An Entire Childhood
Lidudumalingani on his kindred.
Boys, animals, masculinity, landscape. This is an entire childhood, framed and condensed into pixels. Before any village boy knows themselves, they know the contours of the landscape, every undulating detail of it, and how to be a man. In each of these three photographs, there is a boy, an animal, a childhood. The first picture is taken by Rachel Seidu, in Jangaringari, Gombe, Nigeria. I have never met the boy in the picture, but I know him, I know the cows in the background, I know the way he stands, the way he is dressed, the clothes slung over him, rather than being worn.
The other two photographs don’t have young boys in the frame, they’re on the fringes of it, instead, there is a picture of a sheep with its head pinned against the ground, and in the other, its wool being sheared with an old red hand shear. At first glance, at second, even at last, the two pictures don’t seem to be about young boys, much less about masculinity, but they are. Shearing sheep is an essential skill for young boys, without it, one is not boy enough. It’s violent, manly, difficult. The young boy must run after the sheep in the garden, violently pull it around the garden by its wall, into the shed where it would be sheared, and then pin it down to the floor with their knee, whilst the seizer cuts the thick fair of the sheep. Though there are no young boys in this photograph, their presence is heavy, and permeates. One cannot look at them and not see it. One cannot look at the sheep, pinned to the floor, with its eyes wide open, frightened, immobile, and not see a young boy trying to be a man.
Now that you know all of this, now that you see beyond the frame, these three photographs are not very different, they have the same white washed colour hues, the same lanky boy trying to be a man, a fraught friendship with animals, negotiated with love and violence. ¶
About the Contributor
Lidudumalingani is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He lives in Johannesburg and works as a Commissioning Editor at Multichoice/Showmax. See more of his work on his website, and follow him on Instagram.
This is the #7 edition of KINDRED, a series on TENDER PHOTO. Each contributor selects a photograph from their family or personal album, pairs it with another photograph from the Tender Photo archive, and writes a short reflection on why they have selected both photographs. The idea is to find an analogy between two photographs that might be similar or dissimilar, but connected to an experience, emotion, or idea.
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