The Bang-Bang Club (2 page)

It is the work of two outstanding artists; no wonder one of them won the Pulitzer Prize for his photographic depictions of the Hostel War of which this book is the written account.

PREFACE

We faced a number of struggles in writing this book. Clouded memories, our reluctance to revisit what was a very difficult time, and how best to deal with the complexity inherent in telling the story of four people who, despite being bound together professionally, had very different lives and experiences. In the end, we decided that it was a story best told in a single voice, Greg’s. Had we not collaborated, this book would not have been possible. One person never sees enough to be able to pull together a book of this nature, and certainly, the researching and writing of the book helped us understand so much more about our friends, ourselves and the times. We can never hope to know what goes on in the minds of even the closest of intimates, but we have made an honest attempt to penetrate the fog surrounding our friends and ourselves in that time of pain.

We had never intended to write a book about that period. And when we finally did start to write it in 1997, it was more a journey of discovery than a fevered attempt to chronicle what we considered an already established truth. We were to discover that the questions about what we did and how we handled it were much more complex than the way in which we had compartmentalized the issues in our heads. There is a lot of anger and bitterness from those times that cannot be banished - it is a part of us, and of the country. But there is also an amazing amount of forgiveness, grace and humanity that emerges. That mix of emotions is much like the South Africa we know.

The Bang-Bang Club of South African photojournalists was much written about in the period of violence that marked the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The name gives a mental image of a group of hard-living men who worked, played and hung out together
pretty much all of the time. Let us set the record straight: there never was such a creature, there never was a club, and there never were just the four of us in some kind of silver halide cult - dozens of journalists covered the violence during the period from Nelson Mandela’s release from jail to the first fully democratic election.

We discovered that one of the strongest links among us was questions about the morality of what we do: when do you press the shutter release and when do you cease being a photographer? We discovered that the camera was never a filter through which we were protected from the worst of what we witnessed and photographed. Quite the opposite - it seems like the images have been burned on to our minds as well as our films.

We had friendships that linked the four of us, but it was not some kind of joint, mutual friendship, but rather individual bonds that sometimes overlapped. But there certainly was a common denominator - we all covered the shattering events of the 90s with a sense of history and purpose, and we can see how to the outside eye, that easy moniker came to be regarded as factual.

We have used many terms that are uniquely South African, some in a version of English and others in one of the nine African languages and Afrikaans, as well as the township slang called Tsotsitaal. We explain some within the text, and some are self-evident, but there is a glossary at the back of the book that will give some of the texture of the terms that have particular resonance among South Africans - as well as a timeline of South African historical events that we felt were helpful in understanding what has happened since white colonists first established themselves on the southern tip of Africa.

1

THE WALL

If only I could reach
The homestead of Death’s mother
Oh, my daughter
I would make a long grass torch ...
I would destroy everything utterly utterly ...

Traditional Acholi funeral song

‘Not a picture,’ I muttered as I looked through my camera viewfinder at the soldier firing methodically into the hostel. I turned back towards the line of terrified, unwilling and poorly-trained soldiers taking cover alongside the wall next to me. Their eyes darted back and forth under the rims of their steel helmets. I wanted to capture that fear. The next minute, a blow struck me - massive, hammer-like - in the chest. I missed a sub-moment, a beat from my life, and then I found myself on the ground, entangled in the legs of the other photographers working beside me. Pain irradiated my left breast and spread through my torso. It went far beyond the point I imagined pain ended. ‘Fuck! I’m hit, I’m hit! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

As automatic fire continued to erupt from along the wall, Joao and Jim desperately dragged me by my camera vest closer to the wall, seeking shelter next to the soldiers and out of their line of fire. Then an anguished voice broke through the cacophony: ‘Ken O is hit!’ I struggled to turn my head through the tangled cameras and straps around
my neck. A few yards to the right, I could see a pair of long skinny legs that were unmistakably Ken’s protruding from the weeds flourishing against the concrete wall. They were motionless and at an improbable angle to each other. Jim ran over to where Gary was clutching Ken, trying to find a sign of life. The sporadic crack and rattle of high-velocity automatic gunfire reverberated through the air around the huddle of journalists and soldiers trying to flatten themselves against the wall.

Blood seeped from the gaping hole in my T-shirt. I clamped my hand over the hole to stop the bleeding. I imagined the exit wound of the bullet as a deadly, gaping hole in my back. ‘Look for an exit wound,’ I said to Joao. He ignored me. ‘You’ll be OK,’ he said. I reasoned that it must be bad if he didn’t want to look, and as though this was all happening in some feeble movie, I asked him to give a message to my girlfriend. ‘Tell Heidi I’m sorry ... that I love her,’ I said. ‘Tell her yourself,’ he snapped back.

Suddenly a sensation of utter calm washed over me. This was it. I had paid my dues. I had atoned for the dozens of close calls that always left someone else injured or dead, while I emerged from the scenes of mayhem unscathed, pictures in hand, having committed the crime of being the lucky voyeur.

Jim returned, crouching under the gunfire and murmured softly in my ear, ‘Ken’s gone, but you’ll be OK.’ Joao heard and stood up to rush over to Ken, but others were already helping him. He lifted his camera. ‘Ken will want to see these later,’ he told himself. He was annoyed that Ken’s hair was in his face, ruining the picture. Joao took pictures of us both - two of his closest friends - me sprawled on the cracked concrete clutching my chest; Ken being clumsily manhandled into the back of an armoured vehicle by Gary and a soldier, his head lolling freely like that of a rag doll and his cameras dangling uselessly from his neck. Then it was my turn to be loaded into the armoured car; Jim had my shoulders and Joao my legs, but I am large, and Heidi’s pampering had added more kilos. ‘You’re too fat, man!’ Joao joked. ‘I can walk,’ I protested, trying to laugh, but strangely indignant. I wanted to remind them of the weight of the cameras.

After four long years of observing the violence, the bullets had finally caught up with us. The bang-bang had been good to us, until now.

Earlier that morning we had been working the back streets and alleys of Thokoza township’s devastated no-man’s-land that we - Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Joao and I - had become so familiar with over the years of chasing confrontations between police, soldiers, modern-day Zulu warriors and Kalashnikov-toting youngsters as apartheid came to its bloody end.

Kevin was not with us when the shooting happened. He had left Thokoza to talk to a local journalist about the Pulitzer Prize he had won for his shocking picture of a starving child being stalked by a vulture in the Sudan. He had been in two minds about leaving. Joao had advised him to stay, that despite there being a lull, things were sure to cook again. But Kevin was enjoying his new-found status as a celebrity and went anyway.

Over a steak lunch in Johannesburg, Kevin recounted his many narrow escapes. After dessert, he told the journalist that there had been a lot of bang-bang that morning in Thokoza, and that he had to return. While driving back to the township, some 16 kilometres from Johannesburg, he heard on a news report on the radio that Ken and I had been shot, and that Ken was dead. He raced towards the local hospital we had been taken to. Kevin hardly ever wore body armour, none of us did, and Joao flatly refused to. But at the entrance to the township, before reaching the hospital, Kevin dragged his bullet-proof vest over his head. All at once, he felt fear.

The boys were no longer untouchable, and, before the bloodstains faded from the concrete beside the wall, another of us would be dead.

2

‘AH, A PONDO - HE DESERVED TO DIE’

Death has killed the happiest
Death has killed the happiest
Death has killed the great one that I trusted.

Traditional Acholi funeral song

On a sunny spring afternoon in 1990, at the age of 27, I am making the 25-minute drive to Soweto, where politically-motivated fighting has broken out, and feel the as yet gentle tightening of my throat and the thrill of tension that runs from my belly and along my arms as I tighten my grip on the steering wheel. The sensation makes me slightly nauseous; it is like waking from a nightmare whose details are obscure but for the lingering emotions. It’s an indistinct fear: I am abstractly scared that I might be killed, scared of what I might see in the civil conflict that has exploded in the black residential ghettos, but I do not really understand the fear. I also have no idea that this is the start of a new life for me.

I had woken - as always - in a leafy, well-kept suburb of white South Africa, washed in a white-tiled bathroom and shaved with hot water. My house was cleaned by a black woman, and at the petrol station it was a black man who pumped my fuel and washed my windscreen,
hoping for a few cents tip. It had been this way all my life, despite my intellectual opposition to apartheid and my peripheral involvement in the politics of the Struggle. While growing up, my life had, in most ways, been typical of an English-speaking white South African boy.

There had been a very popular advertising jingle in the 70s that was virtually the theme song of my high-school days: ‘We love braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet/They go together in the good old RSA: braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet!’ This ditty perfectly captured the confidence of South Africa’s whites, snug in the paradise that they had created for themselves, despite the international sanctions campaign designed to isolate our country and force our minority government to recant its apartheid ways. White South Africans had retreated into a defensive laager, spending huge amounts on the trappings of self-sufficiency and enjoying extravagant material rewards for being a compliant electorate.

I cannot say that the jingle ever offended me while I was growing up. I loved playing rugby and the thrill of its controlled aggression. I also took the sunny skies and my privileged life for granted when I lay on the steaming tiles around the public swimming-pool next to our home in suburban Johannesburg - I had no thoughts of black teenagers in overcrowded slums with no access to swimming-pools. And there was always plenty of grilled meat left over after the customary weekend braaivleis, or barbecue.

My mother’s parents were Catholic Croats who had emigrated from Yugoslavia in the 20s, and my father had come out to South Africa in the 50s. I was brought up in an all-white, English-speaking community and attended English medium schools. Our only contact with blacks was as service people - domestic workers, ‘garden boys’ and ‘rubbish boys’. I never used the word ‘kaffir’ - the Moslem term for ‘nonbeliever’ that, with centuries of mangled interpretation, had become South Africa’s most emotive racial insult. I never dreamed of going kaffir-bashing on Friday nights - a practice where gangs of drunken white kids looked for lone blacks to beat up. I knew there was a sickness in our society, but then, I did not realize the extent of it. I took the
pleasures of apartheid for granted. Like most of my contemporaries, I had failed to register the situation of black South Africans, had never been to see how different a township school was from my own greenlawned preserve, had no inkling of starvation in the homelands - ethnically-based reserves to which black people were forcibly moved out of ‘white’ South Africa. My mother had instilled in me a sense of justice and fairness that would probably ensure that I grew up to be a ‘nice’ white: one who did his military service, paid taxes and bought defence bonds, and might vote for a less racist, relatively liberal party in an effort to appease his conscience. I would have been one of those blind deaf-mutes who ensured South Africa made enough money to pay for apartheid, without ever getting my hands dirty in directly oppressing anyone.