LEBOHANG KGANYE | KEEP THE LIGHT FAITHFULLY

In Keep the Light Faithfully (2022), Lebohang Kganye  re-imagines western literature of the rarely known and gendered narratives of hundreds of women light keepers from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Kganye searched for women lightkeepers in South Africa to no avail, but she used oral histories and staging to invite new imaginaries. The series faithfully reenacts the oral histories of seven current and former Lighthouse-Keepers, living in some of the most isolated parts of South Africa – along the Western, Northern and Eastern Cape coastlines.

The works implement the act of cutting, folding, pasting and assembling medium or life-sized elements to construct each scene. These moveable paper elements of cardboard cut-outs create the illusion of a theatre set and proposes photography both as practice and object. Each cut-out creates the illusion of an entire world - they look like they could be moved, changed or shifted. The work emphasises the fabricated nature of history and memory: how the visualisation of an event always induces an element of creation, experimentation and error; an on-going construction.

According to Lenore Skomal’s Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter (2010) there was no pension in place for appointed lighthouse keepers, who were always men. When they passed away, or were disabled, their wives, daughters, or unmarried sisters would take over the position and continue to receive the annual salary. By the mid-1800s it was becoming more and more common to have female keepers. By the twentieth century, 211 women had been appointed lighthouse keepers, and twice that number were assistant keepers, frequently daughters or wives. Skomal (2010) focuses on American female lighthouse keeper Ida Lewis of Lime Rock, mentions Kathleen Moore of Fayerweather Island and Grace Darling of the English coast, also a daughter of a lighthouse keeper from the 1800s. The first female lighthouse keeper that history remembers is Hannah Thomas, who lived with her husband at Plymouth Harbor in the late 1700s. When her husband was called to military duty to fight the British in the American Revolution, Hannah was left to tend the lights alone. The history of the forty-five remaining and now fully automated lighthouses along the coastlines of South Africa, dates back to 1824.

Marked by long periods of isolation, the lives of the lightkeepers include dramatic rescues, late night visitors, voyages disrupted by storm tossed seas and gale-force winds, but also the monotonous tasks that frame their lives, “constant repairs of the house, filling out logs that documented the weather, storms, and damages done to the light and pier, record keeping, and ordering of supplies.” Rapid technological developments and advancements are also majorly impacting an already relatively invisible form of labour and public service.