It was difficult to remain unaffected by all those dead people; but it was equally difficult to keep from switching off my emotions. I could not withstand the repeated impact of having a complete emotional response to every corpse or injured person I came across-Iwould need to have been a saint; but nor did I wish to do what more seasoned photographers seemed to do - shut off completely. In my first weeks of working for the AP, my car was stolen in Soweto and so the next day I got a ride with a colleague in his car. The morning was quiet and at midday we went to get a meal at a fast food outlet. We had just received our meals when my colleague got a message that there was trouble in a suburb of Soweto called Central Western Jabavu. We jumped into the car and raced to the address given; it was nearby, and we had not yet finished eating when we arrived at the scene. There were a handful of police and residents on a dirt soccer field and, next to the goalposts, was the object of their attention: a corpse on its back, burning. The flames had burnt most of the clothes off the body and were now through to the skin. I hurled my food away and began to photograph. After a minute or so, I turned to see what my colleague was doing. He was still eating his burger. I was shocked and thought him a callous pig; it was much later that I realized the extent to which his machismo was a defence against feeling too much.

In June of 1992, it was another dead body that drew me to Soweto’s Meadowlands Zone One suburb. But it was through covering the death of what was, at first, just another anonymous tragedy that I came to know a family that would symbolize ordinary black people’s struggle for liberation. I first met Sandy ‘Tarzan’ Rapoo, his wife, Maki, and his father, Boytjie, on the night of Johannes Rapoo’s death. They were in pyjamas in their kitchen when I cautiously entered their house on Bakwena Street. Tarzan was a powerfully built man with a shaven head and an eight-inch scar running up the side of his face and skull. That night, his dark eyes were unblinking and frightening. In the yellow light of the single bulb, I saw the family as hard, uncompromising and angry people. Tarzan’s nephew, Johannes, had been killed by police earlier that day, an unprovoked and pointless death that was symptomatic of the time.

Johannes and some neighbourhood friends had been pushing a wheelbarrow containing a car-engine when they were confronted by the police. They ran away. The police opened fire from inside their armoured vehicle. Johannes died on the way to hospital. The police claimed he was stealing the engine. Later, it was discovered that the engine was not stolen at all. Nobody knew why Johannes ran from the police, other than an all-too-common fear of arbitrary arrest or abuse.

I did not yet know the bitter memories that news of a death in that kitchen evoked. Nor did I yet know the easy laughter and generosity that lay behind those masks of anger. As I returned to cover the funeral of Johannes and other incidents of violence in their conflict-wracked area, I would slowly develop a friendship with the Rapoo family.

Most relationships that I had with black people were either with those my own age that I could relate to, or with people that I met in a very limited, specific way - who could put me in a frame in their minds, and me them, so that any extraordinary behaviour could be ignored or accommodated. I met a lot of people as a journalist, most of them black, and got to know many beyond the usual superficial requirements of the work - but there was always a gulf that was difficult to cross. The cultural differences between a white boy from the suburbs and someone brought up in a township were massive. We shared no common linguistic shorthand - we even spoke different dialects of English. Key or code words they took for granted had to be spelled out to me. If they told me something, I was not sure that I understood the full context of it; and vice versa. But the Rapoos were patient of my ignorance, and with a lot of laughing and teasing they helped me to learn about what was important in their lives. Despite the success of apartheid’s social engineering, we were to become close friends.

More than a year after Johannes’s death, I was visiting his family. It was a quiet afternoon, people were out enjoying the sunshine, chatting with neighbours, children laughing and shrieking as they skipped rope and played tag with a plastic ball. A bearded black man wearing a blue cotton workman’s jacket appeared at the end of the street. He had a quick, uneven gait and his right arm swung stiffly as he moved. He made his way unnoticed into the middle of the street. The first loud bang sent people scurrying off the street. I pressed myself against a garden wall and looked up-I watched the man calmly fire a large revolver into the street where parents screamed for their children in the panic. More shots rang out, but no one was hit. Then the street’s self-defence unit boys began hurling rocks, bottles and curses at him. The bearded man turned and lurched swiftly down the street towards the open veld beyond the last houses. The boys, none older than 18, took off after him, armed with a pitiful assortment of weapons - an axe, a knife and a kwash-a home-made zip-gun of metal pipes, pins and tightly pulled red rubber that could only fire one round at a time.

As we ran, the man kept turning and waiting, taunting the boys to come closer. They told me that he was a notorious Inkatha gunman from the neighbouring hostel, known as ‘Pegleg’ because of a disability that gave him the unusual gait, but he was deceptively fast and my chest was burning from the effort of keeping up with the chase.

The boys failed to catch Pegleg and we returned to a street disturbed and fearful after an incident that exposed the residents’ vulnerability to random violence. The area was protected by youths and ANC comrades who relied on a few shared guns to defend the neighbourhood, though on occasion well-armed self-defence units from other areas would come in to help launch attacks on the hostel. Later that day, I wanted to take pictures of the looted and burnt houses along the street that ran between the brown brick hostel buildings and the neighbourhood the Rapoos lived in. The street was the front-line between Zone One and the Meadowlands Hostel, one of the eight Soweto hostels that had become Inkatha fortresses. On seeing me preparing to drive down that eerie road in the dead zone, a neighbourhood man burst out laughing and leaned into my open car window: ‘If you take that road, you will never come back; it’s a shortcut to Heaven!’

Over time, I learned of the Rapoo family history. Boytjie, the patriarch of the family, sitting in his customary place on a weathered log in the shade cast by a pair of gnarled peach trees, would watch the neighbourhood go about its business. There, under the fruit trees, he told me how the Rapoos had come to Soweto. Boytjie was born Tshoena Reginald Rapoo in 1920, but the white girls he used to play with called him ‘Boytjie’ and the name stuck. The young Boytjie, unlike his own children and grandchildren, played childhood games with whites because he lived in Johannesburg, then a young city that had areas that were racially mixed. But that was before the government trucks and bulldozers made Johannesburg white.

Boytjie’s father had moved to the city from the farm where his family had bred cattle and grown crops for generations. Johannesburg was a new and rough city growing rapidly around the fabulously rich veins of gold that lay under the grassy veld. The mines were desperate for labour and taxes were imposed to force the largely self-sustaining black peasant farmers to enter the labour market. Black families had to send men to the mines in order to earn the cash needed to pay poll-, hut- and even dog-taxes. Boytjie had just begun his life as an adult, he had a job and had fallen in love with a girl called Johanna. He approached his parents, telling them he had met the girl he wanted to marry. They felt he was in too much of a hurry, that he should wait as he had only known her two weeks. But Boytjie was stubborn and took the 500-kilometre journey to Kimberley to visit Johanna’s parents: ‘I took a train all the way, but it was an easy job, thinking about Johanna.’

They soon married and their first child followed shortly. One day his mother’s friends came to visit and saw the infant lying naked on the bed - just a couple of months old. One of Johanna’s friends joked, ‘Oh, be careful, he is naked!’ and the other replied, ‘Don’t worry, that one is Tarzan.’ The name stuck. By the time Tarzan was named, the flood of hundreds of thousands of black men and women flocking to the cities had turned a labour deficit into a surplus. Boytjie had to register and be given a pass book - the tool by which the government effected laws that kept blacks out of the cities unless they were gainfully employed. ‘The old pass was just a piece of paper. It had no photo, so we could borrow someone else’s,’ Boytjie remembered, but the pass laws became more sophisticated and more difficult to evade: ‘The new book had a photo in it, the dompas, we had to carry it under our arm, because it was heavy and tore our pockets.’ The dompas was indeed a heavy burden. It was on the basis of his racial identity, indelibly fixed in the identity book known as the dompas, that Boytjie, his wife and his son, Tarzan, and thousands of other non-white residents of the Johannesburg suburbs of Newclare, Sophiatown and Crown Mines were identified for forced removal to Soweto in 1955.

When the order came for them to leave, they tried to defy the police; they stoned the government trucks that came for them, but the army was eventually brought in and the forced removals proceeded. ‘Once in Meadowlands, they gave us a pint of milk and a loaf of bread for supper. The white official would ask: “How many children do you have?” If you answered “Six,” the reply was “Two loaves for you.” If you had no marriage certificate, they would push you off to the hostel. I had a friend at the council office so he and I went out to look for a better house than the one I had been allocated. There were trains and matchboxes. The trains are all in a line. The brown train. The corner house-a matchbox - had four rooms and the inside ones had three rooms.’ Meadowlands had little appeal for the city-loving Boytjie. ‘There were no fences, no streets, just a jungle with houses. People got lost.’ The little houses were poorly built, the roofs were untreated asbestos, without ceilings. ‘You could see through the bricks, watch people walk past outside. People would lean against an inside wall and it would just collapse. I did not plan to stay.’

But stay the Rapoos did, generation after generation, as apartheid tightened its grip. But it was also in that matchbox house that they had their first taste of liberation. On a summer day in 1990, Soweto spontaneously declared a public holiday and the streets were jammed with people singing, dancing and banging dustbins: the authorities that had kept Mandela incarcerated for 27 years had finally allowed him to walk free. The Rapooos were among millions of South Africans celebrating the release of Nelson Mandela, symbol of the struggle to be free from white minority rule. For decades, simply being in possession of a picture of Mandela tempted arrest, yet on 11 February 1990 the apartheid state dedicated hours of television time to cover the walk to freedom of the world’s most famous prisoner. The task of talking viewers through the historic event fell to an Afrikaans presenter; he made a valiant effort, but decades of demonization of the ANC and Mandela had left him illprepared to inform the nation about the legendary prisoner, especially as Mandela’s release was running hours late, live. In the years preceding his resignation in 1989, then State President P.W. Botha had kept a hotline through to the television studio in order to instantly kill any news piece he disliked. On more than one occasion a newscast had been abruptly cut and an offending item dropped. Those days were over, but white South Africans, and the presenter, were not prepared for a Mandela who had the status of a demi-god.

But decades of strife and loss separated that happy time from the day in 1955 when Boytjie had fatefully chosen a house near the hostel. It was the student uprising of 1976 that laid the ground for the tragedies that would beset the Rapoos. On 16 June, thousands of schoolchildren took to the streets of Soweto to protest against the compulsory use of Afrikaans as a medium of education. Afrikaans was regarded as the language of the oppressor, the language of the Boers, used by police, magistrates and prison warders in the administration of apartheid. The enforced use of Afrikaans stuck in the craw of the teenagers who were coming of age under a system where their skin colour determined that they be regarded as perpetual children, members of an inferior race. Within the warped version of Christianity moulded and followed by the white Nationalist regime, Afrikaners were the chosen people spoken of in the Bible, and blacks were the Canaanites, hewers of wood and carriers of water. They were to have an education that befitted their caste - that of labourers and servants. While Boytjie had grown up speaking English in addition to his African home language, many of the children of ’76 were barely literate in English.

By 1976, Meadowlands was a well-established part of Soweto, now a massive dormitory township, a sprawling ghetto some 17 kilometres long by 11 kilometres wide. Soweto’s population was equal to, or greater than, most white South African cities, but it had been deliberately deprived of the necessary amenities and local political autonomy to be a city in its own right - it had to remain dependent on white cities. It has no industrial area, no central business district, no large stores. Like all townships, it was designed to be a place where black people who worked in neighbouring white areas slept. On the other hand, it did not share a common tax base with Johannesburg - as it logically should have, since its people generated wealth and taxes there - so it was entirely reliant on government hand-outs to survive. Not one of the large supermarket chains had a store in Soweto, and so its residents had to shop in white areas unless they wanted to pay the inflated prices that small neighbourhood shops charged. Real money was not circulated in Soweto itself and Sowetans helped fund their own oppression through the various income and sales taxes they paid to the white regime.

As Tarzan approached Soweto on his way home from work in Johannesburg that June evening, he got his first glimpse of the unrest that would continue intermittently for the next two decades: ‘The whole place was full of smoke. On every corner you saw people running. They were demolishing everything that belonged to the government - the beer houses, the council buildings. Others were looting, I saw a fat lady running with three cases of beers. That was June the sixteenth.’ June 16th and 1976 became milestones in the Struggle, especially among schoolchildren, as they had initiated the uprising.

There were running battles in the streets, police guns facing stones. Dozens of children were killed, none more famously than Hector Petersen, the first to die. His death became an icon of the burgeoning revolution in South African newspaper photographer Sam Nzima’s wrenching photograph of Petersen’s young body being carried away by crying schoolchildren. The riots continued for six months, through to the end of the year. By 1977, the schoolchildren - now the blooded and initiated standard-bearers of the revolution - decided on a work stay-away in an attempt to export the township’s pain to white business and commerce. Gangs of militant, self-righteous children aligned with the ANC or the PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress) manned bus and train stations to ensure that people did not go to work.

Tarzan recalled that the rallying cry of the youth was ‘asigibeli, asigibeli,’ a call to not ride to the towns - to stay at home. The children enforced the stay-away. The Zulus in the hostels, however, refused to be dictated to by youths: ‘These comrades will not tell us what to do. They are just small children.’

The social alienation of the hostel-dwellers had been exacerbated by their exclusion from most political activities planned and initiated by township residents. The sporadic strikes, stay-aways and boycotts called to force political change or protest against living conditions were almost always organized without consulting the migrants, who were not seen as a permanent or integral part of the community. The hostel-dwellers were thus often caught unawares by civic action, which they neither understood nor supported. For them, a strike or a stay-away simply lost them money by keeping them from work - their sole reason for being in the townships. They had no real stake in the community. The police and government were swift to take advantage of the anti-comrade sentiment among the hostel Zulus, and they encouraged and supported the rift between them and the wider community.

The sometimes heroic but always martial history of the Zulus had inculcated in them a feeling of superiority to other tribes. It was a chauvinism born in the bloody forging of the Zulu nation in the early 1800s from the various clans and chiefdoms that shared the northern Nguni language in the fertile lands east of the great escarpment, in the area now called KwaZulu-Natal. As Tarzan put it: ‘The Zulus were always the top people in the hostels, because to fight is in their blood. Their father’s father’s forefathers were fighting, clan fights. It never stops. Never, never.’

I had known the Rapoos for two years before I heard what they had suffered in the kitchen in which I had first met them. Tarzan and I were under the dashboard of my car, fitting a car radio he had given me. While fiddling with wires, he told me how his father had survived an attempt by hostel Zulus to burn him alive. ‘I woke up and this guy is standing right here with a gun and holding me. He tells me, “If you move, I will blow you,” then they took us into the kitchen and I saw the old man, Boytjie. He was wearing his pyjamas. They poured petrol over him. They tried to burn him, but match after match would not light.’

Tarzan did not tell me any more, but it had clearly been a miraculous escape for the old man. What he did not tell me was that his younger brother, Stanley, had been killed that same night. It would be years before Maki, Tarzan’s wife, would tell me the full story of that winter night in 1986.

Maki Rapoo is a large woman, stout, with a big laugh that comes suddenly, often bringing tears to the corners of her dark brown eyes. She was born in Meadowlands in 1956 and went to the same neighbourhood schools as Tarzan. She was a shy girl and Tarzan was a confident boy who used to protect her from schoolyard bullies. But it was only after they had finished school and she went away to study nursing that they began to exchange letters and discuss marriage. By the time I knew them, they had three children. ‘In 1986, Stanley and his comrade friends used to wait at the bus station and taxi ranks to tell people to not buy groceries in town. When they found a person carrying groceries, they would destroy the goods. Flour and mielie meal were scattered on the ground. The youngsters sometimes made the person drink the cooking oil or eat the mayonnaise, things like that.’

The tenth anniversary of the brutally suppressed Soweto uprising of 16 June 1976 saw a revitalization of resistance within the country. The express goal of the ANC was to make the South African townships ungovernable. One of the tactics was to enforce a boycott of shops in the white areas. Stanley had teamed up with other young men from the hostel and was especially friendly with two of the hostel boys. The Meadowlands Hostel was unusual in that there were not just men living in it-a section housed families, displaced people whose homes on the banks of the Klip River had been washed away in floods some years previously. Stanley was 19 then, one of the self-righteous children who patrolled the townships in gangs. But then Stanley and the other township teenagers discovered that the hostel kids were not destroying the groceries, but keeping them. The hostel boys had breached the ethics of the boycott. It was right to destroy goods purchased in white shops, but to steal them was wrong. The youth considered themselves the keepers of the revolution’s morals. It was they who enforced the boycott code, while their parents struggled to make a living. The fallout between the boys was to have fatal consequences as the hostel men became involved.

On a bitterly cold night in June of 1986, the Rapoos retired early and by eight o’clock they were all in bed. But they forgot to lock the doors, something they usually did. When the group of men and boys from the hostel tried the kitchen door, they found it open and simply walked into the house. Near midnight, Maki awoke to hear a man say in Zulu: ‘Cut the phone, they will call the police.’ Within seconds, Stanley was beside her bed and he whispered, ‘They are looking for me, tell them I am not here,’ and slipped out of the room again. The week before, Stanley had suddenly given away all his clothes, claiming that he had found a job and would buy new ones. He also gave away his bible even though it was still new. ‘Maybe he was expecting to die,’ Maki said. ‘He knew they were looking for him, but we did not realize it.’

A group of boys and men, armed with guns and machetes, were in the house. Tarzan awoke to find a revolver pressed under his chin. They threatened that if he dared move they would kill him. The intruders made the whole family gather in the kitchen. They put Tarzan and Boytjie in front of the fridge. One tall man poured petrol from a five-litre can over their heads; it ran down their faces, burning their eyes and soaking into their pyjamas. They were shivering from fright and the cold. Maki was in her nightgown with a towel wrapped around her waist.

‘We knew the boys by name, they were Stanley’s friends. One was Kalahajane and the other Mpandlane. One was a Zulu and the other from Kliptown. They started klapping (hitting) and kicking me, asking me where Stanley was. I said I did not know where he was.’

Tarzan shouted, ‘Leave my wife alone,’ but every time he moved, they pushed the gun more firmly under his chin. They kept another gun trained on Boytjie while some of them searched the house for Stanley. They went to the bedroom where Maki’s new-born baby and the other child were asleep. They turned the bed upside down, to look underneath, and the children fell to the floor and began shrieking. Maki was worried that the baby had broken a limb or been seriously hurt, but she could not go to check. The intruders could not find Stanley and they said they would take all the boys in the house and kill them one by one until he appeared. It was no idle threat, and everyone knew it. At that, Stanley climbed down through the trapdoor from the ceiling, where he had been hiding. He was wearing only an old pair of trousers with holes at the knees and at the back, ones that he only used for gardening and painting, and a pair of sandals even though the night was cold. ‘You have found me, so let’s go,’ he said, speaking as if there was nothing to fear. He told the family that he had something to discuss with the intruders, and then he would return.

At that stage, Maki thought that they might beat him, or hand him over to the police. As they left the kitchen, the tallest of the Zulus poured the remaining petrol from the can on the floor and down the stairs. Another of the intruders took out a box of matches and lit a match, then threw it into the pool of petrol. It did not burn. Nor did the second one ignite the fuel. When he lit the third, Stanley reached over and grabbed his wrist: ‘You have already found me, what are you doing? Let’s go.’ Then two of them took Stanley by the back of the trousers, one on either side, lifting him a little. The frightened family watched them go to the gate, the older men chanting Zulu songs as Stanley’s friends and other hostel youngsters pointed out where other comrades lived. They saw one of the older men chop at the back of Stanley’s knees with a panga. He screamed as the blade cut through his tendons, rendering him unable to escape. Once they were out of the yard, Maki and Tarzan ran fearfully to the gate and watched Stanley being led down the street. He was limping. They began to follow, to see where they were taking him, but they were forced to retreat as the group shot at them. ‘Tarzan went for the police and I went to the bedroom. I knelt near the bed and opened the Bible at random. It was Psalm 144, and there I found, “What is a person? A person’s soul is like the wind,” and I knew that, definitely, they were going to kill him.’

After some time, Tarzan returned with the police. They took statements from the family, but instead of mounting a rescue into the hostel as they had hoped, the police said they should call for the van they use for collecting corpses. Suddenly one of Stanley’s friends came running into the house; he had been shot and stabbed, and was bleeding profusely, but had somehow managed to escape from the hostel and run all the way to the house. He told them that Stanley had been killed and now they were burning him. The police said they should not wait for the morgue van, but go fetch the body before it was burnt to ashes. Maki and Tarzan were scared, as were the police, who called for back-up.

They drove cautiously into the hostel. The police had their guns drawn as they made their way along the rutted dirt road through the dormitories and to the back, near the garbage dump to the place where they knew the Zulus did their killing. There were three bodies there. The killers were sitting and looking at them, just a few metres away. They were not in the least afraid that the police might arrest them. The police ignored the armed men and Maki was afraid to look at them directly in case they decided to kill her and Tarzan too. ‘Stanley was still burning. The police used their hands to throw sand on him to put the fire out. He was bleeding. A lot. That was what stopped him burning too much.

‘I was crying and Tarzan was holding me and comforting me by saying, “As long as they did not burn him too much, we can still recognize him.”’ But by the light from the police cars’ headlamps the only way they could identify Stanley was by the ragged trousers and the beaded necklace he always wore. His eyes had been gouged out. They wrapped the body in a blanket and took him back to their home where Tarzan had to tell Boytjie how they had found Stanley.

As Maki reached the end of the story of Stanley’s death, a small man walked into the rough brick room from which the Rapoos ran a series of pay phones. His ears had small red discs with white dots fitted in the lobes, and he wore a blue-grey pinstripe suit, unfashionably cut by some village tailor. He greeted us in richly-toned Zulu. He was from the hostel. Maki answered him in Zulu, and as he entered a booth to make his call, she said, ‘Let’s wait for him to finish,’ and then she began to cry, tears flowing silently from her eyes. I handed her a pack of Kleenex and patted her hand uselessly. It was a long phone call and throughout it she could not stop crying. The little man in the suit finished and thanked Maki, paid her and left, politely pretending not to notice her tears.

‘Ever time I hear someone speak Zulu, I get scared, or anxious. I do not know how to categorize what I feel. I did not sleep for a long time after Stanley died.’

Tarzan does not like to talk about how Stanley died - he prefers to recall how the matches miraculously never ignited the petrol. But the memory eats at him, of how he, a powerful, confident man, was helpless to save his younger brother. They never see their kitchen the same way I see it; they can never erase the images from that dreadful night when Stanley died.