Masixole Feni: Drain on Our Dignity

Masixole Feni is a winner of the Ernest Cole Award for his project Drain on Our Dignity. As a photojournalist, Feni spends a lot of time photographing service delivery strikes and protest in the townships. Often the images that make it into the newspapers are only of the looting and burnings. Renting a backyard room in an informal settlement, Feni was troubled by this kind of portrayal of the lack of service delivery and the life of the marginalised. As he says, I live at the back of an RDP house in Mfuleni on the Cape Flats. I experience issues like poor sanitation, access to clean water and the flooding first hand. Photographing the lack of sanitation was not pleasant for him, but he did not want a photographer from outside the community telling their stories while he watched on. That too would be a Drain on Our Dignity and thats what inspired this project. Drain on Our Dignity echoes the ground-breaking images produced by Ernest Cole in the early 1960s, showing black life under apartheid. It is a sensitive and honest look at what lack of services is, what it does to a community and what it does to a people. Without the screaming, fighting or burning these captivating images compel the reader to look at what is happening in the Cape Town townships.

• Book condition: Good
• Dimensions: 25 cm x 24 cm x 1,5 cm
• Weight: 500 g
• Paperback: 97 Pages