Abstract

This thesis examines South African artist Zanele Muholi’s self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) (2012–ongoing) as an alternative archive that inserts Black
Queer bodies into South Africa’s visual culture. Through over four hundred black-and-white self-portraits, Muholi reclaims agency over the historical erasure and misrepresentation of Black Queer individuals in South African archives. Their work challenges colonial and apartheid-era visual legacies by engaging with ethnographic photography, identity documentation, and institutionalized archives that have historically dehumanized Black South Africans and excluded Queer narratives. Situating Somnyama Ngonyama within the framework of Black, Queer, and archival practices, this thesis argues that Muholi’s work functions as a self-archive, challenging the rigid, exclusionary structures of South African records of Black
Queer experiences. By foregrounding the body as an archive of personal and collective experiences, Muholi’s series offers a sensorial and subjective mode of archiving that resists colonial and heteropatriarchal knowledge production. Ultimately, I argue that understood as a self-archive, Somnyama Ngonyama functions as an activist tool to insert the presence of Black Queer individuals in South Africa’s visual landscape.