Drummies
South Africa, within the Western Cape and Gauteng Provinces
As a young, South African female photographer it was important to me that I could depict the Majorettes I worked with as empowered and dignified; I wanted to challenge stereotypical ideas of young women as victims. This series was created over a period of a number of years. I really enjoy working over an extended period as I wanted to be able to spend time working within the communities of majorettes to learn more about their world and get to know the different teams and individuals. I have kept in touch with several of the girls and coaches, and it has been amazing to watch them grow up into self-assured young women.
(Alice Mann)
Centurion, Tshwane, 2018.
Majorettes, Goodwood, Cape Town, 2018.
Cape Town, 2017.
“Creating the images was a collaborative process. I wanted to make a space where the girls felt comfortable to tell me exactly what they wanted. They are natural performers, and they felt good in their uniforms and empowered within the group with their teammates.”
Grammar of Belonging
Text by Marta Franceschini
[…]
The Drummies’ uniforms are impossible objects. Glittering, they reference British colonial military bands while asserting Afro-feminist space, promising social mobility that post-apartheid structures deny. In mainstream South African culture, being a “drummie” evokes a time that no longer exists. Yet in marginalised communities, the practice retains a competitive intensity that contradicts the idea of residual folklore. Mann’s photographs inhabit this temporal fracture, an entanglement: the impossibility of disentangling colonial from post-colonial, discipline from emancipation. Bodies align in formation while the satin fabric captures light in ways the colonial original could not have envisaged. It is pure, un-ironic aspiration: that “good life” that Lauren Berlant diagnoses as late-capitalist cruelty.
The girls voluntarily submit to a discipline that could be read as internalisation of patriarchal and colonial norms. Yet, this discipline produces competence, embodied experience of excellence. Band competitions are not simulacra but events where precision, coordination, virtuosity are measured. Formation uniformity does not erase the individual but places them within a collective where personal success is inseparable from the group’s success. The Drummies create a space-time where conditions are already surpassed, if only for the duration of the performance. Counterfactual agency: performing alternative worlds within adverse everyday life. The paradox is that this temporary sovereignty is built through the appropriation of colonial power symbols that continue to marginalise them. The costumes demand financial investment difficult for many families. Hours of practice are hours taken from other activities. Yet this alternative economy—where capital is cultural, social, affective— offers returns denied by the post-apartheid market. The sparkling fabric is materialised relational infrastructure.
[…]
“They would tell me what do to, deciding who would be photographed with whom, and often with a group of girls standing with me behind the camera, instructing the girls in front what do to. I tried to make images that reflected how they saw themselves, and how they wanted to be seen.”
This is not creative appropriation of global flows but radical hybridisation, where the dichotomies local/ global, authentic/contaminated cease to hold explanatory power. The photographs make the group visible to audiences beyond their originating communities. The subjects are already in performance mode, already aware of the gaze. Photography does not introduce the external but intensifies it. Yet speaking of “appropriation” is reductive. The photographed subjectivities negotiate the terms of representation, using image circulation to claim recognition. The image functions like costume. Every circulating photograph makes that practice more visible, capable of attracting new participants, of incorporating new genealogies. In a cultural landscape still governed by fantasies of authenticity that deny the constitutive hybridity of all traditions, these bodies—excessive, recognisable, stylised—propose a different grammar of belonging. One in which tradition is continuously produced rather than safeguarded, community is enacted through ritual practice, and identity takes the form of a costume worn with the knowledge that it has already been worn, and will be worn again, otherwise, inevitably, by those who follow.
Discover the full Travel story in Muse Issue 67.
