My new-found fame was awkward. The fact that I was winning prizes for shooting Tshabalala’s gruesome death troubled me, but when I passed a huge newspaper billboard proclaiming ‘SA Lensman Wins Pulitzer’, I could not but feel a surge of pride. While a few photographers resented my quick success, most seemed genuinely pleased for me. We had a party to celebrate the prize at the new home I shared with my old housemates. The house was packed with friends and journalists, some of whom I had never met before. I was already drunk when photographer Ken Oosterbroek stood on a table in the livingroom and gave a speech. Ken was taller than anyone else in the room anyway, but he wanted to make sure people paid attention. He was like that: when he wanted to be noticed, he would straighten out of his normal, easy-going slouch and get a stern, commanding air about him. I recall Ken recounting how, three years before, I had come up to him in the daily newspaper The Star’s newsroom and complimented him on a picture that had been splashed across the front page. ‘I wish I could shoot pictures like that!’ I had said. The picture that I so admired had won Ken South Africa’s leading photographic award in 1989. Ken, truly a very talented photographer, and a perfectionist, had also struggled to gain a foothold in the industry. He had gone from paper to paper trying to get a job on the strength of pictures he had illegally taken of his fellow-conscripts during his military service.

He had kept a diary while serving as a soldier in southern Angola, where the South Africans were fighting against Angola’s socialist government and southern African guerilla armies from their bases in the then South African colony of South West Africa. When I read those diaries years later after his death, I was appalled that Ken came across as a typical English-speaking white South African who easily referred insultingly to blacks as peckies. On 16 June 1981, for example, he had spent a long time looking at the bodies of six guerrillas that were lying piled in a heap. Ken had been fascinated by ‘the kill’. One fighter had been shot right in the centre of his forehead. Ken assumed that he had been the first killed, shot by a sniper. They were all wearing People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN - the armed wing of the banned Namibian liberation movement SWAPO, South West African People’s Organization) uniforms, except for one who was naked. The naked guerrilla’s legs had been hacked by pangas. Some of them looked young, perhaps no more than 15 or 16, Ken estimated. The scene bothered him, but he rationalized that they had chosen to don guerrilla uniforms: ‘they slipped up’, he wrote. The next day he added a further note in his journal, one which suggests a much more unpleasant scenario. ‘I have been thinking about the terr (terrorist) who was shot in the centre of his forehead. He had wire wrapped around him, which puzzled me. Tied up against a tree and shot?’ In yet another entry he described, with neither reservation nor distaste, how his unit had wired up a young Angolan villager to a field telephone and tortured him for information. As for the vast majority of whites, it was ‘them’ against ‘us’ for Ken.

When I had first met Ken, I knew nothing about his border experiences or his politics, but the newsroom abounded with snide jokes about the chip on his shoulder. He was defensive and had a brittle arrogance. He was always very aware of his appearance - he had quite beautiful brown eyes and a charming smile, though he usually had a serious, intense look on his face. He was very aware of how he looked in pictures and I had never seen a photograph of Ken in which he was not mindful of the camera. Pictures taken of him over the years show a tall, thin man with long hair, inevitably wearing jeans and T-shirt, sometimes a droopy bandito moustache. He had perfected the image of the biker-rebel he so wished to cultivate.

Years after his stint in the army, Ken would return to keeping an occasional journal. When he achieved his first success as a photographer in 1989, he wrote: ‘I won the Ilford Award (South African Press Photographer Of The Year) on Wednesday the 19th of April, exceeding my wildest expectations but fulfilling my ultimate ambition.

‘One excellent night followed, full of cheers and smiles and congratulations & all, and a cheese slice (-shaped) trophy ... i didn’t put the thing down for hours. And then in the morning this kind of emptiness or what-now feeling and it just wasn’t so important anymore.

‘I’ve got it, it’s history, it’s on record and now my head is free of a single-minded one-stop goal. Now i can really let rip. Will somebody please give me a gap to let rip?

‘BUT, give me a break to shoot the real thing. Real, happening, life. Relevant work. Something to get the adrenaline up & the eyes peeled, the brain rolling over with possibilities and the potential for powerhouse pictures. I am a photographer. Set me free.’

By the time we were celebrating my Pulitzer in April of 1991, Ken had had his wish come true. The country was awash with real pictures - passion, excitement and dreadful violence - and Ken had been named South African Press Photographer of the Year for the second time. Once he was the photographer he had dreamed of becoming, he matured into a generous and self-possessed man. His professional life was on track and he was in love with a vivacious journalist, Monica Nicholson. They had just returned from a working holiday to Israel, where they had spent the first two months of 1991 covering the Iraqi Scud-attacks on Israel. One night he and Monica were in bed in their Jerusalem hotel room when they were interrupted by a Scud-attack warning. Before going off to the shelters, Ken took a picture of himself and Monica. The photograph shows his hand reaching for Monica’s exposed breast; they are both wearing gasmasks. He scrawled a note about the incident on hotel notepaper: ‘A moment of passion and love - destroyed by War 23/01/91. A moment’s tenderness. The first few moments of shared warmth. The opening joy, the quiet love felt as we lie together, giving over shared love to the physical. The promise of more, closeness, commitment and co-passion. The moon rising, sirens around us, the hostile hint, grim realization as speakers blurb a Hebrew emergency order.’

Ken and Kevin Carter, another young photographer, had become friends when they first started working for newspapers in the mid 80s. In that period, Kevin had witnessed the first known public execution by necklacing. Necklace was township slang for the barbaric practice of killing a person by placing a tyre filled with petrol around the neck and setting it alight. Maki Skosana, whose necklacing Kevin witnessed and photographed, had been accused of being a policeman’s girlfriend. Her necklacing was the ritual, public execution of a person who had betrayed the community, a punishment reserved for those who collaborated with the state, traitors.

Kevin had watched and photographed as the mob kicked and beat her, and then they poured petrol on her and set her alight. She was still alive and screaming, but eventually she did die. Kevin wrote about that horrific incident years later: ‘I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures; they created quite a stir. And then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a terrible thing to do.’

The state had its own form of the necklace, ritualized murder no less barbarous for its legitimization by law. The death penalty was frequently used against political opponents - hanging was the white regime’s ultimate display of power. Both were equally abhorrent to me. The necklace was a warped symbol of liberation, and became known as shisanyama or burnt meat, three cents, which was then the price of a box of matches, and finally, savagely, Nando’s after a popular flamegrilled chicken franchise.

Kevin’s childhood had been difficult. His parents had found his moods and outbursts impossible to deal with. Years later, he wrote about what he felt then, during the years he lived at home with his parents, Jimmy and Roma Carter, in their middle-class white neighbourhood. The occasional police raids, to arrest blacks who were illegally in the whites-only neighbourhood, was the closest Kevin, as a child, got to seeing apartheid being implemented: ‘We weren’t racist at home of course, coming from a supposedly “liberal” family. We were brought up in a Christian way, to love our neighbours, and that included all humans, but I do now question how my parents’ generation could have been so lackadaisical about fighting the obvious sin of apartheid.’

After high school, Kevin made a stab at studying to be a pharmacist but soon dropped out and was drafted into the army. He hated it, and to escape from the infantry he rashly signed up for the professional air force. He soon realized that four years in the military - even in the air force - was a serious mistake, but he was trapped. In 1980, after an incident in which he was badly beaten up by fellow soldiers for defending a black mess-hall waiter who was being insulted, he went AWOL and tried to start a new life as ‘David’, a radio disc-jockey in the coastal city of Durban. But he soon ran into difficulties, as he could not open a bank account in the false name he was using. He gave up this plan within a month and became increasingly depressed. He felt trapped; years later he would write about that dark period of his life.

‘Somewhere along the line, suicide became the option. I began to think of it more and more, and the more I thought of it, the more appealing it sounded. It was only a question of how really, and when. I had decided to do it. I wandered from chemist shop to chemist shop, accumulating a large quantity and variety of sleeping tablets and painkillers. For the cherry on the top I bought some rat poison, and I took the stash to my room. Then I went out, and spent my very last few Rands on a Wimpy burger and a milkshake.

‘Back in my room I went ahead with my plans. I remember being amazed by the calm I felt. I had a two-litre bottle of Coke in the room, and I proceeded to wash down the tablets. There must have been hundreds in total. Down they went, four or five at a time, until they were all gone. I lay on the bed, waiting to die. I looked forward to it as an upcoming relief, a total escape from my solution, my problems, and the mess I felt I had made of my life. Why had I failed so miserably?

‘Hell, I didn’t believe in heaven or hell. I couldn’t believe I was about to stand judgement on anything. Either it was all about to end abruptly, and that’s that; or I was going to achieve a new form, free of physical restraint, and with a far higher understanding. Free of earth and free of money, free of need and pain, and free of people’s expectations.

‘Thinking of dying, however, I began to wonder why I wasn’t feeling sleepy or drowsy, which I wasn’t, and which was really strange under the circumstances. I decided to go down to the beachfront, and take a walk around. The world seemed very surreal to me that night. I went into one of those amusement arcades, and played a few video games with what were really now my last few coins.

‘Slowly I was becoming aware of the drowsiness. Now it started to seem real. I was ready to die, or was I? Staggering back to my room, I passed a hotel, and in a total daze I walked into a phone booth. I wanted to say goodbye to someone. I don’t know why it only occurred to me then, but I couldn’t die without saying just one goodbye.’

But Kevin did not die and came to in a hospital ward. For him, surviving may have been the worst of that awful episode: ‘I shall never forget facing my mother again. It is living through a suicide that is the hardest part.’

Soon after the suicide attempt, Kevin decided he had to see his military commitment through without creating more trouble. One Friday afternoon in 1983, while on guard duty in Pretoria, he spotted a car recklessly turning across four lanes of traffic; he wrote: ‘It came screeching to a halt in the loading zone outside the Air Force headquarters, it didn’t even straighten out. The front doors sprang open, and two men leaped out. They were hardly out of the doors when my eyes were blinded by an intense explosion of blinding light, and I was hit by a blast of tremendous force, that hurled me off my feet into the window behind me.’

The ANC had detonated a car bomb outside one of the military headquarters buildings and as soon as his initial panic subsided Kevin began to assist the dozens of wounded. It was only afterward that he realized that he too had been injured by flying glass and shrapnel. The incident was one of the ANC’s most successful attacks on a military target. Kevin’s sense of being involved in history at that point seems to have given him the idea of wanting to record history. He decided to be a news-photographer.

By 1984 Kevin had worked himself in to a staff job at The Star. While he was photographing outside the Johannesburg Supreme Court he met a striking, wild-haired photographer named Julia Lloyd and immediately asked her out. Within two weeks of their meeting, they were living together. Julia was soon pregnant. Kevin wanted them to get married, but Julia refused - she had been married twice before and did not want another husband. On the night his daughter was born, Kevin recalled the awe he felt at witnessing Megan’s birth, at being allowed to cut the umbilical cord. Megan became the focus of all that was best about Kevin - loyalty, intense passion, infectious enthusiasm and love. But he and Julia soon broke up and Kevin found himself missing his daughter terribly.

I had met Kevin before I had any plans to be a photographer, through my older brother Bart, who was a sports writer. I would see Kevin when I visited Bart at work, and at parties. Kevin was a tall, thin and good-looking guy, with a quick and winning smile. He had a rakish, mischievous way about him that many women found quite irresistible. He usually wore his hair long and had a diamond stud earring; he usually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and wore leather-thonged Jesussandals. He always seemed pretty crazy to me, up and down like a yoyo, but I liked him. By the time I took up the same line of work in 1990, he had become chief photographer at the anti-apartheid Weekly Mail newspaper. Kevin was one of the few people in the business that I knew and I would see him regularly in the townships. We began to team up to lessen the dangers of working alone.

It was some months later that I first met Joao Silva. In March of 1991, a lot of fighting was taking place in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township. Alex is a tiny crowded slum just one kilometre square that had survived several forced removals, and, unlike all the other townships, is next to the heart of white Johannesburg. It was an unique place, where the lively South African music style kwela had originated: Alex had soul. But it was also a place teeming with criminals who preyed on the wealthy white areas that surrounded the township; a risky place to work.

I was walking up a road in Alex when I saw a helmeted rider getting off a motorbike. I had heard about this guy who was working in the townships on a bike. I had also heard that he was shooting hot pictures. It was dangerous enough working in the townships in a car, but doing it on a bike was not a good idea - the guy had to be a little crazy, I thought to myself. I smiled as I approached and he reciprocated with a friendly greeting. He was dark-skinned, unshaven and short, and he wore glasses, but he seemed sane enough to me. I was taller than him and heavy-set, with a marked physical presence - typical of a sportsman gone slightly to seed (it would get worse). In those days, I still had a mop of dark-brown curly hair. We met in Alex again a week later and worked together. We got on well and a warmth immediately developed. From that day on, Joao was my first choice as a cruising partner. It would not be long before I would discover Joao’s predominant characteristics: he was tenacious and could be pretty aggressive, but above all, his watchword was loyalty-a friend would later say of him that when the ship went down, the last thing you would see would be Silva’s glasses.

For Joao, photography started out simply enough: he wanted to cover war. He was living in the coal-and-steel industrial town of Vereeniging, south of Johannesburg, where his father was a welder. In his second last year of high school he told his parents that he was dropping out of school. School had nothing more to teach him, he felt. Joao had come to South Africa when he was nine years old. Before that, he had spent ten months in Portugal with his godfather after his parents had sent him out of war-torn colonial Mozambique. Once his parents had re-settled in South Africa, they sent for Joao. He was put into an English-medium school, but spoke only Portuguese. He did not fit in at first and felt intimidated, but eventually started making friends by drawing dragons on his classmates’ arms - that only got him into trouble with his teachers. He entered his teens angry and rebellious. After leaving school, Joao went from job to job, lying about having completed his military obligations, and made up details of where he had served. He and his parents had used a grey area in the law with respect to immigrants to avoid the army, but that was not something to admit in the rabidly patriotic atmosphere then prevailing in white South Africa. During the day he worked as a signwriter and at night he worked clubs, but nothing satisfied Joao.

In late 1988, a friend of Joao’s had to take a series of pictures on motion for a course on graphic design and he joined Joao when he went to watch motor car racing at the track. Even then, Joao was an avid motor-sport fan; a speed junkie. The idea of taking pictures appealed to Joao, and he used his friend’s camera to shoot a few rolls of his own. He was immediately hooked. He gave up the club job as well as the signwriting and bought a camera, studying black-and-white photography at night school. A year later, in late 1989, he moved to Johannesburg and began to establish himself as a photographer.

Joao remembers that the first time he saw Ken - at Thokoza’s Phola Park squatter camp towards the end of 1990 - was also his first experience of photographing violence. By then, he had already landed his first job shooting car-crashes and Rotary meetings for a small newspaper in the industrial town of Alberton, east of Johannesburg. It didn’t pay much. The only reliable working camera he had was the Alberton Record’s beat-up old screw-mount Pentax, which had an annoying little hole in the cloth shutter, that left a white dot burnt on to all his pictures, in the top left corner. Joao tried to frame his pictures in a way that he could crop the dot out later.

Joao had convinced the paper’s news editor to let him cover the escalating violence in nearby Thokoza, arguing that the township was right next door to Alberton, the white town which the newspaper served. At Phola Park squatter camp, he had photographed some Xhosa warriors wrapped in blankets and holding sharpened steel rods. They were sitting on their haunches, staring at three corpses lying beneath grey blankets. The warriors directed Joao and his increasingly nervous Afrikaans reporter-colleague toward a cluster of shacks. The two of them had to step carefully to bypass a shrouded corpse in a narrow alley and entered a dark shack to find another covered body. The squatter camp had been attacked earlier that day by Inkatha hostel dwellers in one of the massive assaults that marked the beginning of the Hostel War. His colleague was urging him to return to the office and Joao reluctantly agreed.

As they emerged from the shacks, they ran into another photographer. Joao immediately recognized Ken Oosterbroek, the fastrising photographer with the distinctively long hair and lanky frame, from articles he had seen in newspapers and magazines. Ken looked at Joao, a short, unknown photographer carrying an outdated camera, and dismissed him with a disdainful nod. ‘What an arsehole,’ Joao thought.

While driving out along Thokoza’s main road, Khumalo Street, Joao spotted a group of women chasing another, younger woman. She was bleeding from her head and losing ground fast. In seconds they had caught her, hacking at her with whatever weapons they had, including a sickle. Joao leapt out of the still-moving car and ran towards the crowd. The low cries of pain from the woman on the dirt pavement were almost drowned out by the attackers’ triumphant ululating. Joao was scared, confused. This was not the kind of war photography he had imagined himself doing - this was too weird, but he shot off frame after frame as he retreated. Just then a man walked into the right-hand side of his frame, patronizing the female killers with a broad smile. Joao instinctively felt he had the shot as he pressed the shutter, for once heedless as to where the little black spot would appear on the negative.

That night he had to cover the Alberton Rotary Club’s annual general meeting. It was the last meeting before Christmas and like everyone at the dinner table, he had a cracker to pull. Inside Joao’s was a toy machine-gun. He saw it as an omen; within weeks he put together a portfolio of his best pictures and approached Reuters, Britain’s global wire service, persuading them to let him submit pictures on spec. For a few months he balanced the two: shooting the dull pictures that earned his salary at the paper and covering the burgeoning township war after hours and on the weekends, selling the pictures to Reuters. One day, the Alberton Record’s editor called him in to ask why the paper’s car had been seen in Soweto. Realizing he could no longer balance both jobs, Joao quit the paper to freelance full-time for Reuters.

Joao’s pictures on the wire were earning him a name as a conflict photographer, but a new picture editor for Reuters was coming in and the word was that he was going to get rid of the present stringers to set up his own network. Joao took his portfolio in to The Star to try to get a full-time job. While the Sunday picture editor was rather distractedly paging through the prints, Ken came over and looked over his shoulder and on seeing the picture of the woman being attacked in Thokoza, said, ‘Hey, I heard about that!’ though he seemed not to recall bumping into Joao on the day that the picture had been taken. Joao began to string for the Sunday Star and was still selling pictures to Reuters.

In August 1991, Ken was named chief photographer at The Star; one of the first things he did was hire Joao, the hotshot young photographer who was bringing great pictures back from the war in the townships. It had taken Joao just nine months to move from covering Rotary meetings to being The Star’s most exciting photographer. Ken and Joao became close friends as Joao became Ken’s ally in his struggle to improve the paper’s moribund photographic department.

Joao’s beat was almost exclusively the political violence in the townships. His eager recklessness to go into any situation for a picture and his custom of not shaving for days on end, as well as treating management and danger alike to his ‘fuck you’ attitude, ensured he fitted the part of conflict photographer well. But he maintained a certain equilibrium. He had made a home with an acerbically witty girl three years his junior - Vivian Innes. She was just 17 when they first met in a nightclub where he was a bouncer. She had come from her matric party and looked sexy in a short black sleeveless dress. Some time later, Joao received a Valentine’s card from Viv. He sent her flowers a few days later; from then on they were a couple and she moved in with him some time after he moved to Johannesburg. Over the years, they had accumulated a collection of orphaned cats which they both doted on. A friend once described Joao as ‘Mr War-photographer who just melts all over his cats.’

Johann Greybe ran a small hole-in-the-wall camera shop in Hillbrow. Because he was always willing to give good prices and technical advice to struggling young photojournalists, we all ended up buying second-hand cameras from him - the cameras that I had used to shoot the execution pictures came from him. Johann remembers Joao as the most enthusiastic young photographer he has ever met; extremely energetic and driven to have his picture on the front page. Ken was the ultimate professional. The camera dealer’s impression of Kevin was that he was too sensitive for this world: ‘He was one of the photographers who got nightmares and saw spooks.’ And me? I was level-headed, he said, the one who had his shit the most together.