The Bang-Bang Club (35 page)

One of the most important witnesses was Gary Bernard, who had held Ken in his arms in the seconds after the shooting. Gary had never been quite the same since that day - he had always been too fragile to have covered the violence, and the death of his mentor and friend had been a final straw. He was terrified of testifying, of reliving that day. In light of the grilling the army’s lawyers had given me, it was clear that he was in for a rough time on the stand. Gary did not think he could withstand it. I was unsure if the trauma of reliving Ken’s death would be too much for him, but I was also convinced that if he did not do it, he would forever feel that he had betrayed Ken. The days before he was to testify were tense and the last hours almost unbearable. In the echoing corridors outside the courtroom, I told him that testifying was a test of friendship that would not be offered again. When Gary did get up on the stand, it was clear from the first minute that this was a man on the verge of breakdown - the cross-examination was mercifully easy and without malice.

The inquest dragged on for 15 months and, in that time, Joao drew a collection of comical cartoons of the opposition defence-team and the magistrate; during Joao’s cross-examination, one of their lawyers complained to him about the satirical drawings, saying they were
insulting. Joao said he didn’t give a shit and, again, our lawyer had to calm things down. In April 1996, in the middle of it all, I went to Jerusalem to be the AP’s chief photographer. I was glad to get away, and I was hoping it would be a chance to make an emotional break with the past. But seven months later, in October 1996, when the magistrate was due to pronounce his findings, I found that I was still bound to that period. I could not keep my mind on work and kept calling Joao on his cell-phone to see if a conclusion had been reached. I was pessimistic about the outcome, despite overwhelming evidence and the ballistics, which showed that the peace-keepers were the only ones close enough to Ken to produce the wound he had suffered. That afternoon, Joao called. His voice was flat. We had lost.

The magistrate had ruled that no one could be found responsible for Ken’s death. I was not surprised, but I was still swamped by a mixture of anger and despair. Beaten, I left the office and spent the rest of the day on the phone to friends in Johannesburg. Joao said he had never felt so defeated in his life.

A couple of months later, I was watching the last rays of the sun warm the ancient stone of Jerusalem’s walls. The breeze from the desert was dry and crisp, and all of a sudden I was angry with myself. How could I not have gained any wisdom from what I had gone through? Surely anyone who witnessed and lived through what I had should be wise? But all I had was knowledge, a collection of jumbled images, smells and sounds buried deep inside. These were memories that I was too afraid to approach. Had all the work I had done just been a form of voyeurism, and escape from my own demons? Despite my dread, I knew that the time had come to begin unravelling those experiences, and that the only place to do that was back home.

While I had been away a far more important process had begun in South Africa. The new government had set up an independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by the Nobel Peace Prize-winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Commission was mandated with uncovering the truth about South Africa’s past, as well as reconciling seemingly irreconcilable enemies. To all appearances, it was an
impossible task - how could a commission uncover all the lies, deceit and midnight burials that took place during 35 years of authoritarian rule? How would it open up what had happened in the underground world of the guerrilla movements? The process began amid much controversy: some wanted Nuremberg-type trials and others wanted a general amnesty in order to close the chapter on the past as simply as possible. My thoughts were that the Truth Commission would be a white-wash, with a lot of kissy-kissy-let’s-all-make-up. But the process turned out to be remarkable. It allowed victims of gross human-rights abuses to finally tell their stories. Mothers heard men confess to having killed their children; victims of torture had the chance to confront their tormentors in public. Many people came forward to confess to crimes they had committed: unbelievable atrocities and acts of petty hatred that finally belittled the perpetrators much more than the victims. The worst we had thought of the apartheid regime was far surpassed by the truth.

There was the chilling scene of a police torturer demonstrating how he did his work. It was clear that he was a man broken by what he had done, by what he had been so skilled at. At a police conference a few months after his testimony, all his white police-colleagues shunned him because he had revealed the truth, broken the code of silence. The only person who would speak to him during the tea breaks was one of his former victims, a guerrilla he could not break, who in the new South Africa had ended up becoming a policeman.

The commission also wanted to promote healing, a national reconciliation, through revealing the truth and allowing forgiveness and closure, but that was only partially achieved. It became clear that, unlike the torturer, most South Africans were not always willing to trust the amnesty offered for full disclosure. Most perpetrators did not come forward, but enough did to verify that the white regime had used hit squads and ordinary policemen and soldiers to kill blacks and undermine the liberation movements, even while it was negotiating ‘in good faith’ with them over the gradual retreat from apartheid. It was also clear that many in the ANC and the liberation movements felt they should be regarded as above criticism, despite the fact that their members and
leadership had committed crimes in the fight against apartheid which were far from compatible with retaining the moral high ground - even though they had committed a fraction as compared to the regime and Inkatha.

The big fish never confessed, however. Everybody in South Africa knew a little of what was going on and many knew a lot. The commission did not believe that the top Nat politicians involved with security portfolios and the generals did not give the orders or knowingly lay down the parameters that led to the carrying out of extra-judicial executions and other illegitimate acts by their subordinates. Of course they never donned balaclavas or carried guns in Boipatong on the night of that massacre, nor was it likely that the President actually gave specific orders for any individual killing, but they certainly created the framework for it all. They made and approved the budgets that paid the killers, that trained and armed the Inkatha hit squads, that allowed doctors to research chemical and biological weapons that would only kill blacks and leave whites unharmed. Former President F.W. de Klerk, who had jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela, refused to acknowledge that he had known about any of the dirty tricks or illegal killings carried out by his security forces. In fact, on page 225, volume five, chapter six of the commission’s report, there is a heading, ‘Finding on former State President F.W. de Klerk’, and the space below it is a solid, inky black. He had managed to get a court to order that the findings on him be concealed. Typical, considering that the government he presided over had launched a frantic effort to illegally destroy as many incriminating documents as possible before the ANC took power. The politicians let the foot soldiers take the heat. Ironically, by not confessing to responsibility for any crime, they were unable to apply for amnesty and so have left themselves open to possible prosecution.

In the period from mid-1990 to April of 1994 - when Ken, Kevin, Joao and I had covered the Hostel War - 14,000 people died in the low-grade war between the ANC and Inkatha. Yet none of the Inkatha leaders came forward for amnesty. The Truth and Reconciliation
Commission’s figures tell the story: Inkatha was the primary non-state perpetrator of human-rights abuses and was responsible for a third of all violations reported to the commission (just ahead of the state). Commission statistics show that for every Inkatha supporter killed, more than three ANC supporters died in political violence.

The wounds were healing nevertheless. The single most violent place we photographed, Thokoza, had managed to recover from all the bloodshed. There was no longer a deadly no-man’s-land, even though the political boundaries still existed. The Inkatha supporters who once occupied the homes abandoned by fleeing residents had been forced to make way for the original owners, who gradually moved back in, repairing and cleaning. Interior walls that were once blackened by cooking fires were repainted and the rotted ceilings replaced. But the walls and fences still bore the bullet marks from the years of war - from ‘the Violence’, as people referred to that era. The shops on the corner of Madondo and Khumalo Streets were still burnt-out husks, but the petrol station on Khumalo Street, where Ken had died, had been renovated.

The dead still cast a shadow over the living. A little further down Khumalo Street, a monument has been erected to those who died in Thokoza. The mass of names is startling, all etched in black stone. Ken’s name is there, as is Abdul’s, though Joyce’s granddaughter Mimi is not named on the granite. Nine years after Mimi was murdered, Joyce - who still comes in once a week to clean my house - continues to hope that Mimi will one day be freed from the control of the zombie-mistress and return home.

Tarzan and Maki Rapoo bought a plot of land on the former front-line facing the Meadowlands Hostel, on the ‘shortcut to heaven’ road, shortly after the 1994 elections. The passing of the apartheid era was the start of a new life for them. They felt they would never again have to endure the violence and loss, and they were confident enough to put down roots in a South Africa that they truly belonged to.

When I was invited to celebrate Boytjie’s 75th birthday in February 1999, it was in the yard of a modern, spacious house and not the cramped Soweto matchbox in which most of the Rapoos had grown
up. Boytjie wept as he blew out the scores of candles on an oversized cake. I took pictures. I am still the family’s official chronicler.

Joao had been part of the AP’s pre-election build up in South Africa. After the elections, however, the AP began down-sizing and reorganizing. They were cutting their budget and no longer needed someone to cover the bang-bang full time. Joao was offered jobs he did not want, and was not getting most of the foreign war assignments he asked for, and he resented it. After risking his life over and over for the agency, he had naïvely expected they would reciprocate that commitment. He did little to help the situation, choosing simply to withdraw when the AP cut its rates and asked him to stand by for days on assignments that never materialized. He also struggled with a nagging guilt about the pictures he had taken of Ken on the day he was killed. Joao had taken those pictures because it was what he had learned to do and what he knew Ken would have wanted him to do, but those pictures had moved on the wire. A personal moment had become a business moment. He didn’t feel good about it.

Before I left for Israel in 1996, I had encouraged Joao to take over the gig that I had developed with
The New York Times
. It was not the kind of work he usually did. Both he and the
Times
’s chief correspondent, Suzanne Daley, had their doubts that photography without the excitement and compelling uncertainty of conflict would hold his attention. She was worried that he would be sullen and unenthusiastic. But from the outset, he worked hard for his pictures - no matter what the subject - and was good company. He would still leave for the occasional war, but he took increasing pleasure from the assignments he went on with Suzanne.

After I returned from Israel in 1997, much of the euphoria about the new South Africa had faded. While the big picture was good - we had avoided the civil war everyone thought inevitable, and a racially divided society was slowly normalizing - there were nevertheless major problems. The Struggle had been won, but there was no economic miracle to accompany the political one. The new government had to repay massive loans that the previous regime had taken to finance
apartheid. The poor found their lives more difficult than ever. Employment in the lowest wage-earning sectors was on the decrease. And many of the former self-defence unit fighters felt abandoned by the ANC: they saw former exiles and the political elite driving fancy cars and living in wealthy formerly all-white suburbs, but most of the poor and the militants, the young lions, had been left behind. In a country awash with weapons, some turned to crime to make a living. I had become close friends with a former comrade, a hero of the Hostel War, and in the years after the war he was regularly approached to do assassinations. He was upset that everyone assumed former self-defence unit combatants were now all criminals, and he was angry that his being unemployed allowed people to think he would kill for money. Like many of the informal ANC fighters, he found that he had been deserted by the movement. Despite being wounded and partially disabled in the conflict, he was not eligible for a state or an ANC veteran’s pension. On the other hand, the majority of the most notorious secret police agents and policemen still had their jobs. Other apartheid bad boys were given golden handshakes.

Despite the problems, I was happy in the New South Africa, and for Joao and me, life had settled into a manageable rhythm. But Gary Bernard was in trouble. One winter afternoon in 1998, Joao and I received a call from Gary’s housemate telling us that he had come home to find Gary unconscious. He had taken an overdose of anti-depressant tablets while on a crack binge. Falling unconscious was the only thing that had prevented him from killing himself in the same way Kevin had - there was a length of hosepipe and gaffer’s tape in his car. We took the hosepipe and tape, but there was an awful sense of this having been played out before. Gary had become addicted to crack as a way of escaping his demons. With Robin - his boss at
The Star
- we spent hours in his bedroom trying to talk to him about the attempted suicide, telling him he could not do a Kevin on us, but he just lay underneath the duvet, refusing to speak to us.