Gavin Jantjes
Produced in the style of a children’s activity book, A South African Colouring Book offers readers a radically simplified view of apartheid, reducing its everyday absurdities and cruelties to instructions like “Colour this Whites Only” and “Colour this Labour Dirt Cheap”.
Images for A South African Colouring Book were sourced from the archives of the African National Congress and the International Defense and Aid Fund, and several of the photographs come directly from Ernest Cole’s seminal photobook House of Bondage, also included in the exhibition Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! at A4.
b.1948, Cape Town
Gavin Jantjes, who left South Africa in 1970 on a DAAD scholarship for the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany, was exiled from South Africa as a result of the publication of A South African Colouring Book (1974–1975). Shocked by his German peers’ inability to understand the reality of apartheid, the book relays information graphically and simply, as if – in Jantjes’ words – “one were explaining something to a child.”