On the day of Kevin’s funeral, Monday, 1 August, Judith’s dogs went crazy. People were coming in and out of her house wanting information on Kevin’s last days, to collect things of his, and looking for emotional support. Judith was emotionally overwrought. She kept replaying the last two days in her mind. The dogs were disturbed by the visitors and picked up from her mood that something was very wrong. Minutes before Judith was to leave for the funeral they began fighting in the enclosed yard. She usually separated them by spraying them with water from the green garden hose. But the hosepipe wasn’t there. It was the hosepipe that Kevin had been carrying around in his car for over a week and that he had finally used to commit suicide.
I suffered through a difficult funeral service, during which the Catholic priest said he was sure that Kevin had been to Mass in New York City and had surely made his peace with God. Joao got up and walked out, livid at what he took to be hypocrisy. I thought that Kev had not stepped into a church for religious reasons for more than a decade, and felt angry. But we were too harsh - the priest had wanted to soothe Kevin’s parents with a Catholic funeral service; and perhaps we were wrong - Kevin had told his parents that he had indeed been to Mass in New York. Joao, Gary and I, along with family members, carried Kevin’s surprisingly heavy coffin to the hearse. We slid it on metal runners into its dark interior and the attendant shut the door, then drove off. I was confused as the hearse disappeared. Weren’t we meant to follow it to the cemetery? But he was to be cremated, and his ashes would be buried among the roots of a rosebush at the church in a family ceremony two weeks later.
At first, Julia told Megan that Kevin had had an accident in his car, and gone to heaven. But Megan watched the news on television and had heard the presenters say that he had gassed himself in his car. Megan wanted to know exactly what he had done and how: she was worried her dad had died in a terrible place. So Julia took her to the Sandton Field and Study Centre and showed her. Megan was relieved. ‘There are nice birds here.’
That was one of a series of closures on Kevin, farewell rituals that were prolonged as we tidied up his loose ends. When Kevin’s father, Jimmy, went to collect his son’s pick-up, he found laundry for Roma to wash and, to his surprise, the bottle of Klein Constantia Cabernet that Jimmy had left behind at Kevin’s place, the wine that Kevin had bought him when he returned from New York, a sign of his having made his peace with his parents, of their rediscovered affection.
On the morning that Kevin killed himself, a packet of letters from Japanese schoolchildren, written to Kevin and telling him about how his Sudanese picture affected them, arrived at his parents’ home. The letters were written by students at the Dai Roku Nippon Primary school in Arakawa Ward, Tokyo. Extracts were read out at the funeral:
‘If I will be caught in a bad or hard situation, I will remember your photo and try to get over the situation.’
‘I have been a selfish person until now.’
‘Since I saw this photo, I make an effort to eat everything.’
‘I would not take the picture and rather give water to the girl.’
‘I would take a shot with shivering hand.’
The news of Kevin’s death prompted one Japanese reader, Hisaye Nakajimaa, to write to the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, a letter that could stand as Kevin’s epitaph: ‘I can hardly believe that I was the only person who felt it too harsh to criticize Mr Carter for “not having saved the girl before taking the picture”. I cannot stop praying that Mr Carter have a peaceful mind in the heaven. He left us with a picture that exposed us to a scene that is too sad to be passed by.’
19
A NEW SOUTH AFRICA
Nobody listened to us.
Sylvia Dlomo, a mother of a murdered activist
In the wake of the 1994 elections, South Africa was changing fast. The violence was over and we were doing stories about the transformation from white supremacist rule to a non-racial democracy. Despite setbacks, the ANC-led government set in motion ambitious plans to eradicate the vestiges of apartheid. The homelands were being disbanded. A remarkable new constitution was being written. Clinics and schools sprang up in remote rural areas and townships. It was an exciting time, but we spent a lot of it dwelling on Ken. We built him up into a hero, even though he had done nothing heroic - he had been shot by accident while doing his job. We were consumed with ensuring that he not fade from the public memory.
Joao and I did not realize it at the time, but now, looking back, we made a hero out of Ken to assuage our feelings of self-doubt. If we could feel good about Ken, we could feel good about ourselves. At the time we felt we were guilty, but in retrospect I think this guilt was substituting for a more nagging emotion. What exactly had we done to earn the guilt? At times, we felt like vultures. We had indeed trodden on corpses, metaphorically and literally, in making a living; but we had not killed any of those people. We had never killed anyone; in fact, we had saved some lives. And perhaps our pictures had made a difference by allowing people to see elements of other people’s struggles to survive that they would not have otherwise known about. There were times, like at Nancefield Hostel, when I was guilty of inaction, of just taking pictures; but I was not guilty when tens of thousands of Hutus had been dying of cholera in eastern Zaïre or when I had photographed police opening fire on unarmed civilians in Boipatong. The feeling of guilt is surely more to do with inadequacy, an inability to assist. We should feel bad after witnessing each suffering even though we are not responsible for it. But real guilt can be dealt with: we can confess, or flog ourselves every morning before breakfast. Dealing with an intrinsic inability to help, our own inadequacy, is much more difficult, even impossible - we are always going to be inadequate to help all those who need it.
A group, consisting of Monica, Ken’s mother, his colleagues and friends - and including Joao, Robin and I, helped arrange an exhibition and began planning a book of Ken’s photographs. All of us had our own motives; there was a possessive, slightly jealous aspect to each of our endeavours to preserve ‘our’ Ken.
It was different with Kevin, however. We were inevitably more ambivalent about his death, and I remained angry with him for a long time. We spoke to journalists who were doing stories about the ‘Kevin Carter tragedy’ - but with a certain reluctance. In addition to the numerous articles, a rock band wrote a song about him, and he was the subject of a minor play. The theme was generally ‘the man who had seen too much’. But there was a part of me that saw his death much more in the light that the young fighters in Thokoza did. One day, when Joao and I had gone to the dead zone in Khumalo Street close to where Ken had died, we had run into a group of coms who remembered us. The houses there were still uninhabitable, burnt-out shells. The former self-defence unit members still hung out there though, because they had no place else to go. One of them had read of Kevin’s suicide in the papers, and he sneered: ‘Why did he kill himself, was life too tough?’ I could think of no suitable response.
It took me a year to recover fully from my physical injuries. But all that time I had a heightened sense of urgency, a desperation about time. I wanted to cover every news story around the world and document every aspect of society in South Africa. I was angry with myself about the time I had wasted, frustrated at what I had not achieved, astonished at the thought that if that peace-keeper’s bullet had been angled a degree more acutely into my chest, it would all have been over. As soon as I could, I went on a flurry of stories around the world, covering life in Chechnya’s liberated zone, a village caught up in a caste-war in India, the legacy of fear among Rwandans who had survived the genocide. I also regretted every woman I had let slip through my fingers. I was as unsatisfied and fretful as a greedy child and I broke up with Heidi early in 1995. It would be generous to say I was having an early mid-life crisis.
Joao also focused on overseas assignments - and on regaining the closeness of his relationship with Viv. But he found that he had changed too. In late 1994, when he was in Afghanistan for the AP
, he followed the old caravan-route from Pakistan through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. The road to Kabul was littered with the shattered wrecks of Soviet tanks and vehicles. The city of Kabul was suffering frequent artillery and rocket attacks, and one day, soon after he had arrived, a barrage of rockets landed close to where he and the AP’s Afghan reporter were driving. They turned a corner just seconds later and Joao saw brown clouds of dust from the explosions still hanging in the air as people ran for cover. It was potentially one of the most powerful war scenes Joao had ever witnessed. He told his colleague to stop. But as he got out of the car, a man emerged from the dust. An injured child was draped limply across his arms and he came straight to the car, holding the child out in a mute plea for help.
Without hesitation, Joao helped them back into the back of the car and they raced for the hospital. When they got there, Joao finally took pictures as the man carried his child into the casualty room. He stayed to watch the doctors try desperately to save the little boy, but he died on the operating table. Joao often thought about that day: how he had chosen not to take pictures, but had rather tried to save a child’s life. It would have taken just 1/250th of a second to take an image, but his instincts had changed. At one time, he would have taken the pictures and then, maybe, got around to helping the child. ‘Those were good war images which I chose not to shoot. I had never done anything like this. But ... the child’s dying made the humanitarian deed seem somehow pointless.’
I was finding the new South Africa very liberating. Hundreds of years of social engineering on the basis of race was, however, proving difficult to overcome. But I saw hope and progress wherever I looked. I found that I had mellowed too - where I used to bristle and sometimes confront racists, I gradually began to ignore them. It was their problem. They no longer held the country’s fate in their hands.
But we couldn’t quite leave the past behind. For one thing, the inquest into Ken’s death began in July 1995. Every unnatural death in South Africa has an inquest, though they are sometimes perfunctory. But Ken’s mother and Monica wanted to ensure that the inquest - which would determine who was at fault for the shooting - was properly conducted and they hired an expert criminal lawyer. I had always known that it was the peace-keepers who had shot me and killed Ken. I had heard the gunfire all around me, and knew which direction we had been hit from. It also seemed obvious from the video footage and Ken’s final pictures of the soldiers against the wall, and then the last frames, blurred as he fell, fatally wounded, with his finger locked on the motordrive. Neither Joao nor I particularly wanted to recollect that day in the detail that an inquest would require, but we came around to doing it for Ken’s family.
Initially, it seemed that the matter would be uncontested, but on the third day of the inquest, a team of white lawyers hired by the army (now a volunteer force that had been integrated with the former liberation armies; but it was still the military, and as protective of their own as they had ever been) arrived at the Alberton courthouse. As they unpacked their briefcases, one of them initiated a snide little racial exchange with the Afrikaans magistrate. I knew we were in for trouble - we represented the part of the press who they assumed had helped ruin their paradise. Worse yet, as whites ourselves, we were traitors. The case was now going to be about more than just who had shot Ken. The undercurrent which emerged was that we deserved to be shot. ‘What were you doing there?’ was one of their key arguments. It infuriated us.
One of the issues at stake was the possibility that Ken’s heirs and I could sue the government, but it was far more than that for all of us. The inquest, which should have been a dignified rite of passage, a way of closing the Ken-chapter in our lives, became instead a means of laying the blame for Ken’s death at our door; on his, and our own, actions. Somehow, the proceedings went beyond any sense of getting at the truth for Ken’s sake. It had become our own little battle with the vestiges of the apartheid authorities. It was personal and very nasty. Some of our friends thought we had become obsessed.
One of the most important witnesses was Gary Bernard, who had held Ken in his arms in the seconds after the shooting. Gary had never been quite the same since that day - he had always been too fragile to have covered the violence, and the death of his mentor and friend had been a final straw. He was terrified of testifying, of reliving that day. In light of the grilling the army’s lawyers had given me, it was clear that he was in for a rough time on the stand. Gary did not think he could withstand it. I was unsure if the trauma of reliving Ken’s death would be too much for him, but I was also convinced that if he did not do it, he would forever feel that he had betrayed Ken. The days before he was to testify were tense and the last hours almost unbearable. In the echoing corridors outside the courtroom, I told him that testifying was a test of friendship that would not be offered again. When Gary did get up on the stand, it was clear from the first minute that this was a man on the verge of breakdown - the cross-examination was mercifully easy and without malice.
The inquest dragged on for 15 months and, in that time, Joao drew a collection of comical cartoons of the opposition defence-team and the magistrate; during Joao’s cross-examination, one of their lawyers complained to him about the satirical drawings, saying they were insulting. Joao said he didn’t give a shit and, again, our lawyer had to calm things down. In April 1996, in the middle of it all, I went to Jerusalem to be the AP’s chief photographer. I was glad to get away, and I was hoping it would be a chance to make an emotional break with the past. But seven months later, in October 1996, when the magistrate was due to pronounce his findings, I found that I was still bound to that period. I could not keep my mind on work and kept calling Joao on his cell-phone to see if a conclusion had been reached. I was pessimistic about the outcome, despite overwhelming evidence and the ballistics, which showed that the peace-keepers were the only ones close enough to Ken to produce the wound he had suffered. That afternoon, Joao called. His voice was flat. We had lost.
The magistrate had ruled that no one could be found responsible for Ken’s death. I was not surprised, but I was still swamped by a mixture of anger and despair. Beaten, I left the office and spent the rest of the day on the phone to friends in Johannesburg. Joao said he had never felt so defeated in his life.
A couple of months later, I was watching the last rays of the sun warm the ancient stone of Jerusalem’s walls. The breeze from the desert was dry and crisp, and all of a sudden I was angry with myself. How could I not have gained any wisdom from what I had gone through? Surely anyone who witnessed and lived through what I had should be wise? But all I had was knowledge, a collection of jumbled images, smells and sounds buried deep inside. These were memories that I was too afraid to approach. Had all the work I had done just been a form of voyeurism, and escape from my own demons? Despite my dread, I knew that the time had come to begin unravelling those experiences, and that the only place to do that was back home.
While I had been away a far more important process had begun in South Africa. The new government had set up an independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by the Nobel Peace Prize-winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Commission was mandated with uncovering the truth about South Africa’s past, as well as reconciling seemingly irreconcilable enemies. To all appearances, it was an impossible task - how could a commission uncover all the lies, deceit and midnight burials that took place during 35 years of authoritarian rule? How would it open up what had happened in the underground world of the guerrilla movements? The process began amid much controversy: some wanted Nuremberg-type trials and others wanted a general amnesty in order to close the chapter on the past as simply as possible. My thoughts were that the Truth Commission would be a white-wash, with a lot of kissy-kissy-let’s-all-make-up. But the process turned out to be remarkable. It allowed victims of gross human-rights abuses to finally tell their stories. Mothers heard men confess to having killed their children; victims of torture had the chance to confront their tormentors in public. Many
people came forward to confess to crimes they had committed: unbelievable atrocities and acts of petty hatred that finally belittled the perpetrators much more than the victims. The worst we had thought of the apartheid regime was far surpassed by the truth.
There was the chilling scene of a police torturer demonstrating how he did his work. It was clear that he was a man broken by what he had done, by what he had been so skilled at. At a police conference a few months after his testimony, all his white police-colleagues shunned him because he had revealed the truth, broken the code of silence. The only person who would speak to him during the tea breaks was one of his former victims, a guerrilla he could not break, who in the new South Africa had ended up becoming a policeman.
The commission also wanted to promote healing, a national reconciliation, through revealing the truth and allowing forgiveness and closure, but that was only partially achieved. It became clear that, unlike the torturer, most South Africans were not always willing to trust the amnesty offered for full disclosure. Most perpetrators did not come forward, but enough did to verify that the white regime had used hit squads and ordinary policemen and soldiers to kill blacks and undermine the liberation movements, even while it was negotiating ‘in good faith’ with them over the gradual retreat from apartheid. It was also clear that many in the ANC and the liberation movements felt they should be regarded as above criticism, despite the fact that their members and leadership had committed crimes in the fight against apartheid which were far from compatible with retaining the moral high ground - even though they had committed a fraction as compared to the regime and Inkatha.
The big fish never confessed, however. Everybody in South Africa knew a little of what was going on and many knew a lot. The commission did not believe that the top Nat politicians involved with security portfolios and the generals did not give the orders or knowingly lay down the parameters that led to the carrying out of extra-judicial executions and other illegitimate acts by their subordinates. Of course they never donned balaclavas or carried guns in Boipatong on the night of that massacre, nor was it likely that the President actually gave specific orders for any individual killing, but they certainly created the framework for it all. They made and approved the budgets that paid the killers, that trained and armed the Inkatha hit squads, that allowed doctors to research chemical and biological weapons that would only kill blacks and leave whites unharmed. Former President F.W. de Klerk, who had jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela, refused to acknowledge that he had known about any of the dirty tricks or illegal killings carried out by his security forces. In fact, on page 225, volume five, chapter six of the commission’s report, there is a heading, ‘Finding on former State President F.W. de Klerk’, and the space below it is a solid, inky black. He had managed to get a court to order that the findings on him be concealed. Typical, considering that the government he presided over had launched a frantic effort to illegally destroy as many incriminating documents as possible before the ANC took power. The politicians let the foot soldiers take the heat. Ironically, by not confessing to responsibility for any crime, they were unable to apply for amnesty and so have left themselves open to possible prosecution.
The Bang-Bang Club Page 24