Before it became a photograph.

This photograph was taken in 1963 near Oniipa, in Ovamboland, a region in what is now northern Namibia. by Ilse Steinhoff. At the time, the area was under South African administration, shaped by colonial rule, segregation, and the early structures that would later formalize into apartheid policies. Daily life unfolded within a political system that regulated movement, labor, and visibility.

The image shows women gathered around cooking pots, preparing food collectively in open space. The work is communal, organized, and routine. There is no sense of performance or event. This is everyday life — structured by shared responsibility, proximity, and long-established cultural practice.

During this period, very little everyday life in African communities was photographed, and even less was photographed with attention to ordinary domestic and social structures. Colonial imagery overwhelmingly focused on administration, labor extraction, or ethnographic typologies, rather than lived experience. Women’s work, in particular, was rarely documented as a social system rather than a background activity.

Photographs like this one are therefore significant not because they depict an extraordinary moment, but because they record the ordinary. They preserve how life was organized, how space was shared, and how labor was distributed at a time when such realities were largely absent from the visual historical record.

The photographer, Ilse Steinhoff, worked against this absence by documenting daily life without spectacle. Her images do not dramatize or simplify. Instead, they provide visual evidence of cultural continuity under political constraint.

Before it became a photograph, this scene was simply part of life. What gives the image lasting importance is that it now stands as one of the few visual records of everyday existence in Ovamboland during the late colonial period — a record made at a time when most of the world was not looking.

Click Me