Photojournalist · South Africa
Sam Nzima
Sam Nzima (1934–2018) was a South African photojournalist whose photograph of the schoolboy Hector Pieterson, carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo after police opened fire on students in Soweto on 16 June 1976, became one of the defining images of the struggle against apartheid. Harassed by the security police, Nzima went into hiding and gave up press photography.
Updated 3 min read
The World
Sam Nzima was born on 8 August 1934 in Lillydale, in the Bushbuckridge area of today's Mpumalanga, where his father worked on a farm. In 1968 The World offered him a full-time job as a photojournalist. By 1976 he was a photographer for The World, a Johannesburg newspaper with a large Black readership, particularly in Soweto. It covered the township's life and its politics, at a time when most of the white press ignored both.
16 June 1976
On the morning of 16 June 1976, thousands of Soweto schoolchildren marched against a government order that half of their subjects be taught in Afrikaans. Police opened fire. Nzima saw a young man, Mbuyisa Makhubo, running with the body of a schoolboy in his arms, the boy's sister, Antoinette Sithole, running beside them, her hand raised and her face open in grief. The boy was Hector Pieterson. He died soon afterwards.
Nzima took a short sequence of pictures. He took the film out of his camera and hid it in his sock. The World put one of the pictures on its front page a few hours later, the British papers carried it the next day, and within days it had been reproduced around the world. The shot was taken near the corner of Moema and Vilakazi Streets in Orlando West, close to Phefeni High School. How to look at it: the picture is built from people in motion, the young man carrying the boy and the boy's sister running beside them with her hand raised, and it is easy to forget that each of them is a person with a name: Mbuyisa Makhubo, Antoinette Sithole and Hector Pieterson. Sources give Hector Pieterson's age as 12, 13 or 14. It turned the Soweto uprising — and the apartheid state's response to children — into a story no government could explain away.
The cost
The photograph made Nzima a target. Accused of showing South Africa in a bad light, he was hunted by the police, left Soweto and went back to Lillydale, where he was watched and said he was under house arrest for a year and a half. Sources differ on the closure of The World, one dating it to 1978 and another saying Nzima himself resigned in 1977; either way he did not go back to press photography, and he opened a bottle store in Lillydale. In 1979 he was appointed to the legislative assembly of Gazankulu, one of the apartheid-era homelands, by its chief minister, Hudson Ntsanwisi.
For many years Nzima had no control over his own photograph, which belonged to the Argus group that owned The World. After a long fight he got the rights back in 1998 or 1999 (accounts credit either The Star or the Independent Newspapers group that bought Argus), but he never received the money usually associated with an image of its fame. Later he ran a school of photography in Bushbuckridge, sat on the Bushbuckridge municipal council and the council of the Bohlabela District.
Memory
The Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, opened in Soweto in 2002, stands a short walk from where the picture was taken, and the image is part of it. Nzima's photographs are shown prominently there, though one account says his name was left out of the credits when it opened. 16 June is now a public holiday in South Africa, Youth Day. Nzima died on 12 May 2018, aged 83, in hospital in Nelspruit, after collapsing.
See also
Peter Magubane also photographed the uprising. Read African photography and see our list of South African photographers.
