The Exchange Project

Vanley Burke
Well the story was I was on a bus once going from Johannesburg to Weinburg as I did daily, and on the bus on this occasion was this gentleman, who, despite my efforts to not show where I was from, he recognised that I was not South African and he wanted to know what my tongue was. And I said ‘I’m English’. He said ‘what is your tongue?’; I said ‘English’. He says ‘I know,
I am from Malawi’, I think he said, or somewhere up north, ‘but I speak Zulu, I speak English, I speak so-and-so’. And he said ‘what is your tongue’, not going to accept that I was from England. So I said ‘I come from England’, and he had no concept of England or where it is so I tried to identify it by saying the Queen and drop a few other lines that might denote where England was and he had no idea of England and he kept asking ‘well what is your tongue?’ and I tried to say ‘well, I’m from Jamaica’ or ‘and I live in England’; America came into it and he said, ‘oh, you’re one of the Negro people’.

But you see what people tend to forget as well is that the struggle within the black community does not only exist within small pockets. This struggle is almost gigantic in the sense that Africa becomes the core and the Diaspora, people from Africa to the Caribbean, to the Americas, to England or wherever, they are if you like from one family, and therefore if something happens in South Africa it’s happening here.

And one of the things in the 1985 riots, I remember noticing and focusing on it, I think it’s in one of the photographs, is they wrote 'South Africa must be free'.

The similarity between the treatment as photographers, because there was I, a photographer, an international one exposing South Africa, and here you were, a South African who was exposed to struggle within their environment, and they sort of welcomed it because you were if you like representing part of their struggle, not necessarily in what you photograph but the fact that you come from a land of oppression, so they're bound to welcome you.

George Hallett
I was a comrade.

Vanley Burke
Yes.