I was just 16 when I enjoyed my first holiday away from my parents, experimenting with rum and mampoer moonshine along the beautiful coastline of the Natal South Coast that was reserved for whites. It was during that summer holiday that I fell for an Afrikaans farm girl whose mashed toes began my education in the racial ugliness underpinning our society.
My buddies and I were playing beach soccer when a lean, long-legged girl with hazel eyes and flowing hair joined the game. Her name was Michelle and she played like a boy. As the game slowly petered out, just the two of us were left kicking the ball around. Michelle told me she had learnt to play soccer with the children of the black labourers who worked on her father’s farm. She showed me her toes, crooked and misshapen from playing barefoot on uneven patches of farmland. It was with an aggressive irony that she referred to her black playmates as kaffirs. I was shocked, but then understood that her use of the word was comparable to the way black Americans had appropriated the word ‘nigger’ to blunt its sting. She had grown up with black kids in one of the most brutally racist sectors of white society. As a child, she had been allowed to play with black kids, but now that she was growing up, she was expected to leave her black friends behind. The whites’ biggest fear was that one of their girls would sleep with a black man. Michelle was a
teenager rebelling against her environment and a society mired in racism.
I was startled and attracted by her anger, intrigued by the sense of social injustice that vaguely lurked outside my suburban world. But my life was filled with school, sport, experimenting with alcohol and learning about those mysterious creatures called girls.
By the time I left for university in Pietermaritzburg, far from home, in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, I had become involved in socialist politics and was tutoring black schoolkids from nearby township schools as they prepared for their final school exams. From them, I learned the then-banned hymn and liberation anthem, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’. The all-white university was awash with poisonously right-wing students, many of them fleeing black rule in newly independent Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia to our north. South Africans called them ‘when-we’s’ after their habit of whining about how good things used to be: ‘When we were in Rhodesia ...’ They were generally distinguishable by their clothes: short-sleeved shirts, rugby shorts, long socks and desert boots. From them I first heard the term ‘oxygen-wasters’ applied to black people and it shocked me. Before long I was involved in several brawls and other ugly confrontations. After the April Easter break, I learned that I had been chosen to play rugby for the province’s under-20 side. Though I very much wanted to play in that team, I had already decided to quit the sport - the racism endemic in rugby depressed and angered me too much. I even began to root for any team that played against the South African national side - the Springboks, resenting their victories.
No bright advertising jingle could ever sum up the other, darker formative forces in my life. My parents shared a horrendous marriage, full of quarrels, beatings and loathing. They were divorced when my brother and I were very young and my childhood days were never as happy as when they were separated. I lived with my mother, Franka, while my brother stayed with my father, Mladen. It was a great time: she and I would renovate furniture into the early hours of the morning, and, when I would be too tired for school, she would supply false sicknotes.
But my parents reunited some years later, and the quarrels and fights began again. There were weeks when things went well, but then my mother would turn to the whisky, and that was all she needed to be transformed from a loving woman - generous, caring and fun - into someone who could not resist a fight. My father was a money-obsessed bully who drank too much all the time and who verbally and physically abused his wife. Whenever the signs were there that a fight was about to begin, I would feel the fear build in my stomach, a sickening dread of violence beyond my emotional capacities to handle. I remember vividly the first time I managed to overcome my fear of him. I was about 14 or 15. It was on a weekend, and they were both drunk. I had not heard the beginning of the argument, but it had been going on for some time - and then he began to hit her. I was frightened and angry, but determined to intervene. To Mladen, this was a threat to his manhood - he would not tolerate being questioned by a ‘pip-squeak’. After much screaming and pushing, I somehow ended up with a butcher’s knife in my hand, warning him that unless he left my mother alone, I would stab him. Even through the drink, he realized that I was serious and backed down.
During my last year of school, 1980, when I was 17 years old, doctors discovered my mother had cancer. It had started as lung cancer, but had spread through her organs. She had given up cigarettes eight years earlier, so it came as a shock that her effort had come too late. For me, her illness seemed like some kind of cosmic misunderstanding.
After she learned of the cancer, she began to keep a diary in a small leatherette pocketbook. It had not been her habit - at least not that I was aware of - to keep a diary, though she was a prodigious collector of the most obscure and useless things. The first entry was in a medium blue ballpoint, though she loved writing with a nibbed ink pen, the curves of her convent school handwriting flowing smoothly word after word. There was no mention of her sickness, no prayer for her recovery committed to paper. The pens changed, one that stuttered, a lighter blue, then a fine tipped blue. And the handwriting of which she was so proud degenerated into a cramped, harsh scrawl. And she was writing
much more, as if she felt the disease taking over, compelling her to say more. But she did not manage more than to give overly detailed descriptions of the house and our daily life, naming every family member or friend who visited. She noted that she had baked a turkey and a walnut loaf for Christmas lunch.
The diary then began to mention the pain waking her in the early hours, when the drugs wore off; having to change the bedclothes because she had sweated through them. She was now confined to bed most of the day, and only occasionally got up.
10 December 1980 was the first time the diary mentioned death - it was her last entry: ‘At 16.30 had appointment with Dr Homan for morphine injection. During conversation he told me he was a Christian. Spoke about lack of fear of death. No charge for consultation.’
When I read the journal, I understood the early, mundane entries as her attempt to deny the cancer, to hold on to life. Towards the very end, the drugs she had been prescribed were not enough to keep her completely pain-free, and Mom knew she was too far gone for a cure. Every day, when the pain grew too great, she would ask me to run a hot, hot bath for her. Since she was too weak to bathe herself I would help her undress and lower her into the steaming water. She would gasp from the heat, but it would help to ease the other, mortal pain. I found this experience very hard to handle: my mother was helpless and in immense pain, yet I was embarrassed by her nakedness and it was difficult to accept that this fiercely independent woman could not even dress herself. I cannot recall what her face looked like at that time, but I clearly remember her plump belly in the water.
In the last months of her life, my parents stopped fighting. My brother Bart, who was two years older, could not deal with her illness and he went for hours-long runs to rid himself of the anger he felt. I understood cancer only imperfectly: I knew it could kill you, but I also knew it was curable. Mom had undergone chemotherapy and radiation treatment and I was confident that would cure her. More importantly, God was going to save her. What I did not know was that my mother
knew she was going to die, that her apparent faith in a miracle cure was really for our benefit. The rest of us believed she would pull through. I had recently become as religiously devout as my mother, uncles and aunts. We all prayed day and night, believing the Lord would spare her.
Despite all that love and faith, she did die, on a hot summer night. We were all around her bed in the small yellow room. Mladen was reading some photo-romance comic in another room and had to be called to the deathbed. That was the end of any feelings I had for him, except contempt and hatred, though it would take a year of our trying to keep together as a family ‘for Franka’s sake’, before a rancorous and violent fight finally ended all pretence. To me, he was no longer my father. It took even less time for my naïve belief in God to wither away.
So nine years later, on Friday, 17 August 1990, I found myself, a godless, scared and confused white boy in his late twenties, leaving the comfort of white Johannesburg to venture into black Soweto, armed with nothing but a couple of obsolete cameras. I had taken up photography a couple of years previously as a means to explore other people’s lives, the more different from mine the better. I had discovered that there is nothing like a camera to grant a licence for curiosity. But I was so far out of the news loop that six months earlier, instead of attending the biggest South African news event of my life - Nelson Mandela’s release after 27 years in prison - I had chosen to photograph people coming to pay their respects to the Rain Queen, in the far north of the country, after the death of her daughter. The Rain Queen, or Modjadji as she is known, is a traditional chief who, it is believed, is able to control the rains in a land prone to drought. I had spent a lot of time there and was building up an interesting body of pictures.
Besides such anthropological work, I had been doing stories on people living under apartheid, mostly rural stuff. But after Mandela’s release it was clear that a new era had begun and apartheid was ending. The radio began to carry a steadily increasing number of news reports of burning barricades and deadly clashes in Sebokeng, Thokoza and then Soweto - South Africa’s largest black city, just 15 kilometres from
my home, and a place I was at least familiar with, as opposed to the other, even more ominous names. My uneasy stirring of excitement and fear increased as each hour’s broadcasts told of a widening of the conflict.
There were no visible borders around the townships, no sentries to warn the ignorant, no signs saying ‘Keep Out: Battle Zone’. But there was a war going on inside those ghettos, as residents who supported Nelson Mandela’s non-racial African National Congress (ANC) were pitted in a struggle against the police and migrant rural Zulu nationalists, based in the workers’ hostels that dotted every township. Those hostels, sprawling blocks of single-storey workers’ dormitory buildings, were being turned into Zulu strongholds under the banner of Inkatha, the chauvinist Zulu movement that had been formed as a cultural organization in the 70s, but swiftly became political. I - like most people - did not understand the exact roots of the war and was confused by the seemingly indiscriminate acts of violence. The easy and commonly accepted answer, supplied by the white government, was that the ANC was locked in a battle for power with Inkatha - no more, no less. But many years later, all the half-clues and evidence would finally be put together to show that the euphoria of Mandela’s release had been accompanied by a sustained campaign of brutal killings and terror, covertly planned, funded and executed by government security units and the police. Policemen and soldiers assassinated political figures, community leaders and also hired gangs to spread terror in the townships. The white government wanted to disrupt the ANC’s support base ahead of an election that would allow black, coloured and Indian South Africans to vote in a one-person-one-vote scenario for the first time. Inkatha collaborated with the white state in attempting to crush the ANC and secretly received weapons and military training from the security forces. These Zulu nationalists, with dreams of secession, wanted to retain the autonomy of their KwaZulu homeland, which in the future would surely be subsumed into an ANC-led South Africa.
As I approached the entrance of Nancefield Hostel, deep inside
Soweto, I was confronted by dozens of armed, belligerent Zulu warriors for the very first time. They wore red headbands and were armed with a variety of machete-like pangas, clubs and improvised spears as they stood on the raised railway tracks next to the hostel, shouting insults and threats across an overgrown graveyard. On the far side of the cemetery was a large group of residents, presumably ANC supporters. Among them were several journalists. I did not see much point in going across there; even if I did get pictures, they would be tough to sell to newspapers who had their own, probably more proficient, photographers on the scene. I knew enough to know that the Zulus were seen as the villains of the piece by most of the secondand third-generation township residents from a dozen other South African tribes. I also knew that the massive, decrepit dormitory complexes housing tens of thousands of migrant workers from the rural, tribal homelands across the country were undergoing a brutal purge of all non-Zulus.
The conflict was more complex than just Zulus versus The Rest. In ‘Zululand’, a civil war between Inkatha-supporting Zulus and ANC-SUPPORTING Zulus had been raging for a decade, before it moved to the cities and towns around Johannesburg - the Reef, as it is known. Inkatha worked hard at portraying themselves as the sole representatives of the Zulu people, a lie that was propagated by the government and sympathetic media. But I was entirely innocent as to what these facts meant in reality; they were just words in news reports and I naïvely decided to try and get pictures from the Inkatha side.
The warriors were surprised to see me there and not with the other journalists, but seemed to decide I was no threat. They continued to do their mock charges, leaping up and down, as their traditional war cry of ‘Usuthu!’ rang in my ears. After a few minutes, the warriors tired of taunting their enemies and returned to the hostel. I followed the men into one of the long dormitory blocks, where we sat on cement benches at a cement table in the communal kitchen and eating-room. The tangy smell of the traditional sour grain beer being passed around in a plastic jar added to the acrid stench of the cramped quarters. The windows
were grimy, and except for some scoured aluminium cooking pots, everything seemed dirty.