ILVY NJIOKIKTJIEN
STORY BEHIND THE SHOT
THE KISS
Under Apartheid, interracial relationships were forbidden…
Post-Apartheid, the ‘born-frees’ are the first South African generation permitted to love and marry anyone regardless of their race. Ilvy met this couple, Wilmarie Deetlefs (24) and Zakithi Buthelezi (27) in Johannesburg. “They met on the Tinder dating app and they were very much in love,” she says. “He is from quite a wealthy family, his grandfather was in parliament with Nelson Mandela. Wilmarie is from a smaller town and a conservative family.” When Ilvy first met the couple Wilmarie had not told her parents about her new boyfriend. “He did and they loved her,” she continues. “I took this photo while they were on a night out in Johannesburg. They were kissing and that to me tells a lot about the way things should be, or about the way Nelson Mandela wanted to see his country.”
On May 10, 1994 Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president, thereby bringing an end to Apartheid, a system of institutionalized racial segregation that determined people’s rights by the colour of their skin.
The realities of segregation meant ‘Blacks’ and ‘Coloureds’ had to carry legal passes in ‘White’ areas; schools, workplaces, transport and even beaches were divided by race. White minority rule was guaranteed by denying the vote to the non-white majority. But all that changed when the vote was finally granted to all adults regardless of race and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) party won a resounding majority in South Africa’s first fully democratic elections. In the 25 years since that momentous day, the first generation of free-born South Africans have come of age in a
