Witness to the struggle
Legendary photographer Peter Magubane is focusing on a different subject these days after decades of being on the frontlines of SA’s battle against white supremacy, writes
Igrew up to the north of the Limpopo River, in something of a pink bubble in which all was right with the world. But when I was 11, that changed. In our school library I came across a Time Life photographic book and within a couple of minutes my innocence was stripped from me. I had stumbled across photographs of the massacre of protesters at Sharpeville police station on March 21 1960. It was seven years since that fateful day, but I was totally oblivious of the fact that ordinary people had been mowed down. I had heard dark mutterings from my parents who found the apartheid regime repugnant, but until I saw the photographs of the slaughter in black and white, I could not have imagined that such evil existed.
For Peter Magubane, who was in Sharpeville that day armed only with his camera, his weapon in the struggle against apartheid, it was the last time he allowed himself to keep a distance from anything he was shooting. After that he did not hide behind the safety of a long lens but got as up close and personal as was humanly possible.
Magubane is now 89, sitting in the sun outside the home of his son Linda in Ormonde, Johannesburg. He is frail, lovingly cocooned by his family, being kept safe against the risk of Covid. But Magubane’s memories of that day in March 1960 are still sharp. He had been sent out by Drum editor Tom Hopkinson to cover a march against the pass laws. Magubane accompanied Robert Sobukwe through Soweto to Orlando police station, where Sobukwe handed himself in to the police.
“While I was there, someone told me there was a standoff between the marchers and the police,” Magubane recalls. “I jumped into the Drum staff car and rushed to Sharpeville, arriving moments after the police had opened fire. They killed 67 people. Almost three-quarters of them, according to the autopsy reports, were shot in the back.
“As a young photographer unused to such bloodshed, I was shocked and made the classic mistake for a press photographer. I became very emotional and naturally afraid. I moved to a distance to shoot the pictures.”
The decision nearly cost him his job.
“Mr Hopkinson told me after he had seen my pictures that he wanted my photos to show a ‘bullet entering a man’s head’. He told me if he did not believe I had promise he would have fired me, and my life would have been quite different.
“From then on I changed my style of shooting, getting as close as I could to the action. I wanted to really tell the story of the suffering of black South Africans and would do anything I could to achieve that.”
Magubane’s love of photography began as a child. “My dad bought me a Kodak Box Brownie camera, which I quickly learnt to use. I loved it.”
His father, Isaac, was a fruit and vegetable vendor. The family owned their property in Sophiatown and were proud of the fact. Young Peter helped his father with his rounds but did not much like going to English-speaking households with his dad to sell their wares.
“When they gave us a cup of tea and a slice of bread, the bread was so thin you could almost see through it. Afrikaans people gave us thick slices of gebakte brood with butter and jam on it, and thick sweet black coffee, and it was lekker,” he chuckles.
He was the only child of strict, hard-working parents. His mother, Wilhelmina, instilled the same discipline in her grandchildren. Magubane’s diplomat daughter Fikile, a former ambassador to Spain and consul-general in New York, recalls how her grandmother always told them that a job that was not done right was not worth doing.
After Magubane finished school, during which he made pocket money photographing his friends and selling them their portraits, he landed a job at Drum magazine, not as a photographer but as a driver. It was a foot in the door, was his reasoning.
Magubane spent only a few months as a driver before he was allowed to shadow one of the photographers, and soon after that was sent out on his own. He used to sleep at the office because there was a 9pm curfew for black people. His first published
He covered a pass-law trial in the late 1950s by concealing his Leica camera in a loaf of bread
photo appeared in Drum in 1954.
In 1955, when forced removals began, the Magubanes were among thousands of families evicted from their Sophiatown homes. It was not much consolation, but as property owners they were given a house in Diepkloof, Soweto, which Magubane still owns.
It was not easy being a photographer without upsetting the police, he says from his chair in the sun. He covered the Zeerust pass-law trial in the late 1950s by concealing his Leica camera in a loaf of bread, and managed to be the only photographer to cover the event. At other times he hid his camera in an empty milk carton, pretending to drink milk as he was taking photographs.
Not long after Sharpeville, he was covering the treason trial at the drill hall in Johannesburg when he was cornered in a doorway by the police, demanding that he give them his film. Magubane refused and the police officers started beating him up. Photographer Jürgen Schadeberg, also there shooting for Drum, came to his rescue.
Magubane was close to his colleagues. “I was upset when my editor Tom Hopkinson left the magazine in 1961 and returned to the UK,” he says. “I followed him and worked abroad for a while but I love my country, so I came back and worked for the Rand Daily Mail as a freelancer.”
Legendary RDM editor Raymond Louw gave Magubane free rein to cover any story, big or small. Magubane was repeatedly arrested, detained, interrogated and tortured. At one point he was made to stand on bricks for five days at the notorious John Vorster Square, being given only the occasional cup of black coffee to drink until he collapsed and required medical attention.
“I used to hear other prisoners crying but I got off lightly because the cops were worried about what the paper would say about them.”
Once when harassed by the police, Magubane told the officers his light meter was a sound device that was recording them. They believed him and left him alone.
But this charmed life came to a grinding halt when he was arrested and kept in solitary confinement for 586 days.
After being released he was banned and placed under house arrest, with a policeman posted outside his door. This did not deter him from taking photographs of things that mattered.
“I used to jump over the wall at the back of my Diepkloof house into the garden of an obliging neighbour and carry on as usual, unobserved by the authorities. On one occasion I managed to get out and travel to Brandfort where I photographed Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who was banned and confined to that godforsaken town.
“By 1976, I was allowed to work again and then came June 16th. On the first morning of the protest in
Soweto, the students who were gathering told me that they did not want any press present. I told them that a struggle without documentation is no struggle at all. They then said only I could take photos, but I said they should allow all journalists, irrespective of race, to do their job.
“This time I was thick in the action, recording everything I could. The following day in Alexandra, my lowest moment came when I was forced to expose my film, forced to lose a piece of history. My precious images can never be recovered.”
Despite this loss, Magubane’s 2016 book commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1976 student uprising is regarded as “one of the most
I told the Soweto students that a struggle without documentation is no struggle at all
important works of contemporary Africana to appear in the last two decades”, says his friend and manager, David Meyer-Gollan.
After 1976, Magubane’s name was renowned and he worked for some of the top publications of the day, including Time, the New York Times, Life, National Geographic, Paris Match and the Washington Post.
When Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster prison in January 1991, Magubane was in the front row, but as he raised his camera, the crowd surged forward and pushed him aside. “It is one of the biggest regrets of my career,” he says.
He got over the disappointment when Madiba asked him to become the Mandela family’s personal photographer.
Stories about Magubane and his qualities abound.
Johannesburg news photographer Louise Gubb relates a time in Gugulethu when Magubane jumped on the bonnet of her car and calmed the angry mob baying for white journalists’ blood. “Peter almost certainly saved our lives that day,” says Gubb.
On another occasion, in 1985 in Leandre Village near Pretoria, Magubane witnessed the hacking to death by an angry mob of a man considered to be a sellout. The killers then went to the man’s house with the intention of killing his family. Magubane stood in the doorway of the house and talked the crowd down in his quiet, authoritative voice.
Magubane has received numerous photographic awards, including the Robert Capa gold medal in
1986, which recognised his extreme bravery, and the lifetime-achievement Cornell Capa award from the International Center of Photography.
He has been given eight honorary doctorates, seven from South African universities and one, in 2010, from Columbia in the US.
But his proudest moment, he says, was being honoured by Mandela with the Order of Meritorious Service for his services rendered in telling the story of the struggle.
Magubane says that despite its problems, SA is a much better place than it was.
“Before 1994, all I did was attend mass funerals, witness awful violence and the gunning down of innocent people. I now have a peaceful life and have time to spend with my three children [diplomat Fikile, businessman Linda and law student Ipheleng]. I am really proud of them. I hated not spending time with them when they were growing up, but now I get to have a close relationship with them, and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
Looking back over his long career, Magubane says he would not have done anything differently.
“I have been very blessed to have done what I love doing. I am grateful for the awards and honours and recognition of my work. And now I am in my golden years. At 89 I still love taking photographs. But now my favourite subject is sunsets, shot over the Soweto skyline.”