PROLOGUE
An old felt hat. A cane. An “OK Bazaars” plastic shopping bag in his hand.
As if in a dream, I see the old man coming. The jacket billowing about his meagre frame, white, shirt-collar loose about the throat. He has shaven the flesh about the grey-white half-beard; put a silver clip on his dark tie. Edging through the midday crowd. Past the shoppers, the bureaucrats, the clerks and businesspeople. Up a narrow laneway connecting main streets that cut across the city of Pretoria. Uniformed military personnel salute each other. They pass him by.
An old man with a hat and a cane and a half-empty bag comes walking. He moves with a wariness that is not just the slowness that comes with age. A black man in a white world, he moves cautiously. He does not bother anyone.
Here comes a soldier. He is young, fleshy-white. He wears a faded orange beret flattened about a stainless steel motif. There is a stainless steel buckle about the trousers. He has a single stripe on each khaki shirtsleeve. The soldier comes nodding, smiling, gesturing. He has a camera in one hand. Would the old man kindly pose for a photograph?
Click.
The soldier thanks the old man, turns and walks away. He is looking for another image to capture in black and white. A butterfly collector, except he’s after images, snapshots.
This national servicemen will be posted north to Namibia in a few days to write magazine reports on South African troops.
He will fly out in hammock-like seat in the hold of a military aircraft that will buck on waves of air. A book by an American in Vietnam tucked into an ample pocket in the thigh of his “browns’. Off to play at being a war correspondent. Hoping the required trips to the border camp will be without incident. Maybe it won’t be so bad after all.
He will have to take his own photographs. He must acquaint himself with the camera. He has been given a roll of film. Go practise in the city, the sergeant had said.
The soldier goes wandering through the city streets, snapping left and right. Black cobblers seated on the floor of a cramped shoe repair store smile up at him; a surly white shop attendant pursues him down the footpath, demanding to know why he has taken her photograph. Just practising, he says. The soldier goes ambling about, chewing gum because he has given up smoking. He’s given up smoking because he has developed chronic bronchitis. As long as he can put something in his mouth. He walks along, hoping no-one with serious rank notices the bubbles he blows.
Twenty four frames and we’re done. Time to head back.
*
The image that emerged when the proofsheet was processed later that day in 1979 intrigued me. Even more so the large print of the old man I’d encountered in the sidestreet. At first glance, it seemed that he must have been blind. But look at those bulging white eyes. He is not blind. Is it terror?
I don’t know where he came from or why he was in Pretoria at that moment; how he lived or what he thought when I approached him and asked if I might take his photograph. I don’t if he was at all fazed; if the eyes that blazed that day reveal the fear that seems to be there. I did not introduce myself. I did not ask his name.
You can stare at that picture and think you know everything there is to know about that man and his world. And you know nothing at all.
I have a print. The look is with me still, a continent away. I look at a photograph taken at whim in a northern city a thousand kilometres or more from my hometown. And I think back to the events that brought me there.
It’s tempting to assert that it was them, not us, who put brave men on a prison island. Them, not us, who made the oppressive laws. Always them. Never us.
We were passengers.
We went along for the ride.
- from the book by Larry Schwartz, Allen & Unwin 2000
Larry Schwartz Writer 