Leaving the hostel behind, we looped around Jabulani stadium and turned east again to recross the railway tracks. Simon and Tim were driving slowly, clearly just cruising, but we decided to stick with them in any case. After a kilometre we turned left and followed the tracks up to Inhlazane train station, the closest stop to Jabulani Hostel. We were just a couple of hundred metres short of the corner where the comtsotsis had demanded petrol ten minutes previously, but we found that the stretch of road that would have allowed us to complete our left-handed circle was blocked by several makeshift barricades.
Groups of residents, ANC sympathizers, watched us approach as the early light gradually erased the smudgy darkness. I parked and we got out to speak to the combatants. We introduced ourselves as journalists. The men and youths were aggressive, agitated. They had obviously been up the whole night, skirmishing with their Inkatha enemies from the hostel across the railway tracks. They were not keen to have us around.
‘We work for the foreign press, AP and BBC,’ I said. But one of the men was suspicious. ‘You’re from the Citizen,’ he insisted, referring to a disreputable racist daily that had been set up by a covert government propaganda fund. Every black person I knew hated the paper’s political reporting and editorials, but it nevertheless had a massive black readership drawn by its comprehensive horse-racing results and excellent punter’s guide.
‘Not the Citizen, mjita (my friend), I promise,’ I protested. This was more than a little disingenuous, since all the local papers subscribed to the AP and often used the wire pictures to further their own particular bias. But the partial truth enabled us to stay.
A shrill whistle galvanized the comrades and someone yelled a warning that the police were coming: ‘Poyisa!’ Tom and I followed on the heels of the boys fleeing for shelter behind the station ticket office next to the road. Within seconds an armoured military personnel carrier, a tough, heavy Casspir designed for the bush war in Angola but now used in the townships by the police, careened up the road. The Casspir’s massive wheels simply crunched over the rocks and rubble barricade the residents had erected in a vain attempt to control access to their area.
The police fired randomly from inside the towering behemoth as it sped by, rocking from side to side on its rigid springs. What cowboys, I thought: it would have been stupid bad luck if any of us had been hit. As soon as the Casspir rounded a corner, the coms emerged from cover and tried to drag a big garbage skip into the road to make a more effective barrier. It was like watching a game. The residents could not match the heavily-armed police with their rocks and the rare firearm; but equally the police could not quell the unrest by racing through the township, firing wildly.
The coms grew more at ease with our presence. The shared excitement had broken down some of the mistrust, so we could take pictures more freely. Within a few minutes, shooting broke out again, this time at the bridge leading over the tracks. I ran up the slope of the embankment that bordered the line. A handful of older ANC supporters crouched behind the heavy iron plates edging the bridge. Thirty feet below us were the sunken tracks and the austere concrete platform of Inhlazane station. I ducked down beside a man wearing a soft cloth cap and carrying a revolver. We crouched below the bulwark at the entrance to the bridge. ‘No pictures, you hear?’ he said, glaring fiercely at me. I reluctantly lifted my hands off the cameras to show my acquiescence. He peered over the top, across the railway lines. Several other coms lifted their heads, not wanting to miss out if the gunman hit anything. He cautiously lifted the revolver above the edge and fired, then dropped down on to his haunches again to cheers and admiring calls from the women down behind us at street level. Return fire from the Inkatha side occasionally whistled comfortably high above our heads, but we all ducked reflexively.
A train stopped at the station. The driver was either ignorant or uncaring of the clash going on above him. Some of the young combatants ran down to meet the train, in case there were Inkatha members on it, or to guide their own to the safe side of the tracks. I watched them re-emerge at the top of the wide concrete stairs, pushing and pulling a tall man in a blue workman’s coverall jacket. He was at least a head taller than the boys, but he did not resist as they tugged and drove him towards ANC territory. He could have been returning from a night shift or making an early start to visit friends, but he had unwittingly disembarked into our insignificant little skirmish.
At first, I was not sure of what was going on, but as soon as they had him off the bridge and out of sight of the Inkatha members opposite, they began to stone and stab him. I watched as he fell to the ground, then tried to crawl under a door propped up across the dented steel drums of a street vendor’s stall. I was terrified that I might again witness a murder like the brutal killing at Nancefield Hostel a month before. It had been the first time I’d seen a person killed and I could still not shake off the feeling of guilt that he had died so close to me that I could have reached out and touched him, yet all I had done was take pictures. As much as I wished that I could have had another chance to try to stop his death, that Saturday morning seemed too soon to be offered a chance to redeem myself.
The coms dragged the silent and unprotesting man they had identified as a Zulu to his feet and down the path to the street below. More people gathered around, mostly teenage boys, but there were one or two older men and a handful of even younger boys as well. They crowded around the bloodied Zulu and the assault intensified. A youth ran in and leapt high to deliver a kind of kung fu kick. Another slapped the Zulu hard across the face, a demeaning blow usually reserved for obstinate women and disobedient children. A man in a long-sleeved white shirt hauled out a massive, shiny bowie knife and stabbed hard into the victim’s chest. I was in the midst of the crowd, separated from Tom and the other journalists. My heart was racing and I had difficulty taking deep enough breaths. Stepping across the chasm from my presumed role as a detached observer to that of a participant, I called out: ‘Who is he? What’s he done?’ A voice from the crowd replied, ‘He’s an Inkatha spy.’ I tried to see who was speaking, to make contact with an individual amid the killing fervour.
‘Are you sure he’s a spy? How do you know?’ I asked. Another voice answered: ‘We know.’ It was the man in the white shirt, absolute certainty in his flat voice. But he had stopped the attack for the moment and was looking at me. He seemed to be the leader, though I did not see him command or direct the action. Perhaps it was just that he was older.
‘What if you’re wrong?’ said. ‘I mean, last month I saw Zulus, Inkatha, kill a Pondo because they thought he was Xhosa. Just here, at Nancefield Hostel. Maybe he is Zulu, yes, of course he is, but maybe he is not Inkatha. He could be ANC. Just make sure.’ The man nodded while I talked, watching me shrewdly. Despite the garbled way it came out, he understood. But what I had to say did not matter. He and the others knew their decision had already been made.
The attack resumed and it looked as if the Zulu was now in a state of shock. Maybe the boys had demanded that he give the ANC nicknames for the neighbourhood streets, or someone had shown him a one-rand coin and he had identified it as ‘iLandi’, betraying the rural Zulu dialect that characteristically changed ‘r’ to ‘l’. That would have been enough to secure his death sentence. But I never actually heard the man utter a single word throughout his ordeal. He did not appeal for mercy, nor even look to me for help. He seemed not to recognize what was happening. I wondered if he was mentally deficient, drugged, or just dumb with terror.
My questions had attracted attention from the coms and some of the assailants began an ominous hissing. ‘No pictures, no! Fokoff!’
I managed a fleeting defiance: ‘I’ll stop taking pictures when you stop killing him,’ but the attack simply went on moving down the street as the Zulu stepped slowly and ponderously forward. Now, one person after the next took turns to inflict an injury on the defenceless man. It was as though this was a rite that had been played out before, and everyone but me knew the liturgy.
I noticed odd details. The sun had cleared the single-storey houses and shone with the extraordinary clarity of a spring morning. It would be a hot day.
I saw a young man with a wisp of a beard step forward and stand on his toes to thrust a knife into the Zulu’s chest. His victim just stared dumbly ahead as the knife plunged in, while I released the shutter and wound on the next frame. A part of me did not want to be a photographer just then, but as with the killing in Nancefield Hostel, I smoothly exchanged camera bodies to shoot slide as well as colour negative, ensuring I had material for both the AP and the French agency, Sygma.
The progress down the street halted when the Zulu collapsed into a sitting position on the pavement. Most of the mob was edging away by then and others had slipped behind me, probably to avoid being photographed. The man in the white shirt moved in again; I had a camera in front of my face as I shot and cranked the advance on my shabby Nikkormat. I took a few steps back, driven by a nervous impulse, some vague sense of unease about the spot I was occupying. Afterwards, Simon, the BBC cameraman, would say: ‘Jesus, did you see that guy try to stab you?’
For those crucial minutes, it was as if I lost my grasp of what was going on. I was present, but nothing entering through my senses registered. The pictures I kept mechanically taking would later substitute for the events my memory could not recall.
By now, the victim was lying on his side, propped up on one elbow, facing away from me. A teenager with one arm in a plaster cast used his good hand to throw a rock at his helpless target. In the picture, the victim seems to be looking directly at his assailant while the rock, captured in mid-air, is hurtling towards him. Did it hit him? I can’t recall and as my cameras were without motordrives, there is no photographic memory; no next moment. Another image is of the man in the white shirt stabbing his knife down into the top of the Zulu’s head as he sits on the road, almost absent-mindedly reaching up towards the source of pain. I don’t know if I noted that either.
My awareness gradually returned. The victim was now flat on his back some yards in front of me. All around him, the street was empty. The man in the white shirt was standing next to me, my left shoulder brushing his right. He lifted his right hand, the one he had used for stabbing, to look at a little cut he had sustained and drew his breath in sharply under his teeth: ‘Ththth,’ like a child letting it be known he has hurt himself on the playground.
I peered down at the cut at the base of his thumb; he held it out to ensure I saw. There was a thin line of red along a shallow incision in the soft pink-brown skin of his hand, no deeper than a clumsy shaving cut. I felt we were both acutely aware of how grotesque this instant of bonding was. The moment was broken when a boy, no older than 13, walked across the deserted tarmac to the inert man and unscrewed the cap of the Molotov cocktail he was carrying. I was relieved that I had refused to earlier allow the comtsotsis to siphon petrol from my tank - what if it were fuel from my tank that was poured over that victim? The boy carefully doused the Zulu with the petrol. Then he walked over to where I was standing with the man in the white shirt. The kid knew what must come next, but he would not, or could not, do it himself. I watched him surreptitiously slip a box of matches into the older man’s left trouser pocket, on the far side from me, and whisper in his ear. The man in the white shirt tried to make out that nothing unusual was happening, that I had not caught this grim interchange.
The hissing and cursing around me had grown louder, more menacing. But I was determined not to leave the scene. I had failed to prevent the man’s death, but fuck them if I was going to leave and let them burn him too. I stood my ground next to the man in the white shirt, both of us staring at the body, pretending to be oblivious of the matches in his pocket. I heard the urgent calls from Simon, unnerved by the sight of me just standing next to one of the killers. ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded. I could not answer. ‘What did they say?’ he asked. His words seemed to break the spell and I moved away, reluctantly, but also with relief. I felt as if a giant spring was wound up inside me, desperate for release. We agreed to leave, but then an excited shout went up from near the railway tracks. Onlookers drawn by the drama and participants in the killing ran up the embankment and we followed them. I was panting, though the sprint was brief. A handful of residents were trying to attack a man in a blue shirt, but their assault lacked the conviction of the earlier mob, and when one of those who had taken part in the first attack stretched out his arms protectively to ward off the blows, the attackers backed off. I didn’t know why, but it seemed that he knew the man was not Inkatha; or perhaps he just had been sickened by the previous murder.
There was a low brick building, the ticket office, between me and where the Zulu lay in the street. Suddenly I heard a hollow whoof and women began to ululate in a celebration of victory. I ran towards the edge of the elevation. The man I had thought dead was running across the field below us, his body enveloped in flames. Red, blue and yellow tongues licked the clothing and skin off his body. It was a stumbling, urgent run as he tried to escape the pain. I lifted the long lens camera. The human torch slowed and dropped to a squat. As I focused, I noted that the early sun was right behind the burning man. The camera’s light meter did not work and so I twisted the aperture wide open: f5.6 should be right. I depressed the shutter, then pulled the camera away from my face for a second to advance the crank and frame my next exposure. A bare-chested, barefoot man ran into view and swung a machete into the man’s blazing skull as a young boy fled from this vision of hell, from an enemy who would not die.
I lurched down the slope and stood over the prostrated body that crackled and smouldered. I tried to breathe without allowing the pungent, acrid smell to penetrate my lungs. I shot a few pictures, but I was losing the battle to suppress my emotions. I left while he was still twitching, moaning in a low, monotonous, most dreadful voice. Nearby, Tom was interviewing someone about the killing and I had trouble controlling my own voice as I said: ‘Tom, let’s go.’
‘Yeah, OK.’ He seemed in shock too, but wrapped up in talking with one of the killers. ‘Let’s go, now!’ I repeated, raising my voice, and he took in the danger of the situation; the crowd could turn on us at any time and we had more than we needed. We walked to the car without exchanging a further word.
We got in the car, I started the engine and we drove off. Tom was looking at me, not sure of what to say, not even sure of what he had just seen. Around the first corner I pulled over and, closing my eyes, began to beat the steering wheel with my fists. Finally I could scream.
Only from the following day’s newspapers did I learn the man’s name: Lindsaye Tshabalala. I will never forget it now, but when I was so close to him, he was only an anonymous, unlucky Zulu who should never have caught the train that morning.
The pictures of the fiery death of Lindsaye Tshabalala set off a series of events that I could never have imagined. On the other side of the world, in London, it was a sunny Saturday, and the AP’s day photo editor ‘Monty’ Montgomery was alone on the morning shift. He prepared for the day by checking through the inter-bureau messages, domestic and international news copy and the pictures that had come in overnight. He scanned the newspapers to see how the previous day’s AP pictures had fared against their rival wire services - Reuters and Agence France Presse. He noted that the major stories of the day were the growing Gulf crisis, a coup in Sudan, the Mohawk siege in Canada, the Aquino murder trial in the Philippines and Princess Diana due to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.
Not long into his shift, Monty got a call from Denis Farrell in AP’s Johannesburg office. Denis told him that a stringer had arrived with film of an event in Soweto, but he thought the pictures too graphic to run on the wire. What he really meant was that they were probably too graphic for the US newspapers. There was an unspoken rule that overly graphic pictures of violence should not move on the wire, and the US had a lower tolerance for violent ima
ges than the rest of the world. Monty asked Denis to pick out the best images and let him see them.
Monty had a lot to do that day and the new technology then in place was cumbersome, slow and needed constant coaxing. When the first picture appeared on his screen, he muttered ‘Holy shit!’ to himself in the deserted office. He was used to seeing thousands of pictures but he had rarely seen anything like this. He wondered if I was black and if I was with the ANC.
In those days, the AP was using the Leafax, one of the first machines that scanned directly from the negative, as opposed to scanning from a print. The negatives had to be selected and scanned, cropped, toned and captioned, one at a time; and then transmitted to London on a phone line. Before digital technology made everything faster and easier, a black-and-white transmission took seven minutes, while colour transmissions took three times longer.
In Johannesburg, Denis struggled with the backlit, difficult ‘Human Torch’ negative. The Leafax was an imperfect machine, and so to get better quality he made a print of the picture in the darkroom, sending it with the old-fashioned drum transmitter. The pictures came in slowly, dependent on ‘clean’ phone lines. Every time there was a crackle or noise on the line, it left a mark, or a ‘hit’, on the image that arrived at the other end and the separation would have to be resent. The process of getting pictures to the AP’s newspaper and magazine clients was an intricate, slow and painful procedure.
Chief photo editor Horst Faas, wire veteran and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner (1965 Vietnam and 1972 Bangladesh), came in shortly after the first pictures had landed. He took one look at them and despite his view that a story needed just one or two key images, he sent a customarily terse note to Johannesburg on the message wire: ‘jobp/ pho/lonp Send all pictures. faas/lonp.’
The Bang-Bang Club Page 4