Six months into the coronavirus pandemic in South Africa, the fate of most small businesses remain uncertain. The few left are struggling to survive. Skilled laborers are without jobs and the country faces an unemployment crisis. On the following are snapshots of some parts of the economy slowly crawling back to life.



BUSINESS WAS GOING WELL FOR JOHNNY ZULU, the owner of a 20-year-old salon named K&amp;S Beauty in Johannesburg, before Covid-19. But ever since the state-imposed lockdown that unfolded in various stages in the country, he says he has lost more than half of his customers. “I am not making money like I used to. Most customers say they fear for their lives and the virus,” rues Zulu. “I had no income, I had to make means to pay my rental. I survived through house calls.” To minimize the risk of clients getting infected, Zulu has now employed a new staff member so customers don’t have to wait in queues outside, and he has also started working on appointments. In this image, Zulu is wearing PPE as he works on a client, and as he also awaits another customer who is late for an appointment.



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A fully-loaded taxi leaves the crowded Winnie Mandela taxi rank at Kempton Park, east of Johannesburg on a busy weekday. All passengers are to mandatorily wear masks and sanitize before boarding the vehicles. 



Sifiso Vilakazi, a taxi owner and former professional South African soccer player, says during Level 5 of the lockdown in South Africa, most drivers lost their daily income and their families went hungry. “Now, since people are going back to work, we have more commuters and things are slowly getting back to normal,” says a hopeful Vilakazi.



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With lockdown restrictions gradually easing, and restaurants and bars reopening in South Africa, people are rediscovering the simple joys and conviviality of eating out. Here, youngsters treat themselves to their favorite local delicacy, called inyama yenhloko (head meat), with pap and salsa, at the popular Kwa Skero restaurant in Soweto, Johannesburg’s urban sprawl. 



Tiisetso Kumbula, a regular patron at the eatery, says she hadn’t enjoyed her favorite meal since March. “When the lockdown started, I had to learn how to cook from TV shows and when the President reopened restaurants, the first thing I wanted was to come here,” enthuses Kumbula.



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A mobile street vendor pushes his trolley filled with fresh fruits and vegetables on a sunny Friday morning. He can now conduct his business freely, without being asked for a special permit as was required during lockdown Levels 5, 4 and 3, by the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and South African Police Service (SAPS) patrolling the streets in some parts.



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With South Africa’s tourism sector reopening, strict Covid-19 regulations have been implemented in most facilities such as the Kloofendal Nature Reserve in the West Rand of Johannesburg, where mask-wearing, temperature-scans and hand-sanitizing are mandatory. Only smaller groups are allowed for hiking activities.



Adventurer Sabelo Zitha, who loves hiking, is happy to be back at the park, and says: “When President Cyril Ramaphosa announced we could hike again, I was very pleased to hear that. The recent hike we did was quite adventurous because I was doing what I love: being outdoors and engaging with various people, after a long stay at home. It was priceless. Now, I am even happier we can travel and hike in different provinces.’



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After a fairly long and dry spell in South Africa, television shows have been given the green light to be shot on-location. In this image, an elderly citizen passes the site of a TV shoot in progress with Morgan Gould, a South African international footballer, in Rockville Soweto.



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Senior citizens wait in long queues at a local municipal building in Soweto to collect their monthly social grants. Social distancing is mostly not adhered to at these collection depots. Some of the grantees arrive early to stand in line, braving the cold morning air and Covid-19.

A Day In The Life Of…

FORBES AFRICA&#8217;s photojournalist on what it feels to be diagnosed with the coronavirus. He says he’s lucky to be well enough to see through the stigma and document his experiences.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



On June 5, at 12.44PM, I received a text message on my phone that I had tested positive to the novel coronavirus.



I had been writing about the virus and its effect on small business since the lockdown started in South Africa, but never once thought I would become my own subject this soon.



On the warm Friday afternoon, I had been writing a story on how entrepreneurs are battling the economic downturn when the message came with the words ‘Mr Motlabana Monnakgotla, kindly note…’ and figured it might be yet another promotional message on a new product or policy.



Originally, my symptoms had started with a flu the previous week, and it was definitely more potent than any flu I have endured all my life. I was weak, my forehead had a rash, my temperature was up and down, and I had never sneezed so much in my life.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="768" height="1024" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200608_163307-768x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-45914" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200608_163307-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200608_163307-scaled-300x400.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200608_163307-scaled-600x800.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200608_163307-225x300.jpg 225w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200608_163307-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200608_163307-1536x2048.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200608_163307-scaled.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" /><figcaption>Self-portrait, in isolation at home in Soweto</figcaption></figure>



I did what I would normally do when sick; I got myself medicines from a local chemist and took rest but I was always tired.



It was not until I received a call from my editor and she heard my deep nasal voice, and insisted that I immediately get myself tested for Covid-19 that I thought I may have contracted the virus. I had been in denial until then.



I was saddened that within the 5km radius where I live in Soweto, Johannesburg’s sprawling urban township, clinics had no test-kits or equipment and it had been the case for a while. After a few days of search, I eventually found a clinic that did Covid-19 tests, not far from Baragwanath Hospital. The results were out the very next day.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">&#8220;I have witnessed criticism and judgement and learned that there is surely a stigma around the virus, just like HIV/Aids.&#8221;</blockquote>



Between Friday and now, I have gone through a wave of emotions and experiences. I have witnessed criticism and judgement and learned that there is surely a stigma around the virus, just like HIV/Aids. I had communicated my condition to close friends and family on WhatsApp groups hoping this would make them more aware of the gravity of the disease because someone so close was now infected.



But there were those who twisted the knife in the wound further by reiterating that I am “carrying the virus” and saying I would die of it. The stigma around the virus is real.



On the bright side, I have also made some new friends since opening up about my condition. In the past 72 hours, I have received enough messages of faith and love.



As I write this in my room in isolation, with new eyes, I look at everything around me that I had taken for-granted, such as the framed pictures of beaming family members on the walls in the living room. Life is short, but it’s great to be alive.

T 610

My First 72 Hours As Covid-19 Positive

“I thought (the bullet) had gone through me. Nobody wanted to look. I wasn&#8217;t breathing properly because my lung had been punctured. And there were a couple of other wounds, rather embarrassingly, in my buttocks and in my hand,&#8221; recalls photojournalist Greg Marinovich.
This is one of the four times the 53-year-old has had to endure bullet wounds, three in his country, South Africa, and the last in Afghanistan in 1999.
Awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1991, Marinovich is one of four members of The Bang-Bang Club, famous for its brave coverage of a violent war that raged between 1990 and 1994 during South Africa’s transition from apartheid. As many journalists stayed away from the violence that broke out between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party, only these four photojournalists braved the worst and alerted the world of the gruesome rivalry between political parties.
Interestingly, Marinovich only fell in love with the camera in his early adulthood.
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“Growing up, I never had photographer or journalist role models, I had no ambition to do this work. Now, though, I look up to many of my colleagues, especially Gilles Peress, who is a great photographer and a great thinker,” says Marinovich.
The, now, US-based photojournalist co-authored the book The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, together with the only other surviving member of the club, João Silva. Fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, Kevin Carter, took his own life; Ken Oosterbroek died from a stray bullet in street fighting in Johannesburg, East Rand.
After being dissatisfied with what their images alone told about the war, Marinovich and Silva decided to write a fuller account, what he describes as being deeper than the superficiality of conflict images. Marinovich is still a bit dissatisfied with the legacy The Bang-Bang Club has left.
“It seems to have left a legacy contrary to what we aimed to achieve. It seems that so many young photographers see the business as being glamorous and attractive, whereas we hate the glamorization of photojournalists, nor is it heroic,” says Marinovich.
On his own legacy, Marinovich is prouder.
“Perhaps I have left a passion of truth telling of people’s stories no matter how difficult that is. Of never faking stuff,” says Marinovich.
Testimony to this would be the Marikana investigations where Marinovich helped reveal that South African police had executed miners in a hidden area after the televised shooting, which resulted in the death of 34 mineworkers at the hands of the police in 2012.
Although Marinovich says that only a lotto ticket would make him stop being a photojournalist any time soon, he has ceased from doing conflict journalism, which cost his friend, Silva, both his legs when he stood on a landmine in Afghanistan.
“We are as close as ever, but I was horrified by the incident. He has suffered and still suffers greatly from the wounds,” says Marinovich.
Marinovich reckons the future of photojournalism in Africa is promising, mentioning: some “great” ones in Zanele Muholi; Andrew Esiebo; Tsepo Gumbi; and Boniface Mwangi.
“It’s very tough to make a living for the majority, but if you are consistently excellent you will succeed. Keep telling stories close to your hea

The bloody trail To The Truth

It’s a rough, tough, brutal business for an entrepreneur; you risk your neck in places where no one wants to go to find stories that everyone wants to know; it’s months of tedium and travelling where one slip can mean death.
This is the news business in Africa that is the life of Kenyan Salim Amin; it is also the cruel business in which his father suffered on his way to an early grave.
Amin will never forget November 23, 1996, the day word came through. His father Mo Amin, a legendary photojournalist, had survived many dangers in more than 30 years on the road, including the loss of an arm in an explosion in the Ethiopian civil war. His life came to a tragic end in the Indian Ocean.
“I was at the gym when I got a call from mum asking me to come home immediately as something had happened to dad’s flight. I only believed it after I identified his body in the Comoros,” he says.
Mo was on an Air Ethiopia flight home to Nairobi when hijackers took the plane. He tried to rally passengers to fight back but the plane ran out of fuel and ditched in the sea, off the coast of the Comoros, killing all but 50 on board.
<div id="attachment_4529" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4529" class="size-medium wp-image-4529" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Salim-Amin-Safari-Rally-Picture-for-TIME-300x186.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="186" />Entrepreneur, Photojournalist, Kenya, Salim Amin, March 2016</div>
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“He was still on his feet when the plane crashed trying to get the hijackers off the pilot as he tried to land in the ocean. The hijackers claimed they had a grenade but no evidence of this was found. Mo was flying from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. He had gone to Addis for a meeting with Ethiopian Airlines as we produced the inflight magazine,” says Salim.
Mo died side-by-side with a friend and fellow journalist. Brian Tetley, who was 61, was a British-born, Nairobi-based, king of the keyboard and bon viveur.
“Brian worked with my father for over three decades and they were very close friends. Brian was often the writer while my dad photographed the major news stories, and they also co-authored/produced over two dozen books together. They were like brothers and travelled all over the world on assignments together,” says Salim.
The plane crash cost Salim his father and mentor; the man who remained a mystery right up to his tragic death, an oft told African story of father and son.
“We had a lot of love between us but I hardly saw him and didn’t really know him very well… we didn’t speak much about personal matters, more about work.”
Taking up the camera, for Salim, was bittersweet.
“I started taking pictures when I was eight years old… that’s when he gave me his first camera,” he says.
With this camera, Salim took a picture that appeared in TIME magazine, making him probably the only 10-year-old African to ever have a picture published in a global magazine.
“I was amazed when I saw it actually in print! If I had had any doubts about what I was going to do before that, then those went out of the window when I saw my work in print,” says Salim.
He started working for the media company his father founded – Camerapix.
“My first pay cheque was from Camerapix… he paid me Ksh5,000 for my first month at work in 1992 (then around $100).”
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Salim has no regrets in an unforgiving business.
“I don’t think I would want to ever do anything else… definitely I would want to be doing the same thing in another life.”
This is a trade where you can very easily die, unsung, chasing a story. Salim had his fair share.
“I remember being bombed by government forces in Sudan during the civil war, which was terrifying, the dangers of covering Somalia in the 1990s during Operation Restore Hope, the loss of my friends and colleagues Dan Eldon, Anthony Macharia and Hos Maina in Somalia in 1993, and the genocide in Rwanda which was the most disturbing and brutal story I had ever covered,” says Salim.
Eldon, an English-born Kenyan photojournalist, with Kenyans, Macharia and Maina, were killed by an angry mob in Mogadishu in 1993, in the days when occupying US forces struggled to keep order.
Another journalist who survived that violent day is Angus Shaw, who spent 40 years covering eight wars, from his base in Harare, Zimbabwe.
“We were at the hotel that morning when we heard an explosion five blocks away. We decided to go down and have a look,” recollects Shaw.
“The Camerapix crew drove ahead of us as we headed to the compound where the explosion took place and as we got there, we saw a swelling crowd. The crowd erupted into extreme anger after seeing the carnage and deaths after the bombings of that narrow street, they started throwing stones at our small press convoy yelling ‘Yankies go home’. Eldon had disappeared inside this angry crowd when they started throwing stones. Every photojournalist wanted the best picture so they hardly paid attention to the possible dangers.”
What followed will haunt Shaw forever.
“I saw a handful of people armed with AK-47 rifles firing shots and I saw a nice young man, Macharia, going down. He had been shot. We realized this was getting out of hand and we started driving away and at that point, they had started shooting at our car which was about 25 meters away.”
Days passed with no trace of the 23-year-old Eldon, last seen disappearing into the angry crowd.
“One morning we woke up to the sight of Dan’s bloody shoes at the doorstep of our hotel. This was a warning to us.”
Shaw says, as they were wrapping Eldon’s belongings, Mo reminded the press corps that covering atrocities was more than reporting numbers.
“When you start wrapping the belongings of your own, then you discover that that’s what people go through all over the world,” says Shaw.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4527" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Mo-Amin-back-to-work-with-bionic-arm-300x209.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="209" />
Salim wishes the continent that gave birth to many great journalists could spare a thought for their hardships.
“I wish Africans would celebrate journalists more… we are seen as ‘lowly’ people and in a corrupt profession by many around the continent, and unfortunately even African media organizations do not celebrate African journalists enough. My father was recognized and decorated more outside Africa than within. We should do more and maybe have a commemoration day each year for African journalists that is a celebration of their sacrifices and contributions.”
Salim found himself at the helm of his late father’s business at the age of 26.
“I had no experience at running a company; luckily my father was good at filing all his work so I had to study his documents and correspondences,” he says.
“The first day was chaotic. We had to re-register and restructure the company. We started by giving everybody their dues, close the company and re-employ them again under the new registered company with new shareholding. It never really struck me that I was now running the company, it just happened as there was no succession plan. I had no choice.”
Salim concedes he has to move with the times.
Media and development expert, Rashweat Mukundu, says the internet is changing the news business.
“Traditional models of doing business are being challenged, yet some traditional elements, that include the human touch, will remain necessary, yet more enhanced by ICTs. We are in an era of either business adapts or dies,” he says.
Bruce Mutsvairo, media professor at Northumbria University in Britain, says Africa should plough its own furrow.
“Our innovations should underscore, support and provide the basis for Africa’s cultural and economic needs. We have to come with our own innovations, even if they get rejected in the West.”
In Mo’s day, it was all about hard news, hotspots and wars. The news business these days is more about fashion and business, says Salim. With more than four million images of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and 8,000 hours of video footage, Camerapix Archive is the largest library in Africa.
“Our only asset is our archives. I am not so sure I would attach any monetary value on the company. It’s a family business that I would not dream of selling.”
Like many in the media industry, Salim struggles to make money as there is a lot of free content floating around.
“We are producing a lot of content; it’s not giving us much revenue as yet. So we have to sell our content to multiple broadcasters. There are more opportunities presented through mobile devices but expensive data remains the main impediment.”
Salim plans to ease himself out of the business to make way for the next generation.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4526" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Mo-Amin-and-Salim-In-Ethiopia-300x228.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="228" />
“We did the first private-public partnership with a local university where we are also helping develop their postgraduate degree. We have just moved into the Multimedia University where our production team is housed; in exchange we are helping them develop their master’s program.”
Another chapter for Africa – a great story that many journalists have paid with their lives to tell.

The Cruel Business Of Telling Stories And Bloody Shoes

Reporting on the African continent is an “extreme act of courage”, writes journalist Shyaka Kanuma in a Nieman report. The Rwandan was in exile, addressing other Nieman fellow journalists at Harvard University.
The fellowship, one of the most sought after in the world, has seen its fair share of African journalists fleeing trouble back home. Gregory Stemn was one. The Liberian photojournalist chronicled the horrors of his country’s civil war against Charles Taylor’s wishes. South African Nat Nakasa was the first black African Nieman fellow in September 1964. He chose exile to join the fellowship but committed suicide ten months later, jumping off a Manhattan apartment building, manically depressed at the thought of never returning to the country he was forced to abandon.
To be a journalist on African soil is to consign oneself to an uneasy life; be it in war zones or in fearful newsrooms. Greg Marinovich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning South African photojournalist, writing on the tribulations faced by African war photographers noted, “across&#8230; the continent, ruthless regimes bring the violence and fear to bear to suppress the truth.”
This handful of Africans, merely plying their trade on the side of reason, is often forgotten. These are their stories.
January 9, 1994: Katlehong, a township just outside Johannesburg. Gunfire crackles as dignitaries make it beyond the rusted metal shacks of what they called no-man’s land.
Jessica Pitchford was covering the township beat for public broadcaster SABC on that day. Looking into the camera she began, “at the moment, it’s quite safe here&#8230;”
The rattle of bullets broke off the sentence. Pitchford threw herself to the ground.
Ahmed Sharif, a freelance photographer, is shot next to her; dying from his injuries hours later. On the other side, her colleague Charles Moikanyang is shot in the back. She helps him from the line of fire. He survives.
“We were just part of a group of people who happened to be invading an official war zone,” says Pitchford to a magazine a few months after Katlehong.
She wasn’t happy with her story.
“I hate the way I handled this one&#8230; I should have put it in context. I didn’t even mention that a woman and child had also been caught in the crossfire&#8230; all I was worried about was getting Charles to hospital. It was a journalist’s story. A little too self-indulgent, I thought.”
Violence was playing out across the country. In the early 1990s, South Africa was at a crossroads. Political reforms made way for democratic elections to end apartheid. Nelson Mandela was President-in-waiting.
The country’s media was negotiating a new kind of editorial freedom. Journalists were dodging bullets to tell the story of political violence. It is believed that close to 14,000 South Africans were killed during the bloody transition to democracy. Katlehong was ground zero.
Monica Zwolsman was a reporter at Johannesburg newspaper, The Star; the same publication her late husband, award-winning photographer Ken Oosterbroek, worked for.
“Looking back, I am just horrified at what went on and how people lived through that&#8230; I don’t think anyone knew, and we still don’t really know, who was attacking who.”
Zwolsman was part of an innocent and confused generation of journalists.
“I don’t think we, as journalists, had the skills [to cover these events]&#8230; It was difficult trying to get a handle on what was happening. It was never a constant, it started off with pangas (machetes) and steels bars and it evolved to AK-47s.”
Oosterbroek was a leading light in the now-famous Bang Bang Club, a band of daring photojournalists working in what they called no-man’s land – between battle lines drawn in the townships. A week before the elections of 1994, a bullet stopped him forever in Thokoza, east of Johannesburg.
“Everyone knew he was dead except me&#8230; when I got there people had just ran away and I ran into the hospital and I just saw his feet sticking out… that’s when I realized [that he was dead].”
In the book that chronicled their lives out in the field, friend and fellow Bang Bang Club member Greg Marinovich, who was also injured in the carnage says, “after four long years of observing violence, the bullets had finally caught up with us.”
A willingness to pursue a story at considerable personal risk was typical among reporters. They organized in packs; groups of foreign and local journalists moved together, finding safety in numbers.
“The local journalists knew where to go and where not to go. They could read the situation, you had to get to know that and you had to look out for each other. Even today, people are so closely bonded – that group of journalists – because we worked together and we genuinely lived through some crazy times,” recalls Zwolsman.
Back in the safety of the newsrooms, editors could merely keep tabs on their reporters, says Peter Fabricius, who was an assignment editor at the Independent. He sent a number of South African journalists to conflicts at home and further afield in the Congo; it was a difficult job.
“It was pretty nerve-racking having to send people into danger not knowing what you were exposing them to.”
These were the days before cell phones. Cumbersome satellite phones were the only way. But only a few, well-funded, newsrooms could afford them.
Oppression and imprisonment are other occupational hazards. There must be few jobs in the world where you can consider yourself fortunate to end up in jail.
Seyoum Tsehaye is one of those journalists behind bars. He began his journalism career as a guerrilla with the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the armed movement that ended Ethiopian occupation in 1993.
Some guerrillas were armed with cameras and voice recorders along with Kalashnikovs. They were not objective war-reporters but they captured rare footage of battle and interviewed commanders. These fighters provided the only records of this conflict in Africa’s mysterious hermit kingdom.
After the war, many Eritrean warrior-journalists abandoned their AK-47s to staff the country’s burgeoning state-controlled media. Tsehaye was appointed the country’s first head of state television.
In the late 1990s, with fresh conflict with Ethiopia looming, Tsehaye stopped toeing the party line. He joined an “audacious” independent paper and returned to photography. He began speaking out against the renewed fighting and campaigned for democracy. He was shadowed by secret police until his arrest and detention in 2001.
Recent news of him, provided by “sympathetic prison guards”, claims his health is “deteriorating” as he is shifted from one desert prison to the other.
Still behind bars, Tsehaye won the Reporter’s Without Borders ‘Journalist of the Year Award’ in 2007.
Brian Hungwe, an award-winning journalist from Zimbabwe, is well aware of the risks of political reporting. In 2000, he broke the story of families who lost their sons in the escalating war in the Congo.
Two years earlier, Mugabe mobilized Zimbabwean troops, against the wishes of his electorate, and sent them to the DRC at the start of the Second Congo War. The casualties were considerable.
“It started with one family, their son was a pilot but they only received a knee-cap for burial. They were living in fear that they buried the wrong person,” remembers Hungwe.
Slowly, but surely, more families came forward and Hungwe began an investigation into their claims. It culminated in the “DRC War Casualties Shock” report that won him the CNN Multichoice Journalist of the Year Award.
He was meticulous, even pushing for an official government response, confident that it would shield him from persecution.
“The story was true. If you can defend the truth then you are fortified. I was lucky because the truth was on my side. Getting the government to comment was difficult. They never responded although we faxed them and phoned them as well.”
Once the story was published and Hungwe accepted his award, a senior government representative belatedly denied the story.
Hungwe’s story shows there can be triumphs, as well as danger, in African journalism.
Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist who has been in and out of prison on sedition charges, continues to push the envelope. In 2007, he founded The Independent, a Kampala news magazine. Mwenda won the International Press Freedom Award from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists in 2008. He owns, edits and publishes the magazine.
“You buy the truth, we pay the price,” is the magazine’s motto. Journalists from Kampala to Katlehong will nod with a knowing smile.

The Perils Of  The Written Word

This calm encounter on a spring morning in Sandton, Johannesburg, belies a man who forged his career amid fury. He cheated death at the hands of police to capture the Soweto school uprising, surely, one of the saddest stories ever told in Africa.
On June 16, 1976, Sam Nzima, a photojournalist at The World newspaper, in Johannesburg, took a picture of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying a 13-year-old dying Hector Pieterson from the Soweto massacre. He smuggled the film out in his sock and the picture hit the front pages of the world. The police wanted to destroy it – the image destroyed Nzima’s career.
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The picture changed the political landscape of South Africa; it made a fortune for the news agencies of the world, but he got nothing from it for 22 years.  The iconic image has been on everything from billboards to T-shirts.
“The picture of Hector Pieterson destroyed my future in journalism. I couldn’t continue as a journalist because of that picture and I would never put my life in danger, I was forced to leave everything behind,” says Nzima.
Harassment from police forced Nzima to become a small bottle store owner in the small village Lilydale, in Bushbuckridge, in Mpumalanga. It took him 22 years of struggle to get his copyright back.
“The copyright of the Hector Pieterson Photo was given to me on the November 16, 1998 by Independent Newspapers Holdings Limited and was registered with Webber Wentzel Bowens Attorneys Notaries &amp; Conveyancers intellectual property lawyers in Johannesburg on July 20, 2000,” he says.
The day he risked his life for the picture is as clear as yesterday.
“As early as 6AM in the morning of June 16, I was covering a student march in Naledi High in Soweto with a colleague Sophie Tema. We found the students busy writing placards opposing new Bantu education laws. This followed a circular sent to the schools that Afrikaans will be the medium of instruction,” says Nzima.
When the march reached Morris Isaacson High, a student leader Tsietsi Mashinini addressed students from the top of a tree saying the march was to be a peaceful, says Nzima. Shortly after, armed police arrived in armoured vehicles and instructed all to disperse. The children sang Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika in defiance.
Nzima says the singing agitated a police commander who instructed his officers to open fire. The students ran and Nzima hid in a house.
“I got out from the house, the police had ceased firing, and I saw a little child falling down. There comes this tall boy Mbuyisa and picked him up. As Mbuyisa picked him up, I went with my camera. I was also shooting with my camera, under the shower of police bullets. Mbuyisa was running to the nearest car, the nearest press car was our Volkswagen Beetle. I managed to shoot six sequences of him carrying Hector. My colleague Sophie Tema opened the door and they put Hector inside. Hector was certified dead upon arriving in Phefeni Clinic,” says Nzima.
“I knew the police would come back for me, I wound the film and stashed it in my sock and then loaded another film. As I anticipated, the police came back and grabbed me after they ran away for some few minutes. They took my three cameras and exposed my films. When they thought they had destroyed the evidence, our driver Thomas Khoza rushed the film to The World office. The picture was published the next day.”
Nzima’s gallant work with his camera on that violent winter day in 1976 was to wreck his life. When police came knocking on his door, Nzima left his job in Johannesburg and ended up under house arrest in the remote town of Bushbuckridge, far from his family in Soweto.
“After two days I received a call from the station commander at John Vorster Square, he wanted to have a cup of coffee with me. Percy Qoboza was my editor at The World. He advised me to stay away from the police if I don’t want to come back as corpse.”
Qoboza told the commander to invite him, the editor, for tea instead. This led to a police instruction to shoot Nzima if they found him photographing, a police insider told him at the time.
In April 2011, South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma awarded Nzima with the Order of Ikhamanga for excellence in liberal art.
“If popularity was cash, I was going to tell you I am a millionaire or billionaire. Many people know this picture but some don’t know the man behind it. I was shocked in 2010 when I was invited in Berlin at a school called Hector Pieterson Schule. The school was renamed in celebration of the fall of The Berlin Wall. Germans compared their freedom to the South African independence.”
“Money was not that much, no rewards in cash but I had recognition from the state president. At the beginning I regretted [taking] this picture because this picture destroyed my journalistic career, I lost my job and my friends in Johannesburg. But now I am rejoicing because I am getting high publicity, I have become an icon in South Africa. Maybe one day I will reap a jackpot from some quarters.”
A Sam Nzima Foundation will be opened, including a school for photojournalists, in his hometown near Bushbuckridge. This is where Nzima has a makeshift darkroom that he uses to train school children in his village of Lilydale.
“After the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, I was brave enough to pick up my camera and continue where I left, but all these years I was afraid to do that. The original camera that captured Hector Pieterson is still intact; I have kept it safe in those years.”
When Hillary Clinton visited South Africa for the first time, in the 1990s, she wanted to see Nzima at the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto. She offered to buy the camera, but Winnie Mandela advised Nzima against selling. She said it was the property of the state. Nzima also refused to donate his Pantex camera, with 50mm lens, to the ANC Women’s League.
“I was happy not to sell it, but if it was good money she was offering, I would have been happier to sell. It’s because it’s better enjoying my life when I can than keeping the camera. One day, I will show people of South Africa that this is a camera that brought their freedom. But the person who struggled for freedom gets nothing.”
“South Africans do not value me but I do get recognition from other countries. I remember in 2011 I was invited to exhibit my work in Belgium and address the parliament in Brussels. Parliamentarians showed interest in our history and the role I played in those days.”
Despite Nzima receiving lucrative offers from overseas for the camera, he says his conscience disapproves. It lives in his museum in Bushbuckridge.
“Now I cannot sell the camera, it has become the property of the state, it is our heritage. I have to consult with the politicians for a go-ahead; otherwise I will be frustrated again. If the government officials could learn that I had sold the camera overseas, they will ask me why I did it.”
Hector Pieterson was buried at Avalon Cemetery, in Soweto, and a museum in his memory was built near where he was shot, in 2002. His sister, Antoinette Sithole, the girl running alongside, is a curator at the museum and Makhubo was last traced in Nigeria. He went to exile after the photograph was published.
Every year on June 16, Nzima kneels and prays for the fallen schoolchildren of Soweto. He escaped with his life from the terrible day but his career didn’t.

The Sad Story Behind  The Picture That  Moved The World To Tears

It’s a haunting image. A terrified woman lies flat on the floor of a coffee shop where she might have been sipping a cappuccino just minutes before. Beside her are her two young children. The woman clings to her son and clutches her daughter by the elbow. Empty bullet casings are scattered around them. But what really makes the picture so powerful is how it depicts a safe and familiar scene as anything but. This is a split second in the life of a mother fighting for her children.
<div id="attachment_2947" style="width: 187px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2947" class="size-medium wp-image-2947" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/RTX13XVR-1-177x300.jpg" alt="" width="177" height="300" />Kenya Defence Forces soldiers comb the rooftop of the Westgate shopping mall, on the fourth day since militants stormed into the mall, in Nairobi September 24, 2013. Somalia&#8217;s al Shabaab Islamist group said on Tuesday its militants were still holed up in a Kenyan shopping mall they attacked at the weekend and there were &#8220;countless dead bodies&#8221;, raising fears the death toll could be higher than 62. REUTERS/Noor Khamis (KENYA &#8211; Tags: CIVIL UNREST CRIME LAW MILITARY) &#8211; RTX13XVR</div>
Nairobi-based photojournalist Tyler Hicks, of The New York Times, took the photograph and, in May, won a Pulitzer Prize for it.  A month after it was taken, the woman in the picture contacted him. They found themselves talking about the mall music.
“In covering conflict, it often isn’t the big things that you remember. It’s not the loud explosions or gunfire that your mind focuses on but often it’s some small detail,” he says on a call from Iraq.
“With all the shooting and running around and people screaming there was this very calm music echoing through the shopping mall.”
The woman told him she spent almost five hours lying in that very place with her children, trying to keep them calm and quiet. She remembers quietly singing along with that same mall music to her children to try to distract them and keep them still.
Hicks has risked his life many times to take the photos that have defined his career but this one sticks with him.
“That picture for me sums up what happened there, this is an attack on innocent civilians. The fear on her face and this amazing scene of her trying to hide and protect her kids,” he says.
Since the mall siege a year ago, Nairobi has been under persistent attack. A few months after Westgate, a hand grenade was thrown on to a minibus in the city suburb of Eastleigh. It claimed four lives and maimed at least 40 others. A day earlier, twin bomb blasts rocked the northern town of Wajir, killing one and injuring three others.
But perhaps some of the biggest attacks since Westgate were carried out more recently, further away, on the Kenyan coast. In July, unknown gunmen opened fire at marketplaces in the coastal villages of Hindi and Gamba. As with the mall attack, the gunmen began shooting at market goers indiscriminately. Both attacks claimed 29 lives. Earlier, in June, gun battles raged in Lamu, a resort town, and a number of buildings were set alight. That attack killed 48.
The Somali extremist group, Al-Shabaab, has taken responsibility for each of those attacks. After Kenyan armed forces, supporting a weak UN-backed Somali force, began pursuing the Al Qaeda-linked militants in southern Somalia three years ago, the group has vowed to fight back.
“Kenya’s operations in Somalia are something of a black box,” says Parselelo Kantai, East Africa Editor for The Africa Report, who’s been following the region’s insecurity.
“Because no independent reports have revealed what is going on, Al-Shabaab’s claims of atrocities being committed there by the KDF [Kenya Defense Forces] cannot be ignored&#8230; that’s the reason Al-Shabaab have given for attacking Kenya.”
In May, the group officially announced their war against Kenya.
Beyond the human cost, Hicks’ image of the woman and children tells another story. The abandoned coffee shop, where the family spent hours hiding, is still abandoned today. The economic cost to business owners within the mall was catastrophic. Many lost everything because they did not have the right insurance policy. Even the mall’s owners lost out, despite their insurance pay outs. Until the mall reopens, its owners will lose around $4.5 million every year.
Also, scores of mall employees lost their jobs because of the attack. The mall’s grocery store, Nakumatt, lost three employees during the shootings and its 150-strong staff was made redundant. A new store in another part of the city may rehire some of them.
It has been a year since Westgate and the aftermath is a difficult reality for its survivors. Life for many in Kenya will never be the same again. But if you look closer at the Hicks photograph with the terrified family on the cafe floor, you’ll see that some hope still lingers.

A Picture Of Fear  That Still Lingers

Inspired by the life of her son Dan Eldon, a Reuters photojournalist who was stoned and beaten to death in Somalia in 1993 when he was 22 years old, Kathy Eldon co-founded the Creative Visions Foundation. It is a hub where creative activists (like her son) turn ideas into positive actions to build social movements that impact the world. (Disclosure: I am a board member of Creative Visions Foundation.)
Kathy is also the author of In the Heart of Life, her memoir that was released this month (Harper One). After I read the book, I immediately sent Kathy an email filled with unedited thoughts straight from my head to the keyboard:
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“I finished In the Heart of Life late last night. It is a gift and will be a gift to all who read it. I was moved, touched and unsettled. I cried, smiled and thought. I felt lucky to be let into your life – a real and raw life – a book that is authentic and transparent. I felt your pain and suffering – the pain and suffering that happened years before your son Dan’s tragic death. I tried to stay removed – to not internalize it – but that was impossible. It brought up every emotion, made me think, took me to places I had thought were buried and gave me permission to always live my life. You’ve inspired me…”
I asked Kathy to answer this question: “What are the top five calamities, catastrophes, disasters and disruptions that were critical in your growth and enabled you to become who you are meant to be and live a life of joy? Lessons others can learn from.”
&nbsp;
<h4>1) Apartheid South Africa</h4>
When I was 16, I was thrilled when selected for a seven-month stay as a foreign exchange student in South Africa. However, marooned in an Afrikaans-speaking school in Bloemfontein (which bore an uncanny resemblance to my hometown, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), I spent my time learning a language that sounds like you’re spitting up phlegm. Even worse, meeting black Africans was strictly prohibited in Apartheid South Africa, and my host family was under surveillance by the secret police because “Oom” Bram, Uncle Bram, had defended Nelson Mandela and freedom fighters during the notorious Rivonia Trial. He managed to save those convicted from execution, although they were condemned to life imprisonment. Tragically, Bram was also punished for his radical beliefs. Accused of being a Communist, he was also sentenced to life imprisonment and died as a result of the harsh treatment he received in jail.
Living in South Africa shattered my Midwestern illusions about life, but the experience prepared me for a lifetime as a journalist, author and filmmaker, determined to tell stories about courageous individuals like my first hero, Bram Fischer, whose fearless stand for justice forever disrupted my life.
&nbsp;
<h4>2) Kids</h4>
I was only 24 when I had my first child, Dan, an unexpected development for a determined Wellesley grad whose only ambition was to get out of college and change the world. Suddenly, after marrying an Englishman and moving to London, the only thing I was changing was diapers. Living in a dreary British suburb, with no money for babysitters, and another baby on the way, I had to reinvent myself as a creative hometrepreneur, creating work I could manage without leaving the house. I sewed my clothes, wrote children’s books and produced toys and jewelry to sell to my neighbors. When the kids were in nursery school, I worked as a substitute teacher at the American School in London, overseeing noisy middle-school kids who thought art class was recess.
A loud voice, eyes at the back of my head, as well as a creative approach to problem-solving and the ability to deal with just about anyone are qualities that have served me well since my frustrating years as mother, teacher and wife.
&nbsp;
<h4>3) Divorce</h4>
Removed from all that was safe and familiar, in search of a self I had somehow lost along the way, after leaving my husband I developed a devastating blood condition that nearly killed me. After slowly recovering, I was still filled with guilt and shame, and faced a bleak and uncertain future. But then, by chance, I met a remarkable Ismaili woman, Zarina Dyer, who introduced me to Shakti Gawain’s book, Living in the Light. By page three I was hooked on the author’s description of a place that “all of us must pass through at one time or another, what mystics call ‘the piercing of the veil of illusion.’”
“It’s the point when we truly realize that our physical world is not the ultimate reality and begin to turn inward to discover the true nature of existence. The moment may co-incide with a sense of reaching rock-bottom, but then we may fall through a trapdoor into a bright new world, the world of spiritual truth. “Only by moving fully into the darkness can we move through it into the light.”
Over the next few weeks I met frequently with Zarina, who urged me to be patient with myself. “Everything happens in its own time,” she said, adding, “When the student is ready the teacher appears.”
After my serendipitous encounter with that unlikely teacher I realized that I had to find the trapdoor and allow myself to fall into it. After a terrifying
descent into profound darkness, one day I was able to emerge again, blinking in the unaccustomed light, aware that once again, my dreams of hope, purpose – and even love – were possible again.
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<h4>4) Death Of My Son</h4>
My son Dan became a photojournalist for Reuters in Somalia, where he covered a devastating famine and a bloody civil war. When he and three friends were murdered by a mob, I descended into a downward spiral. Wracked with guilt at having encouraged him to become a journalist, I knew I was to blame for his death at the age of 22.
My journey to understand why my son died to tell an important story – and why I had to live to tell one – was to shape the next 20 years of my life. Over time, thankfully, I have discovered that Dan’s creative, activist spirit, as transmitted through 17 journals he left behind, has inspired countless others to believe they, too, can lead more exciting, adventurous and purposeful lives. Because Dan was killed, we launched the Creative Visions Foundation which celebrates “creative activists” like Dan, who are telling stories that need to be told about problems that need to be solved. Since 2004, we have worked with more than 200 artists, writers, photographers and filmmakers whose powerful, positive spirits ignite sparks in others, bringing new light, life and purpose to our world.
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<h4>5) Happiness</h4>
Recently, after a long patch when my husband had to deal with a deadly form of cancer, and then the after-
effects of the harsh cure, a new chemo treatment resulted in remission for Michael, a delightful disruption from the endless round of blood transfusions and weariness that has accompanied him for more than three years. Now, we don’t take anything for granted, instead we focus on creating vivid memories of moments, hours and days that will remain with us always, a reminder of the joy of now, and the preciousness of each second we have on earth.

Tag: Photojournalist

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After tragedy in Somalia, one woman’s path to self-discovery and pure joy