The Bang-Bang Club (22 page)

So, on 9 January 1994, dozens of journalists were waiting outside Shell House, the ANC headquarters in downtown Johannesburg, preparing to join the caravan of cars heading out to Kathlehong. AP reporter Tom Cohen had agreed to meet Abdul at the ANC building. Abdul, of Indian Moslem descent, was a lithe, dark man with a black beard. He had moved up from KwaZulu-Natal to work in Johannesburg and had recently started stringing for the AP. He was extremely serious about what he did; as Tom put it, ‘He was not one of these jerks that just went plodding in there, taking pictures. He was sensitive and very much aware of the implications of things.’

‘Did you bring the vests?’ was the first thing Abdul had said by way of a greeting. Tom was amazed that Abdul thought they would need bullet-proof vests for what would surely be a simple enough assignment. ‘No, I don’t think we’ll need vests. But they’re at the office, we can go and get them - we have time.’ Abdul demurred, ‘Never mind, it will be fine. We probably don’t need them.’ A little joking started among the group of journalists that were around them. ‘This will probably be the day one of us gets it,’ cracked one of them. Tom joked
that he would probably have to write Abdul’s obituary. Abdul laughed uncomfortably.

Joao, Kevin and Gary Bernard (now a staff photographer at
The Star
) were already in the township. They were with David Brauchli, an American photographer with the AP who had based himself in Johannesburg months ahead of the election. He was a bang-bang kind of photographer and naturally became friendly with the boys. He had quickly realized that Joao was the best local photographer available and persuaded the AP to offer Joao a good contract and the possibility of covering foreign wars. The offer was irresistible and Joao left
The Star
in mid-January. Ken was still at
The Star
, but he was also planning to leave the newspaper after the election, though not many people knew. He wanted to move beyond the restraints of working for a daily and longed for the freedom of spending weeks on a single shoot. Kevin’s self-esteem was high on the praise that followed publication of the vulture picture and he had grown confident that he could make it as a freelancer. And so, he’d left the
Mail
to string for Reuters.

Tom and Abdul followed ANC leaders Cyril Ramaphosa and Joe Slovo to Kathlehong, where they were expected to do a standard brief walkabout and then deliver speeches at the local stadium. Instead the politicians parked on an uneven dirt clearing that served as a soccer-field and immediately set off down the middle of the road towards the hostel.

The journalists, caught unawares, had to hurry to catch up, jumping to avoid the muddy puddles left by overnight rain. As they neared the Inkatha stronghold, shooting broke out. ANC bodyguards closed to form a shield around their charges and hurried them away from the danger zone. ANC self-defence unit members emerged from the front-line houses and returned fire towards the dormitory complex. Tom took cover with the others in the last of the vandalized houses that faced the hostel. For several minutes, there was just the rattle and crack of automatic gunfire as comrades would race up to the edge of cover and blindly spray bullets in the direction of their Inkatha foes.

Abdul decided to cross a clearing between the front-line houses. He was half-way across when he was hit in the chest by a bullet and fell.
Young township residents broke cover to carry him away, in great pain, but still alive. The battle continued with ANC militants passing battered Kalashnikovs between them. They fired from the hip, the bullets going in all directions. Tom was completely unaware of what had happened to Abdul and was concentrating on moving safely away from the battle.

Joao, Kevin, Gary and Brauchli had earlier that day heard of a shooting incident in neighbouring Thokoza and had driven off to see if anything further was happening there. Nobody had envisaged trouble starting at the ANC walkabout, given the massive police presence. The cruise was fruitless as all was by then quiet in Thokoza, and so they decided to join the ANC delegation. As they neared the soccer-field in Kathlehong, they saw Reuters photographer Juda Ngwenya race past with his car full of comrades, some of whom were hanging dangerously out of the windows, waving traffic out of the speeding car’s path. They were curious, but assumed that Juda was taking a wounded combatant to the nearby Natalspruit Hospital. Their relaxed mood evaporated; something was going down, but since they did not know what, they decided not to follow Juda. In the residential area near the hostel, comrades were milling about and journalists were standing around looking shocked and frightened. Some of the journalists were interviewing one of the politicians. Joao shot a few pictures and asked a cameramen what had happened. He said a photographer had been shot - it was the little Indian guy, but he didn’t know his name.

With a jolt, Joao realized that it could have been Abdul whom Juda had been taking to the hospital and they quickly headed there. At the casualty room, several people were being treated, but Abdul was not among them. Joao asked a nurse if she had seen a wounded journalist being brought in. She stared at him and then said, ‘He was dead on arrival. Could you please identify the body?’

Joao and the other photographers followed the nurse through casualty to the rear, where she opened a door that led into a tiny room. It was a laundry closet, the shelves lined with linen and hardly big enough for the metal gurney to fit in it. Soiled laundry was piled up on either side of the stretcher and bright sunlight streamed in from a small
high window at the far end of the narrow room. On the gurney, a green sheet covered a human form, its head nearest Joao. The nurse pulled the sheet aside. It was Abdul. It seemed as if he was asleep, but then the nurse pulled the sheet further down to reveal a hole in the centre of his naked chest. It went through Joao’s mind that the wound looked remarkably neat, that it seemed to have done so little damage. Without a thought or a moment’s contemplation, Joao lifted a camera and shot a frame. The nurse was angry, astonished, and tried to stop him. Joao exploded: ‘If I can take a picture of all the fucking dead people in this country, then I can take one of my friend.’ He turned and stalked out, and only later when he processed the film did he discover that he had shot the picture without setting exposure and the neg. was completely underexposed. Secretly relieved, he threw the roll into the dustbin.

By that time Tom had also heard the news that an Indian photographer had been shot and taken to hospital. He tried to tell himself that it was not necessarily Abdul, but he rushed to the hospital to check. Tom arrived at casualty as the photographers were coming out. Brauchli said, ‘Abdul’s fucking dead; he’s fucking dead.’ ‘What?’ was all that Tom could muster. He thought that perhaps they had not seen the body and there was some mistake, so he insisted on going in to look for himself.

Afterwards, he could not get the image of the wound in Abdul’s chest out of his mind. He kept reliving the exchange about the bullet-proof vests from that morning and he could not avoid the fact that the wound was exactly where the ceramic plate of the bullet-proof vest would have been. But he also had to get a story out: it was a major news event and the AP had not yet filed. It was the AP’s photographer who had been killed and the other wires were going to beat the AP on its own story. And there was still Abdul’s obituary to write.

I returned from Somalia a month later. That day, Joao and Gary picked me up and we went to Kathlehong to see where Abdul had been shot. As we crossed the invisible boundary from Thokoza into Kathlehong, we stopped at a shack that served as a self-defence unit base, to see what was going on. There we met Distance, a hardened
ANC fighter with the looks and physique of an adventure movie-star. It was a quiet day and one of us mentioned Abdul. Distance looked at us and then said: ‘I am not sorry your friend Abdul was killed. It is good that one of you dies. Nothing personal, but now you feel what is happening to us every day.’

12

REVOLUTION

If he is alone, don’t mind him;
If there are two, they are just discussing their own affairs;
If there are three, they are planning something;
If there are four, they are communists. Shoot them.

Bophuthatswana homeland President Lucas Mangope’s alleged instructions to his security forces after a failed ANC-led coup.

In the twilight of the great apartheid experiment of trying to make South Africa’s black population legally non-South African - by assigning them to ten ethnically-based homelands - Bophuthatswana was the most Frankensteinian of its issue. The homelands were the culmination of a disastrous philosophy to separate white- and blackowned land - to the detriment of black people. Some 3.5 million people were often forcibly uprooted and dumped into the patchwork of ‘independent’ and self-governing states - the homelands. By the time Mandela had been released, and the ANC unbanned, the homelands were in the process of being reabsorbed into South Africa, but Bophuthatswana’s leader was refusing to relinquish its dubious sovereignty. The black Tswana homeland’s repressive and illhumoured president, Lucas Mangope, had over the decades proved himself the ideal puppet to the apartheid state. Cloaked in the make-believe garments of independence, the lucrative fantasy realm was to prove maddeningly difficult to disassemble.

His subjects, the Tswana, were traditionally a farming people. From the 50s onwards, their land had been incorporated piecemeal into a homeland that resembled an unfinished jigsaw-puzzle. Entire communities were forced to leave their villages and farms in ‘white’ South Africa, victims of ‘black spot removals’, the technically legal South African version of ethnic cleansing, and been resettled in distant tracts in the middle of the bush.

Bop - as Bophuthatswana was frequently called - lay west of the climatic divide where drought shifts from a periodic hazard to an ever-present menace. Which was, of course, precisely why it been located there. The fertile bushveld thins as one follows the afternoon sun. There, driven by a nostalgic desire for the days of self-sufficiency, the displaced peasants planted crops that withered on the stalk in postagestamp fields and kept stock beyond the carrying capacity of the land.

The previous decade had been one of particularly severe drought. Every blade of grass had been devoured by the herds of emaciated animals roaming from mud-brick village to bone-dry field in search of nourishment. The thin layer of topsoil blew away at an alarming rate. In an effort to halt the erosion, the Bop government had ordered the sale or destruction of the numerous donkeys which were used to pull the four-wheeled carts. Unable to get a decent price in an overwhelmed market, the peasants hid their donkeys and waited for the storm to pass, but police teams were sent to locate and shoot the beasts. The donkey became one symbol of Mangope’s rule and his subjects said that the donkey massacres would return to haunt Mangope. But it was the avocado pear which was to be adopted as the symbol of resistance.

A village meeting, held in the late 80s to oppose the forthcoming forced incorporation of the two tiny black farming communities of Braklaagte and Leeufontein into the homeland, was broken up, unsurprisingly, by Bop police. But, instead of the usual one-sided cakewalk, a villager threw a hand-grenade into an armoured personnel carrier. Several policemen were killed in the steel casket and the inevitable crackdown followed.

Months later, at another tense meeting held under the mistrustful
eyes of the police, a departing villager lobbed a dark green avocado through the open hatch of an armoured vehicle. The panicked policemen dived out of the vehicle without thought of retaining their dignity. The humble avocado had become a weapon, as well as a lunch favourite among tickled activists.

In March of 1994, just over a month before South Africa’s first non-racial elections were due to be held, Mangope was still insisting that the ANC was a banned organization, four long years after South Africa proper had legalized the liberation movement. Aware that a fair poll would see him unceremoniously dumped, he announced that there would be no general election in his fiefdom. Bop residents, emboldened by the new-found freedoms across the ‘border’, rioted against the decree. Mangope was nervous and his notorious policemen seemed less than enthusiastic about quelling dissent, perhaps eyeing the changes next door and worrying about their futures.

In 1988, elements in the military had staged an abortive coup under the leadership of a man optimistically called Rocky Malebane. Mangope called on Pretoria, which sent in the South African Defence Force to crush the mutiny. But in 1994, he could no longer rely on the apartheid government, which had its hands tied in the uneasy transitional power-sharing with Nelson Mandela’s ANC.

Ken, Kevin and Joao were in Bop to photograph the unrest that had started at the university on 10 March and spread through the captial. The end of Bophuthatswana was clearly imminent. That afternoon, Joao and Kevin had to take film back to Johannesburg; Ken had a transmitter, so he did not also have to make the journey. Joao and Kevin were planning to return early the next day, but both were replaced by more senior agency photographers. Kevin was furious that a Reuters staffer had been sent to Bop when he felt that the story rightly belonged to him, and he decided to go back the next day anyway. Joao was pissed off because he had been assigned to shoot a Mandela gig in the morning. Brauchli, as the more senior AP photographer, had been assigned the job, while Joao had to cover the more mundane event, before being able to return to Bop.