Peter Glendinning On His Photographic Project "Attached to the Soil", Inspired by Mandela

Article written by Fulbrighter Peter Glendinning

In April 1978, the Michigan State University’s Board of Trustees voted to sell all stocks in any
company doing business in apartheid-era South Africa. In September of that same year, I began my academic career at their Department of Art, with that decision’s impact becoming an
important part of my sense of the “DNA” of the university I still serve. 

I first visited South Africa in 1999, supported by MSU’s African Studies Center, to share presentations on photography and professional business practices with students and staff at 3 universities across the country, that had been isolated for many years. It was the last year of
President Nelson Mandela’s term, and I hoped that I would return in the future to see how the
“Rainbow Nation” had evolved. Twenty years later, in 2019, a Fulbright Scholar Award took me back, in the 25th anniversary of Mandela’s inauguration, to collaborate with South African youth and story/portrait subjects over a 7-month period in a project titled Attached to the Soil (ATTS).

Little did I know its outcome would have national and international impact and result in my return to South Africa for exhibits, lectures, further collaborations with students and universities, and lasting friendships, each year from 2022 to 2025. The ATTS project is based on the first words that President Mandela addressed to his fellow South Africans in his 1994 inaugural address, as follows: “To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld,”. His words proposed a beautiful soil-related metaphor to express his sense of a unified nation.

In my Fulbright role 25 years later, I asked South African youth what their soil-related
aspirational metaphors were, and whom they knew who had a story from their life that related
to it. Working collaboratively with our portrait/story subjects from across all 9 provinces, based in the young persons’ individual metaphors, we conducted oral-history interviews and created tableau-location portraits of 50 subjects.

Nelson Mandela University students Chadi Tomolo, Lunga Ncabashe and Nobuhlem Msumza with Peter Glendinning and Dumza Maswana during a portrait session.

Dumza Maswana, a successful singer of both jazz and Xhosa traditional songs, 2019. Photo by Peter Glendinning, with inspiration from the aspirational metaphor of Nobuhle Msumza, a Nelson Mandela University student. Msumza's metaphor for the project was: “Our traditions are shared like the rich soil spread by a river along its path, enriching and binding communities together”.

In 2020, Covid struck and delayed the return of the work for the exhibit, but it gave me more time than I had expected to write stories based on the interviews and create 50 large-format artworks. At 2-feet wide and from 2 to 4-feet long, each work holds the subject’s story in English, Afrikanns, Xhosa, and Zulu, and a photographic portrait along with the youth’s aspirational metaphor.

A Fulbright Specialist grant in 2022 sponsored by the University of Pretoria, with support from MSU, brought both me and the 50 works back to a series of 6 exhibits, one at the University of Pretoria itself and 5 at other universities, galleries and museums. That series included week-long residencies at each university for opening events, workshops, classroom and public presentations, with a donation of the works to their permanent collections as well.

In 2023, the University of Pretoria edition of the 50 works hung for 8 months at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory in Johannesburg, and, in 2024, a 3-month exhibit of the works from the University of the Free State collection was held at the William Humphreys Art Gallery (one of the three national art museums). In 2025, the works from the Nelson Mandela University collection were loaned to the Simon’s Town Museum, launching the Cape Town Photography Festival.

If you are interested in seeing more pieces of the Attached to the Soil project, you can find other examples on this link.

Peter Glendinning with Cape Town Photography Festival community photography workshop learners at the Simon’s Town Museum, 2025.