Title: SOWETO
Photographer(s): Peter Magubane
Writer(s): Marshall Lee
Designer(s): Jeremy Sampson
Publisher(s): Don Nelson, Cape Town,South Africa
Year:1978
Print run:
Language(s): English
Pages:137
Size: 22 x 30 cm
Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket
Edition: 2nd Don Nelson, Cape Town,South Africa,1979
Print: Printed by Printpak, Cape Town, South Africa
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: South Africa, 1967-1977
ISBN: 978-0909238322
"June 16, 1976 began as no ordinary day. From seven that highveld winter morning, school children left their homes to join their fellows streaming along the street of Soweto. Carrying hastily made placards, their excitement ran on the adrenalin of protest, for two hours they came from all directions to converge in their thousands on Orlando and mass into a confrontation with authority.
By mid-morning, a 13-year-old boy had been shot dead and two white men had been stoned and smashed to death by the mob."
from the intro of the book by Marshall Lee
Magubane photographed most of South Africa's historic and brutal moments, an hard work that which led to him being shot, beaten, tortured and jailed, as he wrote:
"being on assignment in the early years wasn't easy. We were not allowed to carry a camera in the open if the police were involved, so I often had to hide my camera to get the pictures I wanted. On occasion I hid my camera in a hollowed-out Bible, firing with a cable release in my pocket. At another time, at a trial in Zeerust from which the press were banned, I hid my Leica 3G in a hollowed-out loaf of bread and pretended to eat while I was actually shooting pictures; when the bread went down, I bought milk and hid the camera in the carton. And I got away with it. You had to think fast and be fast to survive in those days."