Peter Magubane
Photographer who was imprisoned and tortured for chronicling the iniquities of apartheid
PETER MAGUBANE, the South African photojournalist, who has died aged 91, spent 586 days in solitary confinement, had his nose broken by the police, was shot and banned from using a camera for five years, but persevered to create the most significant visual record of the struggle against apartheid.
He was there in its early days, when more than 20,000 women demonstrated in Pretoria in 1956 over the requirement to carry passes; at the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when police killed at least 69 unarmed demonstrators; and at the Soweto uprising in 1976, when an estimated 176 schoolchildren were shot by police after protesting against the imposition of the Afrikaans language in class.
The Sharpeville massacre was the turning point in his life. He had expected his editor to be sympathetic, but instead he was berated for not getting any close-ups of victims. He learnt “to pull yourself out of it so that you capture the right moments”.
Sixteen years later, at Soweto, the children asked him not to photograph, as it would help the police identify them later, but Magubane persuaded them that “a struggle without documentation is no struggle”.
He was the first black photographer in South Africa to win a prize, in 1958, and the first to have his own exhibition. His tenacity was boundless: he came up with the trick of hiding his camera in a hollowed-out bible or a half-eaten loaf. In 1968, he hid his camera under a dust coat to photograph black job-seekers at a coal mine being made to strip naked and stand in a line before a tuberculosis screening.
After his arrest in 1969 for covering a protest outside Winnie Mandela’s jail cell, he was kept in solitary confinement for 586 days. He was made to stand on bricks for five days and five nights, drinking black coffee, without sleep.
On release, he had to report to the police every week and was forbidden from leaving Johannesburg or practising photography, but he took the view that it was a violation of his rights. In 1971, he was rearrested for breaking the ban, and spent another 98 days in solitary. At the Soweto uprising a year later, the police broke his nose and made him expose his film. He was detained for five months and his house was burnt down.
He had been a friend of Nelson Mandela since the 1950s, and while Mandela was in prison, Magubane made sure his children got to school safely. The day of Mandela’s release in 1990, he said, was the happiest in his life, even though – for once – he failed to get the photograph because the surging crowds knocked him down.
He served as Mandela’s official personal photographer until 1994. His favourite picture was an intimate snap of him dancing: “Here was this beloved and powerful man, and he was just dishing it out like it was no one’s business,” he said.
One subject that he returned to, from the 1950s to the 1990s, was child labour, photographing a 14-year-old boy in the Soweto coal yards, with hands like an old man’s, and toddlers labouring in fields. He did all he could to reunite child labourers with their families, in 1986 winning the American National Professional Photographers Association Humanistic Award for his willingness to put his camera down and intervene. “It is better to save life than to win a Pulitzer Prize,” he said.
Peter Sexford Magubane was born on January 18 1932 in Vrededorp, Johannesburg, and raised in the lively mixed-race suburb of Sophiatown. His father, who operated a vegetable cart, gave him his first camera, a Kodak Baby Brownie. His mother was a formidable lady who told her son not to come home crying but instead to “beat the hell out of them”. Dutifully, he took up boxing, and retained a healthy respect for matriarchs.
Peter blagged a job as a driver and tea boy at the enlightened magazine Drum. His most famous image, taken in 1956, shows a white girl sitting on a bench marked “Europeans only”, with a black nanny on the “Blacks only” side, combing her hair; the girl looks startled, because Magubane, who had no zoom, had to get up close. “If I want to take a picture, I will,” he later said. “If you object, then I am sorry for your objection, but I don’t have to ask for permission.”
By 1978, he had a contract with Time magazine and also contributed to Life, National Geographic and the New York Times. In the 1990s, he dedicated himself to recording the vanishing traditions of South Africa. He published more than 20 books and held eight honorary doctorates, enjoying the nickname “Doc”.
His son Charles also became a photographer, but was killed in riots in Soweto in 1992. Two marriages ended in divorce, and Peter Magubane is survived by his third wife and a daughter.
Peter Magubane, born January 18 1932, died January 1 2024