He hobbled out on to the verandah, the pain grabbing at his knee. The fireworks over the Waterfront spurted a last bouquet of red and gold and the city, like a dowager returning her jewels for another year’s safekeeping, slipped back into its familiar street garb of twinkling lights set over the darkly rustling trees below.
Gratefully he reached out for the parapet, easing himself on to its hard seat and settling back against the column. But, before he could sink into that world of fresh beginnings, the book on the table caught his attention. The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War by Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva.
He reached for it, knowing what it was before he picked it up, turning it to be confronted once again by Kevin, hunched knock-kneed amid the bric-a-brac of street battle, camera pointing out at the reader in an eternal wait for some long-forgotten moment of decisiveness. One for the darkroom wall? Only to be frozen into the iconography of the camera: photographer photographed photographing photographer. Like the lady on the cocoa tin, this time hypnotising by an infinite regression into the mind.
Kevin Carter shoots Ken Oosterbroek shooting Kevin shooting Ken and bang-bang, they’re dead. Bang-bang, who’s dead? Is it not all done with lenses and prisms and mirrors? Kevin’s camera waits to mock those who inquire for whom the bell tolls.
Sometimes he thinks himself a coward, sometimes he thinks himself a fool, but never a brave man. He is covering an anti-apartheid demonstration in a Pretoria side street. The riot police are wielding whips and truncheons, beating demonstrators into the waiting vans. One protester loses a gleaming new track shoe.
Standing in the watching crowd he shares the prisoner’s indignation. He brushes past inquiring faces and finds himself in the middle of the suddenly clear road. He walks deliberately for the shoe and feels a sense of exultation, as if he was on a stage. He can anticipate every line of the script a warrior rendered invisible to bullets by a theatrical potion. Too soon he reaches the shoe, the fit still upon him. He stoops, plucks and with a few more strides slides it home through the open window of the packed police van. It dawns on him: the country burns and he has saved a shoe.
It is self-knowledge, or the lack of it that haunts him. He nurses a terror that he will find himself present at a necklacing. Will he take refuge behind journalistic “detachment”, or will he intervene at the risk of being roasted alive? How will he live with himself if he doesn’t? He begins to worry he is ducking assignments in the townships.
One day he goes to Duncan village, near East London, for the funeral of 18 people murdered by the police. About 50000 pack into a football ground on a hill top. When they toyi-toyi the earth itself seems to heave from pounding feet. A handful of clerics sit in chairs on a raised platform, exchanging observations with studied aloofness. His stomach lurches as he sees, on the outskirts of the crowd, a roving band of ululating youths jogging to their own rhythm, led by men holding aloft tyres ready for impromptu executions by fire. He forgets them. But the service is interrupted by pandemonium to his right.
Two men, their necks garlanded by tyres, have been driven through the mourners like gargoyle figureheads at the front of a human battering ram. “Burn them, burn them,” rises the chanting.
“No don’t,” he shouts, waving a helpless hand, his cry lonely and lost in the roar of the mob.
“Burn them,” roars the mob, matchboxes brandished towards the two “informers” bleeding in their torn clothes. One falls forward on to his knees, looks up at the men who have risen to their feet on the platform above him and extends his hand in a beseeching gesture. The clerics draw back and hesitate until one hand reaches down and pulls them, dazed, to sanctuary.
After the funeral he drives through the departing crowd, faces smiling at the whey-faced stranger, self-important “marshals” running alongside his car, clearing a passage. Eventually he accelerates into the dusk, the anxious refrain “You tried, didn’t you, you tried?” beating in his head when he is brought to a halt by an open-top police Casspir squatting in the road.
A youth is being driven by shouted curses to clamber up the steel flanks of the armoured vehicle. A policeman on the top gestures him to the floor. Staring down at the waiting car he makes pounding motions with his rifle, as if grinding a body at his feet.
The obscenity of the moment extends to the masturbatory rhythm of his movements. Frozen in his knowing stare the driver finds himself face-to-face with that complicity of inaction he has feared all along. He tested his weight on his knee and then shuffled back across the verandah, the spirit of new years past.
Next week: The Bang-Bang Club and the Hidden War