Portraits of Resilience: A Review of the Ngilima Collection

Abstract

The Ngilima collection is a unique photographic archive comprising 5600 negatives dating from the 1950s and ‘60s, made by two black photographers, Ronald Ngilima and his son Thorence. The negatives plunge us into the world of the Benoni Location, a mixed-race township in the East Rand (present-day Ekurhuleni, Gauteng), a few years before its destruction by the apartheid government in the mid-1960s. This short review attempts to describe the trajectory of this collection, from its inception to its integration in a public university archive in 2012. It also describes the potential of such a collection, both in terms of research material for historians and as a “site of memory” for the ex-residents of the long-gone Benoni Location.