Free The Bang-Bang Club by Greg Marinovich Page A

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