Black South African photojournalist Peter Magubane, who for decades chronicled the violence of the racist apartheid regime, including the 1976 Soweto student uprising, died Monday at the age of 91, his family announced .
When anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was released in 1990, Magubane became his official photographer until his election four years later as the first black president, with the advent of democracy in the country. “He died today peacefully, surrounded by his family,” announced the representative body of the South African press, SANEF.
He was a “conscientious photographer, hard at work”, commented his daughter Fikile on the public channel SABC. “He was passionate, his job was his absolute priority.” “South Africa has lost an outstanding freedom fighter, storyteller and photographer,” Culture Minister Zizi Kodwa tweeted. “Peter Magubane fearlessly documented the injustices of apartheid.”
One of his most famous photos, dating from 1956, shows a little white girl on a bench marked “Europeans only”, her black nanny sitting on the other side of the bench in a Johannesburg suburb. . Having started as a driver for the trendy magazine Drum, devoted to black urban culture, he moved to the photo laboratory before positioning himself behind the lens. He documented daily life and several key moments in the fight against apartheid.
Arrested in 1969 while photographing demonstrators in front of a prison, where activist Winnie Mandela was incarcerated, he spent 586 days in solitary confinement in prison and was sentenced upon his release to cease all photographic activity for five years. In 1971, he was arrested again and imprisoned for many months for disobeying this order.
Harassed by the police, whom he thwarted as much as possible, he widely covered the student uprising in Soweto in 1976, for which he took several of the most striking photos which made him known throughout the world.
Peter Magubane has published around fifteen books, several of which were censored under apartheid, a segregationist regime which raged in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s.
