Denial and Challenge of Modernity: Suffering, Recognition, and Dignity in Photographs by Sammy Baloji

Abstract

Working for wages, for a person or an institution which controls not only working conditions—particularly the time and space in which work takes place—but also the impact of the work on society, was for the great majority of colonized peoples the mandatory passage to modernity. In Belgian Congo until the end of the 1950s, salaried work was the sole means to accessing modernity because of the legislation barring “natives” from owning individual property. The dispossession of control over time and space while passing from agricultural or handicraft activities to salaried work, especially industrial work, is typical of the three historical phases of accumulation: primitive, capitalist, and soviet or colonial socialism. Each time, in the figurative sense for the majority, but in a literal sense for many, death (a “social” death in most cases) precedes the “birth” of the new man, a “modern” being and agent of a society shaped by its political actors that is radically different from the former society that nevertheless remains host to the new one. This transformation is violent in every way for people and for the society, becoming a source of deep suffering that traumatizes social memory, particularly during and at the end of socialist and colonialist transitions, because they are more abrupt than the capitalist transition.