Peter Magubane, 91, photojournalist who peered deep into apartheid

Peter Magubane, a South African photojournalist who documented apartheid’s unrest and repression and was also caught in its grip, once jailed in solitary confinement for 586 days and banned from work for five years by the white-rule regime, died Jan. 1 at 91.

The death was announced by his daughter,

Fikile Magubane. No other details were given. Magubane had been treated for prostate cancer.

As a Black photographer, Magubane often faced far greater risks than white colleagues but sometimes devised ingenious workarounds in places where authorities banned the media — including hiding his camera in a hollowedout Bible and, another time, in a loaf of bread. When he nibbled too much of the bread away, he stashed his Leica 3G in an empty carton of milk.

“You had to think very fast,” he told Mother Jones. “You had to be one up on apartheid.”

His Zulu roots, however, also gave him some advantages in coverage. Magubane could move through Black townships and other areas without drawing much attention.

During riots in Soweto in 1976, protesters were worried that police would identify them through news photos.

Magubane persuaded them to allow him and other photojournalists to do their jobs.

“I said to them, ‘A struggle without documentation is no struggle,’” Magubane recounted in 2001.

His body of work offered one of the most comprehensive archives of South Africa from the 1950s through the end of apartheid and the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first Black president. Much of Magubane’s coverage — first working with South African media and later with international outlets including Time — chronicled some of the worse bloodshed of the apartheid era.