A selection of these images will be exhibited at Syracuse Stage during the showing of the play Sizwe Banzi is Dead starting February 25 and during the exhibit Apartheid and Identity at SUNY Oswego Metro Center starting February 20.
I first met Samson Daba, a black Anglican minister from the South African township of Uitenhage, on a routine photo assignment for The Post-Standard in Syracuse in the spring of 1985. At that time, this township was in the news because of a violent backlash by the government during a period of unrest. Samson was the keynote speaker for a local dinner event and I approached him asking questions about life under apartheid.
“If you want to find out, come over and see for yourself,” Samson replied. I decided to take Samson’s offer.
Once I arrived in July in Johannesburg I was never able to talk to Samson at length on the phone because it was clearly being monitored. I never actually got to meet Samson until late in my trip, the day before the funeral in the Cradock township. The funeral was for four black, United Democratic Front (UDF activists), known as the Cradock 4, who were executed by security police and their bodies burnt. The funeral was a political event attended by thousands of people from all over the country.
The night before the funeral, I finally met Samson at the home of Molly Blackburn, a white English woman who was a leader in the non-violent, anti-apartheid women’s group Black Sash. That night, I joined her and her followers in the Cradock township, where we spent the night in a Catholic convent. A couple of hours after our arrival, a woman rushed into the room saying the government had just announced, over the TV, a state of emergency in the Eastern Cape, the district where we were staying. Apartheid’s grip was tightening.
At the funeral the next day, I stood side by side with Samson at the foot of one of the graves. He looked over at me and said, “So I see you made it.” I realized later he was one of the leading clerics at the funeral.
Scores of activists were arrested as they returned from the funeral. However, it wasn’t until days later when I was in the Johannesburg airport for my return flight that I glanced at the daily newspaper and saw a leading headline stating that the police had detained three black clerics, one of whom was Samson Daba. After arriving in the U.S. in the same day, I walked into a newsstand at JFK airport and saw on the front page of the New York Times a photograph of Molly Blackburn being arrested.
