A Stranger At Home
Words & Photography by KB Mpofu
I was asked to produce a photo-essay on food culture among the white community in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city. Photography is all about access, and for this assignment, getting access was going to be a challenge because I’m not a regular at most of the spots that I had planned to shoot in. This access would instead have to come from the permission of mostly white managers, owners and patrons.
The way Bulawayo is set up, racism—traceable to the colonial days and their offshoot—and classism, still exist and the dining and food scene in the city are testament to this. There are spaces whose patrons are mostly white or Black middle-class folks. It is in the area that is generally termed as eastern suburbs, where you’ll find the fancy restaurants, pizzerias, and pubs.
When I arrived at The Bulawayo Club, which carries a colonial aesthetic and rich history, I asked to see the manager, Brian (a Black man), and introduced myself, and my story. He said it sounded exciting but he was busy preparing for an event, and I should come the next day. He even gave me his number. That was the last I saw of him. Calls and texts went unanswered, and finally, when he did answer my call, he asked me to come the following week. I got the impression that he may have been okay with the idea, but perhaps didn’t have enough power to authorise my request. I totally understood. Zimbabwe is not easy and jobs aren’t easy to come by.
The Pick n Pay at Zonkizizwe, a large grocery store, in Bradfield was my next stop. After waiting to see the branch manager, a Black man, for about 15 minutes, I was put on the phone with him and I explained my story. This time around, I got a firm “No”. One of the guys who was sanitizing customers as they entered the shop recognized me on my way out, and he promised to get me the number of someone more senior, a regional manager perhaps. Nothing materialized.
I checked out Roosters, another popular eatery at Zonkizizwe. The white woman I spoke to said she wasn’t sure and she’d have to check with her boss. When the boss came to see me, I knew from the expression on her face that I wasn’t going to win. “No, unfortunately we have to respect the privacy of our customers. I can’t go desk by desk and say this... man wants to take pictures of you while you eat,” she said, straight faced. You could swear she almost said “This Black man!”
From these experiences, it was clear that I had to change my approach. I needed to find owners or managers of these restaurants, get their contact numbers and speak to them first. This is exactly what I did with Banff, Food Lover’s and Earth Café where I got the images in this essay. I namedropped at Middys, the coffee shop and restaurant on Josiah Tongogara Street and it worked. Turns out the photographer Jeremy Kufuwa has, in the past, done some work with the owner of Middys, Allyson Lasker, and I used his name as a reference. She was very kind and spoke to me for about 20 minutes, about the state of the city, politics. And, more importantly, she gave me the go ahead to shoot, and also offered me lunch on the house.
Ryan Wharam, the manager at Banff, was amazing, so was Bongani Bhebhe and his team at Brooks. In fact, it was Bongani who linked me up with Jacqueline Pikoulis at Earth Café. Jacque was more than happy to give me access to her space and was kind enough to speak to her customers. “We have a photographer here who is working on a story for a magazine in New York, and if you want to be famous, he’s your guy!” This worked well and I ended up having good conversations with a couple of the people that I photographed. Larry at Food Lover’s was also very kind.
How would this assignment have turned out if I was a white photographer? Honestly, there would have been probably fewer hurdles, and less explaining to do. People, Black or white, don’t react the same way to a Black photographer, compared to a white one. Navigating these white eating spaces was an unnerving but, ultimately, an important learning experience for me as a photographer. In my everyday work as a press photographer, I am used to dealing with government officials, farmers, traditional leaders, charity and aid agency workers, so this assignment for me was important because it was getting out of my comfort zone and it required a bit more patience than usual. Hopefully there will be more of these experiences in future.
