Faas, Monty and Denis feared that the notoriously sensitive New York desk would kill the pictures because they were too gory. But on that weekend the London people convinced their cautious counterparts across the Atlantic to let all the pictures move on through to the newspapers. Their fears were well founded: by Monday morning there was an outcry from some of the newspaper editors and publishers who own the AP. They objected to such brutal pictures running on the wire. One editor complained that he ran a family paper, and castigated the AP for putting out such pictures. It was not as if the existence of pictures on the wire obliged anyone to print them; only a fraction of any day’s production are ever published - hundreds of pictures are routinely ignored.
But Monty and Faas believed that the pictures of Lindsaye Tshabalala’s death should be seen. To censor pictures that are too strong, indecent or obscene was to make decisions for the reader that were not theirs to make. They held that it should be shown that people were inflicting terrible violence on other people. In fact, some newspapers in the US did pull back from publishing the pictures, though many papers around the world ran them.
In South Africa, the violence of the photographs had an explosive effect. The South African government saw Lindsaye Tshabalala’s death as a perfect opportunity to portray the ANC as killers who could never be entrusted with leading the country. Within days, police approached the AP Johannesburg bureau to see if I would hand over my pictures to enable them to identify the killers. It would also be necessary for me to appear in court to validate the authenticity of the pictures so that they could be submitted as evidence. The police had not contacted the AP or the local newspapers about my photographs of the Inkatha warriors killing the alleged ANC supporter the previous month - it was presumably not in the interests of the South African state to prosecute their allies. Luckily, the police were trying to find one Sebastian Balic, the pseudonym I had adopted for my by-line, consisting of my middle name and my mother’s maiden name. I had done this to avoid being detected by the military police, who were haphazardly searching for me to complete my military service. During my initial two years of compulsory national service in the army I had refused to carry a weapon. I had been allowed to get away with that little defiance because they needed me to translate Russian - something I just managed to do with a pile of dictionaries as the language is similar to my parents’ mother tongue: Serbo-Croat. But by the time I was called up for camps, as the extended military call-up was known, I knew that even without carrying a gun, I would be playing my part in supporting apartheid.
Despite my horror at the brutal murder and the desire that the killers be prosecuted for it, there was no way I was going to testify. I had been allowed to stay during the clashes because I had convinced the ANC supporters that I was a journalist and not a police informer. If I did testify, journalists covering the war would almost certainly be targeted as soon as word spread. And once in court, Seb Balic would be revealed as Greg Marinovich. After I refused, the prosecutor issued a 205 subpoena, a court order used to force journalists, doctors and others to testify. The AP lawyers ascertained that the state would press ahead with charges against me if I refused to testify - with a maximum sentence of ten years for contempt of court and several more for avoiding military camps. I decided to leave, rather than try my luck with the courts. So, within 24 hours, I was on a plane to London, leaving my housemates to deal with the security branch and plains-clothes policemen who would occasionally appear at the door.
Once in London, I felt that the AP and my magazine photo agency Sygma were less than helpful in finding me work. I unrealistically expected them to care about what I was going through; I understood the business associations as a form of friendship, rather than just an exchange of dollars for my pictures. I felt betrayed that neither agency took me under its wing in that strange city. I was in a troubled state of mind, shocked at what I had seen and depressed at having had to leave South Africa. I kept in touch with very few people back home, and most of my calls were to the Johannesburg AP office, trying to find out when I could return. Money was not really an immediate problem, as the British affiliate of my journalists’ union back home gave me some money and let me stay in the union apartment in the city whenever it was free. When it was occupied, I would spend time at my aunt and her husband’s house in the country, where I was made to feel completely at home. But they lived far from London and it was expensive and timeconsuming to commute from there all the time. Camera Press, a picture agency, let me chase their unpaid bills and shoot local events: it was a job and I could survive on it, but I did not want to cover press conferences, rugby matches or London demos.
I had lots of feature ideas that nobody would assign. I was swiftly learning the dictum of journalism: if it bleeds, it leads. Papers would pay for photographers to go to war zones a lot quicker than they would spring for an essay on gypsy life in Eastern Europe. And so I decided that a good war was what I needed to take my mind off South Africa and to stop me wallowing in self-pity. After two months, Stuart Nicol, a former freelancer who had become the picture editor on the European newspaper, looked through my portfolio and sent me off on my first ever international assignment. He simply gave me a plane ticket and a wad of traveller’s cheques. I assumed I would have to sign some kind of undertaking to work for them until the Second Coming, but Stuart waved me off with an amused smile. My assignment was to cover the student riots in the streets of Belgrade and the possible collapse of Yugoslavia; but, by the time I arrived, the police had already beaten the opposition into submission and there was nothing to photograph. I stayed in progressively cheaper hotels and finally in youth hostels to save the paper’s money - I was so green that I did not yet know that it is a foreign correspondent’s duty to stay in the most costly hotels and run up impressive expenses.
Belgrade in November of 1990 was dark, cold and full of miserable people. I skulked around the region doing inconsequential features, hoping for distraction. One afternoon, I lay on my hotel bed wistfully aroused as I listened to the noisy sex of an anonymous couple on the other side of the thin wall.
Then the paper sent me to Hungary to do a story on the revival of Judaism - a happy story and a chance to escape the Slavic wretchedness of Yugoslavia. The Hungarian capital, Budapest, even in mid-winter, was full of beautiful women and excellent ice cream. But all I could think about was South Africa and my depression grew so severe that I became obsessed with thoughts of suicide. One cold evening I went for a walk and found myself on a bridge over the Danube. I was staring down into the swirling, icy waters: as if I were being drawn down into the current, tugged towards the water. The thought crossed my mind that the river might not be deep enough: what if I plunged off and landed in waist-deep water, cold and embarrassed? I reassured myself that the mighty Danube had to be deep, but the distracting thought made it all seem ridiculous. I pulled back, angry with myself that I could give up so easily. Right then, I decided to go home. Despite my paranoia, the police were not waiting at Johannesburg airport to arrest me.
The Hostel War was going on much as it was when I had left and I easily slipped back into the grisly routine of covering the violence. I again took up stringing for the AP, Sygma and others where I had left off three months earlier. One day, the police came in to the AP office to try to pressurize the bureau chief, Barry Renfrew, into giving them Seb Balic’s address. I was in the newsroom and watched him courteously let them out after telling them that he did not have an address for me, but would let them know when he did. It was all a charade, but it kept my stress levels pretty high. I then began to get phone calls about awards the Lindsaye Tshabalala photographs were winning; the pictures had been submitted for awards from institutions I had never heard of without my even knowing about it. While visiting my uncle and aunt on their mango farm outside Barberton, a rural farming area 450 kilometres east of Johannesburg, Renfrew called to tell me in reverent tones that I was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and, as I had a one-in-three chance of winnin
g, I should stick close to the phone that night. I made an appropriately awed response, but I really was not very excited as I had no idea what this Pulitzer thing was. After putting the phone down, I went and looked it up in the encyclopedia.
4
FAME AND FRIENDSHIP
Kafirs? [said Oom Schalk Lourens] Yes, I know them. And they’re all the same. I fear the Almighty, and I respect His works, but I could never understand why He made the kafir and the rinderpest.
‘Makapan’s Caves’, from the collection of short stories entitled
Mafeking Road by Herman Charles Bosman, Central News
Publishers, 1947
April 1991
The phone rang at about ten that night, waking me from a deep sleep. I heard the distinctive click of an overseas line. It was the AP photo boss, Vin Alabiso, to tell me that I had won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News. Less than four months after turning away from the Danube’s frigid waters, I had joined that journalistic elite - I was a Pulitzer Prize-winner, but right then I did not have a clue as to its significance. I wondered if there were money involved, but I was soon to discover what all the fuss was about. The next call was from the Johannesburg office - they needed pictures of me celebrating as soon as possible. They had the champagne ready. A sense of the importance of the prize was taking shape: they had not asked for pictures of me when I had won any of the other prizes. I became excited as I got dressed to drive to Johannesburg through the night.
My new-found fame was awkward. The fact that I was winning prizes for shooting Tshabalala’s gruesome death troubled me, but when I passed a huge newspaper billboard proclaiming ‘SA Lensman Wins Pulitzer’, I could not but feel a surge of pride. While a few photographers resented my quick success, most seemed genuinely pleased for me. We had a party to celebrate the prize at the new home I shared with my old housemates. The house was packed with friends and journalists, some of whom I had never met before. I was already drunk when photographer Ken Oosterbroek stood on a table in the livingroom and gave a speech. Ken was taller than anyone else in the room anyway, but he wanted to make sure people paid attention. He was like that: when he wanted to be noticed, he would straighten out of his normal, easy-going slouch and get a stern, commanding air about him. I recall Ken recounting how, three years before, I had come up to him in the daily newspaper The Star’s newsroom and complimented him on a picture that had been splashed across the front page. ‘I wish I could shoot pictures like that!’ I had said. The picture that I so admired had won Ken South Africa’s leading photographic award in 1989. Ken, truly a very talented photographer, and a perfectionist, had also struggled to gain a foothold in the industry. He had gone from paper to paper trying to get a job on the strength of pictures he had illegally taken of his fellow-conscripts during his military service.
He had kept a diary while serving as a soldier in southern Angola, where the South Africans were fighting against Angola’s socialist government and southern African guerilla armies from their bases in the then South African colony of South West Africa. When I read those diaries years later after his death, I was appalled that Ken came across as a typical English-speaking white South African who easily referred insultingly to blacks as peckies. On 16 June 1981, for example, he had spent a long time looking at the bodies of six guerrillas that were lying piled in a heap. Ken had been fascinated by ‘the kill’. One fighter had been shot right in the centre of his forehead. Ken assumed that he had been the first killed, shot by a sniper. They were all wearing People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN - the armed wing of the banned Namibian liberation movement SWAPO, South West African People’s Organization) uniforms, except for one who was naked. The naked guerrilla’s legs had been hacked by pangas. Some of them looked young, perhaps no more than 15 or 16, Ken estimated. The scene bothered him, but he rationalized that they had chosen to don guerrilla uniforms: ‘they slipped up’, he wrote. The next day he added a further note in his journal, one which suggests a much more unpleasant scenario. ‘I have been thinking about the terr (terrorist) who was shot in the centre of his forehead. He had wire wrapped around him, which puzzled me. Tied up against a tree and shot?’ In yet another entry he described, with neither reservation nor distaste, how his unit had wired up a young Angolan villager to a field telephone and tortured him for information. As for the vast majority of whites, it was ‘them’ against ‘us’ for Ken.
When I had first met Ken, I knew nothing about his border experiences or his politics, but the newsroom abounded with snide jokes about the chip on his shoulder. He was defensive and had a brittle arrogance. He was always very aware of his appearance - he had quite beautiful brown eyes and a charming smile, though he usually had a serious, intense look on his face. He was very aware of how he looked in pictures and I had never seen a photograph of Ken in which he was not mindful of the camera. Pictures taken of him over the years show a tall, thin man with long hair, inevitably wearing jeans and T-shirt, sometimes a droopy bandito moustache. He had perfected the image of the biker-rebel he so wished to cultivate.
Years after his stint in the army, Ken would return to keeping an occasional journal. When he achieved his first success as a photographer in 1989, he wrote: ‘I won the Ilford Award (South African Press Photographer Of The Year) on Wednesday the 19th of April, exceeding my wildest expectations but fulfilling my ultimate ambition.
‘One excellent night followed, full of cheers and smiles and congratulations & all, and a cheese slice (-shaped) trophy ... i didn’t put the thing down for hours. And then in the morning this kind of emptiness or what-now feeling and it just wasn’t so important anymore.
‘I’ve got it, it’s history, it’s on record and now my head is free of a single-minded one-stop goal. Now i can really let rip. Will somebody please give me a gap to let rip?
‘BUT, give me a break to shoot the real thing. Real, happening, life. Relevant work. Something to get the adrenaline up & the eyes peeled, the brain rolling over with possibilities and the potential for powerhouse pictures. I am a photographer. Set me free.’
By the time we were celebrating my Pulitzer in April of 1991, Ken had had his wish come true. The country was awash with real pictures - passion, excitement and dreadful violence - and Ken had been named South African Press Photographer of the Year for the second time. Once he was the photographer he had dreamed of becoming, he matured into a generous and self-possessed man. His professional life was on track and he was in love with a vivacious journalist, Monica Nicholson. They had just returned from a working holiday to Israel, where they had spent the first two months of 1991 covering the Iraqi Scud-attacks on Israel. One night he and Monica were in bed in their Jerusalem hotel room when they were interrupted by a Scud-attack warning. Before going off to the shelters, Ken took a picture of himself and Monica. The photograph shows his hand reaching for Monica’s exposed breast; they are both wearing gasmasks. He scrawled a note about the incident on hotel notepaper: ‘A moment of passion and love - destroyed by War 23/01/91. A moment’s tenderness. The first few moments of shared warmth. The opening joy, the quiet love felt as we lie together, giving over shared love to the physical. The promise of more, closeness, commitment and co-passion. The moon rising, sirens around us, the hostile hint, grim realization as speakers blurb a Hebrew emergency order.’
Ken and Kevin Carter, another young photographer, had become friends when they first started working for newspapers in the mid 80s. In that period, Kevin had witnessed the first known public execution by necklacing. Necklace was township slang for the barbaric practice of killing a person by placing a tyre filled with petrol around the neck and setting it alight. Maki Skosana, whose necklacing Kevin witnessed and photographed, had been accused of being a policeman’s girlfriend. Her necklacing was the ritual, public execution of a person who had betrayed the community, a punishment reserved for those who collaborated with the state, traitors.
Kevin had watched and photographed as the mob kicked and beat her, and then they poured pe
trol on her and set her alight. She was still alive and screaming, but eventually she did die. Kevin wrote about that horrific incident years later: ‘I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures; they created quite a stir. And then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a terrible thing to do.’
The state had its own form of the necklace, ritualized murder no less barbarous for its legitimization by law. The death penalty was frequently used against political opponents - hanging was the white regime’s ultimate display of power. Both were equally abhorrent to me. The necklace was a warped symbol of liberation, and became known as shisanyama or burnt meat, three cents, which was then the price of a box of matches, and finally, savagely, Nando’s after a popular flamegrilled chicken franchise.
Kevin’s childhood had been difficult. His parents had found his moods and outbursts impossible to deal with. Years later, he wrote about what he felt then, during the years he lived at home with his parents, Jimmy and Roma Carter, in their middle-class white neighbourhood. The occasional police raids, to arrest blacks who were illegally in the whites-only neighbourhood, was the closest Kevin, as a child, got to seeing apartheid being implemented: ‘We weren’t racist at home of course, coming from a supposedly “liberal” family. We were brought up in a Christian way, to love our neighbours, and that included all humans, but I do now question how my parents’ generation could have been so lackadaisical about fighting the obvious sin of apartheid.’
The Bang-Bang Club Page 5