The Bang-Bang Club
Page 8
When Kevin told me about the same nightmare some time later, he described the feelings of helplessness, the anger, the fear he lived though in that dream. It was all that he imagined our subjects must feel towards us in their last moments as we documented their deaths. The dream had variations: sometimes Kevin was the photographer, not the victim, and in that version, the ‘dead’ man would roll over and grab him by the ankle, holding him captive with bloody hands.
Some weeks previously, in a lawless Sowetan shanty town called Chicken Farm, Kevin and I had been following armed policemen as they ran through the shacks, plunging downhill along rough tracks muddy with raw sewage. At a clearing near a stream, we saw a woman in rural Zulu dress wailing in grief, her hands clutching her head. In front of her, a middle-aged man was lying on his back, his arms stretched out on either side of him along a thick wooden beam. It looked as if he had been crucified. His earlobes, pierced and enlarged in the traditional Zulu fashion, were filled with blood from several head wounds. There is no question that a professional thrill ran through me: it was a scene that could be an icon of the civil war. Kevin and I descended on the corpse, but once we started to photograph, I found myself struggling and failing to capture this image of the crucifixion properly. I was unnerved, jittery, my hands were shaking involuntarily. Perhaps it was because of the woman wailing or memories of childhood religion, of Christ on the cross. I looked at Kevin; he looked stunned. Suddenly the corpse groaned and rolled on to its side. We leaped back in terror - we had been so certain he was dead. I will never forget that moment of horror, but unlike Kevin, I had no nightmares; at least none that I could recall in my waking hours.
An American consultant hired in November of 1992 to revamp the look of The Star was convinced that Joao was suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome, similar to what he’d seen among photographers in Vietnam. Management agreed and, despite protests from both Ken and Joao, he was told to stop going to the townships. South Africa’s isolation from the world during the apartheid years meant that any foreigner was automatically granted expert status and respect, often beyond their due. Joao was assigned to cover the effect of pollution on a pond in a wealthy white suburb of Johannesburg. While walking disconsolately around the sad pond, he noticed a duck waddling unsteadily towards him. The duck collapsed and died at his feet. Back at the newspaper, he printed the series as a montage with the mischievous caption ‘Going, going, gone’ and presented it to the photo desk. The consultant was appalled and urged the newspaper to get Joao psychological help.
Late that same night, a ‘press alert’ came across on the pager. An entire family had been in slain in Sebokeng, a sprawling black township south of Johannesburg that was plagued by mysterious killings and massacres and drive-by shootings. Kevin and Joao exchanged calls with Heidi and me, and despite the heavy rain and our anxiety about the fact that it was well after dark, we decided to go. The common wisdom among journalists was to never enter conflict zones after dark: things were different at night; people behaved without restraint. And we would have to use our flashes to get pictures - risky as the bright light going off spooked people and could attract gunfire.
The rain was bucketing down as we raced south in Kevin’s little pick-up. Heidi and I huddled against the cold in the fibreglass canopy on the back, bracing against each other as the car aquaplaned unpredictably every time it hit a patch of standing water on the road. We were uncertain about the wisdom of the foray: rumours of white agents provocateurs taking part in killings in the black townships meant that whites were increasingly treated with hostility. Sebokeng was probably the most dangerous township for journalists to work in, but we were determined to try to expose what was going on. When we got there, the dark streets were deserted. We had no way of finding the house as there were few street signs and residents had taken to painting over their house numbers for fear of being targeted for attack. The killings were so indiscriminate that people had devised convoluted theories as to who might be the next target-a situation which made wandering strangers seem to be a potential threat.
Usually we could ask people for directions or follow our noses to the right place, but the rain and the fear of being out at night meant that there was no one around to help. We started to regret our decision: to the armed self-defence unit members that kept watch, we must have looked like killers ourselves, cruising around looking for victims. We crept fearfully along the main streets, hoping to stumble on to the right house, until we saw a police armoured vehicle lumbering along, the deep growl of its engine breaking the silence. They were surprised to see whites there, but agreed to let us follow them to the house. While we waited for the detectives to finish their investigation, we found shelter from the wet with the survivors in a back room. The rain drummed on the tin roof, leaking through holes. Under the dim glow of a naked light-bulb, 21-year-old Jeremiah Zwane related how two men had burst through the front door and thrown a tear-gas canister into the room, then gone from room to room shooting everyone they found. His father and his brother had been gunned down in one bedroom. Jeremiah’s sister, Aubrey, just seven years old, had tried in vain to hide in her parent’ bedroom closet. She lay on her back in a pool of blood alongside her dead mother. Shot in the face and chest, her little body was a deeply shocking sight even after the many gruesome images we had photographed over the previous two years. A visiting teenage cousin had been shot dead in the lounge. Another teenage sister had died on the way to hospital, but her two-day-old baby had somehow survived the attack unhurt. The house looked like a scene in a horror movie, but this was real. The smell of blood was heavy in the damp air.
The four of us were the only journalists out in Sebokeng that night, despite the fact that every news organization and most journalists had received the message of the killing on their pagers as we had. We were convinced that the only way to stop such killing was to show what those deaths looked like, what those daily body counts actually meant.
The Star, which had suggested Joao lay off covering township violence, ran the story he had reported and two pictures, one on the front page. I transmitted pictures to the AP and The New York Times. Without our pictures, the only source of information on the massacre would have been spokesmen for the police and the political parties. Editors from most domestic and foreign media organizations still took police reports as factual even though the police were clearly a part of the problem. I remember many infuriating discussions with Renfrew, who was then still the AP bureau chief, about police and military involvement in the killings - he would patronizingly accuse me of being politically biased and naïve, but the AP and almost every other news organization chose to believe the government’s propaganda. The public would have been given information about yet another massacre from the people who were actually involved in many of the killings, as would be proved years later. It seemed that the international and domestic public were all too ready to believe that people who sometimes dressed in skins and could not speak English properly must be barbaric, while the white politicians and officials who spoke so logically and kept the trains running on time could not possibly be implicated in the murders. And yet despite our attempts to tell the truth, through our reporting and in our captions, our pictures played an unwitting part in the deception - our images from Sebokeng that night showed horribly dead black people and white policemen in uniform taking the bodies away, investigating their deaths. The impression was of the police helping the victims. Our pictures could not show that they had arrived hours after the emergency calls for help: they could not show the absolute certainty of the survivors that security forces had been involved in the attack.
6
A SHORTCUT TO HEAVEN
We do not want to remember those times, they break our hearts.
Soweto resident, Sandy ‘Tarzan’ Rapoo
By 1992, I had seen a lot of dead bodies. I had once tried to count them in an attempt to properly acknowledge their existence, but it was hopeless. Strange objects, dead bodies. Some were as bereft of any s
ign of having been human as a dead dog on the highway; others appeared to be asleep, no sign of death about them at all. Then there were dead bodies that were so dreadful that they made me fear death itself.
It was difficult to remain unaffected by all those dead people; but it was equally difficult to keep from switching off my emotions. I could not withstand the repeated impact of having a complete emotional response to every corpse or injured person I came across-Iwould need to have been a saint; but nor did I wish to do what more seasoned photographers seemed to do - shut off completely. In my first weeks of working for the AP, my car was stolen in Soweto and so the next day I got a ride with a colleague in his car. The morning was quiet and at midday we went to get a meal at a fast food outlet. We had just received our meals when my colleague got a message that there was trouble in a suburb of Soweto called Central Western Jabavu. We jumped into the car and raced to the address given; it was nearby, and we had not yet finished eating when we arrived at the scene. There were a handful of police and residents on a dirt soccer field and, next to the goalposts, was the object of their attention: a corpse on its back, burning. The flames had burnt most of the clothes off the body and were now through to the skin. I hurled my food away and began to photograph. After a minute or so, I turned to see what my colleague was doing. He was still eating his burger. I was shocked and thought him a callous pig; it was much later that I realized the extent to which his machismo was a defence against feeling too much.
In June of 1992, it was another dead body that drew me to Soweto’s Meadowlands Zone One suburb. But it was through covering the death of what was, at first, just another anonymous tragedy that I came to know a family that would symbolize ordinary black people’s struggle for liberation. I first met Sandy ‘Tarzan’ Rapoo, his wife, Maki, and his father, Boytjie, on the night of Johannes Rapoo’s death. They were in pyjamas in their kitchen when I cautiously entered their house on Bakwena Street. Tarzan was a powerfully built man with a shaven head and an eight-inch scar running up the side of his face and skull. That night, his dark eyes were unblinking and frightening. In the yellow light of the single bulb, I saw the family as hard, uncompromising and angry people. Tarzan’s nephew, Johannes, had been killed by police earlier that day, an unprovoked and pointless death that was symptomatic of the time.
Johannes and some neighbourhood friends had been pushing a wheelbarrow containing a car-engine when they were confronted by the police. They ran away. The police opened fire from inside their armoured vehicle. Johannes died on the way to hospital. The police claimed he was stealing the engine. Later, it was discovered that the engine was not stolen at all. Nobody knew why Johannes ran from the police, other than an all-too-common fear of arbitrary arrest or abuse.
I did not yet know the bitter memories that news of a death in that kitchen evoked. Nor did I yet know the easy laughter and generosity that lay behind those masks of anger. As I returned to cover the funeral of Johannes and other incidents of violence in their conflict-wracked area, I would slowly develop a friendship with the Rapoo family.
Most relationships that I had with black people were either with those my own age that I could relate to, or with people that I met in a very limited, specific way - who could put me in a frame in their minds, and me them, so that any extraordinary behaviour could be ignored or accommodated. I met a lot of people as a journalist, most of them black, and got to know many beyond the usual superficial requirements of the work - but there was always a gulf that was difficult to cross. The cultural differences between a white boy from the suburbs and someone brought up in a township were massive. We shared no common linguistic shorthand - we even spoke different dialects of English. Key or code words they took for granted had to be spelled out to me. If they told me something, I was not sure that I understood the full context of it; and vice versa. But the Rapoos were patient of my ignorance, and with a lot of laughing and teasing they helped me to learn about what was important in their lives. Despite the success of apartheid’s social engineering, we were to become close friends.
More than a year after Johannes’s death, I was visiting his family. It was a quiet afternoon, people were out enjoying the sunshine, chatting with neighbours, children laughing and shrieking as they skipped rope and played tag with a plastic ball. A bearded black man wearing a blue cotton workman’s jacket appeared at the end of the street. He had a quick, uneven gait and his right arm swung stiffly as he moved. He made his way unnoticed into the middle of the street. The first loud bang sent people scurrying off the street. I pressed myself against a garden wall and looked up-I watched the man calmly fire a large revolver into the street where parents screamed for their children in the panic. More shots rang out, but no one was hit. Then the street’s self-defence unit boys began hurling rocks, bottles and curses at him. The bearded man turned and lurched swiftly down the street towards the open veld beyond the last houses. The boys, none older than 18, took off after him, armed with a pitiful assortment of weapons - an axe, a knife and a kwash-a home-made zip-gun of metal pipes, pins and tightly pulled red rubber that could only fire one round at a time.
As we ran, the man kept turning and waiting, taunting the boys to come closer. They told me that he was a notorious Inkatha gunman from the neighbouring hostel, known as ‘Pegleg’ because of a disability that gave him the unusual gait, but he was deceptively fast and my chest was burning from the effort of keeping up with the chase.
The boys failed to catch Pegleg and we returned to a street disturbed and fearful after an incident that exposed the residents’ vulnerability to random violence. The area was protected by youths and ANC comrades who relied on a few shared guns to defend the neighbourhood, though on occasion well-armed self-defence units from other areas would come in to help launch attacks on the hostel. Later that day, I wanted to take pictures of the looted and burnt houses along the street that ran between the brown brick hostel buildings and the neighbourhood the Rapoos lived in. The street was the front-line between Zone One and the Meadowlands Hostel, one of the eight Soweto hostels that had become Inkatha fortresses. On seeing me preparing to drive down that eerie road in the dead zone, a neighbourhood man burst out laughing and leaned into my open car window: ‘If you take that road, you will never come back; it’s a shortcut to Heaven!’
Over time, I learned of the Rapoo family history. Boytjie, the patriarch of the family, sitting in his customary place on a weathered log in the shade cast by a pair of gnarled peach trees, would watch the neighbourhood go about its business. There, under the fruit trees, he told me how the Rapoos had come to Soweto. Boytjie was born Tshoena Reginald Rapoo in 1920, but the white girls he used to play with called him ‘Boytjie’ and the name stuck. The young Boytjie, unlike his own children and grandchildren, played childhood games with whites because he lived in Johannesburg, then a young city that had areas that were racially mixed. But that was before the government trucks and bulldozers made Johannesburg white.
Boytjie’s father had moved to the city from the farm where his family had bred cattle and grown crops for generations. Johannesburg was a new and rough city growing rapidly around the fabulously rich veins of gold that lay under the grassy veld. The mines were desperate for labour and taxes were imposed to force the largely self-sustaining black peasant farmers to enter the labour market. Black families had to send men to the mines in order to earn the cash needed to pay poll-, hut- and even dog-taxes. Boytjie had just begun his life as an adult, he had a job and had fallen in love with a girl called Johanna. He approached his parents, telling them he had met the girl he wanted to marry. They felt he was in too much of a hurry, that he should wait as he had only known her two weeks. But Boytjie was stubborn and took the 500-kilometre journey to Kimberley to visit Johanna’s parents: ‘I took a train all the way, but it was an easy job, thinking about Johanna.’
They soon married and their first child followed shortly. One day his mother’s friends came to visit and saw the infant lying naked on the bed - just
a couple of months old. One of Johanna’s friends joked, ‘Oh, be careful, he is naked!’ and the other replied, ‘Don’t worry, that one is Tarzan.’ The name stuck. By the time Tarzan was named, the flood of hundreds of thousands of black men and women flocking to the cities had turned a labour deficit into a surplus. Boytjie had to register and be given a pass book - the tool by which the government effected laws that kept blacks out of the cities unless they were gainfully employed. ‘The old pass was just a piece of paper. It had no photo, so we could borrow someone else’s,’ Boytjie remembered, but the pass laws became more sophisticated and more difficult to evade: ‘The new book had a photo in it, the dompas, we had to carry it under our arm, because it was heavy and tore our pockets.’ The dompas was indeed a heavy burden. It was on the basis of his racial identity, indelibly fixed in the identity book known as the dompas, that Boytjie, his wife and his son, Tarzan, and thousands of other non-white residents of the Johannesburg suburbs of Newclare, Sophiatown and Crown Mines were identified for forced removal to Soweto in 1955.
When the order came for them to leave, they tried to defy the police; they stoned the government trucks that came for them, but the army was eventually brought in and the forced removals proceeded. ‘Once in Meadowlands, they gave us a pint of milk and a loaf of bread for supper. The white official would ask: “How many children do you have?” If you answered “Six,” the reply was “Two loaves for you.” If you had no marriage certificate, they would push you off to the hostel. I had a friend at the council office so he and I went out to look for a better house than the one I had been allocated. There were trains and matchboxes. The trains are all in a line. The brown train. The corner house-a matchbox - had four rooms and the inside ones had three rooms.’ Meadowlands had little appeal for the city-loving Boytjie. ‘There were no fences, no streets, just a jungle with houses. People got lost.’ The little houses were poorly built, the roofs were untreated asbestos, without ceilings. ‘You could see through the bricks, watch people walk past outside. People would lean against an inside wall and it would just collapse. I did not plan to stay.’