The Bang-Bang Club

by Greg Marinovich

  As I approached the entrance of Nancefield Hostel, deep inside Soweto, I was confronted by dozens of armed, belligerent Zulu warriors for the very first time. They wore red headbands and were armed with a variety of machete-like pangas, clubs and improvised spears as they stood on the raised railway tracks next to the hostel, shouting insults and threats across an overgrown graveyard. On the far side of the cemetery was a large group of residents, presumably ANC supporters. Among them were several journalists. I did not see much point in going across there; even if I did get pictures, they would be tough to sell to newspapers who had their own, probably more proficient, photographers on the scene. I knew enough to know that the Zulus were seen as the villains of the piece by most of the secondand third-generation township residents from a dozen other South African tribes. I also knew that the massive, decrepit dormitory complexes housing tens of thousands of migrant workers from the rural, tribal homelands across the country were undergoing a brutal purge of all non-Zulus.

  The conflict was more complex than just Zulus versus The Rest. In ‘Zululand’, a civil war between Inkatha-supporting Zulus and ANC-SUPPORTING Zulus had been raging for a decade, before it moved to the cities and towns around Johannesburg - the Reef, as it is known. Inkatha worked hard at portraying themselves as the sole representatives of the Zulu people, a lie that was propagated by the government and sympathetic media. But I was entirely innocent as to what these facts meant in reality; they were just words in news reports and I naïvely decided to try and get pictures from the Inkatha side.

  The warriors were surprised to see me there and not with the other journalists, but seemed to decide I was no threat. They continued to do their mock charges, leaping up and down, as their traditional war cry of ‘Usuthu!’ rang in my ears. After a few minutes, the warriors tired of taunting their enemies and returned to the hostel. I followed the men into one of the long dormitory blocks, where we sat on cement benches at a cement table in the communal kitchen and eating-room. The tangy smell of the traditional sour grain beer being passed around in a plastic jar added to the acrid stench of the cramped quarters. The windows were grimy, and except for some scoured aluminium cooking pots, everything seemed dirty.

  The hostels had been designed for temporary occupation by black migrants from the rural areas, whose movement, employment and rights to residence were controlled by a series of laws enacted from the 1920s onwards. Hostels were for single men. This is not to say that the men who lived there were necessarily unmarried, but simply that they were not allowed to bring their wives or families to live with them. The laws of apartheid allowed them to stay in urban areas only as long as they were gainfully employed. When their labour was no longer needed, they had to return to their homelands. Under the pass laws more than 17 million black people were prosecuted from 1916 to 1981. The apartheid dream was to force most blacks, 80 per cent of the population, to be legal citizens of the nominally independent ethnic homelands squashed into 13 per cent of the nation’s territory, so that the rest of South Africa’s vast, rich lands could be enjoyed by a white minority that conveniently employed blacks from the captive labour pool in the homelands.

  The hostels were austere structures, neglected by the municipality and by tenants alike. Their architecture imposed a claustrophobic proximity within, and isolation and distance without.

  They were basically dormitory quadrangles with contiguous single-storey concrete-block lodgings forming the outer perimeter. Enter a typical one, and the dirt and neglect assaulted your senses. Raw sewage from blocked and broken pipes spilled on to the ground. Uncollected garbage and dead dogs rotted unattended.

  The communal ablution blocks were not maintained and broken toilets rose from reeking pools in stalls that had never had doors. The cold-water showers had no doors either, so that those shitting could pass the time by watching those washing. There was no heating, even though temperatures dropped below freezing in winter. In summer, the poorly ventilated rooms were stifling and the stench unbearable.

  Each hostel had only one entrance that led to the dormitories. Few windows had glass panes and many were covered with plastic, cardboard or corrugated iron. To each side, a door led into an openplan sleeping-room meant to be shared by four men, but often as many as 16 were crammed in. Each person had perhaps 1.8 by 1.5 metres of space in which to sleep, but even that was often shared as the beds were occupied in turns by shift-workers. Clothing hung from a length of wire strung above the beds; grey steel lockers stored food, pots and a few smaller items. There were no ceilings, just the underside of a corrugated iron or untreated asbestos roof, often in disrepair. When the fighting forced the township Zulus who were loyal to Inkatha to seek refuge in the hostels, entire families crowded in, worsening the hostels’ already unhygienic conditions.

  No provision was made for entertainment, unless you counted the ubiquitous beer hall run by the municipality. Enterprising residents usually set up a rough stall to sell parts of an animal slaughtered somewhere in the hostel, while others tried to make a living by converting their rooms into shebeens - informal, often illegal, taverns - where clear beer in quart bottles and sorghum beer in paper cartons was sold and consumed. Drunkenness was commonplace, and the Inkatha men that I was sitting with inside the hostel were getting drunk.

  Suddenly, a piercing, excited whistling echoed from somewhere deep in the massive hostel complex. Everyone jumped up and many began running towards the noise. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing, it’s nothing,’ a man answered, as he ran towards the sound, carrying sharpened iron rods and a cardboard shield. I followed another man carrying a piece of steel piping, white paint scuffed and peeling off in places. He paused now and then to blow into the pipe, emitting a thin trumpet-like sound. Was this a call to battle, I wondered? We came to a halt outside an undistinguished dormitory, where a score of men armed with sticks, assegais (spears), sharpened rods and pangas gathered before a white-painted steel door. Some tried to peer cautiously through the windows, shying back as the curtains twitched. ‘Vula! Vula!’ They were demanding that whoever was inside open the door. But there was no response. When they tried to force the door open, it remained stubbornly shut. The door seemed not to be locked, but the person inside appeared to be holding the handle up to prevent the men outside thrusting their way in.

  The mood outside the door seemed strangely jovial. The men did not seem too aggressive, except when they shouted, ‘Vula!’ with an explosive expulsion of breath on the first syllable. They smiled at each other and at me: ‘There is a Xhosa inside. He has been shooting at us,’ explained one. I had not heard a single gunshot in the time I had been at the hostel, but I felt that this was not the time to point this out.

  Slowly, the game turned serious. The men crowded at the door, trying to force their way in. The door gave and swayed slowly inwards, only to be jammed shut again. The contest was slow and deliberate, the strength of the men outside equalled by an unseen force within, as if the door had a powerful spring holding it shut. Eventually the door was pried open long enough for one Zulu to squeeze in. The door slammed shut after him. What was going on inside? The door continued to resist the men outside, but then another warrior managed to slip through. Once again, the door slammed shut after him. Then another warrior managed to slip in. The man inside was clearly weakening. A fourth man pushed through, yet there was still only silence from within.

  What grim battle was taking place inside, I could hardly imagine. Then the door was pulled open from the inside and a tall man with a woollen scarf wrapped like a turban around his head raced out, waving a broom. His eyes were wide open and wild, looking directly into mine, from just feet away, but there was no comprehension, no connection, just a desperate attempt to escape. His shoulders were pulled straight back and his knees pumping high as he burst through the men outside the door. ‘Maybe he can make it,’ I thought.

  The Zulus and I took off after him, a pack hunting its terrified prey. After just a few doz
en steps he went down, but I did not see why or how. The attackers were instantly around him in a tight, voiceless circle, stabbing, slashing, hitting. My ears picked out the slithering, whispery sound of steel entering flesh, the solid thud of the heavy fighting sticks crushing the bone of his skull. These were sounds I had never heard before, but they made sickening sense, as if this were exactly the noise a roughly sharpened, rusty iron rod should make when pushed deep into a human torso. The victim’s body quivered each time he was hit and jerked spasmodically when a jagged spear blade was tugged from the resisting flesh.

  I was one of the circle of killers, shooting with a wide-angle lens just an arm’s length away, much too close. I was horrified, screaming inside my head that this could not be happening. But I steadily checked light readings and switched between cameras loaded with black-and-white and colour, rapidly advancing the film frame by frame. I was as aware of what I was doing as a photographer as I was of the rich scent of fresh blood, and the stench of sweat from the men next to me.

  Some time during those minutes, the man on the floor passed from living to dead and the blows slowed from the frenzy of killing to a sadistic punishment he could no longer feel. Not everyone was silent; the man with the home-made horn I had followed through the hostel blew monotonously into his pipe, emitting a coarse, unearthly sound. It was not a call to battle, I now understood, but a celebration of death.

  ‘Mlungu shoota!’ one of the dozen killers exclaimed as they finally took note that I was taking pictures. The men sprang away, but within seconds they would surely realize that I was a defenceless witness to the murder. Fear swept over me. I prepared myself to do anything to survive: I thought of kicking the dead man and calling him a Xhosa dog. I was even prepared to spit on the corpse. I knew I would be capable of desecrating the body to survive.

  ‘Lungile, ai problem!’ I called out in pidgin Zulu, surprised that my voice sounded calm as I tried to reassure them. Their attention returned to the body and in desperation I tried to ingratiate myself: ‘Who was he anyway?’

  ‘He was a Xhosa, he was shooting at us, a spy!’ said one of the men. I readily agreed, quick to seize this chance to justify the killing, to save myself. The killers were now treating the corpse with what I would later realize was the customary delicacy that Zulus display around dead bodies - to touch the dead is to be spiritually polluted. One of them struggled to go through the dead man’s trouser pockets using the tips of two spears. He fished a green identity book out of a side pocket and opened the pages. Two or three others gathered over the worn book that would reveal the dead man’s tribe, and - in their minds - his political allegiance: ‘Ah, a Pondo - he deserved to die,’ one said.

  The dead man was not, after all, a Xhosa, not a member of the ethnic group that dominated the political leadership of the ANC. He was a Pondo, whose ancestral homeland lay between that of the Zulus and the Xhosas along South Africa’s east coast. Many were culturally more Zulu than Xhosa, and some supported Inkatha. But all that mattered was that he was not a Zulu (and in this instance, read ‘Zulu’ as ‘Inkatha-supporting Zulu’) and therefore an enemy. My mind was in turmoil, I tried not to think of what I had seen or what I had done.

  The killers rapidly lost interest in the corpse and drifted away. I began the long walk out of the hostel compound. Inside the dormitory where the terrified Pondo had hidden, several Zulus were searching for the gun, but there was none to be found. Two men with red headbands presented themselves to me, posing shoulder to shoulder, and demanded: ‘Shoota, baas, shoota us!’ I took the picture, gave a queasy grin and walked on. I feared I couldn’t maintain my calm any more, sure the shock was too apparent on my face for my safety. I concentrated on the well-established poplar trees that lined the road as I walked out. They were beautiful in the late afternoon light.

  I went to a newspaper office where I had friends and asked the darkroom technician, Rudy, to process the films for me - I thought I was too upset to do it properly. But shocked as I was, I was mindful of the importance of the pictures. No words would bring home the horror of what was happening in the townships as clearly as that set of brutal pictures could. I was also aware of the commercial value of those shots. A friend at the paper advised me to take the pictures to the Associated Press, the US wire service. When I got to the AP’s downtown Johannesburg office, I pressed the photo editor for a favourable deal and even persuaded him to put me on to one of the big-selling French picture agencies as a part of the bargain. I was learning fast. This was my chance to make a mark in the world of photojournalism and, I hoped, to break out of the ranks of the perpetually broke freelancers. I was able to do so because of a man’s savage death.

  3

  ‘f5.6 SHOULD BE RIGHT’

  (JOH-106)SOWETO, SOUTH AFRICA, SEPT. 15 - HUMAN TORCH - A small boy runs past as a youth clubs the burning body of a man identified as a Zulu Inkatha supporter and set alight by rival African National Congress supporters, Soweto, South Africa, Saturday morning.

  (AP ColourPhoto) (mon71224/str. SEB BALIC) 1990

  EDS. NOTE: - COLOUR CONTENT: ORANGE/RED FLAMES - PERSONS IN SILHOUETTE, VERY LITTLE DETAIL.

  Associated Press photo caption

  15 September 1990

  There aren’t many trees in Soweto. The gang-ravaged neighbourhood of White City has particularly few, but that morning it had lost several more. Some of the scarred thorn trees along the main through-road had been roughly chopped down and dragged into the street to provide obstacles to possible attacks by hostel Zulus and police. I slowed my car to a crawl, negotiating the newly felled trees, kerbstones and burning tyres that imperfectly barricaded the way to the rows of Jabulani Hostel’s dormitory blocks. The sun was not yet up, and the highveld chill kept fogging the windscreen. It was a month after my first foray into the hostels and I had been back in the townships almost every day since then. Today I was with Tom Cohen, a reporter with the AP who had been posted here from the US just days before. We were planning to do a feature on the hostels as flashpoints of violence. I had established a good relationship with the AP. They didn’t have anyone regularly getting them conflict pictures and they were all too willing to pay me day-rates or to buy pictures from me.

  In the month since I had photographed the Pondo’s death in Soweto, I had become completely absorbed by the news and hadn’t touched the larger format view camera that I normally used for softer documentary stuff. Each day I tried to control my fear and sought out access to the township clashes - I was becoming hooked on the adrenaline and the notion that I was photographing the final push for liberation as it was happening.

  As Tom and I inched along the road, two teenage boys emerged from the inky blue shadows and padded up to my window. They wore knitted woollen caps pulled down low over their foreheads and baggy slacks with hems shortened to leave a gap of a few inches above their loosely-laced canvas takkies - the informal uniform of petty township thugs, tsotsis.

  ‘Heytada,’ I greeted them in tsotsietaal, the township vernacular. ‘Hola,’ they responded with the Spanish greeting that ANC militants had brought back from guerrilla training camps throughout socialist Africa, where most of their military instructors had been Cuban. Tsotsies liked to be considered comrades - full-blooded ANC guerrillas or activists; they wanted to be a part of the ANC-aligned neighbourhood militia that came to be known as ‘self-defence units’. Lawabiding residents duly addressed the tsotsis by the abbreviation coms, but snidely called them comtsotsis behind their backs.

  ‘What’s going on, coms?’ I asked. The boys always knew where things were happening, but it was 50/50 as to whether they would tell you. ‘It’s bad,’ they said. ‘All night, nyaga-nyaga with the fokken amaZulu.’

  ‘Is it quiet now?’ I asked, as I glanced nervously towards the hostel that dominated the low hill some 300 metres in front of us. ‘Tsk,’ was the dismissive reply. ‘Give us petrol, mlungu.’ I smiled weakly, trying to think of a way for this whitey to get around the demand. I knew they wanted the
fuel for Molotov cocktails.

  ‘Leave them. They’re journalists, they can’t,’ another youth commanded from the side of the road. I looked over at him, but could not make out his features in the near dark. He was probably a real comrade, a trained ANC fighter, commanding the thugs’ respect. The comtsotsis turned sullen and began to move away from the window, but then one leant forward and whispered: ‘Give us your gun.’

  ‘I don’t have one,’ I said. This was easier to handle than the demand for petrol, since I had never owned a firearm. He looked at me in disbelief; it was clear to me that he subscribed to the widely held notion that every white man owns a gun. ‘Straight, com,’ I said. ‘You can search the car.’

  The thugs exchanged words in a language I didn’t understand and then drew back. I eased the car into gear and left the barricades behind, driving slowly on to a bridge that crossed the railway line running alongside the hostel’s fortress-like eastern edge. There were three men in long overcoats on watch at the gate that cut through the red brick perimeter wall, defaced by badly executed graffiti proclaiming it Inkatha territory. They stared at us as we approached, the long coats doubtless hiding shotguns or assault rifles. Instead of turning into the entrance, I said to Tom, ‘I don’t feel too good about this, let’s keep driving.’ He readily agreed - we were both scared to go into a hostel following a night of conflict. We caught up with a car ahead of us, recognizing a couple of fellow journalists inside: Simon Stanford and Tim Facey, a television crew for the BBC. We exchanged waves, then followed them as they skirted the south side of the hostel. It was a comfort to be with other journalists, an illusion of safety in numbers. And maybe they had information about something hot that was going on.