IOL Commemorates June 16, 1976 Youth Day Tragedy

Soweto · 16 June 1976

A memorial in photographs — marking fifty years since the children of Soweto changed the history of South Africa.

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Alf Kumalo (centre) with Muhammad Ali

A photographer's life

For

Alf Kumalo

1930 — 2012

Kumalo became famous for his coverage of the resistance to apartheid that swept South

Africa, and especially Soweto, where he lived for most of his life.

He described how he would sometimes take a single shot on a roll of film before hiding the

canister in his socks — or elsewhere on his body — to protect it from the police. He

risked his life to ensure that the story would be told. Sometimes the censors won; the

pictures sat in drawers for decades. Sometimes they reached the world. Either way, he kept

the negatives.

He photographed Mandela, Ali, Tutu, Sisulu. He photographed boys with cardboard placards.

He photographed his own neighbours fleeing the only place they had to go. There is a way

of seeing that does not flinch and does not perform — that is patient, dignified, and

unblinking. That is what Kumalo had.

These eleven photographs are not all that he made in 1976. They are a beginning.

In memoriam

"The children of Soweto changed South Africa. They changed it by refusing to accept what the

state had designed them to become."

Alf Kumalo · 1930 – 2012

Photographs: Alf Kumalo / Independent Newspapers Archive