In the month since I had photographed the Pondo’s death in Soweto, I had become completely absorbed by the news and hadn’t touched the larger format view camera that I normally used for softer documentary stuff. Each day I tried to control my fear and sought out access to the township clashes - I was becoming hooked on the adrenaline and the notion that I was photographing the final push for liberation as it was happening.

As Tom and I inched along the road, two teenage boys emerged from the inky blue shadows and padded up to my window. They wore knitted woollen caps pulled down low over their foreheads and baggy slacks with hems shortened to leave a gap of a few inches above their loosely-laced canvas takkies - the informal uniform of petty township thugs, tsotsis.

‘Heytada,’ I greeted them in tsotsietaal, the township vernacular. ‘Hola,’ they responded with the Spanish greeting that ANC militants had brought back from guerrilla training camps throughout socialist Africa, where most of their military instructors had been Cuban. Tsotsies liked to be considered comrades - full-blooded ANC guerrillas or activists; they wanted to be a part of the ANC-aligned neighbourhood militia that came to be known as ‘self-defence units’. Lawabiding residents duly addressed the tsotsis by the abbreviation coms, but snidely called them comtsotsis behind their backs.

‘What’s going on, coms?’ I asked. The boys always knew where things were happening, but it was 50/50 as to whether they would tell you. ‘It’s bad,’ they said. ‘All night, nyaga-nyaga with the fokken amaZulu.’

‘Is it quiet now?’ I asked, as I glanced nervously towards the hostel that dominated the low hill some 300 metres in front of us. ‘Tsk,’ was the dismissive reply. ‘Give us petrol, mlungu.’ I smiled weakly, trying to think of a way for this whitey to get around the demand. I knew they wanted the fuel for Molotov cocktails.

‘Leave them. They’re journalists, they can’t,’ another youth commanded from the side of the road. I looked over at him, but could not make out his features in the near dark. He was probably a real comrade, a trained ANC fighter, commanding the thugs’ respect. The comtsotsis turned sullen and began to move away from the window, but then one leant forward and whispered: ‘Give us your gun.’

‘I don’t have one,’ I said. This was easier to handle than the demand for petrol, since I had never owned a firearm. He looked at me in disbelief; it was clear to me that he subscribed to the widely held notion that every white man owns a gun. ‘Straight, com,’ I said. ‘You can search the car.’

The thugs exchanged words in a language I didn’t understand and then drew back. I eased the car into gear and left the barricades behind, driving slowly on to a bridge that crossed the railway line running alongside the hostel’s fortress-like eastern edge. There were three men in long overcoats on watch at the gate that cut through the red brick perimeter wall, defaced by badly executed graffiti proclaiming it Inkatha territory. They stared at us as we approached, the long coats doubtless hiding shotguns or assault rifles. Instead of turning into the entrance, I said to Tom, ‘I don’t feel too good about this, let’s keep driving.’ He readily agreed - we were both scared to go into a hostel following a night of conflict. We caught up with a car ahead of us, recognizing a couple of fellow journalists inside: Simon Stanford and Tim Facey, a television crew for the BBC. We exchanged waves, then followed them as they skirted the south side of the hostel. It was a comfort to be with other journalists, an illusion of safety in numbers. And maybe they had information about something hot that was going on.

Leaving the hostel behind, we looped around Jabulani stadium and turned east again to recross the railway tracks. Simon and Tim were driving slowly, clearly just cruising, but we decided to stick with them in any case. After a kilometre we turned left and followed the tracks up to Inhlazane train station, the closest stop to Jabulani Hostel. We were just a couple of hundred metres short of the corner where the comtsotsis had demanded petrol ten minutes previously, but we found that the stretch of road that would have allowed us to complete our left-handed circle was blocked by several makeshift barricades.

Groups of residents, ANC sympathizers, watched us approach as the early light gradually erased the smudgy darkness. I parked and we got out to speak to the combatants. We introduced ourselves as journalists. The men and youths were aggressive, agitated. They had obviously been up the whole night, skirmishing with their Inkatha enemies from the hostel across the railway tracks. They were not keen to have us around.

‘We work for the foreign press, AP and BBC,’ I said. But one of the men was suspicious. ‘You’re from the Citizen,’ he insisted, referring to a disreputable racist daily that had been set up by a covert government propaganda fund. Every black person I knew hated the paper’s political reporting and editorials, but it nevertheless had a massive black readership drawn by its comprehensive horse-racing results and excellent punter’s guide.

‘Not the Citizen, mjita (my friend), I promise,’ I protested. This was more than a little disingenuous, since all the local papers subscribed to the AP and often used the wire pictures to further their own particular bias. But the partial truth enabled us to stay.

A shrill whistle galvanized the comrades and someone yelled a warning that the police were coming: ‘Poyisa!’ Tom and I followed on the heels of the boys fleeing for shelter behind the station ticket office next to the road. Within seconds an armoured military personnel carrier, a tough, heavy Casspir designed for the bush war in Angola but now used in the townships by the police, careened up the road. The Casspir’s massive wheels simply crunched over the rocks and rubble barricade the residents had erected in a vain attempt to control access to their area.

The police fired randomly from inside the towering behemoth as it sped by, rocking from side to side on its rigid springs. What cowboys, I thought: it would have been stupid bad luck if any of us had been hit. As soon as the Casspir rounded a corner, the coms emerged from cover and tried to drag a big garbage skip into the road to make a more effective barrier. It was like watching a game. The residents could not match the heavily-armed police with their rocks and the rare firearm; but equally the police could not quell the unrest by racing through the township, firing wildly.

The coms grew more at ease with our presence. The shared excitement had broken down some of the mistrust, so we could take pictures more freely. Within a few minutes, shooting broke out again, this time at the bridge leading over the tracks. I ran up the slope of the embankment that bordered the line. A handful of older ANC supporters crouched behind the heavy iron plates edging the bridge. Thirty feet below us were the sunken tracks and the austere concrete platform of Inhlazane station. I ducked down beside a man wearing a soft cloth cap and carrying a revolver. We crouched below the bulwark at the entrance to the bridge. ‘No pictures, you hear?’ he said, glaring fiercely at me. I reluctantly lifted my hands off the cameras to show my acquiescence. He peered over the top, across the railway lines. Several other coms lifted their heads, not wanting to miss out if the gunman hit anything. He cautiously lifted the revolver above the edge and fired, then dropped down on to his haunches again to cheers and admiring calls from the women down behind us at street level. Return fire from the Inkatha side occasionally whistled comfortably high above our heads, but we all ducked reflexively.

A train stopped at the station. The driver was either ignorant or uncaring of the clash going on above him. Some of the young combatants ran down to meet the train, in case there were Inkatha members on it, or to guide their own to the safe side of the tracks. I watched them re-emerge at the top of the wide concrete stairs, pushing and pulling a tall man in a blue workman’s coverall jacket. He was at least a head taller than the boys, but he did not resist as they tugged and drove him towards ANC territory. He could have been returning from a night shift or making an early start to visit friends, but he had unwittingly disembarked into our insignificant little skirmish.

At first, I was not sure of what was going on, but as soon as they had him off the bridge and out of sight of the Inkatha members opposite, they began to stone and stab him. I watched as he fell to the ground, then tried to crawl under a door propped up across the dented steel drums of a street vendor’s stall. I was terrified that I might again witness a murder like the brutal killing at Nancefield Hostel a month before. It had been the first time I’d seen a person killed and I could still not shake off the feeling of guilt that he had died so close to me that I could have reached out and touched him, yet all I had done was take pictures. As much as I wished that I could have had another chance to try to stop his death, that Saturday morning seemed too soon to be offered a chance to redeem myself.

The coms dragged the silent and unprotesting man they had identified as a Zulu to his feet and down the path to the street below. More people gathered around, mostly teenage boys, but there were one or two older men and a handful of even younger boys as well. They crowded around the bloodied Zulu and the assault intensified. A youth ran in and leapt high to deliver a kind of kung fu kick. Another slapped the Zulu hard across the face, a demeaning blow usually reserved for obstinate women and disobedient children. A man in a long-sleeved white shirt hauled out a massive, shiny bowie knife and stabbed hard into the victim’s chest. I was in the midst of the crowd, separated from Tom and the other journalists. My heart was racing and I had difficulty taking deep enough breaths. Stepping across the chasm from my presumed role as a detached observer to that of a participant, I called out: ‘Who is he? What’s he done?’ A voice from the crowd replied, ‘He’s an Inkatha spy.’ I tried to see who was speaking, to make contact with an individual amid the killing fervour.

‘Are you sure he’s a spy? How do you know?’ I asked. Another voice answered: ‘We know.’ It was the man in the white shirt, absolute certainty in his flat voice. But he had stopped the attack for the moment and was looking at me. He seemed to be the leader, though I did not see him command or direct the action. Perhaps it was just that he was older.

‘What if you’re wrong?’ said. ‘I mean, last month I saw Zulus, Inkatha, kill a Pondo because they thought he was Xhosa. Just here, at Nancefield Hostel. Maybe he is Zulu, yes, of course he is, but maybe he is not Inkatha. He could be ANC. Just make sure.’ The man nodded while I talked, watching me shrewdly. Despite the garbled way it came out, he understood. But what I had to say did not matter. He and the others knew their decision had already been made.

The attack resumed and it looked as if the Zulu was now in a state of shock. Maybe the boys had demanded that he give the ANC nicknames for the neighbourhood streets, or someone had shown him a one-rand coin and he had identified it as ‘iLandi’, betraying the rural Zulu dialect that characteristically changed ‘r’ to ‘l’. That would have been enough to secure his death sentence. But I never actually heard the man utter a single word throughout his ordeal. He did not appeal for mercy, nor even look to me for help. He seemed not to recognize what was happening. I wondered if he was mentally deficient, drugged, or just dumb with terror.

My questions had attracted attention from the coms and some of the assailants began an ominous hissing. ‘No pictures, no! Fokoff!’

I managed a fleeting defiance: ‘I’ll stop taking pictures when you stop killing him,’ but the attack simply went on moving down the street as the Zulu stepped slowly and ponderously forward. Now, one person after the next took turns to inflict an injury on the defenceless man. It was as though this was a rite that had been played out before, and everyone but me knew the liturgy.

I noticed odd details. The sun had cleared the single-storey houses and shone with the extraordinary clarity of a spring morning. It would be a hot day.

I saw a young man with a wisp of a beard step forward and stand on his toes to thrust a knife into the Zulu’s chest. His victim just stared dumbly ahead as the knife plunged in, while I released the shutter and wound on the next frame. A part of me did not want to be a photographer just then, but as with the killing in Nancefield Hostel, I smoothly exchanged camera bodies to shoot slide as well as colour negative, ensuring I had material for both the AP and the French agency, Sygma.

The progress down the street halted when the Zulu collapsed into a sitting position on the pavement. Most of the mob was edging away by then and others had slipped behind me, probably to avoid being photographed. The man in the white shirt moved in again; I had a camera in front of my face as I shot and cranked the advance on my shabby Nikkormat. I took a few steps back, driven by a nervous impulse, some vague sense of unease about the spot I was occupying. Afterwards, Simon, the BBC cameraman, would say: ‘Jesus, did you see that guy try to stab you?’

For those crucial minutes, it was as if I lost my grasp of what was going on. I was present, but nothing entering through my senses registered. The pictures I kept mechanically taking would later substitute for the events my memory could not recall.

By now, the victim was lying on his side, propped up on one elbow, facing away from me. A teenager with one arm in a plaster cast used his good hand to throw a rock at his helpless target. In the picture, the victim seems to be looking directly at his assailant while the rock, captured in mid-air, is hurtling towards him. Did it hit him? I can’t recall and as my cameras were without motordrives, there is no photographic memory; no next moment. Another image is of the man in the white shirt stabbing his knife down into the top of the Zulu’s head as he sits on the road, almost absent-mindedly reaching up towards the source of pain. I don’t know if I noted that either.

My awareness gradually returned. The victim was now flat on his back some yards in front of me. All around him, the street was empty. The man in the white shirt was standing next to me, my left shoulder brushing his right. He lifted his right hand, the one he had used for stabbing, to look at a little cut he had sustained and drew his breath in sharply under his teeth: ‘Ththth,’ like a child letting it be known he has hurt himself on the playground.

I peered down at the cut at the base of his thumb; he held it out to ensure I saw. There was a thin line of red along a shallow incision in the soft pink-brown skin of his hand, no deeper than a clumsy shaving cut. I felt we were both acutely aware of how grotesque this instant of bonding was. The moment was broken when a boy, no older than 13, walked across the deserted tarmac to the inert man and unscrewed the cap of the Molotov cocktail he was carrying. I was relieved that I had refused to earlier allow the comtsotsis to siphon petrol from my tank - what if it were fuel from my tank that was poured over that victim? The boy carefully doused the Zulu with the petrol. Then he walked over to where I was standing with the man in the white shirt. The kid knew what must come next, but he would not, or could not, do it himself. I watched him surreptitiously slip a box of matches into the older man’s left trouser pocket, on the far side from me, and whisper in his ear. The man in the white shirt tried to make out that nothing unusual was happening, that I had not caught this grim interchange.

The hissing and cursing around me had grown louder, more menacing. But I was determined not to leave the scene. I had failed to prevent the man’s death, but fuck them if I was going to leave and let them burn him too. I stood my ground next to the man in the white shirt, both of us staring at the body, pretending to be oblivious of the matches in his pocket. I heard the urgent calls from Simon, unnerved by the sight of me just standing next to one of the killers. ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded. I could not answer. ‘What did they say?’ he asked. His words seemed to break the spell and I moved away, reluctantly, but also with relief. I felt as if a giant spring was wound up inside me, desperate for release. We agreed to leave, but then an excited shout went up from near the railway tracks. Onlookers drawn by the drama and participants in the killing ran up the embankment and we followed them. I was panting, though the sprint was brief. A handful of residents were trying to attack a man in a blue shirt, but their assault lacked the conviction of the earlier mob, and when one of those who had taken part in the first attack stretched out his arms protectively to ward off the blows, the attackers backed off. I didn’t know why, but it seemed that he knew the man was not Inkatha; or perhaps he just had been sickened by the previous murder.

There was a low brick building, the ticket office, between me and where the Zulu lay in the street. Suddenly I heard a hollow whoof and women began to ululate in a celebration of victory. I ran towards the edge of the elevation. The man I had thought dead was running across the field below us, his body enveloped in flames. Red, blue and yellow tongues licked the clothing and skin off his body. It was a stumbling, urgent run as he tried to escape the pain. I lifted the long lens camera. The human torch slowed and dropped to a squat. As I focused, I noted that the early sun was right behind the burning man. The camera’s light meter did not work and so I twisted the aperture wide open: f5.6 should be right. I depressed the shutter, then pulled the camera away from my face for a second to advance the crank and frame my next exposure. A bare-chested, barefoot man ran into view and swung a machete into the man’s blazing skull as a young boy fled from this vision of hell, from an enemy who would not die.

I lurched down the slope and stood over the prostrated body that crackled and smouldered. I tried to breathe without allowing the pungent, acrid smell to penetrate my lungs. I shot a few pictures, but I was losing the battle to suppress my emotions. I left while he was still twitching, moaning in a low, monotonous, most dreadful voice. Nearby, Tom was interviewing someone about the killing and I had trouble controlling my own voice as I said: ‘Tom, let’s go.’

‘Yeah, OK.’ He seemed in shock too, but wrapped up in talking with one of the killers. ‘Let’s go, now!’ I repeated, raising my voice, and he took in the danger of the situation; the crowd could turn on us at any time and we had more than we needed. We walked to the car without exchanging a further word.

We got in the car, I started the engine and we drove off. Tom was looking at me, not sure of what to say, not even sure of what he had just seen. Around the first corner I pulled over and, closing my eyes, began to beat the steering wheel with my fists. Finally I could scream.

Only from the following day’s newspapers did I learn the man’s name: Lindsaye Tshabalala. I will never forget it now, but when I was so close to him, he was only an anonymous, unlucky Zulu who should never have caught the train that morning.

The pictures of the fiery death of Lindsaye Tshabalala set off a series of events that I could never have imagined. On the other side of the world, in London, it was a sunny Saturday, and the AP’s day photo editor ‘Monty’ Montgomery was alone on the morning shift. He prepared for the day by checking through the inter-bureau messages, domestic and international news copy and the pictures that had come in overnight. He scanned the newspapers to see how the previous day’s AP pictures had fared against their rival wire services - Reuters and Agence France Presse. He noted that the major stories of the day were the growing Gulf crisis, a coup in Sudan, the Mohawk siege in Canada, the Aquino murder trial in the Philippines and Princess Diana due to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

Not long into his shift, Monty got a call from Denis Farrell in AP’s Johannesburg office. Denis told him that a stringer had arrived with film of an event in Soweto, but he thought the pictures too graphic to run on the wire. What he really meant was that they were probably too graphic for the US newspapers. There was an unspoken rule that overly graphic pictures of violence should not move on the wire, and the US had a lower tolerance for violent images than the rest of the world. Monty asked Denis to pick out the best images and let him see them.

Monty had a lot to do that day and the new technology then in place was cumbersome, slow and needed constant coaxing. When the first picture appeared on his screen, he muttered ‘Holy shit!’ to himself in the deserted office. He was used to seeing thousands of pictures but he had rarely seen anything like this. He wondered if I was black and if I was with the ANC.

In those days, the AP was using the Leafax, one of the first machines that scanned directly from the negative, as opposed to scanning from a print. The negatives had to be selected and scanned, cropped, toned and captioned, one at a time; and then transmitted to London on a phone line. Before digital technology made everything faster and easier, a black-and-white transmission took seven minutes, while colour transmissions took three times longer.

In Johannesburg, Denis struggled with the backlit, difficult ‘Human Torch’ negative. The Leafax was an imperfect machine, and so to get better quality he made a print of the picture in the darkroom, sending it with the old-fashioned drum transmitter. The pictures came in slowly, dependent on ‘clean’ phone lines. Every time there was a crackle or noise on the line, it left a mark, or a ‘hit’, on the image that arrived at the other end and the separation would have to be resent. The process of getting pictures to the AP’s newspaper and magazine clients was an intricate, slow and painful procedure.

Chief photo editor Horst Faas, wire veteran and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner (1965 Vietnam and 1972 Bangladesh), came in shortly after the first pictures had landed. He took one look at them and despite his view that a story needed just one or two key images, he sent a customarily terse note to Johannesburg on the message wire: ‘jobp/ pho/lonp Send all pictures. faas/lonp.’

Faas, Monty and Denis feared that the notoriously sensitive New York desk would kill the pictures because they were too gory. But on that weekend the London people convinced their cautious counterparts across the Atlantic to let all the pictures move on through to the newspapers. Their fears were well founded: by Monday morning there was an outcry from some of the newspaper editors and publishers who own the AP. They objected to such brutal pictures running on the wire. One editor complained that he ran a family paper, and castigated the AP for putting out such pictures. It was not as if the existence of pictures on the wire obliged anyone to print them; only a fraction of any day’s production are ever published - hundreds of pictures are routinely ignored.

But Monty and Faas believed that the pictures of Lindsaye Tshabalala’s death should be seen. To censor pictures that are too strong, indecent or obscene was to make decisions for the reader that were not theirs to make. They held that it should be shown that people were inflicting terrible violence on other people. In fact, some newspapers in the US did pull back from publishing the pictures, though many papers around the world ran them.

In South Africa, the violence of the photographs had an explosive effect. The South African government saw Lindsaye Tshabalala’s death as a perfect opportunity to portray the ANC as killers who could never be entrusted with leading the country. Within days, police approached the AP Johannesburg bureau to see if I would hand over my pictures to enable them to identify the killers. It would also be necessary for me to appear in court to validate the authenticity of the pictures so that they could be submitted as evidence. The police had not contacted the AP or the local newspapers about my photographs of the Inkatha warriors killing the alleged ANC supporter the previous month - it was presumably not in the interests of the South African state to prosecute their allies. Luckily, the police were trying to find one Sebastian Balic, the pseudonym I had adopted for my by-line, consisting of my middle name and my mother’s maiden name. I had done this to avoid being detected by the military police, who were haphazardly searching for me to complete my military service. During my initial two years of compulsory national service in the army I had refused to carry a weapon. I had been allowed to get away with that little defiance because they needed me to translate Russian - something I just managed to do with a pile of dictionaries as the language is similar to my parents’ mother tongue: Serbo-Croat. But by the time I was called up for camps, as the extended military call-up was known, I knew that even without carrying a gun, I would be playing my part in supporting apartheid.

Despite my horror at the brutal murder and the desire that the killers be prosecuted for it, there was no way I was going to testify. I had been allowed to stay during the clashes because I had convinced the ANC supporters that I was a journalist and not a police informer. If I did testify, journalists covering the war would almost certainly be targeted as soon as word spread. And once in court, Seb Balic would be revealed as Greg Marinovich. After I refused, the prosecutor issued a 205 subpoena, a court order used to force journalists, doctors and others to testify. The AP lawyers ascertained that the state would press ahead with charges against me if I refused to testify - with a maximum sentence of ten years for contempt of court and several more for avoiding military camps. I decided to leave, rather than try my luck with the courts. So, within 24 hours, I was on a plane to London, leaving my housemates to deal with the security branch and plains-clothes policemen who would occasionally appear at the door.

Once in London, I felt that the AP and my magazine photo agency Sygma were less than helpful in finding me work. I unrealistically expected them to care about what I was going through; I understood the business associations as a form of friendship, rather than just an exchange of dollars for my pictures. I felt betrayed that neither agency took me under its wing in that strange city. I was in a troubled state of mind, shocked at what I had seen and depressed at having had to leave South Africa. I kept in touch with very few people back home, and most of my calls were to the Johannesburg AP office, trying to find out when I could return. Money was not really an immediate problem, as the British affiliate of my journalists’ union back home gave me some money and let me stay in the union apartment in the city whenever it was free. When it was occupied, I would spend time at my aunt and her husband’s house in the country, where I was made to feel completely at home. But they lived far from London and it was expensive and timeconsuming to commute from there all the time. Camera Press, a picture agency, let me chase their unpaid bills and shoot local events: it was a job and I could survive on it, but I did not want to cover press conferences, rugby matches or London demos.

I had lots of feature ideas that nobody would assign. I was swiftly learning the dictum of journalism: if it bleeds, it leads. Papers would pay for photographers to go to war zones a lot quicker than they would spring for an essay on gypsy life in Eastern Europe. And so I decided that a good war was what I needed to take my mind off South Africa and to stop me wallowing in self-pity. After two months, Stuart Nicol, a former freelancer who had become the picture editor on the European newspaper, looked through my portfolio and sent me off on my first ever international assignment. He simply gave me a plane ticket and a wad of traveller’s cheques. I assumed I would have to sign some kind of undertaking to work for them until the Second Coming, but Stuart waved me off with an amused smile. My assignment was to cover the student riots in the streets of Belgrade and the possible collapse of Yugoslavia; but, by the time I arrived, the police had already beaten the opposition into submission and there was nothing to photograph. I stayed in progressively cheaper hotels and finally in youth hostels to save the paper’s money - I was so green that I did not yet know that it is a foreign correspondent’s duty to stay in the most costly hotels and run up impressive expenses.

Belgrade in November of 1990 was dark, cold and full of miserable people. I skulked around the region doing inconsequential features, hoping for distraction. One afternoon, I lay on my hotel bed wistfully aroused as I listened to the noisy sex of an anonymous couple on the other side of the thin wall.

Then the paper sent me to Hungary to do a story on the revival of Judaism - a happy story and a chance to escape the Slavic wretchedness of Yugoslavia. The Hungarian capital, Budapest, even in mid-winter, was full of beautiful women and excellent ice cream. But all I could think about was South Africa and my depression grew so severe that I became obsessed with thoughts of suicide. One cold evening I went for a walk and found myself on a bridge over the Danube. I was staring down into the swirling, icy waters: as if I were being drawn down into the current, tugged towards the water. The thought crossed my mind that the river might not be deep enough: what if I plunged off and landed in waist-deep water, cold and embarrassed? I reassured myself that the mighty Danube had to be deep, but the distracting thought made it all seem ridiculous. I pulled back, angry with myself that I could give up so easily. Right then, I decided to go home. Despite my paranoia, the police were not waiting at Johannesburg airport to arrest me.

The Hostel War was going on much as it was when I had left and I easily slipped back into the grisly routine of covering the violence. I again took up stringing for the AP, Sygma and others where I had left off three months earlier. One day, the police came in to the AP office to try to pressurize the bureau chief, Barry Renfrew, into giving them Seb Balic’s address. I was in the newsroom and watched him courteously let them out after telling them that he did not have an address for me, but would let them know when he did. It was all a charade, but it kept my stress levels pretty high. I then began to get phone calls about awards the Lindsaye Tshabalala photographs were winning; the pictures had been submitted for awards from institutions I had never heard of without my even knowing about it. While visiting my uncle and aunt on their mango farm outside Barberton, a rural farming area 450 kilometres east of Johannesburg, Renfrew called to tell me in reverent tones that I was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and, as I had a one-in-three chance of winning, I should stick close to the phone that night. I made an appropriately awed response, but I really was not very excited as I had no idea what this Pulitzer thing was. After putting the phone down, I went and looked it up in the encyclopedia.