Peter Magubane, the South African photojournalist, who has died aged 91, spent 586 days in solitary confinement, had his nose broken by the police, was shot and banned from using a camera for five years, but persevered to create the most significant visual record of the struggle against apartheid.
He was there in its early days, when more than 20,000 women marched in Pretoria in 1956 to protest being required to carry passes; at the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when police killed at least 69 unarmed demonstrators; and at the Soweto uprising in 1976, when an estimated 176 schoolchildren were shot by police after protesting the imposition of the Afrikaans language in class.
The Sharpeville massacre was the turning point in his life. He had expected his editor to be sympathetic, but instead he was berated for not getting any close-ups of victims: “In this business, you don’t get shocked.” He learnt “to pull yourself out of it so that you capture the right moments”.
One of Magubane’s most famous images, a nanny combing her charge’s hair
Credit: Peter Magubane
Sixteen years later, at Soweto, the children asked him not to photograph, as it would help the police identify them later, but Magubane persuaded them that “a struggle without documentation is no struggle”.
He was the first black photographer in South Africa to win a prize, in 1958, and the first to have his own exhibition. His tenacity was boundless: in his twenties, he came up with the trick of hiding his camera in a hollowed-out bible or a half-eaten loaf of bread, which he would pretend to nibble. When he accidentally ate too much of the bread, he put the camera in a carton of milk.
In 1968, he hid his camera under a dust coat to photograph black job-seekers at a coal mine being made to strip naked and stand in a line before a tuberculosis screening. Once, he came back from an assignment so bloodied that his editor failed to recognise him.
After his arrest in 1969 for covering a protest outside Winnie Mandela’s jail cell, he was kept in solitary confinement for 586 days. The only person he saw was the guard, who said: “Don’t talk to me.” He was made to stand on bricks for five days and five nights, drinking black coffee, without sleep.
Magubane’s image of two young South African boys
Credit: Peter Magubane/Everett/Alamy
On release, he had to report to the police every week and was forbidden from leaving Johannesburg or practising photography, but he took the view that it was a violation of his rights as a free man. In 1971, he was rearrested for breaking the ban, and spent another 98 days in solitary.
When the ban expired in 1975, he recalled, “it was like being back from the dead. But it was uphill, because I had lost my photographer’s eye.”
At the Soweto uprising a year later, the police broke his nose and made him expose his film to the light; he had to start with another roll. He was then detained for another five months, during which his house was burnt down.
He had been a friend of Nelson Mandela since the 1950s, and while Mandela was imprisoned, Magubane made sure Mandela’s children got to school safely. The day of Mandela’s release in 1990, he said, was the happiest in his life, even though – for once – he failed to get the photograph because the surging crowds knocked him down.
A child in Soweto underneath a photograph by Magubane
Credit: Denis Farrell/AP
He served as Mandela’s official personal photographer until 1994. His favourite picture was an intimate snap of Mandela dancing: “Here was this beloved and powerful man, and he was just dishing it out like it was no one’s business,” he said.
One subject that he returned to, from the 1950s to the 1990s, was the problem of child labour in South Africa, photographing a 14-year-old boy in the Soweto coal yards, with hands like an old man’s, and toddlers labouring in fields. He then did all he could to reunite child labourers with their families, in 1986 winning the American National Professional Photographers Association Humanistic Award for his willingness to put down his camera and intervene. “It is better to save life than to win a Pulitzer Prize,” he said.
Peter Sexford Magubane was born on January 18 1932 in Vrededorp, Johannesburg, and raised in the lively mixed-race suburb of Sophiatown, before it was razed in 1955 to become whites-only. His father operated a vegetable cart, and gave him his first camera, a Kodak Baby Brownie.
His mother was a formidable lady who told her son not to come home crying but instead to “beat the hell out of them”. Dutifully, he took up boxing, and retained a healthy respect for matriarchs. Later, when he needed to hide a roll of film from the police, he would pick a house at random and leave it with the mother.
Magubane with his friend Nelson Mandela
Credit: William F Campbell/Getty Images
Peter blagged a job as a driver (despite not having a licence) and tea boy at the enlightened magazine Drum. His early schooling in chutzpah made him a brilliant street photographer. His most famous image, taken in 1956, shows a white girl sitting on a bench marked “Europeans only”, with a black nanny on the “Blacks only” side, combing her hair; the girl looks startled, because Magubane, who had no zoom, had to get up close. “If I want to take a picture, I will,” he later said. “If you object, then I am sorry for your objection, but I don’t have to ask for permission.”
By 1978, he had a contract with Time magazine and retrained in colour photography. He also contributed to Life, National Geographic and the New York Times. In the 1990s, he declared himself tired of spending “the whole day waiting for police to shoot people”, and dedicated himself to recording the vanishing traditions of South Africa.
He published more than 20 books and held eight honorary doctorates, enjoying the nickname “Doc”.
His son Charles also became a photographer, but was killed in riots in Soweto in 1992. Two marriages ended in divorce, and Peter Magubane is survived by his third wife and a daughter.
Peter Magubane, born January 18 1932, died January 1 2024
