Peter Magubane, who fought apartheid with camera

By Alan Cowell

CAPE TOWN: Peter Magubane, a Black South African photographer whose images documenting the cruelties and violence of apartheid drew global acclaim but punishment at home, including beatings, imprisonment and 586 consecutive days of solitary confinement, died on Monday. He was 91. His death was confirmed by family members speaking to South African television news broadcasts. No other details were provided.

Such were the challenges and perils facing Black photographers in South Africa’s apartheid-era segregated townships, Magubane liked to say, that he took to hiding his camera in hollowed-out bread loaves, empty milk cartons or even the Bible, enabling him to shoot pictures clandestinely. “I did not want to leave the country to find another life,” he told The Guardian in 2015. “I was going to stay and fight with my camera as my gun. I did not want to kill anyone, though. I wanted to kill apartheid.”

He never staged pictures, or asked for permission to photograph people, he said. “I apologize afterwards if someone feels insulted,” he said, “but I want the picture.” And he learned early in his career to put his photography first. “I no longer get shocked,” he once said, “I am a feelingless beast while taking photographs. It is only after I complete my assignment that I think of the dangers that surrounded me, the tragedies that befell my people.”

The country’s violence took its toll on him in 1992 when his son Charles, also a photographer and then in his early 30s, was murdered in the sprawling Black township of Soweto. Magubane (pronounced mah-goo-BAHN-eh) blamed migrant Zulu hostel-dwellers for the killing.

“I’ve been covering violence from the ’50s to now,” he said. “It’s never struck me as it’s struck me now. Now it has struck on my own door.” He produced images of many of South Africa’s turning points, including the shooting deaths of 69 unarmed demonstrators in Sharpeville in 1960, the Rivonia trial of Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress in the early 1960s, and the uprising by high school students in Soweto in 1976. But, when asked by The Guardian in 2015 to single out his best photograph, he chose a more tranquil image.

The photograph, from 1956, shows an anonymous Black maid in a beret and apron tending a young white girl on a bench marked with the words “Europeans Only.”

It is a poignant representation of an era and a symbol of the racial divide that the maid seems to be trying to reach across while her white charge peers inscrutably at the camera. “When I saw ‘Europeans Only,’ I knew I would have to approach with caution,” Magubane told The Guardian. “But I didn’t have a long lens, so I had to get close. I did not interact with the woman or the child, though. I never ask for permission when taking photos. I have worked amid massacres, with hundreds of people being killed around me, and you can’t ask for permission.”

In that same period, he befriended Nelson Mandela and Mandela’s wife at the time, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. After Mandela’s release from 27 years imprisonment in 1990, Magubane became his official photographer for four years, until Mandela’s election as South Africa’s first Black president in 1994.