The Bang-Bang Club (21 page)

Joao gave him a look. He didn’t like this ‘I-shot-shit’ at the best of times, much less when he had not seen any outstanding picture opportunities, but Kevin continued, not even noticing his friend’s sceptical look. ‘I was shooting this kid on her knees, and then changed my angle, and suddenly there was this vulture right behind her!’ Kevin was excited now, and talking fast. ‘And I just kept shooting - shots lots of film!’ His arms were all over the place, as they usually were when he was recounting something exciting.

Joao perked up, ‘Where?’ looking around, hoping to catch up on this amazing-sounding scene. If it were still there, he needed to shoot it. ‘Right here!’ Kevin said, pointing frantically fifty metres in front of them. Joao could see a child lying face down on the dry, grey-brown soil. The child looked similar to the one Joao had photographed a little earlier, but there had been no vulture near it then, and there was none now. ‘I’ve just finished chasing the vulture away!’ Kevin’s eyes were
wild, he was speaking too fast, and losing words. He kept wiping at his eyes with the green bandanna he wore around his neck. ‘I see all this, and all I can think of is Megan.’ He lit a cigarette and dragged hard, getting more emotional by the second, the thin grey smoke disappearing into the air. ‘I can’t wait to hug her when I get home.’

Joao sensed immediately that he had missed out on a big moment, and, imagining what the picture would look like from Kevin’s description, knew his own take was going to look bad. Joao consoled himself with the thought that Kevin always got overly excited. He, on the other hand, had nothing to get excited about at all. But he was prepared to wait and see the pictures, being used to watching Kevin get electrified about images that sometimes turned out to be very average. Minutes later, they were back in the plane and leaving Ayod behind.

Kevin was telling Rob and the pilot all about the moment he had just experienced and how it made him feel, and that all he could think of was his own fortunate young daughter back home. He repeated how much he looked forward to seeing her, to hugging and kissing her. ‘Just five minutes in Sudan and he is blabbering about how terrible it is and how he’d never seen anything like it, all because of war,’ Joao thought. Up in the air, away from the realities, Kevin’s mood improved and he seemed a little happier. The realization of what he had shot was seeping in, for both Kevin and Joao. Joao sat quietly in his seat, withdrawn, disappointed and wishing he were elsewhere. The flies that had persistently followed them at the camp took off with them, making themselves at home in the plane. ‘So far my prediction is right,’ muttered Joao miserably to himself; he felt he had nothing but pictures of some hungry kids and half-naked men with guns. ‘Flies and skinny people.’

 

In New York, four years later, Nancy Lee, then
The New York Times
picture editor, bought me lunch and told me about how the vulture picture came to be published in the
Times
.

‘It all started when we were trying to illustrate a story out of the Sudan and it was really hard. Very few people got in. Nancy Buirski
called around. She called you and you said Kevin had pictures.’

That phone call from
The New York Times
’s foreign picture editor Nancy Buirski had come late at night, waking me with its insistent ringing. There are few things I hate more than those late-night calls - people seem to ignore time differences, and I am partial to my sleep. Nancy Buirski wanted to know if, by any chance, I had recent pictures from Sudan. They were doing a story and needed to illustrate it. Their Nairobi correspondent had been in Juba when a food aid barge had arrived after 59 days of arduous and dangerous travel up the Nile. (It was the same barge Kevin had flown in to photograph, before he and Joao had both finally flown in to Ayod for those few, fateful hours.)

I told her that I had never been there, but that a friend of mine had returned from Sudan just a few days earlier with a great picture: an image of a vulture stalking a starving child who had collapsed in the sand. Was that the kind of thing they were interested in? From what had been a long-shot phone call, suddenly Nancy got excited. I gave her Kevin’s phone number. I had a strange feeling, a kind of jealousy, an envy, about introducing that picture to people. I, like many others, knew that it was going to be a massive picture and had been telling Kevin that, encouraging him to make the most of it, but when Nancy Buirski called me, I had a moment when I thought about not telling her of it. It was silly, and just a fleeting thought, maybe because he had shot it with a lens borrowed from me, maybe because I liked being the only South African Pulitzer-winner. In reality, I did not hesitate in telling her about Kevin’s vulture picture, but the selfishness of that short-lived, regretful thought has stayed with me, bothering me.

When that picture and a selection of others were finally transmitted to the
Times
, Nancy Buirski was waiting at the machine for it to roll off. Nancy Lee says she cannot forget the moment when she first saw the vulture picture - the
Times
, at that time, still had the old-style wire machine which would suddenly spit out prints, one at a time. Once she saw the picture, she instructed Buirski to make sure that Kevin not sell it to anyone else before they had published it.

Nancy Lee recalls that after the picture ran, people started calling.
There was a lot of interest in what had happened to the girl. So she called Kevin and asked him. He said she had continued on to the feeding station. ‘Did you help her?’ ‘No, she got up and walked to the feeding centre, we were very close, within sight of it.’ ‘So you didn’t do anything, you didn’t help her?’ ‘No, but I know she made it, I saw her.’

The
Times
then ran an Editors’ Note saying that the girl had made it to the feeding station. But Nancy Lee was still unsatisfied, ‘I remember Nancy Buirski and I both felt uncomfortable. If he was that close to the feeding station and the child was on the ground, then, having taken the picture - which was, I think, important to do - why had he not gone there and got help? What do you do in cases like this? What is the obligation of any news professional in the face of tragedy in front of them? I don’t know; I have a humanistic feeling about it and a journalistic feeling about it. If something terrible is about to happen and you can stop it, if you can do something to help once you’ve done your job, why wouldn’t you? It bothered me, as a person. He could have done it, it would have cost him nothing. She would have weighed something like ten pounds. He could have picked her up and carried her there, could have gone there and got someone to come back and help her, whatever.

‘I don’t like to judge people, I was not there, I do not know what the situation was, I don’t know. But I would have helped the girl, me, as a person.’

11

‘IT IS GOOD THAT ONE OF YOU DIES’

We are telling you that people are being destroyed;
We are from the South, where guns cry.

Songs from the Struggle

I spent the second half of 1993 in Bosnia, chasing pictures in mountain valleys and deserted villages. In September I decided to take a short break and flew to New York City to try to secure an assignment for the upcoming South African elections. My first choice was
Time Magazine
- the Rolls-Royce of news magazines as far as photographers are concerned. But the picture editor in charge of international coverage, Robert Stevens, said it was too early to make a decision. In any case, they had Peter Magubane and Louise Gubb, both respected South African photographers, and their top war-photographer, Jim Nachtwey, was also coming in to cover the election for the magazine. Disappointed, my next stop was
Newsweek Magazine
. The then photo director, Jimmy Colton, agreed to a contract for the election period - guaranteeing at least six days work a month; though in reality this would work out to be every other day and more in the frantic buildup. It was a good gig - there were going to be a lot of photographers out there and to have secured something was important. I went back to
Bosnia, doing work mostly for
Newsweek
,
Time
and the AP until the end of the year.

In January of 1994, I spent a few weeks in Somalia for the AP covering the withdrawal of US forces. From Mogadishu’s Sahafi Hotel, I spoke to Robert from
Time
again. This time, he asked me if I would work for them during the elections in South Africa. I was exasperated and told him I would love to but that I had already committed to
Newsweek
, and it would be unprofessional to switch now.

I knew I was making the wrong choice. The reason for my unease about working with
Newsweek
as opposed to
Time
was one of corporate culture. I felt unsure that
Newsweek
were the right people to back me up in what was a potentially dangerous story: in Bosnia, I had done work on guarantee for
Newsweek
, covering the Muslim-Croat conflict, a nasty war where a drive along a valley road saw you cross front-lines several times, and came to experience the difference between
Newsweek
’s attitude as opposed to that of their great rival,
Time
. I had asked if I could hire a ‘hard car’-a bullet-proofed vehicle that would dramatically increase my safety, and give me an advantage in getting pictures.
Newsweek
’s answer was no; they suggested I get a ride with someone who had a hard car. This meant asking Nachtwey, the
Time
photographer, if I could ride with him. Given our friendship, it was unlikely he would refuse, but it also meant that whatever advantage
Time
had had from spending over $1,000 a day on a hard car might accrue to me - the competition. When
Time
assigns photographers to a war zone, they make sure that there is as little extra pressure put on them as possible. They spend money to get the best pictures and safeguard their photographers, even if they are just freelancers. An assignment is an agreement to temporarily employ you on a fixed day-rate, pay all your expenses and accept responsibility for you in case something happens.
Newsweek
’s method was to give freelance photographers a guarantee that would cover expenses, day-rates and car-hire. The guarantee system could put a few dollars more in your pocket if you stayed in cheap hotels and skimped on expenses. It was quite different to being on assignment.

The system of guarantees had evolved as a hands-off way of getting photographs. The company is allegedly less liable if someone gets hurt or killed while on guarantee than if that person is on assignment. Photographer-lore has it that
Newsweek
had instituted the system after photographers working for them had been expensively hurt or killed.

I was still in Somalia when I learned that Abdul Shariff, a South African photographer, had been shot dead in a township while stringing for the AP. I did not know Abdul well, but he was a likeable guy with a very good eye. Abdul’s death happened on a sortie into Kathlehong with ANC leaders, a trip which none of the journalists had foreseen as dangerous.

The election dates, 27 and 28 April 1994, had finally been set the year previously, following nationwide outrage, and the threat of civil war, after the assassination of the popular Communist Party and ANC armed-wing leader, Chris Hani, by a right-wing white fanatic on 10 April 1993. It was a classic confrontation of good and evil, whichever side you were on. At that time, it had seemed as if everyone was holding their breath waiting for the country to explode, but the ANC and Communist Party leadership called on their supporters to exercise restraint. The police acted swiftly on information supplied by one of Hani’s white neighbours, and the Polish-born assassin and his accomplices, including a leader in the far-right Conservative Party, were arrested. This was followed by the announcement of the election date, and the expected explosion failed to materialize. But the announcement of a date raised the stakes for those who did not want fully-democratic, non-racial elections. Political violence increased steadily over the next 12 months as the elections approached.

The continuing violence had disrupted communities so seriously that senior ANC leaders were planning to go to Kathlehong, one of the trouble-spots, in a show of support for the residents, most of whom were ANC supporters. The politicians were fearful that the township war would prevent campaigning and, more worryingly, voting in the upcoming April elections. Political violence was escalating as parties which were willing to take part in the election stepped up their
campaigns. On the other hand, Inkatha and various right-wing groups - both inside and outside of the parliamentary system - which were all refusing to participate, busied themselves with training and organizing hit squads to disrupt the election. These groups had pinned their hopes on widespread disruption, bordering on civil war, forcing the transitional government - made up of the ANC, the ruling white National Party and centrist parliamentary parties - to accede to their demands of a more federal constitution and white homelands. But there was also the added complication that some ANC self-defence units were out of control - terrorizing their own communities and fighting turf-wars with other comrades. Some of the units had been infiltrated by police operatives, who used their cover to sow further confusion. The ANC leadership wanted to be seen to be dealing with the problem. They had ensured that every media organization knew about their visit to the heart of one of the dead zones in the townships. They expected the visit to be good public relations.