This article, penned by Tom Sharpe, appeared in The Times on 3 August 1978.
In 1956 while acting as a freelance photographer at the Treason Trial in Johannesburg I met Peter Magubane very briefly. We were standing in the road when the police suddenly baton-charged a group of protesters and chased them up the pavement. As the batons cracked down we photographed the scene with Jurgen Schaderberg who was Magubane’s mentor on Drum magazine. We were never in the line of the police charge but the South African police have an aversion for photographers and Magubane and Schaderberg were both arrested. I was more fortunate and managed to photograph the arrests. I still possess a print showing a small black man being dragged across the street by five white policemen one of whom had twisted Magubane’s camera strap round his neck and was partially throttling him. He was charged with obstructing the police and later acquitted.
Since then I have never met Peter Magubane but the memory of that arrest has been revived by the photographs in his book. Over the past 22 years Magubane has gone on recording the crass stupidity of apartheid and the murderous brutality of the South African police doggedly and courageously. For his simple record of what is happening in South Africa he has spent 586 days in solitary confinement, six months in what he euphemistically calls an ordinary jail and has been banned for five years. For those who do not know what “banning” means Magubane’s introduction to this book will provide an explanation. The photographs are self-explanatory. They depict a country in the process of destroying itself. Magubane spares nobody. White police stunned by the massacre they have just perpetrated on unarmed blacks at Sharpeville in 1960. Zulus on the rampage in Soweto on their way to kill other blacks in 1977. Black policemen with automatic rifles grinning and a young black woman screaming from a bullet wound in her stomach in Alexander Township.
But the photographs are not all of violence. The squalor in which Magubane and his fellow Africans are forced to live is the greatest indictment of Vorster and the apartheid policy. The deaths and riots are part of the self-fulfilling nightmare which has haunted White South Africa since the Nationalists came to power. Out of White Nationalism there has come Black Nationalism, out of White Power Black Power and Magubane’s photographs are a simple record of that process. Slave labour, floggings, starvation, funerals, Magubane has witnessed them all but interspersed with these grim images there are others which are less sensational. Weddings, baptisms, Xhosa horsemen at sunset in the Transkei, children playing and women laughing. In their way they are the most remarkable photographs in this book and in that resilient good humour lies White South Africa’s last hope. It will take a miracle to save the Whites but miracles happen in South Africa and the fact that Magubane has not been murdered by the South African police long ago is perhaps the greatest miracle of them all. If that should ever happen this book will stand as a memorial long after Vorster and the Afrikaans tribe have been forgotten.