Peter Magubane, 91, who fought against apartheid with his camera, is dead
Peter Magubane, a black South African photographer whose images documenting the atrocities and violence of apartheid won praise worldwide but punished at home including beatings, prison terms and 586 consecutive days of solitary confinement, died on Monday. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by relatives who spoke to South African television news broadcasts. No other details were provided.
The challenges and dangers faced by black photographers in apartheid-era South Africa’s segregated townships were so great, Mr. Magubane liked to say, that he hid his camera in hollowed-out loaves of bread, empty milk cartons or even the Bible, leaving him in was allowed to take photos clandestinely.
“I didn’t want to leave the country to find another life,” he told The Guardian in 2015. “I would stay and fight with my camera as a weapon. I didn’t want to kill anyone though. I wanted to abolish apartheid.”
He never staged photos or asked permission to photograph people, he said. “I apologize afterwards if anyone is offended,” he said, “but I want the photo.”
And he learned early in his career to put his photography first. “I don’t scare anymore,” he once said, “I’m a numb animal while taking photographs. Only after I have completed my mission do I think of the dangers that surrounded me, the tragedies that have befallen my people.”
The violence in the country took its toll on him in 1992 when his son Charles, also a photographer and then in his early thirties, was murdered in the vast black township of Soweto. Mr Magubane (pronounced mah-goo-BAHN-eh) blamed migrant Zulu hostel residents for the killing.
“I’ve covered violence from the 1950s to the present,” he said. ‘It has never affected me as much as it does now. Now it has landed on my own doorstep.”
He produced images of many of South Africa’s turning points, including the shooting of 69 unarmed demonstrators in Sharpeville in 1960, the Rivonia trial Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress in the early 1960s, and the uprising of high school students in Soweto in 1976. But when The Guardian asked to pick his best photo in 2015, he opted for a calmer image.
The 1956 photo shows an anonymous black girl in a beret and apron tending to a young white girl on a bench with the words “Europeans Only.”
It’s a poignant representation of an era and a symbol of the racial divide the girl seems to want to bridge as her white charge peers inscrutably at the camera.
“When I saw ‘Europeans Only’ I knew I had to tread carefully,” Mr Magubane told The Guardian. “But I didn’t have a long lens, so I had to get close. However, I had no contact with the woman or child. I never ask for permission when I take photos. I have worked in the midst of massacres, with hundreds of people murdered around me, and you cannot ask permission.”
During the same period he became friends with Nelson Mandela and Mr Mandela’s then wife. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. After Mr Mandela’s release from 27 years in prison in 1990, Mr Magubane became his official photographer for four years until Mr Mandela’s election as South Africa’s first black president in 1994.
Mr Magubane was often lionized among a generation of black photographers whose skin color gave them access to segregated townships but provoked visceral reactions among white police officers.
These photographers included Alf Khumalo And Sam Nzimawhose photograph of Hector Pieterson, a fallen student during the 1976 Soweto riots, became one of the most powerful images of the uprising and the racial conflict it fueled.
Much of the impetus for the rise of black photography came from a magazine called Drum, which chronicled the abuses of apartheid, and from its German-born chief photographer, Jurgen Schadeberg. Mr Magubane was so keen to work at the magazine that he took a job as a driver and messenger in 1954 before working his way into the photography department.
He increasingly cast himself as part of the campaign to end white minority rule.
After many run-ins with the authorities, including five years under a so-called banning order that denied him the right to work or even be photographed or quoted, Mr Magubane entered the Soweto riots “with my camera and in revenge”. said.
“Thanks to my photos, the whole world saw what happened,” he said.
When he arrived in Soweto that day, June 16, 1976, young protesters “wouldn’t let us take pictures of them,” he told a university audience in South Africa in 2014.
He added: “I told them, ‘Listen, this is a battle; a struggle without documentation is not a struggle. Let them record this, let them take pictures of your struggle; then you have won. ”
He believed that whatever his role as a photographer, it did not preclude intervention to save lives.
In 1996, he testified before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and said that on June 16 in Soweto, a crowd tried to pull a man from his car. “I quickly stopped taking pictures, went over and said, ‘This doesn’t help your case at all,’” he said. “Thankfully this crowd listened; they listened to me, and this man could drive where he drove.
He also told about an incident involving an ‘infamous’ green car, from which two white police officers opened fire.
“Wherever they were shooting, if there was someone who needed help, I would become an ambulance man, pick up the body and take it to hospital if the person was still alive,” Mr Magubane told the committee.
“Sometimes my colleagues wanted to know if it was okay for me to help, because my job is to photograph,” he continued, “and I said that if my editor ever told me not to help – I not to offer help when it is needed – then my editor can go to hell.
Peter Magubane was born on January 18, 1932 in the mixed-race area of Johannesburg known as Vrededorp. He grew up in Sophiatown, a cosmopolitan suburb that was later designated for exclusive white occupation and renamed Triomf, the Afrikaans word for triumph.
His father, Isaac, who sold vegetables to white customers from a horse-drawn cart, was a “tall, slim man with ‘colored’ features who spoke the language of the oppressors, Afrikaans,” Mr. Magubane wrote in an essay in 1978: One of the few times he spoke publicly about his family. In the apartheid lexicon, ‘coloured’ meant mixed race.
“My mother, Welhemina Mbatha,” he added, “was a pitch-black woman who was proud of herself and didn’t want to bother anyone.”
From his teenage years, Mr Magubane lived under the increasing grip of apartheid – a pervasive web of racial legislation that underpins the strictly enforced division between South Africa’s white, black, ‘coloured’ and Indian populations. The apartheid laws were so intrusive, he once said, that black photographers were not allowed to share darkrooms with white colleagues.
His interest in photography began when his father presented him with a Kodak Box Brownie, although he says he completed his first professional assignment – photographing an African National Congress conference in 1955 – with a Japanese-made Yashica camera. paid by his father.
His career cost him his first marriage to Gladys Nala. Ms. Nala, he wrote, objected to his irregular working hours and late nights sleeping in the office because there was no way to return home. “So I had to choose between my career and my wife,” he wrote.
A second marriage, in 1962, ended in divorce three years later. A third woman died of cancer in 2002. His survivors include a daughter, Fikile Magubane, and a granddaughter.
As the protests spread, Mr. Magubane interrupted by beatings and spells in prison. Occasionally the security police made him stand on three stones for five days and nights in a row. He moved from Drum to The Rand Daily Mail, a liberal newspaper, and reported on the growing number of forced relocations as black communities were removed to so-called “homelands” under the apartheid vision of separation.
After spending 586 days in solitary confinement, he was released in 1970 and declared a prohibited person. The terms of his restriction included not being allowed to associate with more than one other person at a time for five years, and not being allowed to enter any school or newspaper office.
In his 1978 essay, Mr Magubane gave a moving account of the impact of living ‘five years as a ghost’.
“There was no one to talk to,” he said, “even my sweethearts ran away like rats.”
He added: “My job as a newspaper photographer was done. It meant the end of my profession.”
Even during the ban, he was sent back to prison in 1971, where he spent another 98 days in solitary confinement, followed by six months in prison.
Through it all, he said, while being held under repressive laws ostensibly designed to counter communism and terrorism, “I was never convicted of any crime.”
As the Soweto uprising unfolded, he and other black journalists were detained, this time for 123 days, and his house was burned down. But his images of the uprising won him international recognition, including a job at Time magazine in South Africa in 1978. He went on to document the unrest, protests and emergencies of the mid-1980s that led to Mandela’s release.
Over time, he published 17 books, exhibited widely, and received seven honorary doctorates and many awards, including the prestigious Cornell Capa Infinity Award in 2010.
But in his later years, as he battled prostate cancer, he focused more on sunsets than protests. In 2012, he told The New York Times, “I’m tired of dealing with dead people. I’m currently working on sunsets. They are so beautiful. You see so many; it’s like meeting beautiful women.”