House Of Bondage

First published in the United States in 1967 and in Britain in 1968, House of Bondage presented images from South Africa that shocked the world. The young African photographer had left his country at 26 to find an audience for his stunning exposure of the system of racial dominance known as apartheid. In 185 photographs, Cole's book showed from the vantage point of the oppressed how the system closely regulated and controlled the lives of the black majority. He saw every aspect of this oppression with a searching eye and a passionate heart. House of Bondage is a milestone in the history of documentary photography, even though it was immediately banned in South Africa. In a Chicago Tribune review of 1967 Robert Cromie described it as "one of the frankest books ever done on South Africa--with photographs by a native of that country who would be most unwise to attempt to return for some years." Cole died in exile in 1990 as the regime was collapsing, never knowing when his portrait of his homeland would finally find its way home. Not until the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg mounted enlarged pages of the book on its walls in 2001 were his people able to view these pictures, which are as powerful and provocative today as they were 50 years ago.

The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.

None but those who resided in the South during the time of slavery can realize the terrible punishments that were visited upon the slaves. Virtue and self-respect were denied them.-Octavia Albert in The House of BondageWith a fiery, righteous rage, former slave Octavia Albert set about, after Emancipation, collecting the true stories of those that "terrible institution" affected most. That raw material gave rise to The House of Bondage, a refutation to Uncle Tom's Cabin, and an answer to other works of literature of the period that purported to show the horror of slavery even though their authors had never set foot in the South. First published in 1890, this is an important example of a sadly small genre: 19th-century literature by African-American women.With its straightforward and heartbreaking litany of cruelty at the hands of slaveowners, families forever divided, and the harsh effects of particularly hard labor, this is an unforgettable work that should be read by every American who thinks he knows his nation's history.Teacher and social activist OCTAVIA V. ROGERS ALBERT (1853-c.1890) was born into slavery in Georgia; after Emancipation, she studied at Atlanta University.

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Setting out to correct the inaccuracies of most previously written accounts of slavery, teacher and social activist Octavia Albert presents the personal narratives of former slaves, along with her own incisive commentary. Like many antebellum slave narratives, her early interviews depictcruel punishments, divided families, and the debilitating effects of unusually harsh labor. But as Albert came to see herself as a public advocate for social change, her focus shifted to the condition and progress of former slaves. The later interviews reflect her insistence that every Christianpersonally take some responsibility for slavery's legacies and lessons.

Slave rebellions have been studied in considerable detail, but this volume examines other patterns of slave resistance, concentrating on runaway slaves and the communities some of them formed. These essays show us who the runaways were, suggest when and where they went, and who harboured them.

"Ernest Cole (1940-1990) believed passionately in his mission to tell the world in photographs what it was like and what it meant to be black under apartheid. He identified intimately with his own people in photographs of unsurpassed strength and gravitas. With imaginative daring, courage and compassion, he portrayed the full range of experience of black people as they negotiated their lives through the insanity of apartheid and its racist laws and oppression. In order to publish his book, House of Bondage, Cole went into exile. Immediately after it came out in 1967, it was banned in South Africa and this major critique of apartheid has hardly been seen in his own country since. Cole died in New York in 1990 after more than 23 years of painful exile, never having returned to South Africa and leaving no known negatives and few prints of his monumental work. Tio fotografer, an association of photographers with whom Cole worked from 1969 to 1975 when his place of residence was Stockholm, received a collection of his prints and these were later donated to the Hasselblad Foundation. These extremely rare prints, most of them made by Cole himself and most never previously exhibited, form the core of this exhibition and book. This book tells the story of Ernest Cole's life, both in his own words and through the reminiscences and writings of those people who knew him personally and professionally." -- Back cover.

"White slave traffic : presentment of the Additional Grand Jury for the January Term of the Court of General Sessions in the County of New York, in the matter of the investigation as to the alleged existence in the County of New York of an organized traffic in women for immoral purposes / John D. Rockefeller, Jr., foreman": pages 468-480.