dead in the lounge. Another teenage sister had died on the way to hospital, but her two-day-old baby had somehow survived the attack unhurt. The house looked like a scene in a horror movie, but this was real. The smell of blood was heavy in the damp air.
The four of us were the only journalists out in Sebokeng that night, despite the fact that every news organization and most journalists had received the message of the killing on their pagers as we had. We were convinced that the only way to stop such killing was to show what those deaths looked like, what those daily body counts actually meant.
The Star , which had suggested Joao lay off covering township violence, ran the story he had reported and two pictures, one on the front page. I transmitted pictures to the AP and The New York Times . Without our pictures, the only source of information on the massacre would have been spokesmen for the police and the political parties. Editors from most domestic and foreign media organizations still took police reports as factual even though the police were clearly a part of the problem. I remember many infuriating discussions with Renfrew, who was then still the AP bureau chief, about police and military involvement in the killings - he would patronizingly accuse me of being politically biased and naïve, but the AP and almost every other news organization chose to believe the government’s propaganda. The public would have been given information about yet another massacre from the people who were actually involved in many of the killings, as would be proved years later. It seemed that the international and domestic public were all too ready to believe that people who sometimes dressed in skins and could not speak English properly must be barbaric, while the white politicians and officials who spoke so logically and kept the trains running on time could not possibly be implicated in the murders. And yet despite our attempts to tell the truth, through our reporting and in our captions, our pictures played an unwitting part in the deception - our images from Sebokeng that night showed horribly dead black people and white policemen in uniform taking the bodies away, investigating their deaths. The impression was
of the police helping the victims. Our pictures could not show that they had arrived hours after the emergency calls for help: they could not show the absolute certainty of the survivors that security forces had been involved in the attack.
6
A SHORTCUT TO HEAVEN
We do not want to remember those times, they break our hearts.
Soweto resident, Sandy ‘Tarzan’ Rapoo
By 1992, I had seen a lot of dead bodies. I had once tried to count them in an attempt to properly acknowledge their existence, but it was hopeless. Strange objects, dead bodies. Some were as bereft of any sign of having been human as a dead dog on the highway; others appeared to be asleep, no sign of death about them at all. Then there were dead bodies that were so dreadful that they made me fear death itself.
It was difficult to remain unaffected by all those dead people; but it was equally difficult to keep from switching off my emotions. I could not withstand the repeated impact of having a complete emotional response to every corpse or injured person I came across-Iwould need to have been a saint; but nor did I wish to do what more seasoned photographers seemed to do - shut off completely. In my first weeks of working for the AP, my car was stolen in Soweto and so the next day I got a ride with a colleague in his car. The morning was quiet and at midday we went to get a meal at a fast food outlet. We had just received our meals when my colleague got a message that there was trouble in a
suburb of Soweto called Central Western Jabavu. We jumped into the car and raced to the address given; it was nearby, and we had not yet finished eating when we arrived at the scene. There were a handful of police and residents on a dirt soccer field and, next to the
The four of us were the only journalists out in Sebokeng that night, despite the fact that every news organization and most journalists had received the message of the killing on their pagers as we had. We were convinced that the only way to stop such killing was to show what those deaths looked like, what those daily body counts actually meant.
The Star , which had suggested Joao lay off covering township violence, ran the story he had reported and two pictures, one on the front page. I transmitted pictures to the AP and The New York Times . Without our pictures, the only source of information on the massacre would have been spokesmen for the police and the political parties. Editors from most domestic and foreign media organizations still took police reports as factual even though the police were clearly a part of the problem. I remember many infuriating discussions with Renfrew, who was then still the AP bureau chief, about police and military involvement in the killings - he would patronizingly accuse me of being politically biased and naïve, but the AP and almost every other news organization chose to believe the government’s propaganda. The public would have been given information about yet another massacre from the people who were actually involved in many of the killings, as would be proved years later. It seemed that the international and domestic public were all too ready to believe that people who sometimes dressed in skins and could not speak English properly must be barbaric, while the white politicians and officials who spoke so logically and kept the trains running on time could not possibly be implicated in the murders. And yet despite our attempts to tell the truth, through our reporting and in our captions, our pictures played an unwitting part in the deception - our images from Sebokeng that night showed horribly dead black people and white policemen in uniform taking the bodies away, investigating their deaths. The impression was
of the police helping the victims. Our pictures could not show that they had arrived hours after the emergency calls for help: they could not show the absolute certainty of the survivors that security forces had been involved in the attack.
6
A SHORTCUT TO HEAVEN
We do not want to remember those times, they break our hearts.
Soweto resident, Sandy ‘Tarzan’ Rapoo
By 1992, I had seen a lot of dead bodies. I had once tried to count them in an attempt to properly acknowledge their existence, but it was hopeless. Strange objects, dead bodies. Some were as bereft of any sign of having been human as a dead dog on the highway; others appeared to be asleep, no sign of death about them at all. Then there were dead bodies that were so dreadful that they made me fear death itself.
It was difficult to remain unaffected by all those dead people; but it was equally difficult to keep from switching off my emotions. I could not withstand the repeated impact of having a complete emotional response to every corpse or injured person I came across-Iwould need to have been a saint; but nor did I wish to do what more seasoned photographers seemed to do - shut off completely. In my first weeks of working for the AP, my car was stolen in Soweto and so the next day I got a ride with a colleague in his car. The morning was quiet and at midday we went to get a meal at a fast food outlet. We had just received our meals when my colleague got a message that there was trouble in a
suburb of Soweto called Central Western Jabavu. We jumped into the car and raced to the address given; it was nearby, and we had not yet finished eating when we arrived at the scene. There were a handful of police and residents on a dirt soccer field and, next to the
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