ABSTRACT
Plaatje was a founder member and the first Secretary-General of the South African Native National Congress. which became the African National Congress. In 1913 Plaatje travelled more than 2,000 kilometres across South Africa to record the harsh realities of the lives of his fellow South Africans. Under apartheid, social documentary's function was crucial. At the Culture and Resistance Conference held in Botswana in 1982, Peter McKenzie, 'the first Black person to study photography formally in South Africa', asserted that 'no photographer can lay claim to any individual artistic merit in an oppressed society'. In The Rise and Fall of Apartheid Enwezor wrote that in the 1980s the 'sophisticated network of publishing, distribution, and dissemination', especially of photography, could be seen as a form of political activism and noted that the basis of photographic practice that grew out of this period was one that took its departure from 'the point of view of social documentary rather than photojournalism'.
