ABSTRACT
How was the violence of apartheid coded, resisted, recalled, and even turned into a commodity through its images?1 This chapter seeks to explore this question by following depictions of the ‘Mello-Yello,’ the notorious canary-colored South African police truck, and its khaki armored car cousins the ‘Buffel’ and the ‘Hippo’ on their zigzag routes through recent history. My project was inspired by Miriam Mathabane’s autobiographical description of the terror-filled days of her youth in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township. In what follows, I look beyond ‘the numbers and the rage’ that she describes, in order to consider how the armored cars, the teargas, and the bullets of late apartheid were countered through the mediation of oral and visual culture. Especially during the height of the struggle period from roughly 1976 to 1994, songs and visual art negotiated the real violence of apartheid. Black township residents whose neighborhoods were harassed by the army and the police sought to shield themselves from the effects of living under siege, through a complex process of internalization and domestication of the outward signs of the apartheid war machine. As I will show, also, this displacement of street violence onto images in visual culture and song was not immune to cooption, inversion, or commoditization.
