The Bang-Bang Club

by Greg Marinovich

  Kevin had to go: he had to return to Johannesburg to be interviewed about the Pulitzer he had won just a week back. Joao told him to cancel, that it was dumb to leave now as the township was going to cook, but Kevin left anyway, saying he would be back in the afternoon. A few minutes after Kevin had left, ANC activists decided to string a ‘Vote Mandela’ banner across Khumalo Street, within easy range of the gunmen in the hostel. Everyone knew that this would provoke a response from the hostel-dwellers. As the comrades struggled to tie the long banner between a pine-tree and a lamp-post, we gathered under them, waiting, the peace-keepers’ armoured vehicle between us and Mshaya’zafe Hostel. It was not long before the expected shots rang out. Everyone scattered for cover and the peace-keepers’ vehicle trundled up the deserted street. We followed, using the slow-moving vehicle for cover. BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen was doing a stand-up further down Khumalo Street. Finishing the piece, he watched the group of photographers follow the blue vehicle up the street. ‘One of those arseholes is going to get shot,’ he said to himself.

  The armoured vehicle was accelerating. I looked to the side and saw Jim leaning forward, straining to keep up with the vehicle. It was obvious that we were going to lose the race and we peeled off, making for the safety of the houses lining the street. Civilians were crowding the pavement and peering out of front yards to watch the action. There was an atmosphere of excitement and glee - the soldiers were going to take on their enemy for them. Another episode of the neighbourhood’s favourite spectator sport was about to unfold, but this time with well-armed soldiers on their team. A self-defence unit member appeared with an AK and we followed as he threaded his way along the narrow alleys that led through the houses. By the time we emerged near the derelict petrol station on Khumalo Street again, we found that the peace-keepers had formed a barrier of armoured vehicles to prevent the ANC supporters crossing the concrete forecourt towards the hostel. Our gun-toting guide melted into the crowd. We kept moving and the line of soldiers let us through.

  The first thing we saw was a peace-keeper hopping across to an armoured vehicle, leaning on a colleague who was carrying his boot. He had shot himself in the foot. Joao and I followed him, taking pictures, and after he had struggled into the back of the high vehicle we pulled away and exchanged malicious grins. It was a silly picture, one that showed the peace-keepers to be farcically unprepared for this nasty neighbourhood war they found themselves in. We should have thought about that a little more. We moved on, to the long pre-cast concrete wall that marked the end of the garage forecourt and that shielded us from the outer wall of the hostel, some 20 metres further ahead.

  Dozens of soldiers had taken up positions along the wall, crouching in the rank profusion of weeds and grass. Their officers were moving among them, preparing them to advance around the edge of the protective wall to charge the hostel that the sniper was firing from. The windows of the hostel that faced us had long ago been blocked by plywood and iron-sheeting, and the walls were pockmarked by the bullets from many gun battles. The soldiers were scared - this was more than they had bargained for when they signed on as peace-keepers. Some were so reluctant that a stocky black officer was kicking them to get them moving. Though doubtless a time-tried military motivational method, it did not seem to be working too well. Ken, Gary, Jim, Joao, several other photographers, a couple of television cameramen and I were all lined up parallel to the soldiers, focusing our lenses on their clearly terrified expressions. I approached the black officer who had been using his boot to encourage his men, ‘We are not going to get in your way, but we want to follow you guys in. We’ll stay behind you. Is that OK?’ ‘Sure, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘Hey, and if one of us gets hurt, you will help us, right?’ I half-joked. He smiled back.

  There was a tense, anticipatory lull as the solders readied themselves. We waited for the moment when we would have to fling ourselves around the wall and into the line of fire. Adrenaline was pumping into my veins. I was scared, but it did not occur to me to leave - there were pictures to be had. This is what we do.

  A little while earlier, Ken had called Robin Comley, The Star’s picture editor. He was angry, telling her to make sure the paper ran a story about how the peace-keepers were fucking up in the township. Ken had, some weeks before, gone to photograph the peace-keepers training. He had seen them practising crowd control with batons and shields - as far as he was concerned, that preparation was not what they needed for the war in Thokoza. Then, he went on to tell Robin about a mouse that he had been forced to kill at home that morning. About how Monica had made him kill it and how upset he was over that. Robin listened for a while, quite unsettled by this strange conversation. She had never heard Ken ramble on like this before. ‘Ken, can we discuss this another time? Anyway, haven’t you got pictures to shoot?’

  The first breezes of autumn had begun, blowing an empty tin across the forecourt; its eerie rumbling clatter stood out from the white noise of the armoured vehicles’ idling diesel engines. The hiatus was broken by a burst of gunfire from the hostel. A soldier on top of one of the armoured vehicles began to fire towards the hostel gunman.

  And then I got hit. An utter confusion of sensations overwhelmed me. The video footage of cameraman Sam Msibi captured me as I was hit and careened into him and Joao. The videotape has the blur of my shadow merging with theirs and there is the violent gasp of air leaving my lungs on the soundtrack before the camera hit the ground and switched off. I had always known that I might be wounded somewhere some time. On many occasions, death had come too close to allow me to dismiss the danger, but I had never truly felt that I would be wounded. I had accepted the intellectual possibility, even probability that one day I would be hurt; but on an emotional level, I was untouchable, immortal. The illusion of safety that was merely the absence of being hit had unexpectedly been blasted away to reveal an unimaginable vulnerability. The pathetic belief that I was in control of myself, my own destiny and my immediate environment was shattered.

  As Joao and Jim dragged me along the ground towards cover, we had no idea that Ken had been shot. We were caught up in our own crisis. Smoke rose from the barrels of the rifles next to us as the bullets continued to crack and whine. I couldn’t figure out whom they were shooting at. Joao was yelling at them to stop firing. He looked down at me and shot off a series of frames: it was important to him to record the moment. I had been hit in the chest. I had seen enough chest wounds to know that it was serious and could be fatal. At first I wanted to know if the bullet had gone right through my torso, so that I could know how much time I had to live. But neither Jim nor Joao wanted to look, and then that panic passed and I felt strangely relieved that I had finally been shot. I had always experienced guilt about being a passing voyeur during other people’s moments of tragedy. A strong sense of peace came over me, a feeling that I had now paid my dues.

  Then Gary cried out, ‘Ken O is hit!’ Jim left me and ran in a low crouch to where Gary was trying to get a response out of Ken, whose eyes were glassily open. A trickle of blood was running out the side of his mouth. As Jim bent over Ken, one of the soldiers right next to them fired again, the blast of cordite and the passage of the bullet raising the hair on Gary’s head and then Jim’s - they both dropped flat, screaming at the soldier to stop firing. One bullet had come within millimetres of killing them both. Jim scuttled back. The light-meter he habitually kept in his shirt pocket fell out, stopping at the end of the cord that tethered it. Jim picked it up, and reflexively took a light-reading before slipping it back in his pocket. Perhaps he was checking to see whether it had been damaged in the fall. ‘Ken’s gone, but you’ll be OK,’ he said into my ear.

  Joao ran over to see Ken, who was being picked up by Gary and a peace-keeper. There was nothing he could do but take pictures: Ken would want to see those pictures of himself tomorrow. It passed through his mind that Ken, always exceptionally mindful of how he looked in photographs, would prefer a picture where his hair was not hiding his face. He reca
lled how Ken had insisted on photographing Joao’s injuries after he had been smashed in the face with a brick during riots in Johannesburg the year before, when Joao was still with The Star. Ken, the consummate professional, had instilled in Joao the ethic of getting the picture first, then dealing with the rest later. The minutes on that garage forecourt seemed to drag on for ever as we tried to get an armoured vehicle close enough to the wall to get Ken and me into it without having to risk more gunfire. The peace-keepers near Ken were still firing haphazardly, and their commander shouted repeatedly at them to cease fire. Their shooting threatened no one but their own comrades and us.

  Jim was propping me up, waiting for Ken to be loaded into the back of the armoured vehicle first. Gary and the officer I had spoken to earlier were carrying Ken and they clumsily bundled him into the back. Jim and Joao struggled to carry me and, with the help of others, pushed me in. Ken was crumpled in a heap on the narrow metal floor at my feet, and I perched uncomfortably above him. The video footage was more reliable than my own memory, its unwavering eye showing what I could not see: Joao raised his arms to the sky and cursed in frustration, ‘Fuck!’ Then the vehicle began to move and he leapt on to the step pulling himself inside. The white captain we had previously argued so fiercely with drove the vehicle himself, yelling back over his shoulder: ‘We have three minutes! Hang on ... three minutes!’ In spite of all that had happened between us and the peace-keepers, including them shooting us, those words gave us a measure of hope. The captain, surely experienced in this, was certain that we had three minutes - there had to be a chance.

  A young British photographer felt Ken’s pulse. There was a moment of hesitation and then he looked up at us and said there was a pulse. Joao instructed him to give Ken mouth-to-mouth, which he immediately began doing, straddling Ken in the cramped floor space where Ken lay between the sets. We still thought there was hope, but he actually knew that there was no life left. He just could not face being the one to say that it was too late for Ken. Once at Natalspruit Hospital, just off the top end of Khumalo Street, Joao was the first out and he ran into the hospital entrance heading towards where he thought he would find help. It was all familiar from three months earlier when he had rushed in there in search of Abdul, only to be directed to a laundry cupboard and the lifeless corpse. Joao was not sure whom it was he hoped to find - a nurse or a doctor perhaps - but instead he came upon a row of gurneys, and he pushed one back towards the armoured vehicle. Gary and the rest were pulling Ken from the back of the vehicle. They lowered him on to the gurney and rushed him into the entrance foyer, where nurses pointed out the way to the emergency room.

  Inside the rudimentary emergency area, the doctor immediately began trying to resuscitate Ken. I followed unsteadily and nurses and colleagues helped me on to an operating table. The doctor examined me briefly. ‘I’m OK. Look at Ken,’ I said and he turned away. Joao would not leave the room. He wanted to be there, to make sure that no one mistakenly pronounced Ken dead if he were still alive. Or maybe he needed proof that Ken was not coming back. The doctor pronounced him dead after Joao had helped him lift Ken’s torso and peel off his blue journalists’ union T-shirt to look for a wound. Joao ran his hands through Ken’s hair, but in their haste, he and the doctor had missed the tiny entry wound under his arm. ‘Could be a broken neck,’ the doctor erroneously surmised and then Ken’s corpse was covered by a sheet and wheeled into a corner. A bullet had penetrated Ken’s chest cavity at his armpit. The high energy of that point-blank shot meant that the bullet had disintegrated on meeting the soft tissue of the organs in his chest: that was why there was no exit wound.

  I was alive, despite some minutes during which I had been doubtful, but when Ken was declared dead, some of the resilience I had regained evaporated. I looked up and saw Mark Chisholm and Rob Celliers, two of the most hardened television cameramen I knew, just staring at me, their faces in total despair; their cameras weren’t rolling, just hanging at their sides. The doctor turned his attention to me. With a distinct lack of gentleness, he slashed through the flesh under my arm and shoved a foot-long plastic drain deep into my chest to draw the blood and fluid from my collapsed lung. I gasped, ‘Jesus, that’s like being shot again!’ He agreed, and then said, ‘I put it in wrong, we have to do it again. Sorry.’

  He had started to examine the gaping, dinner-plate sized wound in my chest when a woman was wheeled in, a victim of a car accident and in a bad way. The doctor left me to try to resuscitate the woman, her head a bloody mass and strange, watery breathing sounds coming from her. She died within minutes and was wheeled away. He came back to me, finished cleaning out the wound and sewed up the flaps of flesh and skin with large, untidy stitches. Then he began to examine the wounds to my butt - shrapnel had made large holes in my left cheek. Joao watched in fascination as the doctor’s finger disappeared into the holes peppering my bum - not the most dignified of wounds. I had not known about the wounds, nor even noticed that another piece of fragmented bullet had shattered the bones of my right thumb. Joao stepped outside to get away from the image of Ken dead and covered. Ken was now just a corpse in the corner of an otherwise distracted room - all that vitality and personality was gone.

  Brauchli began a series of phone calls. His first was to the AP news desk to report that two journalists had been shot in Thokoza and to get them to send an ambulance to get me out of the township hospital. Next Brauchli called Ken’s wife, Monica. He was nervous about telling her: ‘No fucking way I was going to tell Monica. She was way too fucking unstable.’ But he knew he had to: ‘Monica,’ he said. ‘Look, Ken has been shot in Thokoza, can you get hold of The Star and get down to the hospital right away?’ ‘What?’ she screamed. ‘Hang on, just get hold of The Star and get here.’ ‘Is he OK?’ she asked. Brauchli prevaricated. ‘I don’t know, Jim just told me that he was shot and that’s all I know.’ He did not have the heart or the courage to tell her. ‘Please, Monica, call The Star.’

  Before the shooting, I had called Heidi at home and told her that I could not leave Thokoza just yet, but that I would come fetch her as soon as things quietened down a little. The next call she received was from Donna Bryson at the AP, who told her that she had something to tell her but not over the phone. ‘Why not? Come on, Donna, what’s up?’ ‘Greg got shot in Thokoza.’ Heidi felt numb. ‘Is he dead?’ ‘No, but nobody actually knows what’s going on out there.’ Donna promised to pick her up to take her to Thokoza.

  Heidi and Donna went to Thokoza with the new bureau chief, John Daniszewski. John drove, Donna sat next to him, looking at the map to find their way to Thokoza. John was a notoriously slow driver, and that day was no exception. They had been in the car for a full hour, when someone up front switched the radio on. The news reader was saying, ‘. . . Ken Oosterbroek died on the spot. Greg Marinovich was seriously injured and now is being treated in Natalspruit Hospital.’ Heidi lost her temper. ‘Why didn’t one of you tell me that Ken is dead?’ she shouted. ‘And can’t you drive faster?’ She immediately apologized; it wasn’t anybody’s fault, but Heidi was scared and tense. They reached Thokoza, but then they got lost trying to find the hospital. When they eventually got there, Heidi rushed towards the entrance, but Jim stopped her, saying, ‘I called Newsweek. You don’t have to worry, they are paying for everything.’ Heidi thought he was very sweet, but the last thing on her mind was bills. Outside casualty, Chisholm with his Betacam on his shoulder, told her, ‘Greg is OK, but don’t go in there, he’s about to be operated on.’

  She waited anxiously outside, but then saw journalists leaving the room and thought that if they could be there, so could she. When I saw her, I burst into tears; she took my face in her hands as I blurted out that I was sorry for getting shot. Heidi had always cautioned me when I went into dangerous situations. She had feared my getting hurt and I had always assured her that nothing would ever happen.

  Monica arrived a few seconds later and went straight to Joao who was standing outside the entrance. She kn
ew that he would tell her the truth. ‘Is it true? Is Ken dead?’ Joao felt that she wanted reassurance that it was all a mistake, that Ken was OK, but he looked into her eyes and said, ‘Yes, it’s true.’ Monica ran into the hospital and found Ken lifeless in the corner of the emergency room, his shoes, socks and shirt neatly packed below the sheet-draped figure. She began weeping, a deep, anguished sobbing, hugging Ken’s body. She was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Heidi went over to comfort her. Monica said, ‘His hair is so strange, this morning it was much smoother.’ Then she began to talk to her dead husband. ‘You can wake up now, Ken, it’s over. Wake up!’

  Heidi, always the straight arrow, said to Monica in her Euro-English accent, ‘Ken doesn’t wake up any more.’ Monica turned to her and said: ‘You’re lucky, your man is alive; mine is dead.’ Then Monica just sat quietly next to her husband’s body, holding his hand, and weeping.

  Kevin had raced back to Thokoza after hearing about the shooting on the radio. Outside the entrance to casualty, Gary flung his arms around Kevin’s neck and blurted out that Ken was dead. Kevin just stared straight ahead. His best friend was dead.

  Newsweek and the AP (with remarkable loyalty to a freelancer who was no longer working for them) had begun to try to get me evacuated to a better hospital. Newsweek had no plan in case someone got hurt; AP had a list of phone numbers, but no step-by-step procedure despite Abdul having been killed while working for them in neighbouring Kathlehong just three months before. The Star had no set plan either. Nor did I, other than a vague faith in my colleagues and the comrades getting me to a hospital as quick as possible. A planned emergency procedure would not have helped us that day - the helicopter rescue services that were called that afternoon all refused to go to Natalspruit Hospital, never mind Khumalo Street - too dangerous, they said. There was no way an ambulance was going to enter an ongoing battle to get someone out. But in any case, no rescue service could assist someone hurt in a township battle faster than the people that were around. We had all, on many occasions over the years, had to abandon photographing the news and rush wounded fighters or civilians to hospital - often we were the only ones with a car available. There is an elaborate, unspoken code about helping people in trouble, in any war zone, in any country. The limits and responsibilities are unclear, just how much risk to take to assist colleagues, combatants, civilians. The rules are fluid, yet seemingly understood - if you can, you help. If it is a friend you do whatever your heart tells you to, but for strangers, it was uncommon for us to risk our lives.