The Bang-Bang Club (34 page)

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.