On Monday, the world lost the famous artist and photographer Peter Magubane, who for decades throughout apartheid illuminated the daily hardships faced by Black South Africans. He was ninety-one.
Magubane rose to notoriety as one of the few Black photographers documenting the oppressive era after signing with Drum magazine in 1955.
A year later, in a posh district of Johannesburg, he captured one of his iconic pictures: a white girl seated on a bench with a “Europeans Only” sign, and a Black worker sitting behind her, brushing her hair.
He covered Nelson Mandela’s incarceration and the African National Congress (ANC) party’s ban in the 1960s during a peak of anti-apartheid movement.
A decade later, his coverage of the Soweto student rebellion was garnering him recognition on a global scale.
He endured constant abuse, threats, and incarceration for 586 days in solitary confinement beginning in 1969.
Magubane continued to take pictures and was named official photographer to the recently liberated Nelson Mandela in the 1990s.
He was “someone who made very big sacrifices for the freedom that we enjoy today,” his granddaughter Ulungile Magubane told newsmen.
“Luckily he was alive to see the country change for the better,” she said.
Magubane was born in 1932 in the now-pageview Johannesburg suburb of Vrededorp. He was raised in Sophiatown, which was formerly home to many well-known Black artists but was eventually demolished by apartheid.
Around noon, his daughter Fikile Magubane said that he passed away quietly. On January 18, he would have turned 92.
