Congress Alliance

Peter Magubane: courageous photographer who chronicled South Africa's struggle for freedom

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, January 4, 2024
People, African National Congress, Walking, Family, Kolkata metropolitan area, Federation, Congress Alliance, Book, Woman, Movement, Government, Defiance Campaign, Chill, Student, Population, Group Areas Act, Pain, Hope, Union Buildings, Police, Common Ground, Congress, Mouth, Black, Heart, National Party, Fruit, Arrest, Abdomen, Atrocity, Knowledge, Sharpeville massacre, Apartheid, Drum, Intention, Adoption, Courage, 1956 Treason Trial, Time, Skin

The photographer suffered great losses during apartheid.

Key Points: 
  • The photographer suffered great losses during apartheid.
  • He miraculously survived being shot 17 times below the waist at the funeral of a student activist in Natalspruit in 1985.
  • Despite the pain and suffering he witnessed and experienced, Magubane’s photographs testify to the hope that is at the heart of the struggle for a just world.

Witness to momentous events

  • He not only witnessed, but also took part in, many of the most significant events in modern South African history.
  • Referred to as the “dompas”, the document was used to control and restrict the movement of black South Africans.
  • His images focusing on life in the township were later to form the subject of several of his books.
  • He soon began to work as a photographer under the tutelage of Drum’s chief photographer and picture editor, Jürgen Schadeberg.
  • the events of that day produced the picture of the funeral as one of the central iconographic emblems of the anti-apartheid struggle.
  • Her slender hands are beautiful, and their perfect smoothness accentuates the brutal rupture where her skin has been broken.

The archive

  • In 2018 his work was exhibited in a major retrospective, On Common Ground, alongside that of another renowned South African photographer, David Goldblatt.
  • He served as Nelson Mandela’s photographer from 1990 to 1994.
  • Magubane’s indomitable spirit and compassionate vision live on through his work.


Kylie Thomas ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

Essop Pahad: a diligent communist driven by an optimistic vision of a non-racial South Africa

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Goolam Essaji Vahanvati, ANC, Food, University, Congress Alliance, Life, HIV, Communist party, Diplomacy, Politics, Parent, Lovedale (South Africa), African Democratic Change, Czechoslovakia, Sleep, Social science, Liberian Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Research, Communism, History, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Movement, Government, Human back, University of Sussex, Congress, Man, History of the African National Congress, Retirement, Time, Essop Pahad, McCrady's Tavern and Long Room, The Thinker, Institute, Political lists, Bantu Education, Student, University of the Witwatersrand, Eviction, Death, Family, Select committee, African National Congress, Film industry, Drug, Nightclub, Birth control, Tourism, Commercial property, African, Geography of Nepal, New Youth, Czech

Any examination of Pahad’s full political record will take you back to the heroic phases of South Africa’s liberation history, when prospects for a democratic South African government seemed very remote.

Key Points: 
  • Any examination of Pahad’s full political record will take you back to the heroic phases of South Africa’s liberation history, when prospects for a democratic South African government seemed very remote.
  • As a teenager in the 1950s he was busy in the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress.
  • This was the equivalent of the youth league of the liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), for Indian South Africans.
  • In my own research on the South African Communist Party’s history, groups like the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress were game-changers.

The early years

    • Pahad employed ANC leader Walter Sisulu, supporting his efforts to become an estate agent.
    • Both Essop and his younger brother Aziz did well enough to obtain entry to the University of the Witwatersrand.
    • The Transvaal Indian Youth Congress was led by party members and its political affiliations were very evident in its journal, New Youth.
    • Mbeki was then staying in Johannesburg, completing his A-levels through correspondence after expulsion from Lovedale College for leading a class boycott.

Exile years

    • Pahad would complete an MA and a doctorate at Sussex between 1965 and 1971, producing a workmanlike dissertation about the South African Indian Congresses.
    • Pahad’s most conspicuous activity during his exile was his deployment in Prague at the World Marxist Review; acknowledgement by the Communist Party of his status as a reliable theoretician.
    • He and Meg lived in Prague between 1975 and 1985, and their two daughters were born there, attending Czech schools.

Right-hand man

    • At that time Mbeki’s future succession to the presidency was uncertain and the party was one key constituency.
    • But it is true that Pahad’s subsequent political career would be defined by his status as Mbeki’s trusted friend, his best man as it were, a function he actually performed at Mbeki’s wedding in 1974.
    • So, during the presidency of Nelson Mandela (10 May 1994-16 June 1999) he served as Mbeki’s “parliamentary counsellor”.

Diligent

    • He surprised even his critics with the diligence with which he supported the offices placed under his authority as minister, for example urging municipalities to “mainstream” disability rights.
    • He had invited Ajay Gupta to join the International Marketing Council in 2000, an appointment that he subsequently regretted.