The Bang-Bang Club (7 page)

4

FAME AND FRIENDSHIP

Kafirs? [said Oom Schalk Lourens] Yes, I know them. And they’re all the same. I fear the Almighty, and I respect His works, but I could never understand why He made the kafir and the rinderpest.

‘Makapan’s Caves’, from the collection of short stories entitled
Mafeking Road
by Herman Charles Bosman, Central News
Publishers, 1947

The phone rang at about ten that night, waking me from a deep sleep. I heard the distinctive click of an overseas line. It was the AP photo boss, Vin Alabiso, to tell me that I had won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News. Less than four months after turning away from the Danube’s frigid waters, I had joined that journalistic elite - I was a Pulitzer Prize-winner, but right then I did not have a clue as to its significance. I wondered if there were money involved, but I was soon to discover what all the fuss was about. The next call was from the Johannesburg office - they needed pictures of me celebrating as soon as possible. They had the champagne ready. A sense of the importance of the prize was taking shape: they had not asked for pictures of me when I had won any of the other prizes. I became excited as I got dressed to drive to Johannesburg through the night.

My new-found fame was awkward. The fact that I was winning prizes for shooting Tshabalala’s gruesome death troubled me, but when
I passed a huge newspaper billboard proclaiming ‘SA Lensman Wins Pulitzer’, I could not but feel a surge of pride. While a few photographers resented my quick success, most seemed genuinely pleased for me. We had a party to celebrate the prize at the new home I shared with my old housemates. The house was packed with friends and journalists, some of whom I had never met before. I was already drunk when photographer Ken Oosterbroek stood on a table in the livingroom and gave a speech. Ken was taller than anyone else in the room anyway, but he wanted to make sure people paid attention. He was like that: when he wanted to be noticed, he would straighten out of his normal, easy-going slouch and get a stern, commanding air about him. I recall Ken recounting how, three years before, I had come up to him in the daily newspaper
The Star
’s newsroom and complimented him on a picture that had been splashed across the front page. ‘I wish I could shoot pictures like that!’ I had said. The picture that I so admired had won Ken South Africa’s leading photographic award in 1989. Ken, truly a very talented photographer, and a perfectionist, had also struggled to gain a foothold in the industry. He had gone from paper to paper trying to get a job on the strength of pictures he had illegally taken of his fellow-conscripts during his military service.

He had kept a diary while serving as a soldier in southern Angola, where the South Africans were fighting against Angola’s socialist government and southern African guerilla armies from their bases in the then South African colony of South West Africa. When I read those diaries years later after his death, I was appalled that Ken came across as a typical English-speaking white South African who easily referred insultingly to blacks as peckies. On 16 June 1981, for example, he had spent a long time looking at the bodies of six guerrillas that were lying piled in a heap. Ken had been fascinated by ‘the kill’. One fighter had been shot right in the centre of his forehead. Ken assumed that he had been the first killed, shot by a sniper. They were all wearing People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN - the armed wing of the banned Namibian liberation movement SWAPO, South West African People’s Organization) uniforms, except for one who was naked. The naked
guerrilla’s legs had been hacked by pangas. Some of them looked young, perhaps no more than 15 or 16, Ken estimated. The scene bothered him, but he rationalized that they had chosen to don guerrilla uniforms: ‘they slipped up’, he wrote. The next day he added a further note in his journal, one which suggests a much more unpleasant scenario. ‘I have been thinking about the terr (terrorist) who was shot in the centre of his forehead. He had wire wrapped around him, which puzzled me. Tied up against a tree and shot?’ In yet another entry he described, with neither reservation nor distaste, how his unit had wired up a young Angolan villager to a field telephone and tortured him for information. As for the vast majority of whites, it was ‘them’ against ‘us’ for Ken.

When I had first met Ken, I knew nothing about his border experiences or his politics, but the newsroom abounded with snide jokes about the chip on his shoulder. He was defensive and had a brittle arrogance. He was always very aware of his appearance - he had quite beautiful brown eyes and a charming smile, though he usually had a serious, intense look on his face. He was very aware of how he looked in pictures and I had never seen a photograph of Ken in which he was not mindful of the camera. Pictures taken of him over the years show a tall, thin man with long hair, inevitably wearing jeans and T-shirt, sometimes a droopy bandito moustache. He had perfected the image of the biker-rebel he so wished to cultivate.

Years after his stint in the army, Ken would return to keeping an occasional journal. When he achieved his first success as a photographer in 1989, he wrote: ‘I won the Ilford Award (South African Press Photographer Of The Year) on Wednesday the 19th of April, exceeding my wildest expectations but fulfilling my ultimate ambition.

‘One excellent night followed, full of cheers and smiles and congratulations & all, and a cheese slice (-shaped) trophy ... i didn’t put the thing down for hours. And then in the morning this kind of emptiness or what-now feeling and it just wasn’t so important anymore.

‘I’ve got it, it’s history, it’s on record and now my head is free of a single-minded one-stop goal. Now i can really let rip. Will somebody please give me a gap to let rip?

‘BUT, give me a break to shoot the real thing. Real, happening, life. Relevant work. Something to get the adrenaline up & the eyes peeled, the brain rolling over with possibilities and the potential for powerhouse pictures. I am a photographer. Set me free.’

By the time we were celebrating my Pulitzer in April of 1991, Ken had had his wish come true. The country was awash with real pictures - passion, excitement and dreadful violence - and Ken had been named South African Press Photographer of the Year for the second time. Once he was the photographer he had dreamed of becoming, he matured into a generous and self-possessed man. His professional life was on track and he was in love with a vivacious journalist, Monica Nicholson. They had just returned from a working holiday to Israel, where they had spent the first two months of 1991 covering the Iraqi Scud-attacks on Israel. One night he and Monica were in bed in their Jerusalem hotel room when they were interrupted by a Scud-attack warning. Before going off to the shelters, Ken took a picture of himself and Monica. The photograph shows his hand reaching for Monica’s exposed breast; they are both wearing gasmasks. He scrawled a note about the incident on hotel notepaper: ‘A moment of passion and love - destroyed by War 23/01/91. A moment’s tenderness. The first few moments of shared warmth. The opening joy, the quiet love felt as we lie together, giving over shared love to the physical. The promise of more, closeness, commitment and co-passion. The moon rising, sirens around us, the hostile hint, grim realization as speakers blurb a Hebrew emergency order.’

Ken and Kevin Carter, another young photographer, had become friends when they first started working for newspapers in the mid 80s. In that period, Kevin had witnessed the first known public execution by necklacing. Necklace was township slang for the barbaric practice of killing a person by placing a tyre filled with petrol around the neck and setting it alight. Maki Skosana, whose necklacing Kevin witnessed and photographed, had been accused of being a policeman’s girlfriend. Her necklacing was the ritual, public execution of a person who had betrayed the community, a punishment reserved for those who collaborated with the state, traitors.

Kevin had watched and photographed as the mob kicked and beat her, and then they poured petrol on her and set her alight. She was still alive and screaming, but eventually she did die. Kevin wrote about that horrific incident years later: ‘I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures; they created quite a stir. And then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a terrible thing to do.’

The state had its own form of the necklace, ritualized murder no less barbarous for its legitimization by law. The death penalty was frequently used against political opponents - hanging was the white regime’s ultimate display of power. Both were equally abhorrent to me. The necklace was a warped symbol of liberation, and became known as shisanyama or burnt meat, three cents, which was then the price of a box of matches, and finally, savagely, Nando’s after a popular flamegrilled chicken franchise.

Kevin’s childhood had been difficult. His parents had found his moods and outbursts impossible to deal with. Years later, he wrote about what he felt then, during the years he lived at home with his parents, Jimmy and Roma Carter, in their middle-class white neighbourhood. The occasional police raids, to arrest blacks who were illegally in the whites-only neighbourhood, was the closest Kevin, as a child, got to seeing apartheid being implemented: ‘We weren’t racist at home of course, coming from a supposedly “liberal” family. We were brought up in a Christian way, to love our neighbours, and that included all humans, but I do now question how my parents’ generation could have been so lackadaisical about fighting the obvious sin of apartheid.’

After high school, Kevin made a stab at studying to be a pharmacist but soon dropped out and was drafted into the army. He hated it, and to escape from the infantry he rashly signed up for the professional air force. He soon realized that four years in the military - even in the air force - was a serious mistake, but he was trapped. In 1980, after an incident in which he was badly beaten up by fellow soldiers for
defending a black mess-hall waiter who was being insulted, he went AWOL and tried to start a new life as ‘David’, a radio disc-jockey in the coastal city of Durban. But he soon ran into difficulties, as he could not open a bank account in the false name he was using. He gave up this plan within a month and became increasingly depressed. He felt trapped; years later he would write about that dark period of his life.

‘Somewhere along the line, suicide became the option. I began to think of it more and more, and the more I thought of it, the more appealing it sounded. It was only a question of how really, and when. I had decided to do it. I wandered from chemist shop to chemist shop, accumulating a large quantity and variety of sleeping tablets and painkillers. For the cherry on the top I bought some rat poison, and I took the stash to my room. Then I went out, and spent my very last few Rands on a Wimpy burger and a milkshake.

‘Back in my room I went ahead with my plans. I remember being amazed by the calm I felt. I had a two-litre bottle of Coke in the room, and I proceeded to wash down the tablets. There must have been hundreds in total. Down they went, four or five at a time, until they were all gone. I lay on the bed, waiting to die. I looked forward to it as an upcoming relief, a total escape from my solution, my problems, and the mess I felt I had made of my life. Why had I failed so miserably?

‘Hell, I didn’t believe in heaven or hell. I couldn’t believe I was about to stand judgement on anything. Either it was all about to end abruptly, and that’s that; or I was going to achieve a new form, free of physical restraint, and with a far higher understanding. Free of earth and free of money, free of need and pain, and free of people’s expectations.

‘Thinking of dying, however, I began to wonder why I wasn’t feeling sleepy or drowsy, which I wasn’t, and which was really strange under the circumstances. I decided to go down to the beachfront, and take a walk around. The world seemed very surreal to me that night. I went into one of those amusement arcades, and played a few video games with what were really now my last few coins.

‘Slowly I was becoming aware of the drowsiness. Now it started to seem real. I was ready to die, or was I? Staggering back to my room, I
passed a hotel, and in a total daze I walked into a phone booth. I wanted to say goodbye to someone. I don’t know why it only occurred to me then, but I couldn’t die without saying just one goodbye.’

But Kevin did not die and came to in a hospital ward. For him, surviving may have been the worst of that awful episode: ‘I shall never forget facing my mother again. It is living through a suicide that is the hardest part.’

Soon after the suicide attempt, Kevin decided he had to see his military commitment through without creating more trouble. One Friday afternoon in 1983, while on guard duty in Pretoria, he spotted a car recklessly turning across four lanes of traffic; he wrote: ‘It came screeching to a halt in the loading zone outside the Air Force headquarters, it didn’t even straighten out. The front doors sprang open, and two men leaped out. They were hardly out of the doors when my eyes were blinded by an intense explosion of blinding light, and I was hit by a blast of tremendous force, that hurled me off my feet into the window behind me.’