to show: tenderness instead of violence,” Rearick recalls, “but it has become very bittersweet.” The happy ending to Sindi’s story was tragically short lived. In 2018, out of nowhere, Rearick got news that Sindi had been murdered in her home; no motive was ever established.
Anne Rearick’s Township is at L’Oeil Urbain in Corbeil-Essonnes, France until 22 May
