The Bang-Bang Club (8 page)

The ANC had detonated a car bomb outside one of the military headquarters buildings and as soon as his initial panic subsided Kevin began to assist the dozens of wounded. It was only afterward that he realized that he too had been injured by flying glass and shrapnel. The incident was one of the ANC’s most successful attacks on a military target. Kevin’s sense of being involved in history at that point seems to have given him the idea of wanting to record history. He decided to be a news-photographer.

By 1984 Kevin had worked himself in to a staff job at
The Star
. While he was photographing outside the Johannesburg Supreme Court he met a striking, wild-haired photographer named Julia Lloyd and immediately asked her out. Within two weeks of their meeting, they were living together. Julia was soon pregnant. Kevin wanted them to get married, but Julia refused - she had been married twice before and did not want another husband. On the night his daughter was born, Kevin recalled the awe he felt at witnessing Megan’s birth, at being allowed to cut the umbilical cord. Megan became the focus of all that was best
about Kevin - loyalty, intense passion, infectious enthusiasm and love. But he and Julia soon broke up and Kevin found himself missing his daughter terribly.

I had met Kevin before I had any plans to be a photographer, through my older brother Bart, who was a sports writer. I would see Kevin when I visited Bart at work, and at parties. Kevin was a tall, thin and good-looking guy, with a quick and winning smile. He had a rakish, mischievous way about him that many women found quite irresistible. He usually wore his hair long and had a diamond stud earring; he usually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and wore leather-thonged Jesussandals. He always seemed pretty crazy to me, up and down like a yoyo, but I liked him. By the time I took up the same line of work in 1990, he had become chief photographer at the anti-apartheid
Weekly Mail
newspaper. Kevin was one of the few people in the business that I knew and I would see him regularly in the townships. We began to team up to lessen the dangers of working alone.

It was some months later that I first met Joao Silva. In March of 1991, a lot of fighting was taking place in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township. Alex is a tiny crowded slum just one kilometre square that had survived several forced removals, and, unlike all the other townships, is next to the heart of white Johannesburg. It was an unique place, where the lively South African music style kwela had originated: Alex had soul. But it was also a place teeming with criminals who preyed on the wealthy white areas that surrounded the township; a risky place to work.

I was walking up a road in Alex when I saw a helmeted rider getting off a motorbike. I had heard about this guy who was working in the townships on a bike. I had also heard that he was shooting hot pictures. It was dangerous enough working in the townships in a car, but doing it on a bike was not a good idea - the guy had to be a little crazy, I thought to myself. I smiled as I approached and he reciprocated with a friendly greeting. He was dark-skinned, unshaven and short, and he wore glasses, but he seemed sane enough to me. I was taller than him and heavy-set, with a marked physical presence - typical of a sportsman gone slightly to seed (it would get worse). In those days, I still had a
mop of dark-brown curly hair. We met in Alex again a week later and worked together. We got on well and a warmth immediately developed. From that day on, Joao was my first choice as a cruising partner. It would not be long before I would discover Joao’s predominant characteristics: he was tenacious and could be pretty aggressive, but above all, his watchword was loyalty-a friend would later say of him that when the ship went down, the last thing you would see would be Silva’s glasses.

For Joao, photography started out simply enough: he wanted to cover war. He was living in the coal-and-steel industrial town of Vereeniging, south of Johannesburg, where his father was a welder. In his second last year of high school he told his parents that he was dropping out of school. School had nothing more to teach him, he felt. Joao had come to South Africa when he was nine years old. Before that, he had spent ten months in Portugal with his godfather after his parents had sent him out of war-torn colonial Mozambique. Once his parents had re-settled in South Africa, they sent for Joao. He was put into an English-medium school, but spoke only Portuguese. He did not fit in at first and felt intimidated, but eventually started making friends by drawing dragons on his classmates’ arms - that only got him into trouble with his teachers. He entered his teens angry and rebellious. After leaving school, Joao went from job to job, lying about having completed his military obligations, and made up details of where he had served. He and his parents had used a grey area in the law with respect to immigrants to avoid the army, but that was not something to admit in the rabidly patriotic atmosphere then prevailing in white South Africa. During the day he worked as a signwriter and at night he worked clubs, but nothing satisfied Joao.

In late 1988, a friend of Joao’s had to take a series of pictures on motion for a course on graphic design and he joined Joao when he went to watch motor car racing at the track. Even then, Joao was an avid motor-sport fan; a speed junkie. The idea of taking pictures appealed to Joao, and he used his friend’s camera to shoot a few rolls of his own. He was immediately hooked. He gave up the club job as well as the
signwriting and bought a camera, studying black-and-white photography at night school. A year later, in late 1989, he moved to Johannesburg and began to establish himself as a photographer.

Joao remembers that the first time he saw Ken - at Thokoza’s Phola Park squatter camp towards the end of 1990 - was also his first experience of photographing violence. By then, he had already landed his first job shooting car-crashes and Rotary meetings for a small newspaper in the industrial town of Alberton, east of Johannesburg. It didn’t pay much. The only reliable working camera he had was the
Alberton Record
’s beat-up old screw-mount Pentax, which had an annoying little hole in the cloth shutter, that left a white dot burnt on to all his pictures, in the top left corner. Joao tried to frame his pictures in a way that he could crop the dot out later.

Joao had convinced the paper’s news editor to let him cover the escalating violence in nearby Thokoza, arguing that the township was right next door to Alberton, the white town which the newspaper served. At Phola Park squatter camp, he had photographed some Xhosa warriors wrapped in blankets and holding sharpened steel rods. They were sitting on their haunches, staring at three corpses lying beneath grey blankets. The warriors directed Joao and his increasingly nervous Afrikaans reporter-colleague toward a cluster of shacks. The two of them had to step carefully to bypass a shrouded corpse in a narrow alley and entered a dark shack to find another covered body. The squatter camp had been attacked earlier that day by Inkatha hostel dwellers in one of the massive assaults that marked the beginning of the Hostel War. His colleague was urging him to return to the office and Joao reluctantly agreed.

As they emerged from the shacks, they ran into another photographer. Joao immediately recognized Ken Oosterbroek, the fastrising photographer with the distinctively long hair and lanky frame, from articles he had seen in newspapers and magazines. Ken looked at Joao, a short, unknown photographer carrying an outdated camera, and dismissed him with a disdainful nod. ‘What an arsehole,’ Joao thought.

While driving out along Thokoza’s main road, Khumalo Street, Joao
spotted a group of women chasing another, younger woman. She was bleeding from her head and losing ground fast. In seconds they had caught her, hacking at her with whatever weapons they had, including a sickle. Joao leapt out of the still-moving car and ran towards the crowd. The low cries of pain from the woman on the dirt pavement were almost drowned out by the attackers’ triumphant ululating. Joao was scared, confused. This was not the kind of war photography he had imagined himself doing - this was too weird, but he shot off frame after frame as he retreated. Just then a man walked into the right-hand side of his frame, patronizing the female killers with a broad smile. Joao instinctively felt he had the shot as he pressed the shutter, for once heedless as to where the little black spot would appear on the negative.

That night he had to cover the Alberton Rotary Club’s annual general meeting. It was the last meeting before Christmas and like everyone at the dinner table, he had a cracker to pull. Inside Joao’s was a toy machine-gun. He saw it as an omen; within weeks he put together a portfolio of his best pictures and approached Reuters, Britain’s global wire service, persuading them to let him submit pictures on spec. For a few months he balanced the two: shooting the dull pictures that earned his salary at the paper and covering the burgeoning township war after hours and on the weekends, selling the pictures to Reuters. One day, the
Alberton Record
’s editor called him in to ask why the paper’s car had been seen in Soweto. Realizing he could no longer balance both jobs, Joao quit the paper to freelance full-time for Reuters.

Joao’s pictures on the wire were earning him a name as a conflict photographer, but a new picture editor for Reuters was coming in and the word was that he was going to get rid of the present stringers to set up his own network. Joao took his portfolio in to
The Star
to try to get a full-time job. While the Sunday picture editor was rather distractedly paging through the prints, Ken came over and looked over his shoulder and on seeing the picture of the woman being attacked in Thokoza, said, ‘Hey, I heard about that!’ though he seemed not to recall bumping into Joao on the day that the picture had been taken. Joao began to string for the
Sunday Star
and was still selling pictures to Reuters.

In August 1991, Ken was named chief photographer at
The Star
; one of the first things he did was hire Joao, the hotshot young photographer who was bringing great pictures back from the war in the townships. It had taken Joao just nine months to move from covering Rotary meetings to being
The Star
’s most exciting photographer. Ken and Joao became close friends as Joao became Ken’s ally in his struggle to improve the paper’s moribund photographic department.

Joao’s beat was almost exclusively the political violence in the townships. His eager recklessness to go into any situation for a picture and his custom of not shaving for days on end, as well as treating management and danger alike to his ‘fuck you’ attitude, ensured he fitted the part of conflict photographer well. But he maintained a certain equilibrium. He had made a home with an acerbically witty girl three years his junior - Vivian Innes. She was just 17 when they first met in a nightclub where he was a bouncer. She had come from her matric party and looked sexy in a short black sleeveless dress. Some time later, Joao received a Valentine’s card from Viv. He sent her flowers a few days later; from then on they were a couple and she moved in with him some time after he moved to Johannesburg. Over the years, they had accumulated a collection of orphaned cats which they both doted on. A friend once described Joao as ‘Mr War-photographer who just melts all over his cats.’

Johann Greybe ran a small hole-in-the-wall camera shop in Hillbrow. Because he was always willing to give good prices and technical advice to struggling young photojournalists, we all ended up buying second-hand cameras from him - the cameras that I had used to shoot the execution pictures came from him. Johann remembers Joao as the most enthusiastic young photographer he has ever met; extremely energetic and driven to have his picture on the front page. Ken was the ultimate professional. The camera dealer’s impression of Kevin was that he was too sensitive for this world: ‘He was one of the photographers who got nightmares and saw spooks.’ And me? I was level-headed, he said, the one who had his shit the most together.

5

BANG-BANG

I lament with sorrow and cry because the boys are finished. The boys are finished

Traditional Acholi funeral song

We were all white, middle-class young men, but we went to those unfamiliar black townships for widely differing reasons and with contrasting approaches; over the years, we would find common ground in our shared experiences and develop friendships.

Ken, unlike the rest of us, was not at ease with black people, and in the beginning I avoided working with him too much because of that. Not that I can recall Ken ever saying anything racist: it was just a difference in response, in empathy. Perhaps he was as uncomfortable with me and my open support for blacks in a country where identity was deeply, indelibly based on the colour of a man’s skin and how tight his hair curled. But Ken’s experiences as a photographer slowly changed his attitudes and had rid him of that native, unthinking racism.

While Ken was undergoing that process, Joao and he became close friends. The hours spent processing and printing pictures in each other’s company created a lot of time to learn about each other. They mostly just chatted or gossiped, but the claustrophobic processing cubbyholes at
The Star
were ideal for intimacies and sharing secrets. It was in Ken’s
cubicle that he showed Joao the contents of a photo-paper box he treasured. Inside were pictures of a little girl: Tabitha, his daughter from a previous relationship. Ken’s wife, Monica, had forbidden him to see his daughter and had even made him promise in writing to not visit the child. For someone who worked so hard to keep things in hand, there were parts of Ken’s life that were definitely out of control. Monica’s jealousy was so intense that Ken would ask Joao and others at the newspaper to lie to her when he went to see Tabitha. Ken hid those pictures, fearing Monica would destroy them if she ever found them.