The Bang-Bang Club (6 page)

The hissing and cursing around me had grown louder, more menacing. But I was determined not to leave the scene. I had failed to prevent the man’s death, but fuck them if I was going to leave and let them burn him too. I stood my ground next to the man in the white shirt, both of us staring at the body, pretending to be oblivious of the matches in his pocket. I heard the urgent calls from Simon, unnerved by the sight of me just standing next to one of the killers. ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded. I could not answer. ‘What did they say?’ he asked. His words seemed to break the spell and I moved away, reluctantly, but also with relief. I felt as if a giant spring was wound up inside me, desperate for release. We agreed to leave, but then an excited shout went up from near the railway tracks. Onlookers drawn by the drama and participants in the killing ran up the embankment and we followed them. I was panting, though the sprint was brief. A handful of residents were trying to attack a man in a blue shirt, but their assault lacked the conviction of the earlier mob, and when one of those who had taken part in the first attack stretched out his arms protectively to ward off the blows, the attackers backed off. I didn’t know why, but it seemed that he knew the man was not Inkatha; or perhaps he just had been sickened by the previous murder.

There was a low brick building, the ticket office, between me and where the Zulu lay in the street. Suddenly I heard a hollow whoof and
women began to ululate in a celebration of victory. I ran towards the edge of the elevation. The man I had thought dead was running across the field below us, his body enveloped in flames. Red, blue and yellow tongues licked the clothing and skin off his body. It was a stumbling, urgent run as he tried to escape the pain. I lifted the long lens camera. The human torch slowed and dropped to a squat. As I focused, I noted that the early sun was right behind the burning man. The camera’s light meter did not work and so I twisted the aperture wide open: f5.6 should be right. I depressed the shutter, then pulled the camera away from my face for a second to advance the crank and frame my next exposure. A bare-chested, barefoot man ran into view and swung a machete into the man’s blazing skull as a young boy fled from this vision of hell, from an enemy who would not die.

I lurched down the slope and stood over the prostrated body that crackled and smouldered. I tried to breathe without allowing the pungent, acrid smell to penetrate my lungs. I shot a few pictures, but I was losing the battle to suppress my emotions. I left while he was still twitching, moaning in a low, monotonous, most dreadful voice. Nearby, Tom was interviewing someone about the killing and I had trouble controlling my own voice as I said: ‘Tom, let’s go.’

‘Yeah, OK.’ He seemed in shock too, but wrapped up in talking with one of the killers. ‘Let’s go, now!’ I repeated, raising my voice, and he took in the danger of the situation; the crowd could turn on us at any time and we had more than we needed. We walked to the car without exchanging a further word.

We got in the car, I started the engine and we drove off. Tom was looking at me, not sure of what to say, not even sure of what he had just seen. Around the first corner I pulled over and, closing my eyes, began to beat the steering wheel with my fists. Finally I could scream.

Only from the following day’s newspapers did I learn the man’s name: Lindsaye Tshabalala. I will never forget it now, but when I was so close to him, he was only an anonymous, unlucky Zulu who should never have caught the train that morning.

The pictures of the fiery death of Lindsaye Tshabalala set off a series
of events that I could never have imagined. On the other side of the world, in London, it was a sunny Saturday, and the AP’s day photo editor ‘Monty’ Montgomery was alone on the morning shift. He prepared for the day by checking through the inter-bureau messages, domestic and international news copy and the pictures that had come in overnight. He scanned the newspapers to see how the previous day’s AP pictures had fared against their rival wire services - Reuters and Agence France Presse. He noted that the major stories of the day were the growing Gulf crisis, a coup in Sudan, the Mohawk siege in Canada, the Aquino murder trial in the Philippines and Princess Diana due to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

Not long into his shift, Monty got a call from Denis Farrell in AP’s Johannesburg office. Denis told him that a stringer had arrived with film of an event in Soweto, but he thought the pictures too graphic to run on the wire. What he really meant was that they were probably too graphic for the US newspapers. There was an unspoken rule that overly graphic pictures of violence should not move on the wire, and the US had a lower tolerance for violent images than the rest of the world. Monty asked Denis to pick out the best images and let him see them.

Monty had a lot to do that day and the new technology then in place was cumbersome, slow and needed constant coaxing. When the first picture appeared on his screen, he muttered ‘Holy shit!’ to himself in the deserted office. He was used to seeing thousands of pictures but he had rarely seen anything like this. He wondered if I was black and if I was with the ANC.

In those days, the AP was using the Leafax, one of the first machines that scanned directly from the negative, as opposed to scanning from a print. The negatives had to be selected and scanned, cropped, toned and captioned, one at a time; and then transmitted to London on a phone line. Before digital technology made everything faster and easier, a black-and-white transmission took seven minutes, while colour transmissions took three times longer.

In Johannesburg, Denis struggled with the backlit, difficult ‘Human
Torch’ negative. The Leafax was an imperfect machine, and so to get better quality he made a print of the picture in the darkroom, sending it with the old-fashioned drum transmitter. The pictures came in slowly, dependent on ‘clean’ phone lines. Every time there was a crackle or noise on the line, it left a mark, or a ‘hit’, on the image that arrived at the other end and the separation would have to be resent. The process of getting pictures to the AP’s newspaper and magazine clients was an intricate, slow and painful procedure.

Chief photo editor Horst Faas, wire veteran and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner (1965 Vietnam and 1972 Bangladesh), came in shortly after the first pictures had landed. He took one look at them and despite his view that a story needed just one or two key images, he sent a customarily terse note to Johannesburg on the message wire: ‘jobp/ pho/lonp Send all pictures. faas/lonp.’

Faas, Monty and Denis feared that the notoriously sensitive New York desk would kill the pictures because they were too gory. But on that weekend the London people convinced their cautious counterparts across the Atlantic to let all the pictures move on through to the newspapers. Their fears were well founded: by Monday morning there was an outcry from some of the newspaper editors and publishers who own the AP. They objected to such brutal pictures running on the wire. One editor complained that he ran a family paper, and castigated the AP for putting out such pictures. It was not as if the existence of pictures on the wire obliged anyone to print them; only a fraction of any day’s production are ever published - hundreds of pictures are routinely ignored.

But Monty and Faas believed that the pictures of Lindsaye Tshabalala’s death should be seen. To censor pictures that are too strong, indecent or obscene was to make decisions for the reader that were not theirs to make. They held that it should be shown that people were inflicting terrible violence on other people. In fact, some newspapers in the US did pull back from publishing the pictures, though many papers around the world ran them.

In South Africa, the violence of the photographs had an explosive
effect. The South African government saw Lindsaye Tshabalala’s death as a perfect opportunity to portray the ANC as killers who could never be entrusted with leading the country. Within days, police approached the AP Johannesburg bureau to see if I would hand over my pictures to enable them to identify the killers. It would also be necessary for me to appear in court to validate the authenticity of the pictures so that they could be submitted as evidence. The police had not contacted the AP or the local newspapers about my photographs of the Inkatha warriors killing the alleged ANC supporter the previous month - it was presumably not in the interests of the South African state to prosecute their allies. Luckily, the police were trying to find one Sebastian Balic, the pseudonym I had adopted for my by-line, consisting of my middle name and my mother’s maiden name. I had done this to avoid being detected by the military police, who were haphazardly searching for me to complete my military service. During my initial two years of compulsory national service in the army I had refused to carry a weapon. I had been allowed to get away with that little defiance because they needed me to translate Russian - something I just managed to do with a pile of dictionaries as the language is similar to my parents’ mother tongue: Serbo-Croat. But by the time I was called up for camps, as the extended military call-up was known, I knew that even without carrying a gun, I would be playing my part in supporting apartheid.

Despite my horror at the brutal murder and the desire that the killers be prosecuted for it, there was no way I was going to testify. I had been allowed to stay during the clashes because I had convinced the ANC supporters that I was a journalist and not a police informer. If I did testify, journalists covering the war would almost certainly be targeted as soon as word spread. And once in court, Seb Balic would be revealed as Greg Marinovich. After I refused, the prosecutor issued a 205 subpoena, a court order used to force journalists, doctors and others to testify. The AP lawyers ascertained that the state would press ahead with charges against me if I refused to testify - with a maximum sentence of ten years for contempt of court and several more for avoiding military
camps. I decided to leave, rather than try my luck with the courts. So, within 24 hours, I was on a plane to London, leaving my housemates to deal with the security branch and plains-clothes policemen who would occasionally appear at the door.

Once in London, I felt that the AP and my magazine photo agency Sygma were less than helpful in finding me work. I unrealistically expected them to care about what I was going through; I understood the business associations as a form of friendship, rather than just an exchange of dollars for my pictures. I felt betrayed that neither agency took me under its wing in that strange city. I was in a troubled state of mind, shocked at what I had seen and depressed at having had to leave South Africa. I kept in touch with very few people back home, and most of my calls were to the Johannesburg AP office, trying to find out when I could return. Money was not really an immediate problem, as the British affiliate of my journalists’ union back home gave me some money and let me stay in the union apartment in the city whenever it was free. When it was occupied, I would spend time at my aunt and her husband’s house in the country, where I was made to feel completely at home. But they lived far from London and it was expensive and timeconsuming to commute from there all the time. Camera Press, a picture agency, let me chase their unpaid bills and shoot local events: it was a job and I could survive on it, but I did not want to cover press conferences, rugby matches or London demos.

I had lots of feature ideas that nobody would assign. I was swiftly learning the dictum of journalism: if it bleeds, it leads. Papers would pay for photographers to go to war zones a lot quicker than they would spring for an essay on gypsy life in Eastern Europe. And so I decided that a good war was what I needed to take my mind off South Africa and to stop me wallowing in self-pity. After two months, Stuart Nicol, a former freelancer who had become the picture editor on the
European
newspaper, looked through my portfolio and sent me off on my first ever international assignment. He simply gave me a plane ticket and a wad of traveller’s cheques. I assumed I would have to sign some kind of undertaking to work for them until the Second Coming, but Stuart
waved me off with an amused smile. My assignment was to cover the student riots in the streets of Belgrade and the possible collapse of Yugoslavia; but, by the time I arrived, the police had already beaten the opposition into submission and there was nothing to photograph. I stayed in progressively cheaper hotels and finally in youth hostels to save the paper’s money - I was so green that I did not yet know that it is a foreign correspondent’s duty to stay in the most costly hotels and run up impressive expenses.

Belgrade in November of 1990 was dark, cold and full of miserable people. I skulked around the region doing inconsequential features, hoping for distraction. One afternoon, I lay on my hotel bed wistfully aroused as I listened to the noisy sex of an anonymous couple on the other side of the thin wall.

Then the paper sent me to Hungary to do a story on the revival of Judaism - a happy story and a chance to escape the Slavic wretchedness of Yugoslavia. The Hungarian capital, Budapest, even in mid-winter, was full of beautiful women and excellent ice cream. But all I could think about was South Africa and my depression grew so severe that I became obsessed with thoughts of suicide. One cold evening I went for a walk and found myself on a bridge over the Danube. I was staring down into the swirling, icy waters: as if I were being drawn down into the current, tugged towards the water. The thought crossed my mind that the river might not be deep enough: what if I plunged off and landed in waist-deep water, cold and embarrassed? I reassured myself that the mighty Danube had to be deep, but the distracting thought made it all seem ridiculous. I pulled back, angry with myself that I could give up so easily. Right then, I decided to go home. Despite my paranoia, the police were not waiting at Johannesburg airport to arrest me.

The Hostel War was going on much as it was when I had left and I easily slipped back into the grisly routine of covering the violence. I again took up stringing for the AP, Sygma and others where I had left off three months earlier. One day, the police came in to the AP office to try to pressurize the bureau chief, Barry Renfrew, into giving them
Seb Balic’s address. I was in the newsroom and watched him courteously let them out after telling them that he did not have an address for me, but would let them know when he did. It was all a charade, but it kept my stress levels pretty high. I then began to get phone calls about awards the Lindsaye Tshabalala photographs were winning; the pictures had been submitted for awards from institutions I had never heard of without my even knowing about it. While visiting my uncle and aunt on their mango farm outside Barberton, a rural farming area 450 kilometres east of Johannesburg, Renfrew called to tell me in reverent tones that I was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and, as I had a one-in-three chance of winning, I should stick close to the phone that night. I made an appropriately awed response, but I really was not very excited as I had no idea what this Pulitzer thing was. After putting the phone down, I went and looked it up in the encyclopedia.