What does it mean, practically, to engage in African scholarship in schools and communities in rural KwaZulu-Natal in relation to HIV and AIDS? How do university researchers draw on the voices of the people who most crucially must be heard in debates about curriculum and care, and how can the research itself do more than just draw on the voices, but make sure that those voices are heard? In the case of rural communities, how do groups such as teachers and community health workers, both of whom have a great deal to contribute to the issues around challenges and solutions in working with young people, hear each other? These were some of the issues that our research team made up of researchers from Education, Social Work and Public Health were concerned with when we first proposed the Learning Together project to the National Research Foundation, a study which set out to explore the ways in which participatory methodologies could contribute to having community health care workers and teachers, each responsible for the same young people but from different vantage points see each other’s work and “learn together”.

Our approach, which we believe contributes to an ongoing investigation into ‘what does it make to do African research’, relies heavily on visual methodologies. Drawing on the burgeoning body of work on photo-voice, performance, video documentary and other visual approaches, we decided that the most appropriate way for teachers and community health care workers to come to see the work of the other, and to share concerns was to give everyone a ‘point and shoot’ camera so that all the participants could not only ‘see for themselves’ but also show others how they see the issues of HIV and AIDS in their communities. In the study, the teachers and health care workers explored two pivotal questions through their photographs: What are some of the key issues that affect young people? How are young people involved in solutions?

The photographs in the collection, numbering more than 500, serve in their sepia expressiveness, as poignant narratives of race, gender, life and death: we see a bus waiting to pick up community members on their way to yet another funeral, pictures of AIDS Awareness Days in a school, a health care worker walking past a few cows and into the mountains every day to visit a patient, a group of white people sitting in the open space of the Clinic. We are shown an 18 year old boy who has just learned that he is HIV positive, and a young girl asking to be photographed on the day her father died, and so on. Their comments about the photographs are also illuminating:

I took a picture of this bus because it represents for me what AIDS is doing to our community. This bus is taking a group to a funeral. Another AIDS-related funeral”

“I took this picture in a beauty salon. The chairs are empty. You would expect to see pretty young women sitting under these hair-dryers but they are not there. They are sick and can’t go out. Or they are dead.”

Jean Stewart
Relebohile Moletsane
Nadine DeLange
Claudia Mitchell