“The End of Nervous Tension”: Apartheid in South Africa

Like countless other photos in the ICP, the photo I chose was startlingly intense and disturbing; taken in black-and-white, almost as if to highlight the tension between the black majority and the white minority under apartheid, the photo depicts a corpse covered by a fragment of newspaper that ironically reads, “This I believe by a South African–What Would You Die For?” The black man’s face is concealed which might indicate how his identity has been lost to a cause that thousands of others have died for. On a smiliar note, the man’s body is limp and lifeless–this implies that the man is a martyr, sacrificed at the altar of racism. At the center of the newspaper lies an image of a rather sinister-looking white man. Perhaps this image represents the human, or inhuman, face of the eugenicist, white-supremacist male who desired the black man’s destruction. The ad on the right side of the newspaper further emphasizes this idea because it is advertising a medicine that supposedly catalyzes the “end of nervous tension.” I inferred that on metaphorical grounds, the “end of nervous tension,” or the end of apartheid, may be brought about by spilling the blood of innocents, white and black alike.