Free The Bang-Bang Club by Greg Marinovich

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