The Bang-Bang Club
Page 7
When there was a lot of violence, we would team up for ‘dawn patrols’ - waking before dawn to be in the townships by first light. It was a ritual that we had each done singly at first and then later two or three of us would sometimes cruise together. The companionship meant I did not feel so alone when the alarm jerked me awake to face the next day of witnessing the violence. Sometimes when the days had been really bad I would wake seconds before the alarm and try to find excuses for staying in that warm bed, but the thought that the others were waiting somewhere would help me to get up.
A girl leads her younger sister to safety as an impi, or regiment, of Inkatha-supporting Zulu warriors moves down Khumalo Street, Thokoza, at the start of the Hostel War, August 1990. Ken would later be killed in this same street, four years later. (Ken Oosterbroek / The Star)
Nancefield Hostel, Soweto, 17 August, 1990. A group of Inkatha-supporting Zulu hostel dwellers kill a man they suspect of being a Xhosa - understood by the attackers to be synonymous with the ANC. It turned out that he was an ethnic Pondo of undetermined political allegiance. (Greg Marinovich)
Khumalo Street, Thokoza, December 1990. A man laughs towards the camera as he passes a group of female Inkatha supporters beating an unidentified woman. The severely injured woman was later picked up by police, but it is not known if she survived. (Joao Silva)
ANC-supporting Xhosa warriors receive magic potion or intelezi from a sangoma at ‘the mountain’ in Bekkersdal township, west of Johannesburg, 1993. (Kevin Carter/Corbis Sygma)
Inhlazane, Soweto, 15 September, 1990. An ANC supporter prepares to plunge a knife into Lindsaye Tshabalala, a suspected Inkatha supporter, during clashes at the start of the Hostel War. (Greg Marinovich)
Inhlazane, Soweto, 15 September, 1990. An ANC supporter hacks at a burning Lindsaye Tshabalala as a young boy flees. This was one of a series of pictures that won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News in 1990. (Greg Marinovich)
Maki and Sandy ‘Tarzan’ Rapoo explain how their nephew, Johannes, was shot dead by police in their Meadowlands Zone 1 suburb of Soweto, June 1992. They were in the kitchen of the house on Bakwena Street, where they had previously suffered the loss of Sandy’s younger brother, Stanley. (Greg Marinovich)
Maki Rapoo leads her brother-in-law, Lucas, out into the yard of the family home on Bakwena Street to do a traditional dance during his wedding reception in 1996. (Greg Marinovich)
The maternal aunt of Aaron Mathope grieves next to the nine-month-old infant’s corpse after he was hacked to death by Inkatha attackers, aided by police, in Boipatong Township, 18 June, 1992. 45 people were killed. One of the Inkatha attackers’ leaders later explained the killing of Aaron thus: ‘You must remember that a snake gives birth to a snake.’ (Greg Marinovich)
Policemen open fire on an unarmed crowd of Boipatong residents who had wanted access to a man shot dead earlier by police after President FW de Klerk was chased from the township on 20 June, 1992, days after the massacre. There were several deaths and injuries. Police and the government denied this incident occurred, saying residents and journalists had fabricated the casualties. (Greg Marinovich)
A resident of Boipatong hacks at the body of a Zulu man suspected of being an Inkatha member who had taken part in the Boipatong Massacre. He was later burned. (Joao Silva)
Daniel Sebolai, 64, who lost his wife and son in the Boipatong Massacre, holds back the tears during a workshop on issues related to the Truth & Reconciliation Commission in Sebokeng, 28 October, 1998. Next to him is Boy Samuel Makgome, 48, who lost his eye during an attack on a train by Inkatha Freedom Party members in 1992. Hundreds of victims who did not find sufficient or any redress from the commission are counselled and advised of their rights by nongovernmental self-help groups made up of human-rights victims. (Greg Marinovich)
An ANC mourner takes evasive action from police gunfire during violent clashes at the funeral of Communist Party and ANC military leader, Chris Hani, 19 April, 1993. Hani was assassinated by white extremists. An election date for one year later was set soon afterwards. (Greg Marinovich)
Kevin Carter aims his camera to take a picture of Ken Oosterbroek as Soweto residents flee police gunfire outside the Protea police station where they had been protesting after Chris Hani was assassinated by right-wing whites, April 1993. (Ken Oosterbroek / The Star)
From 1991 to 1993, South African political players were embroiled in protracted negotiations towards a transition to the ‘New South Africa’, and the ongoing violence was being used as a negotiating tool. It was impossible not to notice how the number of inexplicable massacres and attacks surged whenever the talks were at a critical stage. Even though we each in our own way were deeply motivated by the story, pictures and politics, cash also had its part in getting us up before the sun. The dawn was the transition between the chaos of the night and the occasional order of day - when the police would come in to collect the bodies.
I had become known as a conflict photographer. I could ask for assignments to almost any place, as long as people were killing each other. But it had taken me a while to learn how to make use of that reputation. When I had gone to New York in August of 1991 to collect the Pulitzer, I had asked if I had to wear a tux to the ceremony, not knowing that tuxes are not worn to lunchtime affairs. I also naïvely thought that the award would be a great opportunity to say something about what was happening back home. I spent days working on a speech and it was in my jacket pocket when my name was called and I walked up to the dias at Columbia University. But all the man did was shake my hand and give me a little crystal paperweight with Mr Pulitzer’s image engraved on it before ushering me away.
The other winners received their awards with equal haste and then there was a luncheon. It was the 75th anniversary of the prize and all living winners had been invited. It was an absurdly ideal place to establish contacts with many of the most important picture editors and the world’s greatest photographers. I made a wan effort to meet people, but I was in no frame of mind to do it effectively and left soon afterwards.
Despite my ineptitude in handling the business side of photography and in marketing myself, by late September of 1991 I had convinced the AP to assign me to cover the war in Croatia, and within days I was in the front-line village of Nustar. It was autumn, cold and wet, and the roads had been churned into muddy trails by the tanks. It was my first time in a ‘real war’ with tanks, artillery and machine-guns. I had no clue of what was reasonably safe and what was insane, yet somehow I survived those first weeks without getting myself or anyone else killed. I found that I liked war. There was a peculiar, liberating excitement in taking cover from an artillery barrage in a woodshed that offered no protection at all. Two other journalists shared that particular woodshed with me: one was a young British photographer called Paul Jenks, who huddled in a steel wheelbarrow because it made him feel safer as the massive detonation of nearby shells mingled with the scream of others passing overhead. He would be killed months later by a Croat sniper’s bullet: Paul had come too close to discovering the cause of the death of another journalist who had been strangled by a member of a motley unit of international volunteers to the Croat army. My other companion was Heidi Rinke, an Austrian journalist with long black hair, beautiful green eyes and a wicked sense of humour. I lent her my flak jacket as she did not have one and so began a romance that would keep us warm through the long winter months of covering the Serbo-Croat war.
Because of my Croat parentage, I spoke a passable pidgin Serbo-Croat and this sometimes gained me good access. So, in December of 1991, Heidi and I were the only journalists accompanying a troop of Croatian soldiers as they took village after village in the Papuk mountains. The Croats met only token resistance from geriatric villagers firing old hunting rifles at them, since the Yugoslav army and the Serb militia had already retreated, having seemingly decided that the area was bound to be lost sooner or later. It was eerie to see house after house burst into flames as we advanced on foot. In addition to putting Serb ho
mes to the torch, many of the Croat soldiers were looting everything they could find, especially the local plum moonshine, slivovic. They also murdered many of the old folk who had been left behind. Deeper in the mountains, a soldier and I helped an old lady to the safety of her neighbour’s farmhouse after her house had been torched. The Croat commander, a decent enough man in charge of a bunch of murderous drunks, promised that the women would be safe. A few hours later, I stopped by to check on them, but the barn and house had been burnt out. My heart was in my mouth as I searched for the two women. I found only one and she was lying dead in the frozen mud.
In another hamlet, on another day, a conscience-stricken Croat soldier whispered to me that there was an old man still alive in one of the partially burnt farmhouses. Heidi and I tried to be nonchalant as we walked up the drive where blood spilled on the mud gave urgency to our search. We found nothing in the house, not even a corpse. I came back down to the road and surreptitiously asked the soldier where the wounded man was; he was terrified that his comrades would see him talking to me and whispered, ‘In the barn.’ I went back up past the blood and to the wooden barn, but saw only piles of hay. I started pulling at it, prepared for the worst; but I still got a fright when confronted by the grey, bloodless and unshaven face of an old man at the bottom of the pile. He was alive, but in a bad way. He had been shot and left under the hay to die. I tried to tell him to be calm, that we would get help. While Heidi was staunching the old peasant’s bleeding leg, I bent closer to hear what he was saying. I had my ear next to his mouth before I understood what it was that he kept repeating: ‘Don’t let the pigs eat my feet, don’t let the pigs eat my feet!’ It was not a crazy fear - pigs will eat anything, and on a few occasions I had seen pigs feeding off human corpses.
It was a strange war. One day I discovered a white-haired Serb lying dead in a ditch with his ears cut off. An unshaven, grinning Croat soldier with rotten teeth came up to me as I was taking pictures and he gleefully told me that he had killed and mutilated the old villager. His commander had a standing offer that anyone who brought him a pair of Serb ears could go home for four days. My Croatian surname allowed me to witness one side of the intimate brutalities of the civil war, but it precluded me from seeing the even greater toll of Serb atrocities up close.
Despite the horrors and my ancestral links to the country, the war did not have the same emotional impact on me as the events I had witnessed in South Africa - it was not my country and not my struggle. I was definitely there as a foreign journalist. In February of 1992, I returned to South Africa with Heidi. We lived together in the house I’d bought shortly after winning the Pulitzer. I had taken out a mortgage in order to buy it, as for the first time in my life I felt financially secure, after years of living hand-to-mouth. I was perpetually amazed by the turnaround in my circumstances - just one year previously I had been on the run from the police, but I now reckoned that there would be an outcry if they arrested South Africa’s only Pulitzer Prize-winner. I began to use my real name as a by-line. But in reality, the environment was changing, and ‘crimes’ such as mine were being ignored, as were draft-dodgers and conscientious objectors - whereas they had previously been hunted to ensure there was no ‘moral rot’ among whites. But even the Pulitzer could not change the effect that witnessing such searing events had had on me; on my return I found that I was almost immediately emotionally and politically ensnared by the events in South Africa. Unlike in the former Yugoslavia, I could not keep a distance from this story, nor from the people I photographed.
I remember a Sunday morning just weeks after coming back. In the street outside my house I was cleaning my car. Several neighbours also had hosepipes and buckets out as they cleaned and polished their cars - a Sunday ritual in my working-class neighbourhood. We greeted each other - they recognized me from interviews on television and in the papers. What they did not know was that I was not getting the car spruced up for the weekend, but that I was grimly trying to wash someone’s brains out of the cloth upholstery of my back seat. The previous afternoon, while most of South Africa was grilling meat on the braai or watching sport on television, I had been racing through the streets of Soweto trying to get to the hospital before the rasping, noisy breathing of the young man lying on my back seat ceased. The comrade’s girlfriend cradled his head in her lap and Heidi, sitting alongside, was telling me not to bother speeding, that it would make no difference. Brain-matter and fluid bubbled freely out of a gunshot wound in his head and he was not going to make it. At the hospital they pronounced him dead.
So, despite the cheery greetings from my neighbours, I resented them cleaning simple street dirt off their cars. This was something that I could not explain to them, nor to anyone else. It was as if they were occupying a different planet to me. It was precisely this that helped draw Joao, Ken, Kevin and me close to each other. When we tried to discuss those little telling details from incidents in the townships with people who had never experienced them, the usual response was either disgust or uncomprehending stares. We could only really talk about these matters to each other. Kevin had once written about his feelings on photography and covering conflict in an article which expressed thoughts that we had all, on occasion, shared: ‘I suffer depression from what I see and experience nightmares. I feel alienated from “normal” people, including my family. I find myself unable to relate to or engage in frivolous conversation. The shutters come down and I recede into a dark place with dark images of blood and death in godforsaken dusty places.’
It was from this sense of being outsiders from the society we had grown up in, and of being insiders to an arcane world, that we developed into a circle of friends prompting a local lifestyle magazine, Living, to dub some of us ‘the Bang-Bang Paparazzi’ in a 1992 article. Joao and I were so offended by the word ‘paparazzi’ that we persuaded the editor of the magazine-a friend called Chris Marais - to change it to ‘the Bang-Bang Club’ when he wrote a follow-up piece that was about the four of us. We were a little embarrassed by the name and its implications, but we did appreciate being acknowledged for what we were doing. No matter what they called us, we liked the credit.
Articles like the Bang-Bang Club piece made us minor celebrities in media circles. As a result, several young South African photographers were motivated to try their hand at documenting the violence. One of these was a young man called Gary Bernard, who had always wanted to be a professional news-photographer. He kept seeing our pictures in the papers and he eventually signed up at a non-profit photographic workshop, where he attended classes in the evening while working as a printer during the day. Gary’s decision to be a news-photographer coincided with Ken’s becoming The Star’s chief photographer. From being a notoriously self-absorbed egotist who cared only for his career and awards, Ken had become a champion of aspiring photojournalists. Gary was one of a group of interns Ken had taken on at The Star in a programme to recruit talented young photographers from the workshop into the newspaper. Gary would go out with us to learn the ropes and he became a friend. He wanted to be a bang-bang photographer. Despite his desire to cover conflict, Gary was far too sensitive to deal with the violence, but he kept his feelings to himself. On the surface he seemed to handle the emotional aspect of the violence OK. We had no idea about his dysfunctional family past and how he blamed himself for not having been around when his father committed suicide. Sometimes I would catch myself looking at Gary and wondering what was going on in his mind, but I was too preoccupied to follow up on any of the small signs that might have indicated a real problem. It was only later that we understood the full effect that the accumulated trauma was having on him.
The stress from what we were seeing and the at times callous act of taking pictures was making an impact on all of us. Ken was waking up in the middle of the night sweating and screaming about things he had seen. Joao had become quiet and withdrawn, and I sank into a deep depression that I only clawed my way out of years later. Kevin was the most outwardly affected and t
hat meant that life as his friend could be demanding. He seemed to have no borders, no emotional boundaries - everything that happened to him would penetrate his very being and he let all that was inside him just pour on out. The highs of boundless energy and infectious joy would inevitably crash and then we would get the despondent midnight calls. Joao, Ken and I all had our turns at spending hours talking to a weeping Kevin until he had been soothed or grown exhausted enough to sleep. But through it all, Kevin had a way about him, an openness to pain, a generosity with his time and affection which meant it was easy to overlook those lapses and become even closer friends.
Maybe it was because his emotions were always right up front that Kevin was the most candid of us all about the effect that covering the violence was having on him. He was having a beer at a pub opposite The Star one Saturday afternoon when Joao came in after covering an uneventful political funeral. They listened to a radio report that three people had died in clashes following the burial. Joao wanted to go back to the township, but Kevin said it was getting dark and talked him out of the idea. After several more beers, Kevin recounted a recurrent nightmare that was plaguing his sleep. In the dream, he was near death, lying on the ground, crucified to a wooden beam, unable to move. A television camera with a massive lens zoomed closer and closer in on his face, until Kevin would wake up screaming. Kevin thought that the dream meant it might be time to leave photography.