Photo exposed brutality of apartheid
Sam Nzima, who has died aged 83, was a South African photographer who exposed the brutality of apartheid to the world with his image of 12-year-old Hector Pieterson, one of the first students to be killed during the 1976 youth uprising in the Johannesburg township of Soweto.
On June 16, Nzima was sent by the black-run daily newspaper The World to cover the protest march in Soweto, organised in response to a decree making Afrikaans an official language of teaching.
Carrying placards with slogans such as ‘‘Blacks are not dustbins – Afrikaans stinks’’, about 15,000 students left their schools and converged on Orlando stadium. Nzima joined them, taking pictures and chatting with the marchers. But as the crowd reached Vilakazi St in Orlando West, one of Soweto’s townships, police opened fire with live ammunition.
‘‘All hell was let loose,’’ Nzima recalled. Hector was among the first to be hit. An older boy, Mbuyisa Makhubu, picked him up and rushed to get him into the press car. Hector’s sister, Antoinette, ran alongside sobbing, and Nzima took pictures of them as they went. A colleague of Nzima’s drove Hector to a nearby clinic, where he was pronounced dead. Realising the significance of the moment he had just captured, Nzima hid the camera film in his sock. He loaded new film and carried on taking photographs.
That new roll was confiscated by police, but the crucial shots made it back to the offices of The World. Hours later – after some agonising from editorial staff over the possible consequences of publication – the image of Hector hanging limply in Makhubu’s arms appeared on the front page of the paper’s late edition. The headline ran ‘‘4 Dead, 11 Hurt as Kids Riot’’.
By the end of that month, official estimates put the casualties from the unrest at 176, although some thought the true figure was nearer 700.
While Nzima’s picture was published globally, rekindling the protests that would eventually lead to the end of apartheid, it also heralded the end of his photographic career. The security police started to crack down on students and journalists who had witnessed the June 16 violence. The World was eventually banned by order of the apartheid government.
Faced with death threats, Nzima returned to his home village of Lillydale in eastern South Africa. The authorities tracked him down and placed him under house arrest and constant surveillance.
Twenty-two years elapsed before he succeeded in claiming the copyright for his famous picture. In 2016 Time magazine included it in a list of history’s