The Origins And 55-Year Pictorial History Of Roshnee (1967-2022) is a new book and pictorial history that will be released. Put together by former teacher, mayor and photographer Yunus Chamda, the book aims to showcase the history of a community through photographs. The Daily Vox team spoke to Chamda about the work required to pull off the project.
Chamda, who was a history and art teacher, always had a deep interest in community history. In particular, he has a deep interest in Roshnee – the community he lives in and grew up in. Roshnee is a small town in Vereeniging. It was established by the Group Areas Act as a segregated housing development for Indians living in the Vereeniging in the late 1960s. The pictorial history and coffee table book put together by Chamda traces the history and development of the book.
Chamda said he would always love hearing stories of the past told at social gatherings and events. That fascination is what is at the root of this project. The project being the collection, curation and inventorisation of hundreds of pictures from the 1960s until the present day.
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The pictures tell the story of the area from its struggles to its triumphs and everything in between. Most of the images were taken by Chamda himself over the years. But he also got a lot of help from the community. Over 150 families and individuals provided images from family photographs as well as negatives and slides.
“The storytelling ability of photographs – I always found that very powerful,” said Chamda. Already in the 1990s, Chamda along with his friends, Essop Gathoo and Haroun Pochee spoke about putting together a history of the area. They didn’t know how they would go about it. But they most certainly knew that they wanted to record the history of the area.
It was in 2007 when Chamda finally settled on the idea of a pictorial history of Roshnee. The lifestyle show Eastern Mosaic came to Roshnee in 2007 to profile the area and they started by visiting Chamda and his history project. While he worked through his collection of over 240 000 images for the show, the idea slowly grew.
“It has certainly been a very long road,” said Chamda. For the past seven years, he has been working intensely to ensure the book was ready for the 55th anniversary of the area. Part of what made the process so long was transferring the analogue images and digitising them. He had to digitise his own collection as well as photographs he received from community members.
Chamda recalls receiving a collection of photographs from someone in the community that had over 2000 photographs in different formats. With the negatives and slide film, he had to scan those with special equipment which was an incredibly time-consuming process.
“I always say that if you want to know where you’re going, you certainly have to know your points of anchor. You can’t determine your direction if you only have one point of anchor… But if you have the past and the present, you can somehow see the direction the community is going in the future,” Chamda said. It’s that passion which lies at the heart of the project. Despite the time consuming nature of it and the various difficulties encountered, Chamda wanted to preserve and present the history of his community.
One of the anecdotes Chamda had which served to emphasise why he took on the project was about a photograph of a man who was a radio technician. In the photograph, the man is surrounded by all his radios. At face value, it seems like a simple photograph. It is the story behind it that makes it powerful. The man taught many of his nephews the trade and now they own very successful businesses of their own.
The book is divided in several chapters and importantly starts with the origins and establishment of the area. It has sections on education, business, sport, politics and art amongst several others.
The book will be launched on February 3 and 4 in Roshnee. Get the latest updates – follow Roshnee 55 Book on Social Media:
https://bit.ly/Roshnee55Instagram
https://bit.ly/Roshnee55Facebook
https://bit.ly/Roshnee55Youtube
