The Bang-Bang Club (11 page)

It was from this sense of being outsiders from the society we had grown up in, and of being insiders to an arcane world, that we developed into a circle of friends prompting a local lifestyle magazine,
Living
, to dub some of us ‘the Bang-Bang Paparazzi’ in a 1992 article. Joao and I were so offended by the word ‘paparazzi’ that we persuaded the editor of the magazine-a friend called Chris Marais - to change it to ‘the Bang-Bang Club’ when he wrote a follow-up piece that was about the four of us. We were a little embarrassed by the name and its implications, but we did appreciate being acknowledged for what we were doing. No matter what they called us, we liked the credit.

Articles like the Bang-Bang Club piece made us minor celebrities in media circles. As a result, several young South African photographers were motivated to try their hand at documenting the violence. One of these was a young man called Gary Bernard, who had always wanted to be a professional news-photographer. He kept seeing our pictures in the
papers and he eventually signed up at a non-profit photographic workshop, where he attended classes in the evening while working as a printer during the day. Gary’s decision to be a news-photographer coincided with Ken’s becoming
The Star
’s chief photographer. From being a notoriously self-absorbed egotist who cared only for his career and awards, Ken had become a champion of aspiring photojournalists. Gary was one of a group of interns Ken had taken on at
The Star
in a programme to recruit talented young photographers from the workshop into the newspaper. Gary would go out with us to learn the ropes and he became a friend. He wanted to be a bang-bang photographer. Despite his desire to cover conflict, Gary was far too sensitive to deal with the violence, but he kept his feelings to himself. On the surface he seemed to handle the emotional aspect of the violence OK. We had no idea about his dysfunctional family past and how he blamed himself for not having been around when his father committed suicide. Sometimes I would catch myself looking at Gary and wondering what was going on in his mind, but I was too preoccupied to follow up on any of the small signs that might have indicated a real problem. It was only later that we understood the full effect that the accumulated trauma was having on him.

The stress from what we were seeing and the at times callous act of taking pictures was making an impact on all of us. Ken was waking up in the middle of the night sweating and screaming about things he had seen. Joao had become quiet and withdrawn, and I sank into a deep depression that I only clawed my way out of years later. Kevin was the most outwardly affected and that meant that life as his friend could be demanding. He seemed to have no borders, no emotional boundaries - everything that happened to him would penetrate his very being and he let all that was inside him just pour on out. The highs of boundless energy and infectious joy would inevitably crash and then we would get the despondent midnight calls. Joao, Ken and I all had our turns at spending hours talking to a weeping Kevin until he had been soothed or grown exhausted enough to sleep. But through it all, Kevin had a way about him, an openness to pain, a generosity with his time and
affection which meant it was easy to overlook those lapses and become even closer friends.

Maybe it was because his emotions were always right up front that Kevin was the most candid of us all about the effect that covering the violence was having on him. He was having a beer at a pub opposite
The Star
one Saturday afternoon when Joao came in after covering an uneventful political funeral. They listened to a radio report that three people had died in clashes following the burial. Joao wanted to go back to the township, but Kevin said it was getting dark and talked him out of the idea. After several more beers, Kevin recounted a recurrent nightmare that was plaguing his sleep. In the dream, he was near death, lying on the ground, crucified to a wooden beam, unable to move. A television camera with a massive lens zoomed closer and closer in on his face, until Kevin would wake up screaming. Kevin thought that the dream meant it might be time to leave photography.

When Kevin told me about the same nightmare some time later, he described the feelings of helplessness, the anger, the fear he lived though in that dream. It was all that he imagined our subjects must feel towards us in their last moments as we documented their deaths. The dream had variations: sometimes Kevin was the photographer, not the victim, and in that version, the ‘dead’ man would roll over and grab him by the ankle, holding him captive with bloody hands.

Some weeks previously, in a lawless Sowetan shanty town called Chicken Farm, Kevin and I had been following armed policemen as they ran through the shacks, plunging downhill along rough tracks muddy with raw sewage. At a clearing near a stream, we saw a woman in rural Zulu dress wailing in grief, her hands clutching her head. In front of her, a middle-aged man was lying on his back, his arms stretched out on either side of him along a thick wooden beam. It looked as if he had been crucified. His earlobes, pierced and enlarged in the traditional Zulu fashion, were filled with blood from several head wounds. There is no question that a professional thrill ran through me: it was a scene that could be an icon of the civil war. Kevin and I descended on the corpse, but once we started to photograph, I found
myself struggling and failing to capture this image of the crucifixion properly. I was unnerved, jittery, my hands were shaking involuntarily. Perhaps it was because of the woman wailing or memories of childhood religion, of Christ on the cross. I looked at Kevin; he looked stunned. Suddenly the corpse groaned and rolled on to its side. We leaped back in terror - we had been so certain he was dead. I will never forget that moment of horror, but unlike Kevin, I had no nightmares; at least none that I could recall in my waking hours.

An American consultant hired in November of 1992 to revamp the look of
The Star
was convinced that Joao was suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome, similar to what he’d seen among photographers in Vietnam. Management agreed and, despite protests from both Ken and Joao, he was told to stop going to the townships. South Africa’s isolation from the world during the apartheid years meant that any foreigner was automatically granted expert status and respect, often beyond their due. Joao was assigned to cover the effect of pollution on a pond in a wealthy white suburb of Johannesburg. While walking disconsolately around the sad pond, he noticed a duck waddling unsteadily towards him. The duck collapsed and died at his feet. Back at the newspaper, he printed the series as a montage with the mischievous caption ‘Going, going, gone’ and presented it to the photo desk. The consultant was appalled and urged the newspaper to get Joao psychological help.

Late that same night, a ‘press alert’ came across on the pager. An entire family had been in slain in Sebokeng, a sprawling black township south of Johannesburg that was plagued by mysterious killings and massacres and drive-by shootings. Kevin and Joao exchanged calls with Heidi and me, and despite the heavy rain and our anxiety about the fact that it was well after dark, we decided to go. The common wisdom among journalists was to never enter conflict zones after dark: things were different at night; people behaved without restraint. And we would have to use our flashes to get pictures - risky as the bright light going off spooked people and could attract gunfire.

The rain was bucketing down as we raced south in Kevin’s little
pick-up. Heidi and I huddled against the cold in the fibreglass canopy on the back, bracing against each other as the car aquaplaned unpredictably every time it hit a patch of standing water on the road. We were uncertain about the wisdom of the foray: rumours of white agents provocateurs taking part in killings in the black townships meant that whites were increasingly treated with hostility. Sebokeng was probably the most dangerous township for journalists to work in, but we were determined to try to expose what was going on. When we got there, the dark streets were deserted. We had no way of finding the house as there were few street signs and residents had taken to painting over their house numbers for fear of being targeted for attack. The killings were so indiscriminate that people had devised convoluted theories as to who might be the next target-a situation which made wandering strangers seem to be a potential threat.

Usually we could ask people for directions or follow our noses to the right place, but the rain and the fear of being out at night meant that there was no one around to help. We started to regret our decision: to the armed self-defence unit members that kept watch, we must have looked like killers ourselves, cruising around looking for victims. We crept fearfully along the main streets, hoping to stumble on to the right house, until we saw a police armoured vehicle lumbering along, the deep growl of its engine breaking the silence. They were surprised to see whites there, but agreed to let us follow them to the house. While we waited for the detectives to finish their investigation, we found shelter from the wet with the survivors in a back room. The rain drummed on the tin roof, leaking through holes. Under the dim glow of a naked light-bulb, 21-year-old Jeremiah Zwane related how two men had burst through the front door and thrown a tear-gas canister into the room, then gone from room to room shooting everyone they found. His father and his brother had been gunned down in one bedroom. Jeremiah’s sister, Aubrey, just seven years old, had tried in vain to hide in her parent’ bedroom closet. She lay on her back in a pool of blood alongside her dead mother. Shot in the face and chest, her little body was a deeply shocking sight even after the many gruesome images
we had photographed over the previous two years. A visiting teenage cousin had been shot dead in the lounge. Another teenage sister had died on the way to hospital, but her two-day-old baby had somehow survived the attack unhurt. The house looked like a scene in a horror movie, but this was real. The smell of blood was heavy in the damp air.

The four of us were the only journalists out in Sebokeng that night, despite the fact that every news organization and most journalists had received the message of the killing on their pagers as we had. We were convinced that the only way to stop such killing was to show what those deaths looked like, what those daily body counts actually meant.

The Star
, which had suggested Joao lay off covering township violence, ran the story he had reported and two pictures, one on the front page. I transmitted pictures to the AP and
The New York Times
. Without our pictures, the only source of information on the massacre would have been spokesmen for the police and the political parties. Editors from most domestic and foreign media organizations still took police reports as factual even though the police were clearly a part of the problem. I remember many infuriating discussions with Renfrew, who was then still the AP bureau chief, about police and military involvement in the killings - he would patronizingly accuse me of being politically biased and naïve, but the AP and almost every other news organization chose to believe the government’s propaganda. The public would have been given information about yet another massacre from the people who were actually involved in many of the killings, as would be proved years later. It seemed that the international and domestic public were all too ready to believe that people who sometimes dressed in skins and could not speak English properly must be barbaric, while the white politicians and officials who spoke so logically and kept the trains running on time could not possibly be implicated in the murders. And yet despite our attempts to tell the truth, through our reporting and in our captions, our pictures played an unwitting part in the deception - our images from Sebokeng that night showed horribly dead black people and white policemen in uniform taking the bodies away, investigating their deaths. The impression was
of the police helping the victims. Our pictures could not show that they had arrived hours after the emergency calls for help: they could not show the absolute certainty of the survivors that security forces had been involved in the attack.

6

A SHORTCUT TO HEAVEN

We do not want to remember those times, they break our hearts.

Soweto resident, Sandy ‘Tarzan’ Rapoo

By 1992, I had seen a lot of dead bodies. I had once tried to count them in an attempt to properly acknowledge their existence, but it was hopeless. Strange objects, dead bodies. Some were as bereft of any sign of having been human as a dead dog on the highway; others appeared to be asleep, no sign of death about them at all. Then there were dead bodies that were so dreadful that they made me fear death itself.

It was difficult to remain unaffected by all those dead people; but it was equally difficult to keep from switching off my emotions. I could not withstand the repeated impact of having a complete emotional response to every corpse or injured person I came across-Iwould need to have been a saint; but nor did I wish to do what more seasoned photographers seemed to do - shut off completely. In my first weeks of working for the AP, my car was stolen in Soweto and so the next day I got a ride with a colleague in his car. The morning was quiet and at midday we went to get a meal at a fast food outlet. We had just received our meals when my colleague got a message that there was trouble in a
suburb of Soweto called Central Western Jabavu. We jumped into the car and raced to the address given; it was nearby, and we had not yet finished eating when we arrived at the scene. There were a handful of police and residents on a dirt soccer field and, next to the goalposts, was the object of their attention: a corpse on its back, burning. The flames had burnt most of the clothes off the body and were now through to the skin. I hurled my food away and began to photograph. After a minute or so, I turned to see what my colleague was doing. He was still eating his burger. I was shocked and thought him a callous pig; it was much later that I realized the extent to which his machismo was a defence against feeling too much.