‘Heytada,’ I greeted them in tsotsietaal, the township vernacular. ‘Hola,’ they responded with the Spanish greeting that ANC militants had brought back from guerrilla training camps throughout socialist Africa, where most of their military instructors had been Cuban. Tsotsies liked to be considered comrades - full-blooded ANC guerrillas or activists; they wanted to be a part of the ANC-aligned neighbourhood militia that came to be known as ‘self-defence units’. Lawabiding residents duly addressed the tsotsis by the abbreviation coms, but snidely called them comtsotsis behind their backs.
‘What’s going on, coms?’ I asked. The boys always knew where things were happening, but it was 50/50 as to whether they would tell you. ‘It’s bad,’ they said. ‘All night, nyaga-nyaga with the fokken amaZulu.’
‘Is it quiet now?’ I asked, as I glanced nervously towards the hostel that dominated the low hill some 300 metres in front of us. ‘Tsk,’ was the dismissive reply. ‘Give us petrol, mlungu.’ I smiled weakly, trying to think of a way for this whitey to get around the demand. I knew they wanted the fuel for Molotov cocktails.
‘Leave them. They’re journalists, they can’t,’ another youth commanded from the side of the road. I looked over at him, but could not make out his features in the near dark. He was probably a real comrade, a trained ANC fighter, commanding the thugs’ respect. The comtsotsis turned sullen and began to move away from the window, but then one leant forward and whispered: ‘Give us your gun.’
‘I don’t have one,’ I said. This was easier to handle than the demand for petrol, since I had never owned a firearm. He looked at me in disbelief; it was clear to me that he subscribed to the widely held notion that every white man owns a gun. ‘Straight, com,’ I said. ‘You can search the car.’
The thugs exchanged words in a language I didn’t understand and then drew back. I eased the car into gear and left the barricades behind, driving slowly on to a bridge that crossed the railway line running alongside the hostel’s fortress-like eastern edge. There were three men in long overcoats on watch at the gate that cut through the red brick perimeter wall, defaced by badly executed graffiti proclaiming it Inkatha territory. They stared at us as we approached, the long coats doubtless hiding shotguns or assault rifles. Instead of turning into the entrance, I said to Tom, ‘I don’t feel too good about this, let’s keep driving.’ He readily agreed - we were both scared to go into a hostel following a night of conflict. We caught up with a car ahead of us, recognizing a couple of fellow journalists inside: Simon Stanford and Tim Facey, a television crew for the BBC. We exchanged waves, then followed them as they skirted the south side of the hostel. It was a comfort to be with other journalists, an illusion of safety in numbers. And maybe they had information about something hot that was going on.
Leaving the hostel behind, we looped around Jabulani stadium and turned east again to recross the railway tracks. Simon and Tim were driving slowly, clearly just cruising, but we decided to stick with them in any case. After a kilometre we turned left and followed the tracks up to Inhlazane train station, the closest stop to Jabulani Hostel. We were just a couple of hundred metres short of the corner where the comtsotsis had demanded petrol ten minutes previously, but we found that the
stretch of road that would have allowed us to complete our left-handed circle was blocked by several makeshift barricades.
Groups of residents, ANC sympathizers, watched us approach as the early light gradually erased the smudgy darkness. I parked and we got out to speak to the combatants. We introduced ourselves as journalists. The men and youths were aggressive, agitated. They had obviously been up the whole night, skirmishing with their Inkatha enemies from the hostel across the railway tracks. They were not keen to have us around.
‘We work for the foreign press, AP and BBC,’ I said. But one of the men was suspicious. ‘You’re from the
Citizen
,’ he insisted, referring to a disreputable racist daily that had been set up by a covert government propaganda fund. Every black person I knew hated the paper’s political reporting and editorials, but it nevertheless had a massive black readership drawn by its comprehensive horse-racing results and excellent punter’s guide.
‘Not the
Citizen
, mjita (my friend), I promise,’ I protested. This was more than a little disingenuous, since all the local papers subscribed to the AP and often used the wire pictures to further their own particular bias. But the partial truth enabled us to stay.
A shrill whistle galvanized the comrades and someone yelled a warning that the police were coming: ‘Poyisa!’ Tom and I followed on the heels of the boys fleeing for shelter behind the station ticket office next to the road. Within seconds an armoured military personnel carrier, a tough, heavy Casspir designed for the bush war in Angola but now used in the townships by the police, careened up the road. The Casspir’s massive wheels simply crunched over the rocks and rubble barricade the residents had erected in a vain attempt to control access to their area.
The police fired randomly from inside the towering behemoth as it sped by, rocking from side to side on its rigid springs. What cowboys, I thought: it would have been stupid bad luck if any of us had been hit. As soon as the Casspir rounded a corner, the coms emerged from cover and tried to drag a big garbage skip into the road to make a more
effective barrier. It was like watching a game. The residents could not match the heavily-armed police with their rocks and the rare firearm; but equally the police could not quell the unrest by racing through the township, firing wildly.
The coms grew more at ease with our presence. The shared excitement had broken down some of the mistrust, so we could take pictures more freely. Within a few minutes, shooting broke out again, this time at the bridge leading over the tracks. I ran up the slope of the embankment that bordered the line. A handful of older ANC supporters crouched behind the heavy iron plates edging the bridge. Thirty feet below us were the sunken tracks and the austere concrete platform of Inhlazane station. I ducked down beside a man wearing a soft cloth cap and carrying a revolver. We crouched below the bulwark at the entrance to the bridge. ‘No pictures, you hear?’ he said, glaring fiercely at me. I reluctantly lifted my hands off the cameras to show my acquiescence. He peered over the top, across the railway lines. Several other coms lifted their heads, not wanting to miss out if the gunman hit anything. He cautiously lifted the revolver above the edge and fired, then dropped down on to his haunches again to cheers and admiring calls from the women down behind us at street level. Return fire from the Inkatha side occasionally whistled comfortably high above our heads, but we all ducked reflexively.
A train stopped at the station. The driver was either ignorant or uncaring of the clash going on above him. Some of the young combatants ran down to meet the train, in case there were Inkatha members on it, or to guide their own to the safe side of the tracks. I watched them re-emerge at the top of the wide concrete stairs, pushing and pulling a tall man in a blue workman’s coverall jacket. He was at least a head taller than the boys, but he did not resist as they tugged and drove him towards ANC territory. He could have been returning from a night shift or making an early start to visit friends, but he had unwittingly disembarked into our insignificant little skirmish.
At first, I was not sure of what was going on, but as soon as they had him off the bridge and out of sight of the Inkatha members opposite,
they began to stone and stab him. I watched as he fell to the ground, then tried to crawl under a door propped up across the dented steel drums of a street vendor’s stall. I was terrified that I might again witness a murder like the brutal killing at Nancefield Hostel a month before. It had been the first time I’d seen a person killed and I could still not shake off the feeling of guilt that he had died so close to me that I could have reached out and touched him, yet all I had done was take pictures. As much as I wished that I could have had another chance to try to stop his death, that Saturday morning seemed too soon to be offered a chance to redeem myself.
The coms dragged the silent and unprotesting man they had identified as a Zulu to his feet and down the path to the street below. More people gathered around, mostly teenage boys, but there were one or two older men and a handful of even younger boys as well. They crowded around the bloodied Zulu and the assault intensified. A youth ran in and leapt high to deliver a kind of kung fu kick. Another slapped the Zulu hard across the face, a demeaning blow usually reserved for obstinate women and disobedient children. A man in a long-sleeved white shirt hauled out a massive, shiny bowie knife and stabbed hard into the victim’s chest. I was in the midst of the crowd, separated from Tom and the other journalists. My heart was racing and I had difficulty taking deep enough breaths. Stepping across the chasm from my presumed role as a detached observer to that of a participant, I called out: ‘Who is he? What’s he done?’ A voice from the crowd replied, ‘He’s an Inkatha spy.’ I tried to see who was speaking, to make contact with an individual amid the killing fervour.
‘Are you sure he’s a spy? How do you know?’ I asked. Another voice answered: ‘We know.’ It was the man in the white shirt, absolute certainty in his flat voice. But he had stopped the attack for the moment and was looking at me. He seemed to be the leader, though I did not see him command or direct the action. Perhaps it was just that he was older.
‘What if you’re wrong?’ said. ‘I mean, last month I saw Zulus, Inkatha, kill a Pondo because they thought he was Xhosa. Just here, at
Nancefield Hostel. Maybe he is Zulu, yes, of course he is, but maybe he is not Inkatha. He could be ANC. Just make sure.’ The man nodded while I talked, watching me shrewdly. Despite the garbled way it came out, he understood. But what I had to say did not matter. He and the others knew their decision had already been made.
The attack resumed and it looked as if the Zulu was now in a state of shock. Maybe the boys had demanded that he give the ANC nicknames for the neighbourhood streets, or someone had shown him a one-rand coin and he had identified it as ‘iLandi’, betraying the rural Zulu dialect that characteristically changed ‘r’ to ‘l’. That would have been enough to secure his death sentence. But I never actually heard the man utter a single word throughout his ordeal. He did not appeal for mercy, nor even look to me for help. He seemed not to recognize what was happening. I wondered if he was mentally deficient, drugged, or just dumb with terror.
My questions had attracted attention from the coms and some of the assailants began an ominous hissing. ‘No pictures, no! Fokoff!’
I managed a fleeting defiance: ‘I’ll stop taking pictures when you stop killing him,’ but the attack simply went on moving down the street as the Zulu stepped slowly and ponderously forward. Now, one person after the next took turns to inflict an injury on the defenceless man. It was as though this was a rite that had been played out before, and everyone but me knew the liturgy.
I noticed odd details. The sun had cleared the single-storey houses and shone with the extraordinary clarity of a spring morning. It would be a hot day.
I saw a young man with a wisp of a beard step forward and stand on his toes to thrust a knife into the Zulu’s chest. His victim just stared dumbly ahead as the knife plunged in, while I released the shutter and wound on the next frame. A part of me did not want to be a photographer just then, but as with the killing in Nancefield Hostel, I smoothly exchanged camera bodies to shoot slide as well as colour negative, ensuring I had material for both the AP and the French agency, Sygma.
The progress down the street halted when the Zulu collapsed into a sitting position on the pavement. Most of the mob was edging away by then and others had slipped behind me, probably to avoid being photographed. The man in the white shirt moved in again; I had a camera in front of my face as I shot and cranked the advance on my shabby Nikkormat. I took a few steps back, driven by a nervous impulse, some vague sense of unease about the spot I was occupying. Afterwards, Simon, the BBC cameraman, would say: ‘Jesus, did you see that guy try to stab you?’
For those crucial minutes, it was as if I lost my grasp of what was going on. I was present, but nothing entering through my senses registered. The pictures I kept mechanically taking would later substitute for the events my memory could not recall.
By now, the victim was lying on his side, propped up on one elbow, facing away from me. A teenager with one arm in a plaster cast used his good hand to throw a rock at his helpless target. In the picture, the victim seems to be looking directly at his assailant while the rock, captured in mid-air, is hurtling towards him. Did it hit him? I can’t recall and as my cameras were without motordrives, there is no photographic memory; no next moment. Another image is of the man in the white shirt stabbing his knife down into the top of the Zulu’s head as he sits on the road, almost absent-mindedly reaching up towards the source of pain. I don’t know if I noted that either.
My awareness gradually returned. The victim was now flat on his back some yards in front of me. All around him, the street was empty. The man in the white shirt was standing next to me, my left shoulder brushing his right. He lifted his right hand, the one he had used for stabbing, to look at a little cut he had sustained and drew his breath in sharply under his teeth: ‘Ththth,’ like a child letting it be known he has hurt himself on the playground.
I peered down at the cut at the base of his thumb; he held it out to ensure I saw. There was a thin line of red along a shallow incision in the soft pink-brown skin of his hand, no deeper than a clumsy shaving cut. I felt we were both acutely aware of how grotesque this instant of
bonding was. The moment was broken when a boy, no older than 13, walked across the deserted tarmac to the inert man and unscrewed the cap of the Molotov cocktail he was carrying. I was relieved that I had refused to earlier allow the comtsotsis to siphon petrol from my tank - what if it were fuel from my tank that was poured over that victim? The boy carefully doused the Zulu with the petrol. Then he walked over to where I was standing with the man in the white shirt. The kid knew what must come next, but he would not, or could not, do it himself. I watched him surreptitiously slip a box of matches into the older man’s left trouser pocket, on the far side from me, and whisper in his ear. The man in the white shirt tried to make out that nothing unusual was happening, that I had not caught this grim interchange.