“Hey Mister!” I ignored him. I have learnt it is best to ignore the police, usually.
“Hey Mister, is this your car?” as I opened the door. Busted.
“Yes.”
“These, these flags, you must change them,” he pointed to the little South African flags ‘gloves’ adorning the wing mirrors.
I stared blankly at him, were they obscuring my vision… guess they were.
“The red of the flag has to be on top, so if you swap them from left side to right mirror, they will be right.
I could feel the colour of shame climb my cheeks as I fumbled with the suddenly, obviously, upside-down flags.
Okay, after watching Bafana play perhaps we should all fly the flag upsidedown. Flying the flag upsidedown is the international signal for distress, a call for help.
The soccer world cup had finally arrived, and just days before the kick-off in Africa’s first world football fiesta, dozens of journalists from all over Africa were arriving in Johannesburg for the rather amazing TwentyTen project (www.roadto2010.com). Not counting the thousands of world media types.
The project is pegged to Africa’s first soccer world cup, run by the tarnished but shameless FIFA. Trouble is, despite the otherwise irrefutable Pele’s prediction in 1997 that an African team would win the world cup before 2000, it seems as if we will need powerful gri-gri and imuti to get into even the second round.
Obviously, I exclude Ghana from that sad prediction, as they seem to have the quarterfinals within their grasp.
The African team I had the most hope for, Cote d’Ivoire – The Elephants, crashed and burned quite spectacularly. I feel for you, my brothers, that despite the great Drogba you are winging it home far too early.
I was in that fine country just a few weeks ago, to mourn the long march back north, here are a few iphone pix.
I have to admit to a startling and disturbing memory that overtook me as I was driving towards Ventersdorp to watch Eugene Terre’blanche be buried. Thousands of his sad and angry supporters were also driving to that little North West (formerly Western Transvaal) town to bid their white power icon adieu, after he was murdered by two black farmhands. (More on that later).
As I drove through a gray dawn, I reflected on my history of run-ins with the far right of South African politics, the AWB. Vivid memories of bearded and heavily-set men wearing their firearms like a phallus, and mean-eyed yet sexy boeremeisies in khaki skirts giving me a look that went way beyond political disdain.
I now admit that my ‘Eighties fantasies in the khaki realm were, firstly, to sacrifice myself in a suicidal attack on Terre’blanche and rid our land of a terrible evil; and, secondly, to have violent sex with one of those comely Nazi hussies. I don’t mean rape, but well, you know, rough nookie of the kind that got Sodom blitzed, and perhaps even move onto that really bad stuff that did for Gomorrah. Actually, perhaps I should swap those two fantasies around, for the sake of logic, you know. And that, it seems, is surprisingly close to ET’s own fantasies – if police reports about him having pants down and a recently used condom at The Leader’s bedside are to be believed.
Farmhands? Rent boys? Our whiter-than-white neo Nazi having sex with black boys? Is it real or is it a very convoluted conspiracy? Disinformation? Sunday, the police denied a used condom was found, but the younger alleged murderer said Terre’blanche wanted to sodomize him. Who’s to know the truth, but now I’m concerned that the mean, piercing gaze he and his cohorts used to give me when I covered their rallies was not a “Damn kaffirboetjie’ look but rather a ‘I could do with some of that boy’s cute butt right now’ look. Yowzer.
In fact, while living in the boonies for some years, I was told a great tale about the little town of Senekal. Whenever the river that divided the white town from the black township flooded overnight, there were some very angry husbands (black) yelling at their wives who got caught on the wrong (white) side of the river in the wee hours without their spouses’ knowledge. Just down the road from Senekal is an even smaller dorp called Excelsior. Google that, and try key wording in the ‘Seventies, Nationalist Party, miscegenation and suicide …. (do let me know what you find, my Internet connection is too slow to play).
Other memories of the AWB arise not from my imagination, but reality. In 1994, as they tried to support the last pillar of Apartheid in Bophuthatswana, I came close to being executed by one khaki-clad Sunday warriors. The only thing that saved me was another AWB member stepping between us so he could steal the camera from round my neck. Ah yes, fond memories indeed.
What is interesting is how many people attended Terre’blanche’s funeral. Several thousand easily. The last time I saw that many AWB supporters together in Bop in ’94, they drove old and cheap clunkers like me. On Friday, most of the cars in the column going from the church to the farm were very expensive and very new. So much for the theory that economic deprivation was driving Afrikaners to the right.
The images below are from 1989, 1994 and 2010.
Sharpeville. If one word epitomises the history of the South African people’s struggle against malign power, then it is the name of this small township south of Johannesburg.
It was in 1960, on March 21, that white police officers opened fire with sten guns on an unarmed crowd of some 5,000 black protesters who were offering themselves up for arrest following an extension of the Pass Laws to include women.
69 people were killed, most shot in the back as they fled.
A lot has happened since then: there is now a black majority government that rules South Africa, instead of a white minority. The white racists who once invented and codified Apartheid twitter on the periphery of political power.
Yet on February 23, 2010, South African police once again opened fire on residents of Sharpeville who were protesting their lot.
The Pass Laws and Apartheid are history, but the living conditions of people in the townships continues to be dire. Yet despite the plethora of ‘service delivery protests’ that occur throughout the country; this was a protest of a different kind.
The protest was primarily against corruption within the local municipality, and very little of the opportunities afforded other former black townships being afforded to them. The prolonged lack of delivery of sanitation, electricity and decent housing has kept tempers simmering.
Some within the ruling African National Congress say that the protests are the work of ambitious ANC members trying to usurp the incumbents for their turn at the trough.
That might explain the ferocity with which the police fired on protesters and even non-protesting residents in their yards and on the streets. At least three women, including a schoolgirl, were injured police firing rubber bullets and shotgun rounds (pellets) at close range. A dozen or so were arrested, including a citizen who was filming events on his cell phone. What crime did he commit, I wonder?
What I find particularly odd is that publications who had journalists on the scene quote police spokespersons about a policeman and a bus passenger injured by stone-throwing protesters yet do not mention the people shot and wounded by police in what appeared to me to be excessive use of their mandate. Their photographers documented some of these incidents. Bizarre.
The Times (a part of the Sunday Times) http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article323090.ece
News24
702 news radio
http://www.ewn.co.za/articleprog.aspx?id=33327
http://www.therichmarksentinel.com/rs_headlines.asp?recid=3972
fortunately one newspaper, The Star, does mention people injured by police and better yet gives context to the protests and riots.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20100224071842386C227413
To me it was tough to tell the difference between Apartheid policing in the Eighties and Nineties and what I saw in Sharpeville last week. Yet then as now, the media, with one shining exception, reports what the police tell them, mostly without any critical analysis or questioning.
As in 1960, many women and children were among the injured.
PS to see COLOUR images and great sound, please see Leonie’s multimedia piece at http://vimeo.com/9911315
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I must admit, I was nervous about going to Nigeria. It seemed akin to going into the lair of the beast. I had seen District 9, after all, and have ventured through Little Nigeria – Hillbrow – of a night.
Was I, too, about to become cat food? Nah, I told myself as I waited in the line to get through the myriad of officials at Lagos airport, they’ve banned the film from being shown in Nigeria, so surely no-one will get that idea. Then again, maybe they don’t need any filmmakers’ ideas.
Okay, so what did happen to me during a week of walking and photographing in that modern Sodom & Gomorrah, aka Lagos? The answer is nothing. I mean nothing bad. Lots of good things happened. My Dutch vrienden and I did motorbike pillion races through the crowded streets that were absolutely exhilarating. The drivers even give you paper mache crash helmets. The most elegant of Lagosian women wear the helmet perched atop their elaborate hairstyles. This is a new trend – ever since the new governor started cracking down on the mean streets of Lagos in a Giuliani manner, things have gotten much better.
Apparently one couldn’t wait those hours stuck in the never ending traffic jams without a crook trying to grab something off you. I found it pretty safe, never feeling threatened. But that traffic is a bit much, by anyone’s standards.
At any rate, while wandering the choked market street near our hotel, the dubiously dubbed Excellence Hotel, I bumped into a barefoot man swathed in a simple white robe. Hmm, Nigerian Zioni, I thought. As it happens, he was a pastor at the Celestial Church of Christ, which had been founded in 1947. I invited myself to one of their services, and in the coming days made my way through a series of confusing phone calls. We were directed to a place that was meant to be nearby. In a city of some 17 million (Lagosians say 33 million, but that’s because federal money is allocated by popula….. you get the picture) I was unsure what hat meant. We – aforementioned vrienden Chris de Bode, Frederiek Biemans and I – took a motorized tricycle with a driver who drove around for over 90 minutes, hopelessly lost. But we got there, and it was really not far, had we had a driver with some sense.
The church was a delight. An elaborate altar with lots of shiny mirrors and splendid Jesus painting. It was pretty freewheeling, a kind of Billy Graham meets old fashioned Nigerian syncretic Christianity. The music was great, and the best was when a female adherent felt the spirit move her prophesy at length in a courtyard called Mercy Place.
Lagos is fabulously energized, humorous and fun, despite the fact that the city runs off generators and not grid power (again, don’t ask), and when it rains, many of the streets simply flood. Can’t have it all.
‘Tis the time to be jolly, give presents, drink a lot, eat too much, be maudlin, and take long afternoon naps.
This year the winning Marinovich Christmas tree photograph came from an entry by Mevrou Marinovich, who was traveling in Benin shortly before Santa Claus was due to visit.
Please click on the link to download a full sized PDF of this delightful image.
Merry Christmas from Madeline, Luc, Leonie & Greg
Of course I had forgotten about Angola’s farewell sting. At the airport, once safely past immigration, security and the shops, the “Financial Police” gather at enclosed cubicles for the final shakedown.
“How much dollars you have?”
“Not much…” I said, fanning the notes in my wallet.
The policeman nodded intensely, eyes fixed on my wallet, “And Angolan currency?”
That was when it all came back to me. Damn. “Just this,” I flourished the 500 Kwanza note.
He relaxed and smiled, “It is not allowed, I have to take it.” He pointed out the eight point letters taped to the wall of the cubicle, as another passenger was searched for currency alongside me.
Harrumph, I was annoyed at being caught in such a sorry scam. “Pity you don’t have any signs outside the airport,” I passed the note to him with the best grace I could muster.
He beamed, gently tugging the grubby note from my fingers, “I am sorry.”
Luanda was its usual charming, mad self. But the vast amounts of oil, etc, money seem to be finally showing in the streets of the capital. Roads and hotels are being upgraded everywhere. Money seems to be flowing so freely, I expected to see handfuls of it in the still hugely deficit sewer system.
Without chancing my luck at a real restaurant, I went to a simple eatery where I had a prego roll, salad and handful of prawns. It is Luanda’s equivalent of a fast food joint – plastic chairs bolted to the floor, but that meal still set me back $56. Oh, and I also had two beers.
I have been coming to Angola since 1991, and it never fails to shock, horrify and fascinate. This time, it was the unprecedented spread of banking to all corners. I went to Angola to do a corporate assignment – to photograph progress at the massive gas plant being built at Soyo, where the great Congo River flows into the Atlantic. There seemed to be a modernist single storey bank building on every corner.
Angolans were being trained and employed by the multinationals as artisans. One can imagine this previously forgotten corner of Africa one day being an oasis of growth and prosperity. If, that is, the lovely culture of sanctioned graft - and the much larger nemesis of top-level corruption – can be defeated.
The images here are from one breakfast at the company canteen where I dined for some days.
1 of 3. Breakfast, very large corporate canteen, Soyo, Angola
2 of 3. Breakfast, very large corporate canteen, Soyo, Angola
3 of 3. Breakfast, very large corporate canteen, Soyo, Angola
Football hero Stephen Appiah
Soccer boys, Accra, Ghana, Greg Marinovich
A man watches evening traffic in Jamestown, Accra. Greg Marinovich
Back street, Ussher Town, Accra, Ghana.
Labour, Accra, Ghana.
A new church founded by a man in Accra, Ghana. The man was called in a vision, but has yet to attract congregants. Greg Marinovich.
I was having an unusual breakfast of spaghetti and meatballs at my hotel in Accra, Ghana, gulping desperately at the fourth or fifth cup of weak coffee when I noticed that the entire kitchen and wait staff were riveted to the television set.
Instead of the usual CNN or soccer on the massive flat screen, there was a Ghanaian station broadcasting a religious service.
The massive church auditorium was packed with evangelical Christians singing and praying. They were led in their adulation by a short, well-dressed man, his handsome face hinting at a touch of cruelty.
A young girl of about ten years old is carried shoulder high to the stage, her eyes closed, could she be dead or unconscious?
There is an uproar as she is presented to the pastor, the entourage that carried her in tears, hysterical.
“Is she dead?” I ask the room at large.
“Yes, she is dead,” comes the reply, but none of the Ghanains can drag their eyes away from the screen.
By now, nor can I. The child is held aloft, clearly dead. The pastor starts to pray loudly, laying his hands on the child. Others join him in a rush of divine healing and the child is hidden from sight and the camera by the moaning religious fervour of the church elite.
Then the crowd clears and we see the child coughing and spluttering back to life, hugging the pastor. The church goes wild, ecstatic. The pastor now struts around with the child hugging him tightly, his face set with a restrained and proud delight that he attempts to cover with a righteous scowl. The girl’s mother tries to touch her, but the sobbing child pushes her away – all she wants to do is hold onto her saviour.
The tension has evaporated from the hotel staff. They amble back to their work. Priscilla, one of the waitresses, turns to me and asks.
“Do you believe it?” a mischievous smile on her face.
“Well, I’m not sure what I just saw, what happened?”
“The girl was taken to a hospital, but was dead when she arrived. The nurse there said they should take the child to the pastor immediately. And he brought her back from the dead.”
“So this happened right now, live on television?” Priscilla nods and takes my coffee cup away.
Someone switches the station back a rebroadcast of a European football game.
So now, I have witnessed either a most amazing miracle that should challenge my absolute lack of belief in gods, or a callous con among the plethora of scams perpetrated by greedy and unscrupulous dream merchants.
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Unable to resist the issue of ‘truth in the telling’, I fell into Errol Morris’ writings on the NYT blog space. Amazing musings, on everything from re-enactments in doccy films to the ‘veracity’ of Fenton’s Crimean War images of the Valley iof the shadow of Death.
One of my favourite subjects – the ‘truth’ of photographs. As a photojournalist (albeit partially lapsed) and documentary photographer, I am a little obsessed with just how much, or which part of, the truth an image represents.
I long ago lost a naive belief in objectivity and the truth of journalism. But I do have an intuitive sense that the more open the medium is about his/her subjectivity; the closer we can come to representing fragments of ‘the truth’.
Far from straying from factual representation, I think that being transparent in the way one works and presents photography can help us and the viewer get closer to the truth of what actually happened around the photograph.
Ye Gods, see what a day perusing Errol Morris can do to you.
This is a long discussion, I have to dasjh, but will update.
I would post some images of veracity and otherwise, but we were burgled and lost all computers and back-up data…. never mind, it will serve to remind me to shoot film.
who says press releases can’t be funny?
Nat Nakasa was a prominent journalist
and writer who died in exile. This annual award
recognises the exceptional efforts of any
Media Practitioner.
The Elangeni Hotel (Durban) was filled with journalist, editors, photographers and heads of the country’s publication house on Saturday, 27 June 2009. One would assume that the President was in venue… he was but he was not the man of the moment.
It was Greg Marinovich who stole the spot light from the President. Greg Marinovich was awarded the Nat Nakasa Award for the year 2009. The Nat Nakasa Award is presented by the Print Media SA, SANEF and Nieman Society of SA with the aims for awarding deserving media practitioners for their work within the industry. This is year Marinovich walked away with this award.
“For your courageousness during our times or trouble in Africa, for your superb pictures each worth thousands of words, for your films and for your dedication to telling the truth about our wonderful country and continent, even when that truth was ugly” said Peter Sullivan during his speech.
Greg Marinovich, born in South Africa in 1962, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and is co-author of The Bang Bang Club, a non-fiction book on South Africa’s transition to democracy.
He has spent 18 years doing conflict, documentary and news photography around the globe. His photographs have appeared in top international publications such as Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian of London, among others. He is chair of the World Press master Class nominating committee for Africa, and was a World Press Photo judge in 1994, as well as convenor of the FujiFilm awards in 2000.
Marinovich’s past achievements include:
* Pulitzer Prize for spot news, 1991
* Leica Award for excellence 1990
* Visa d’Or, Scoop Award (France) 1990
* Overseas Press Club 1991
* United Nations award of Recognition for
Services to Humanity, 1994
* Runner up to Pulitzer twice (1992 and 1993)
* Mondi Award for Magazine Photography (1995)
* Diageo Business photography (2007)
* Vodacom Journalist of the Year, Photography (2007)
During his speech, President Zuma he mentioned importance of the Media in aiding democracy and emphasised there was still work to be done within the industry on matters such as transformation. He also mentioned that he was confident that the SABC matter will be resolved and the public broadcaster will
continue with its work. President Zuma congratulated the Nat Nakasa Award winner.
My colleagues in the SA Editors’ Forum honoured me this past weekend with the Nat Nakasa Award for courageous journalism, in balmy Durban. A lifetime achievement award, it is great to be recognised in this way. Trick is to ensure I keep up working in unusual places; as at just 46, I would hate to think of this as my swansong!
SAfm invited me to chat with Sydney Baloyi last night about it, and it was such a good conversation, I decided to put it up on the blog. The best part is that my Luc, my four and a half year old, stayed awake to listen, even though the hour was late (by his standards). His little sister faded earlier. She believed I was in the garden shed outside. Luc kept trying to get my attention by calling to the radio as he sat wrapped up in a blanket next to it, “Daddy! Daddy!” Now I am not sure that he fully understands that magic box yet, but he is certainly the audience I am proudest of!
It was a long chat, so settle back and relax and you can download it HERE