The Bang-Bang Club

by Greg Marinovich

  In the period from mid-1990 to April of 1994 - when Ken, Kevin, Joao and I had covered the Hostel War - 14,000 people died in the low-grade war between the ANC and Inkatha. Yet none of the Inkatha leaders came forward for amnesty. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s figures tell the story: Inkatha was the primary non-state perpetrator of human-rights abuses and was responsible for a third of all violations reported to the commission (just ahead of the state). Commission statistics show that for every Inkatha supporter killed, more than three ANC supporters died in political violence.

  The wounds were healing nevertheless. The single most violent place we photographed, Thokoza, had managed to recover from all the bloodshed. There was no longer a deadly no-man’s-land, even though the political boundaries still existed. The Inkatha supporters who once occupied the homes abandoned by fleeing residents had been forced to make way for the original owners, who gradually moved back in, repairing and cleaning. Interior walls that were once blackened by cooking fires were repainted and the rotted ceilings replaced. But the walls and fences still bore the bullet marks from the years of war - from ‘the Violence’, as people referred to that era. The shops on the corner of Madondo and Khumalo Streets were still burnt-out husks, but the petrol station on Khumalo Street, where Ken had died, had been renovated.

  The dead still cast a shadow over the living. A little further down Khumalo Street, a monument has been erected to those who died in Thokoza. The mass of names is startling, all etched in black stone. Ken’s name is there, as is Abdul’s, though Joyce’s granddaughter Mimi is not named on the granite. Nine years after Mimi was murdered, Joyce - who still comes in once a week to clean my house - continues to hope that Mimi will one day be freed from the control of the zombie-mistress and return home.

  Tarzan and Maki Rapoo bought a plot of land on the former front-line facing the Meadowlands Hostel, on the ‘shortcut to heaven’ road, shortly after the 1994 elections. The passing of the apartheid era was the start of a new life for them. They felt they would never again have to endure the violence and loss, and they were confident enough to put down roots in a South Africa that they truly belonged to.

  When I was invited to celebrate Boytjie’s 75th birthday in February 1999, it was in the yard of a modern, spacious house and not the cramped Soweto matchbox in which most of the Rapoos had grown up. Boytjie wept as he blew out the scores of candles on an oversized cake. I took pictures. I am still the family’s official chronicler.

  Joao had been part of the AP’s pre-election build up in South Africa. After the elections, however, the AP began down-sizing and reorganizing. They were cutting their budget and no longer needed someone to cover the bang-bang full time. Joao was offered jobs he did not want, and was not getting most of the foreign war assignments he asked for, and he resented it. After risking his life over and over for the agency, he had naïvely expected they would reciprocate that commitment. He did little to help the situation, choosing simply to withdraw when the AP cut its rates and asked him to stand by for days on assignments that never materialized. He also struggled with a nagging guilt about the pictures he had taken of Ken on the day he was killed. Joao had taken those pictures because it was what he had learned to do and what he knew Ken would have wanted him to do, but those pictures had moved on the wire. A personal moment had become a business moment. He didn’t feel good about it.

  Before I left for Israel in 1996, I had encouraged Joao to take over the gig that I had developed with The New York Times. It was not the kind of work he usually did. Both he and the Times’s chief correspondent, Suzanne Daley, had their doubts that photography without the excitement and compelling uncertainty of conflict would hold his attention. She was worried that he would be sullen and unenthusiastic. But from the outset, he worked hard for his pictures - no matter what the subject - and was good company. He would still leave for the occasional war, but he took increasing pleasure from the assignments he went on with Suzanne.

  After I returned from Israel in 1997, much of the euphoria about the new South Africa had faded. While the big picture was good - we had avoided the civil war everyone thought inevitable, and a racially divided society was slowly normalizing - there were nevertheless major problems. The Struggle had been won, but there was no economic miracle to accompany the political one. The new government had to repay massive loans that the previous regime had taken to finance apartheid. The poor found their lives more difficult than ever. Employment in the lowest wage-earning sectors was on the decrease. And many of the former self-defence unit fighters felt abandoned by the ANC: they saw former exiles and the political elite driving fancy cars and living in wealthy formerly all-white suburbs, but most of the poor and the militants, the young lions, had been left behind. In a country awash with weapons, some turned to crime to make a living. I had become close friends with a former comrade, a hero of the Hostel War, and in the years after the war he was regularly approached to do assassinations. He was upset that everyone assumed former self-defence unit combatants were now all criminals, and he was angry that his being unemployed allowed people to think he would kill for money. Like many of the informal ANC fighters, he found that he had been deserted by the movement. Despite being wounded and partially disabled in the conflict, he was not eligible for a state or an ANC veteran’s pension. On the other hand, the majority of the most notorious secret police agents and policemen still had their jobs. Other apartheid bad boys were given golden handshakes.

  Despite the problems, I was happy in the New South Africa, and for Joao and me, life had settled into a manageable rhythm. But Gary Bernard was in trouble. One winter afternoon in 1998, Joao and I received a call from Gary’s housemate telling us that he had come home to find Gary unconscious. He had taken an overdose of anti-depressant tablets while on a crack binge. Falling unconscious was the only thing that had prevented him from killing himself in the same way Kevin had - there was a length of hosepipe and gaffer’s tape in his car. We took the hosepipe and tape, but there was an awful sense of this having been played out before. Gary had become addicted to crack as a way of escaping his demons. With Robin - his boss at The Star - we spent hours in his bedroom trying to talk to him about the attempted suicide, telling him he could not do a Kevin on us, but he just lay underneath the duvet, refusing to speak to us.

  We eventually forced him to go to hospital, where he spent three days in intensive care. After Gary was discharged, we drove him to a drug rehab centre. He did not want to go, but Robin told him that unless he went for treatment he would lose his job. During the entire six-hour journey he said no more than a few perfunctory words to us. We had become the enemy, we were trying to come between him and his fix. Within an hour after we had dropped him off, he left the centre and returned home. He went on a binge but then checked himself into a Johannesburg centre, where he made a real attempt to kick the crack. Some weeks later, he began talking to us again, explaining his addiction and the things in his life that had so fucked him up. He was going regularly to therapy and Narcotics Anonymous meetings and was doing well at work again - he had even won the same top South African press award that Ken and Joao had earned. It seemed to me that he was beginning to turn things around, but I was disappointed with him and had decided to keep my distance.

  On 12 September 1998, Gary would go on an all-night crack binge. In the morning, he carefully arranged a duvet and pillow on the floor of his kitchen, attached his vacuum cleaner hose to the gas stove outlet and then opened the tap fully. He lay down and put a plastic bag over his head and slipped the hose into his mouth. When Joao and two other friends got to the flat that night, hours later, Gary’s eyes were open and his hand stiffly frozen in the position in which he had held the pipe to his mouth. It was a rainy Saturday night in spring and I was on assignment out of town, some 300 kilometres away. Yet again, it was Joao who had to call me with the news of a friend’s death. I raced back along the highway slick with rain, I wanted to get back in time to say goodbye before the body w
as removed. The endless back and forth motion of the windscreen wipers and the hiss of the tyres kept my thoughts going round in circles. I kept thinking about the decision I had made after his previous suicide attempt. I had decided that I would not help Gary any more, that I could not do any more for him. I had mentally played through a scenario just like this, in which I would hear that Gary was dead. In that make-believe rehearsal I felt I could justify my withdrawal-Icould not watch him 24 hours a day nor could I force him to choose life over death. But I still felt like a shit.

  20

  FINISHED BUSINESS

  Redemption is living with one’s self.

  Joao Silva

  24 January 1999

  I was sitting low in the drainage ditch, bullets whizzing several feet above me. I had been eyeing possible cover throughout the morning and when the inevitable gunfire broke out I immediately knew where I wanted to be. The handful of journalists and photographers with me in Ndaleni township in Richmond, KwaZulu-Natal, that misty summer’s morning, were amused, but theirs was an uncomfortable laugh.

  They were not sure whether to join me or to keep well away from me, because, despite being wounded twice more since the Thokoza shooting, I had survived. My thoughts were not quite the same as theirs. ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ ran through my mind several times - I had half-promised myself to stop covering this kind of stuff. Doing cat-portraits was something I recall mentioning. One reason was that the bloody political turf battle going on in this small town was too interesting to resist, but there is no single, simple answer - perhaps it is just the way I’m wired.

  In the years since 1994, I had been shot once with buckshot during some riots in a township and once more seriously just a few months previously, when South African troops had entered the tiny land-locked kingdom of Lesotho to restore order after a partial military coup. Joao had been with me on both occasions, as we continued to work together whenever the bang-bang went down. He had always escaped unscathed. The Lesotho episode had, however, been one of the scariest moments in both our careers.

  Lesotho had been brewing a coup for weeks and, as we made plans to visit this mountainous rural country in the middle of South Africa, the NYT bureau chief Suzanne, Joao and I were expecting to cover a charged political story with perhaps the chance of the occasional shot being fired. As it happened, South African troops, as part of the regional mutual defence agreement, had invaded during the night. But we still did not take the situation too seriously, expecting the vastly superior South African army to have the little country under control by the time we got there. Our biggest fear was, in fact, that we had missed it all. As we got nearer to the Lesotho border, we saw massive palls of smoke rising in the distance.

  Lesotho’s capital, Maseru, is not far from the border post and soon we were amidst the looters ransacking the downtown business area, carting away as much as they could carry and setting the rest on fire. We heard on the radio that the Lesotho army had made a last stand and had then surrendered at the army barracks just outside of town, so we decided to drive out there and see. Suddenly at the entrance to the base, which looked deserted, we started taking sniper fire. We scrambled out of the car and ran for cover behind a guard-post.

  After a while an armoured South African column came by, the soldiers looked at us and left. They had taken no fire, so we dashed back to the car with the idea of getting out of there. But, just up the road, we ran into the column again. This time they had been stopped and were taking heavy fire. It was an ambush and we were caught in the middle of it. We ditched the car and Suzanne took cover in a shallow gully, where she spent the next hour unable to see a thing, just hearing the sound of the battle raging all around her. Joao and I ran straight towards the action and into a scene of utter confusion. The bullets were whining past us as we tried to find places among the armoured cars that would offer us protection from the cross-fire. That’s when we laughed. This was good bang-bang. Right in front of us, a South African soldier roughly pulled a dead comrade out of a light tank and dumped him at the base of the ambulance that was also armour-plated. The medic inside paid no attention, he was too busy working on injured soldiers. The most bizarre part was that he was standing on the corpses of two other soldiers. We were getting good pictures.

  The column finally retreated and we were able to use them for cover and leave too. But a few kilometres away, at a South African army staging area, it became clear that a larger and better-armed column was preparing to go back to engage the BaSotho soldiers at the base. They were to replace the bloodied unit we had been ambushed with. Joao wanted to follow it. That’s when we had an intense discussion about what to do next. Suzanne though that going back was ridiculously dangerous and argued that Joao already had more pictures than certainly the Times would ever use. Joao argued that the story wasn’t over and he wanted to see it through. I agreed with him, but there was no way I wanted to go back down that road. So we found a compromise of sorts. We would stay back a couple of kilometres until the battle was over and then go in. We all thought it was a matter of an hour or two.

  I selected a safe-looking dip alongside the road to park in and we sat listening to the sounds of the battle. It was hot and we wondered if the shop a little up the road was open. Then a machine-gun opened up on us. The rounds were hitting the earth bank behind us as the gunner began to find his range. I started the car and pulled off as fast as I could making a U-turn. But as I reached the middle of the road, the car stalled. The gunman then had time to correct his aim. A bullet came through the wheel-well of the car and hit me in the leg. I also felt a sharp pain in my solar plexus, and I could not breathe properly. It seemed like I had been hit twice, but I did not want to think about it. I concentrated on getting the engine started, hoping I could still operate the pedals. I did not want to tell Suzanne or Joao that I was hit until after I had the car going again, then I screamed ‘I’ve been hit.’ There was a lot of yelling and screaming going on inside that car, as the bullets cracked and whined through the open windows. As I sped down the road, the fusillade of bullets continued. I was completely terrified, bracing for the pain of more bullets entering my body. The magic bubble of invulnerability had once again been burst, and I felt as helpless as I ever had in my life. I have never been more scared. Yet, even in my state of panic, I noticed that the people who had gathered at the side of the roads to watch the outcome of the battle between their army and the invading South Africans were fleeing the verges of the road as we approached - we brought with us a rain of bullets. But we finally did escape the machine-gunner’s range and I pulled over to let Joao drive.

  I looked at my chest and saw no wound, nothing. I must have jerked forward as I was hit in the leg and pulled a muscle. My trouser-leg and right boot were soaked with blood. Still, I was relieved to note that I could move and feel my toes. As I hopped around to the passenger side, I noticed that the tyres had also been hit, and that the race for safety had shredded them. Joao took over, but by now the car was struggling, the shredded rubber was wearing down rapidly and Joao was trying to keep it going as fast as possible. The fuel gauge read empty - the tank must have been hit too. We were still about ten kilometres short of Maseru, where the South Africans were presumably in control and we would be safe.

  Along the way we caught up with the retreating South African column that we had been ambushed with. We came alongside their armoured medical Casspir, and I caught the driver’s eye and showed him my bloody leg, but he just waved us forward. The message was clear - they were not going to stop until they got to Maseru. Suddenly, there was more gunfire. I could hear bullets flying close by us again and could see the dust dance on the walls of houses and shops alongside the road as the South Africans returned fire at their hidden attackers. Joao just kept the accelerator floored as we passed the lumbering column. At one point he was doing 110 kilometres an hour on two tyres and two bare rims. When we came to a traffic circle it was clear we had lost the brakes too. But in the end, Joao got us
in to Maseru. There the South Africans bandaged my leg and agreed to chopper me out with the rest of their wounded. Leaning on a fence, waiting for the helicopter, I fainted. But Suzanne caught me.

  After our close call in Lesotho, the word throughout the photographic community was that Marinovich was a human target, a bullet magnet. Word had spread as far as Baghdad, where one of my friends told me there was a debate going on about whether it was dangerous to be beside me or whether that might be the safest place in the world because I always got the bullet. Very amusing. But I had begun to wonder about my luck too. Joao, besides taking far more chances than I ever did while photographing, had also taken up a long-time passion for fast cars and had begun motor-racing. Shortly after Lesotho, he walked away from an 180kmh crash at Kyalami racetrack without suffering even a bruise.