Page One Picture

Duncan Village, South Africa, 1977

A woman sits in the shade of a thorn tree overlooking the destruction. Tears stream down her cheeks unheeded as she rocks back and forth, a broken transistor radio cradled in her lap.

Unnoticed, I work with my camera to capture her grief for the morning paper and the world to see, knowing that I have a page one picture if I can get the exposure right. It's tricky with the shadow of the tree and the weeping black face contrasting with the light on the hillside. I want the dramatic clouds in the background too; boiling emotion, a pending storm. I am frantic in my movements, shooting off an entire roll of film at different exposures with and without fill-in flash. I am scared the woman will break the spell of her grief before I can capture the moment.

I’ve already photographed the devastation further down the hillside where shacks of corrugated iron and cardboard have been savagely flattened by front-end loaders and men with sledgehammers and axes; the possessions that were inside them soaked in petrol and burned in still-smouldering heaps. I’ve photographed the stray dogs that sniff among the ruins, the upturned pot of cooked maize with its white contents oozing into a trampled sea of mud. I thought I might have a potential page one picture with the two pale kittens, soot-smudged and looking lost among the wreckage – until I saw the woman and her unseeing grief.

The hillside is near Duncan Village, a black township on the outskirts of the South African city of East London. It is a time of apartheid, society split into black and white.

This is the first time I’ve been sent alone to cover one of the squatter camp removals, as they are called. But I have enough news sense to know that my pictures, if they capture the moment as I see it, will transport what has become a commonplace story to page one prominence.

“What is your name,” I gently ask the woman, camera put aside in favour of a notebook.

There is no response.

“Mama, what is the trouble?” I ask again, using the courteous, if incongruous, title. My concern and sympathy are genuine. I’m not yet experienced enough to be unaffected by what happened on the hillside during the night.

“Mary. Mary Mmosama,” the woman is barely audible and I write down her name without attempting to check the spelling as I normally would, scared to break the spell. She stares into the distance, remembering.

“What happened here, Mary? What happened to the shacks? What happened to the people?”

“They came in the night.” The woman speaks softly but still without looking at me. “Policemen with lights and dogs. They came when we were sleeping. They broke our houses around us with machines and hammers.”

It is the usual story and I wait, hoping she will continue; that she will have something to tell that is different. But the woman lapses into silence, staring at nothing.

“What about the people? What happened to the people that lived here?”

“They took them to the Transkei!” For the first time the woman meets my eye. “They said they were taking them home to the Transkei. They put them in the big red trucks that stood there and there.” She gestures towards the top of the hill. “The dogs were biting and the children were crying. The men shouted and kicked and hit them until all the children were on the trucks. They said they were taking them home; that they didn’t belong here.”

“And you, Mama. Why did they leave you behind?”

“I am not from the Transkei,” the woman says, as if that is explanation enough. Then … “I ran and hid in the bushes. The dogs didn’t see me.”

She looks down the hill at the ruins. “My house, it was there.” She points to a place down a barren gully. “I went back when it was light but it is broken, everything burned. The little ones are gone. Perhaps they took them too.” Looking down at the radio, the woman begins weeping again. “This is all that is left. My little ones are gone.”

Mary Mmosama resumes rocking back and forth, repeating “my little ones are gone” over and over. Nothing I can do, nothing I ask, will persuade her to tell me more.

I picture the woman searching in the dark for her children in the aftermath of the trucks and police, calling their names, hoping they too have run away and escaped the men with the dogs. But, try as I might, I cannot get the woman to tell me how many children she has lost, what their names are and what might happen to them, alone and abandoned in the Transkei. She has drawn a wall of grief around herself.

I take more photographs but the light is fading and I know I’ve done the best I can. After a brief look to see if there is anyone else I can talk to, I turn my back on the valley. I have photographs to print and a story to write – and, if I do it well enough, I will get a page one picture and my by-line on the story. It seems wrong, but I feel a strange sense of excitement at the prospect of telling Mary Mmosama’s story; of trying to put a human face to what’s happening across the country on a daily basis.

The woman could be somebody’s maid, I realise. Perhaps that’s how I should approach it for the readers … Today Mary looks after your children … tomorrow she’s gone. I never think, even for even a moment, to paint Mary Mmosama as anyone’s mother, sister or aunt. For, as fiercely as I would deny it, as a white reporter I am every bit as much a product of apartheid as the black woman on the hillside.

I’ll try to get police comment, of course; try to find out how many people were removed and where to. But I know they will tell me nothing. I have already estimated how many have been rounded up and transported in the night. At best they will have been taken to the area they left to seek work in the city; at worst to a resettlement camp in what the government calls a homeland, where the soil is barren and there is no hope of a job. I won’t say these things in the story of course, any more than I will include my idea of suggesting Mary could be somebody’s maid. I will write only the facts, like I’ve been taught; what I’ve seen and been able to verify. The editor might get away with opinion and comment but, in the news columns, I have already learned there is room only for cold, hard, verifiable facts.

** *

My photograph makes page one the next morning, under the headline Homes destroyed, children taken. Beneath the picture the caption reads: Ms Mary Mmosama clutches a broken radio, all she has left after police raided her squatter camp home near Duncan Village and removed her children to the Transkei.

But the cancellation of a forthcoming tour by a rebel Australian rugby team and a riot in Soweto force most of the story off the front page. It doesn’t get a by-line and I am not sure whether this is to protect me from police repercussions, or because Fred Cronje the news editor, an ageing tyrant held in awe by all of us, was furious with me for failing to get all the details.

There are things in the story that aren’t strictly fact, but I didn’t dare tell Fred that. Like the way I said the woman’s two children, a boy and a girl, had been lost in the roundup, and had presumably been taken to the Transkei by the police. I told Fred that the woman was too grief-stricken to give me her children’s names or ages. The police had, as usual, refused to give out any information about the squatters; how many of them there were; where they were taken; and whether there were any children unaccompanied by their parents.

It was only when I came to write the story that I realised what I’d missed in my inexperience, and how crucial the missing facts were. I didn’t dare tell Fred that it was I who decided the woman must be referring to only two children, and that I invented the fact they were a boy and a girl. She was only an ignorant woman from the bush, I told myself. She was probably illiterate. It wasn’t as if she would read the paper and complain.

“I don’t send you out to come back with half the story,” Fred fumed. “For once we’ve got a first-hand, human-interest angle to a squatter camp removal and you let your feelings for some old woman prevent you getting all the facts.”

But he calmed down considerably when he saw the photographs. Outlined in harsh black and white, every line of the woman’s body spelt defeat, tear-tracks etched in glistening detail on her cheeks. The cruel thorns of the acacia silhouetted against a brooding sky completed the scene. Even the wires of the radio, visible through the smashed casing, were crisp and clear.

“Get the rest of the story tomorrow. Go and find this Mary Mmosama, and bring me the full story of what happened to her children,” were the news editor’s final instructions.

** *

I didn’t sleep well that night. What if the woman had two girls? What if her children were all boys? What if it turned out that she had five, or even six children that had been taken by the police? What would Fred say then, about the story that had been missed? Worse still, what if I couldn’t find Ms Mmosama? What if she had already set off for the Transkei in search of her children?

Bleary-eyed, head spinning with “what ifs”, I go out early the next morning as instructed, back to the squatter camp to look for Mary Mmosama.

The hillside is less desolate in the fresh start of a new day, already healing from the wounds of two short nights ago. A muddy piece of cardboard is all that marks where the woman sat under the acacia, no longer black and thorn-threatening but a fresh, bright green in the morning light.

There is movement among the broken shacks. Young boys from Duncan Village have come scavenging for building materials, pots or anything else of value left after the bashing and burning. Their pickings are meagre and held firmly to their bodies with the uncertainty of new ownership.

They are suspicious of my white skin, thinking that I may be with the police, and that I have come to prevent their looting. But once I call to them, telling them I’m looking for the woman who was there yesterday, under the thorn tree, they come willingly enough, like stray puppies sniffing an unfamiliar scent.

“I’m looking for Mary Mmosama,” I explain. “I spoke to her there, under that tree yesterday afternoon.”

The boys chatter to themselves in Xhosa, gleaming white teeth in smiling black faces. I don’t speak their language.

“Mary Mmosama,” I repeat. “Her children were taken by the police.” Then, thinking at last of the obvious, I unfold the morning edition of the Daily Dispatch. “The woman in the picture. Do you know where she is?”

The children burst into excited chatter and giggles, pointing and gesticulating. One of them throws himself to the ground and, to the howling amusement of his friends, imitates the grief-stricken moans of Mary Mmosama. “My little ones are gone. My little ones are gone,” he wails and the other youngsters take up the chant. “My little ones are gone. My little ones are gone.”

“The Mad Mama! She is over there.” One of the larger boys eventually tells me, putting down a sheet of rusting corrugated iron to point the way.

I can see her now, where she sits among the ruins at the bottom of the hill, still clutching something to her chest. My relief at finding her is enormous and I barely notice the youngsters following me in a screeching, giggling group.

Mary looks up as we approach. “See. My little ones are back.”

She holds out one of the two white kittens on her lap. “My little ones are found again!”