Defiance Campaign

Peter Magubane: courageous photographer who chronicled South Africa's struggle for freedom

Retrieved on: 
星期四, 一月 4, 2024
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The photographer suffered great losses during apartheid.

Key Points: 
  • The photographer suffered great losses during apartheid.
  • He miraculously survived being shot 17 times below the waist at the funeral of a student activist in Natalspruit in 1985.
  • Despite the pain and suffering he witnessed and experienced, Magubane’s photographs testify to the hope that is at the heart of the struggle for a just world.

Witness to momentous events

  • He not only witnessed, but also took part in, many of the most significant events in modern South African history.
  • Referred to as the “dompas”, the document was used to control and restrict the movement of black South Africans.
  • His images focusing on life in the township were later to form the subject of several of his books.
  • He soon began to work as a photographer under the tutelage of Drum’s chief photographer and picture editor, Jürgen Schadeberg.
  • the events of that day produced the picture of the funeral as one of the central iconographic emblems of the anti-apartheid struggle.
  • Her slender hands are beautiful, and their perfect smoothness accentuates the brutal rupture where her skin has been broken.

The archive

  • In 2018 his work was exhibited in a major retrospective, On Common Ground, alongside that of another renowned South African photographer, David Goldblatt.
  • He served as Nelson Mandela’s photographer from 1990 to 1994.
  • Magubane’s indomitable spirit and compassionate vision live on through his work.


Kylie Thomas ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

Winnie and Mandela biography: a masterful tale of South Africa's troubled, iconic power couple

Retrieved on: 
星期四, 八月 31, 2023
International Defence and Aid Fund, Apartheid, ANC, Ruth Mompati, Swings, Violence, Communist party, Friends, Politics, Leadership, African, Marriage, Anger, Rehabilitation, Id, ego and super-ego, The Lady, Africanisms, Courtship, Congress, Portrait, Lady, Dementia, Defiance Campaign, Man, Steinberg, Time, Love, Altruism, Divorce, Political lists, Ambition, Assault, Fraud, Letter, Party, Death, History of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, Family, Film industry, Book, Drug, Nightclub

A new book on South African liberation struggle icons Nelson and Winnie Mandela is a masterful biography of the pair.

Key Points: 
  • A new book on South African liberation struggle icons Nelson and Winnie Mandela is a masterful biography of the pair.
  • Jonny Steinberg’s splendid 550-page biography, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, ends on a note of pathos with a poignant tale from Nelson Mandela’s deathbed.
  • Four days from death in December 2013, Nelson is in an advanced state of dementia and refuses to eat.
  • Winnie, on the other hand,
    is at once the most commanding figure and a figure of terrible subjection.

Ambition and expedience

    • The early Nelson is portrayed as a man consumed by insecurity and ambition.
    • Sometimes ambition and expedience get in the way of altruism and principle.
    • He joins the Communist Party, but when the Pan-Africanist Congress takes off, he proposes sidelining whites and dropping the Party.
    • This book gives space to just two of his many lovers – the Women’s Federation leaders Lilian Ngoyi and Ruth Mompati.

Nelson and Winnie post-1990

    • It was in his bid to save her after the murder of Seipei that Nelson bared his teeth and emerged in the least favourable light.
    • First, when Winnie failed to get elected to the executive of her local ANC branch in Soweto, he got his aides to set up a new branch, which duly elected her.
    • Nelson did all this to save Winnie.

Four murders

    • The book directly implicates Winnie in the murders of two young men, Lolo Sono and Siboniso Tshabalala (both falsely accused of being informers, when the real informers were Winnie’s lover Johannes Mabotha and Jerry Richardson).
    • It also strongly implies that she was behind the murder of her doctor Abu Baker Asvat (who’d examined Seipei) but leaves the question open as to whether she’d ordered Seipei’s murder.