The Bang-Bang Club

by Greg Marinovich

  ‘But I’m showing you being attacked,’ I tried to convince them in my best Afrikaans. ‘It’s in your interest.’ No one bought that line, but it stalled them a little. The column had begun to retreat and in their eagerness to leave it looked as though they would not bother with me. I started to relax, but then I turned to my right and I saw a man standing on the bed of a light pick-up some 15 metres away. He was pointing a pistol right at my head. ‘I’m going to kill you now,’ he informed me softly in Afrikaans. I watched his index finger tighten on the trigger. Everything slowed right down. I knew he was not bluffing, that he was going to shoot. Suddenly, a tall wiry man with an ugly grimace underneath his greying moustache stepped between the gun and me. He ripped the one camera off my neck and hurled it to the ground - the other of my two cameras was hanging from my shoulder, and I used my elbow to push it out of sight, behind my back. His face contorted and he was saying something, but I could not hear for the blood rushing through my ears. I could have kissed that unattractive face - he had unwittingly save my life. Then they were all gone and we were alone.

  I walked shakily back to the car and got in. Heidi looked at me, her face pale, stricken. We pulled off on to a side road where black residents urgently waved us to a hiding place behind the hut that the AWB had been shooting up. I feared they might follow us, not believing we had somehow managed to get away unscathed. I also had difficulty believing how stupid I had been. I knew the pictures were shit from the first frame. But there was no time to dwell on it: a woman had been severely wounded in one of the houses. They carried her out into the dusty yard, where Heidi began to dress her wounds. She looked in a bad way, blood everywhere.

  The convoy we had intercepted had been trying to leave Bop. The homeland army had been unhappy with Mangope’s decision to call on the Boers, and the unmitigated racism displayed by the right-wing militia had utterly alienated them. Their disappearance from the streets was the sign that they had withdrawn their support of Mangope. Constand Viljoen had watched his attempted rescue of the homeland leader start to degenerate into a racial showdown and ordered his men to pull out.

  A few hundred metres further up the road from my close call, Kevin and Jim had also inadvertently intercepted the retreating column. When Afrikaner gunmen started to take pot-shots at them, Jim had accelerated up the sand verge to get ahead, overtaking the slow-moving vehicles in the column. Within seconds, they ran into an intense gun battle between the retreating neo-Nazis and the better-armed Bop security forces.

  Scrambling out of the car, they lay flat on the ground. The firing petered out and Jim looked up to see a 70s Mercedes and three AWB members surrounded by a dozen uniformed Bop soldiers. He had to get there. Holding his camera above his head to show the Bop soldiers that he was not a combatant, he slowly stood up. In the aftermath of the gunfight, the silence was conspicuous. He took a step forward - still no reaction. Jim then walked the short distance across the road and began to take pictures. Kevin followed right behind him.

  One of the right-wingers was dead, crumpled face down in the dirt, blood flowing past the tripod swastika insignia on his shoulder. Another was lying across the back seat, the third crouched next to the driver’s seat, waving his pistol back and forth across the semi-circle of black men facing him. Jim tried to calm him down: ‘You’re surrounded, don’t start shooting. Stay calm.’

  The bearded man, Alwyn Wolfaardt, was wounded and scared, and asked for an ambulance. ‘We can’t call an ambulance. They will do it, they will arrest you then they’ll get you an ambulance,’ Jim said, as he and the others kept shooting pictures. He had been in similar situations before and he felt that the peak of danger had passed; the presence of all those journalists should also have had a calming effect. The Reuters photographer alongside Kevin also thought that the crucial moment had passed. He wanted to get back to Johannesburg to file in time to make European paper deadlines, taking Kevin’s films with him.

  Several more journalists arrived. A Bop soldier quickly walked in and pulled the pistol out of Wolfaardt’s hand and instructed his captives to lie flat on the ground. Journalists were questioning Wolfaardt. A black radio reporter asked, ‘Aren’t you sorry for what you have done?’ Wolfaardt just kept asking for an ambulance, but no one responded. It was too good a journalistic moment. Kevin could not quite believe what he was seeing. He recognized how important this scene was and tried to capture it all: the swastika-like emblem; the blood; the fear of their victorious black enemies etched on the right-wingers’ faces. The worm had well and truly turned.

  A hundred metres away, CBS cameraman Siphiwe Rallo was rolling long on the scene. He watched through the viewfinder as a Bop policeman tried to fire a semi-automatic rifle into the journalists’ backs. The journalists were oblivious to the danger just behind them. The deadly weapon jammed, and the policeman struggled to clear it, but his rage and haste slowed him down - time enough for another uniformed Bop man to take it from him.

  Meanwhile, the cameras and tape recorders worked on. Without warning, one of the Bop soldiers walked swiftly up to the two surviving right-wingers and executed them with rapid single shots from his assault rifle. It was over in a heartbeat. The death of white supremacy.

  Kevin had finished the films he had in his cameras and was busy rewinding them when those first shots were fired. There was no way to reload fast enough to catch those few desperate seconds, and he had to just watch it happen.

  Oblivious to one of the most dramatic moments of South African history being played out just a little further up the road, I was looking for the camera that my unlikely saviour had hurled into the weeds bordering the road; but it seemed that one of the fleeing right-wingers must have paused long enough to help himself to it. I was scuffing pointlessly in the grass when a television crew drove past and the cameraman yelled out of the window, ‘Some AWB have been killed up ahead!’

  I ran to the car and called for Heidi. We sped up the road to find three white men sprawled against and half out of a shot-up car. They were all very dead. I saw Jim and other photographers running away. The scene caught my eye and I shot a few frames of the dead men and three photographers fleeing like culprits. I had missed the killing of the AWB men and the drama surrounding it, important pictures, but despite that professional regret, I felt a surge of elation, a bitter pleasure at seeing those corpses in the Bop dust. Kevin would later say how the cold-blooded execution of those men had disgusted him, but for me it was pure justice.

  Working the scene from different angles, I looked up to see a white man in Bop army uniform charging toward us. He screamed abuse in a heavy Afrikaans accent, called us scavengers and hysterically chased us away with a shotgun. He was one of the South African military men seconded to the homeland security forces, and was clearly distraught at the murder of his countrymen. Black men in the uniform he wore had killed white men with whom he shared language, culture and probably ideology - they were the Volk, the chosen race of Africa.

  We drove back to the hotel. It was a Friday, and if I could get the film back to the Newsweek office in Johannesburg quickly enough, it could still be shipped to New York in time to make the magazine’s Saturday deadline. Everyone was in a state of excitement. I entrusted my film to CBS, who were driving back to Johannesburg to feed their tape to New York.

  Ken also arrived late at the battleground. Unsettled by the deserted scene around the Mercedes, he shot out of the car window, planning to move closer once he had a picture in the bag. The same white officer with the shotgun raced out of the barracks and thrust the barrel into Ken’s face. Ken instinctively shied back and pushed the barrel away from him as the man pulled the trigger, and the shotgun discharged harmlessly into the air. In the aftermath of the gun battle, the Bop army had retaken the streets. Using armoured personnel carriers, they herded the confused and fearful AWB stragglers out of town. Afrikaner militants still trapped inside the homeland feared they would be killed as they tried to leave. A group approached Ken and pleaded with
him to help them escape, to safeguard them - their hatred of the press had disappeared along with their bravado. ‘Sorry,’ Ken replied, with suppressed satisfaction. ‘We’re only here to observe.’

  Joao had raced to Bop after doing the early morning Mandela job, but he was too late to get anything. He was upset, because he knew that he had been forced to miss great pictures. But Brauchli somehow also missed the pictures that counted - he had arrived on the scene when it was all over. Denis Farrell in Johannesburg knew AP were going to get severely beaten world-wide unless he came up with a frame to match Kevin’s Reuters picture. Desperate, he called his opposite number at Reuters, Patrick de Noirmont, and asked for an out-take, a reject, from Kevin’s films. This was not that unusual-I had on more than one occasion snipped a neg. for my opposition when they were in real trouble on a story. The rule is to make sure you keep very quiet about it and to make sure that the picture you give is never going to beat yours. I had once foolishly allowed a Reuters photographer in Bosnia to choose his own neg. from my AP take and woke up the next morning to discover that I had been beaten by my own picture. Patrick had been in the game a long time and he gave Denis an inferior image from the scene; Kevin’s Reuters pictures dominated the play while the AP got its arse kicked.

  13

  THE SIN OF LOOKING

  Let’s go get some bang-bang!

  Kevin Carter

  April 1994, Johannesburg

  The democratic transformation of South Africa was big news. Thousands of journalists, photographers, cameramen and producers had descended on us either to witness the birth of a non-racial democracy from the ashes of the apartheid state, or to watch the conflagration - either way it was a great story and profitably career-advancing. The violence escalated dramatically as the election date approached, and various groups tried to derail the process.

  By now, we had become a tight-knit group: Ken, Kevin, Joao and me - the so-called Bang-Bang Club that had been suggested all those years ago. But in fact, it was not just us four, it had been enlarged to include a few local and foreign photographers whom we had befriended over the years. After some time, we shut the door and even excluded a long-time friend who had arrived in the country late. He found that he could not team up with the group of globe-trotting conflict-photographers he usually worked with. We regretted it, but we had consciously made the decision to exclude any more people from joining our already overloaded clique.

  We were arrogant, elitist and highly competitive. And for us, it became a comical spectacle as several visiting photographers - strangers - desperately tried to hook up with us: what easier way to be able to access and photograph the violence than with local boys who knew the terrain and had all the information? I recall an evening in that period when I told one renowned international photographer that he could not join us as there were already too many people travelling in the group. He called me back near midnight in a frothing rage and warned me that I would need him one day, that he was too important to be treated in this fashion. I listened and tried not to laugh: this famous photographer was being excluded from an elite he felt he belonged to, his ego was bruised, but he also knew that every week he was getting his butt kicked by our pictures.

  Early one morning in April, Joao, Ken, Jim and Brauchli turned on to the road leading into Thokoza. They were surprised to see three clearly marked journalists’ cars parked on the verge. They slowed down to see if anything was going on, then realized that the foreign photographers were simply parked there. Odd. They drove past and were then amazed to see the little convoy pull out and follow them along Khumalo Street. Joao laughed. But Brauchli became angry - this had happened before and these people were leaching off our local knowledge. Let them find their own pictures. Approaching the dead zone, yet another car swung out of a side street and slipped into the convoy, right behind the lead car. Brauchli lost it and told Jim to stop the car. He stormed up to the car behind us and aggressively said ‘Hey, why are you guys following us? Do your own thing, stop following us!’ The driver was a South African, Paul Velasco, who knew the townships well enough to not need to follow anyone, and he had happened to pull out from the side street and into the convoy at an unfortunate moment. Velasco, who is notorious for his quick temper, yelled back, ‘Fuck off, you piece of shit!’ and dropped the clutch, overtaking the bang-bang car. Bauchli, undeterred, proceeded down the line, berating each car in turn.

  It was funny, but in truth we had spent years working here, learning how to get pictures in extremely difficult circumstances, and now people reckoned we should help just anybody who waltzed into our backyard for a couple of weeks. They did not even offer to buy us lunch - the usual way that foreign journalists milk information from local ones. We were happy to work with some people, especially those who had put in the time and effort to be ‘one of the boys’, but others we wanted no truck with - it was quite arbitrary.

  In that first quarter of 1994, South Africa was precariously balanced on the edge of the abyss-a fully-fledged civil war between several groupings based on race and political allegiance. Far-right-wingers had begun a terror campaign and were calling on whites to rise up against the state in order to be allowed to take a portion of the country and secede - in effect, to form a white homeland, an ironic inversion of their original policy. Despite the humiliation in Bophuthatswana, dozens of rural towns flew the old Transvaal Boer Republic’s vierkleur flag and had declared themselves independent of the New South Africa, as the nascent post-apartheid state had been dubbed.

  We were all working incredibly long and arduous hours - one day we would be chasing a speeding campaign-convoy to some remote rural town where we would have to battle security and crowds to get worthwhile images; the next we would be ducking bullets in yet another violent incident. I recall the entire period as one of extended exhaustion.

  Kevin’s position at Reuters had become tenuous. He would sometimes come in with brilliant pictures from conflict - such as the ones from Bophuthatswana or the townships - and then on other occasions he would completely fail to deliver. He had resumed doing hard drugs on a regular basis and Kathy eventually grew sick of it. In the first week of April, over Easter, she told him to move out of her apartment, which they had shared for almost a year. The most stable element in Kevin’s life was no longer his to rely on and he seemed to lose control almost completely. A few days later Reuter’s chief photographer, Patrick de Noirmont, sent Kevin to cover Mandela speaking at a Johannesburg hotel. Kevin did not return for hours and Patrick was getting anxious and irritated waiting for the film. Late that night he finally heard from Kevin - he had been arrested for reckless and drunken driving and possession of drugs, and was now being held at a police station. Patrick was enraged - even more so when he heard the full story. Mandela had already begun to speak when Kevin had walked in, holding a glass of wine in his hand and visibly out of it. He slowly negotiated his way to the front row where the other photographers were, stepping carefully over the microphone cables that led to the podium. He sat down and after a while said he was bored. He got up and walked back the way he had come, and as he passed the last photographer he said loudly, ‘If the old man catches a bullet, phone me.’

  Kevin went back to his car, where he had a ‘ready-made’ white pipe waiting. On the way back to the Reuters office, he failed to negotiate a turn and crashed the car into a garage door and a wall, hitting his head against the windscreen. When the startled house-owner came out to find out what was happening and assist if need be, she saw Kevin swaying next to the car, blood pouring down his face. She started screaming at him to keep away from her. Kevin was not looking his dashing best: the haunted artist had degraded into a wasted-druggie look. The police arrived - the woman’s hysteria and Kevin’s usual belligerence towards the police resulted in Kevin getting involved in a tussle with a policeman. The police also found a bag of dagga and the used bottle neck from the white pipe in the car. When Patrick got to the Brixton police station, the first question he was asked
was, ‘How can you work with people who are stoned and drunk?’

  Patrick was allowed into the cell where he found Kevin, still wasted. Kevin told him that he had been beaten up by the cops. Patrick left angrily, having retrieved the Mandela film. Patrick then called Kathy, even though he knew that she and Kevin were no longer together. She rushed to the police station, where they would not allow her to see Kevin, even though she had the money to pay his bail. The police insisted he had to spend the night in jail. Early the next morning, Kevin looked dreadful; he had not been allowed to wash, and his face was caked with dry blood from the gash above his forehead. He told Kathy that he had slept on the cold concrete floor and that he had not been given even a blanket. He was charged and a court appearance date was set; Kathy was then allowed to post his bail. She felt guilty about having kicked Kevin out and that he was now in such a bad way. She still cared for him and allowed him to stay at her flat for the day while he recovered. That night Kathy suggested that he seek professional help for his addiction, but Kevin insisted he could beat the drugs on his own. In the days leading up to the accident and arrest, Kevin had undoubtedly been coming to work stoned. Judith, a friend at Reuters, recalls that there was a general feeling that he was unravelling, losing it; when people in the office heard about his accident, the collective feeling was that he gone too far.

  What happened at Reuters following the arrest is not completely clear. I had always believed that it was common knowledge that they had fired Kevin after the incident, but Patrick and the Reuters bureau chief, Rodney Pinder, offer different versions of what happened. One version had Patrick firing Kevin the night of the accident in a fit of anger, and then relenting the next day - he had seemingly started having second thoughts, thinking he had been too hasty and that maybe he should give Kevin another chance. In another version Pinder insisted that there was no place for someone like Kevin at the agency, and Kevin was fired. Pinder himself now says that he suggested they fire Kevin, but had left it up to Patrick, who had thought that they needed Kevin, as he would probably bring in good pictures over the election period. Colleagues who had been in the office were sure that Kevin had been fired. Kevin was also convinced that he had been fired. In any event, whether the confusion led Kevin to believe he had been fired, or he really had been, the outcome was the same: it added to Kevin’s instability at a time when he need something to hold on to.