Cole organized House of Bondage into fifteen chapters exploring aspects of life under apartheid, including living conditions, commuting, jobs, health care, religion, and education. In the chapter “Education for Servitude,” for example, Cole included photographs of hungry students, exhausted teachers, and parents encountering bureaucratic hurdles, as well as overcrowded and underfunded schools. In his corresponding text, Cole described how the inadequate education of Black children in South Africa fit into a larger system of oppression in which they were largely limited to working as domestic and physical laborers.
Gallery label from 2023