Apartheid in South Africa.

September 1966
Images that cost a photographer his citizenship

Frank Fischbeck’s life as a photojournalist began in Johannesburg with The Rand Daily Mail, a newspaper staunchly vocal in opposing the government’s stand on racial segregation. It was this anti-apartheid activism that brought Frank into frequent conflict with the governing authorities.

After the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, Hendrik Verwoerd – the country’s prime minister and a man known as ‘the architect of apartheid’ - tightened his grip on the country. Two attempts on Verwoerd’s life were made, in both cases the perpetrators were white South Africans. The second - and fatal - attack in September 1966 in the House of Assembly in Cape Town was by a Greek immigrant who considered the prime minister a dictator and tyrant.

During the tense days that followed Verwoerd’s funeral, Frank continued to document the mood in South Africa between blacks and whites. In one instance at the Johannesburg railway station, he photographed shackled black labourers who were being sent off to labour camps. Those railway photos set in motion a swift train of events that changed the course of Frank’s life. On storming his car, the police confiscated his remaining cameras, film and hand-written notes, assuming they had secured the incriminating evidence of convicting him of contravening the “Prisons Act”.

Though the police never found the film, Frank was subsequently charged in a court of law. He was forced to surrendered his passport to the authorities as a condition of bail for two court cases drummed up against him.

After both trials, at Security Headquarters to collect his travel document he was handed instead a letter from the Department of the Interior. His passport had been withdrawn. His citizenship had been rescinded. He was, effectively, stateless.

The following day, Frank applied for, and was granted, an exit permit but because his parents had immigrated to South Africa after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1935, officials at the German embassy issued him a German passport. Frank left South Africa that night.

Under the apartheid government unable to return to South Africa, Frank in 1972 joined the Hong Kong bureau of LIFE Magazine.

I visited a family in the Tembisa township when by coincidence an inspector of the dreaded passbook arrived. People designated as “black” or “coloured” were obliged by law to carry their passbooks on them at all times or risk being jailed or fined. Each year, on average, a quarter of a million blacks were arrested for technical offences under the oppressive pass laws. Non-whites lived in constant fear of being caught out, which was why this elderly man kept his passbook close at hand, in the pocket of his much-worn coat as he was obliged to identify his place in the system within minutes of the inspector demanding it.

The impact of apartheid on South Africa’s non-white population was devastating, for decades leading to a mood of despair among the black population. Having to contend with segregation laws and getting through the daily routine of life, epitomised for me this woman’s expression of hopelessness and the toll of blacks living in townships endured.

In the days after Dr Verwoerd’s assassination, I unexpectedly stumbled upon and photographed a group of shackled prisoners at the Johannesburg railway station awaiting to be transported to a labour camp.

After I’d taken several photos, a black policeman on guard duty gave chase but I managed to evade him. Suspecting trouble, I rewound the film I’d just taken of the handcuffed men and placed it out of sight of the authorities.Then I reloaded the camera and, about an hour later, returned to the railway station in an attempt to get further photographs. But the car I was travelling in was abruptly surrounded by police vehicles, blocking any chance of retreat.

The police then confiscated all cameras, film and hand-written notes ... assuming they’d secured images of the prisoners in question as evidence that I’d contravened South Africa’s Prisons Act, which forbade photographing people or locations connected to any form of detention. Although the police never found the incriminating film, I was arrested and charged under the Act. As a condition of being granted bail, I had to surrender my South African passport. The case came to trail three weeks later when I was found guilty and fined. This court action changed my life.

On the morning of 21 March 1960, thousands of black unarmed demonstrators marched on Sharpeville police station. The intention was to deliberately hand themselves in for not carrying their passbooks. The previous year the pass laws had been extended to include women, which meant that every black person over the age of 16 was now under that legal obligation. By lunchtime, the peaceful demonstration had convulsed into a massacre. Sixty-nine people – including eight women and ten children - were killed when the police opened fire.

A mass funeral for the victims took place a week later. The country was very tense and as whites were despised it was obvious that journalists were unable to attend. The newspaper that had assigned me to cover the event chartered a helicopter from which this aerial view was taken.

One of the ironies of South Africa’s history is that the settlers who introduced segregation also brought with them Christianity. As a result, the majority of black South Africans who grieved after Sharpeville were Christian. In the weeks following the massacre, prayer services for those who had lost their lives were held by family members and relatives in township churches and school halls. Among those was Desmond Tutu the Archbishop of Cape Town who would go on to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He wryly summed up African Christianity, "When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray'. We closed our eyes. When we opened them again, we had the Bible and they had the land."

Dogs in those cities, however, could also be used for less- principled purposes. Every year in Johannesburg a consumer exhibition known as the Rand Show is held. In the 1960s, it had more of an agricultural theme. Here livestock was awarded prizes and paraded around the grounds; it attracted large crowds. The police force would use the occasion for a public demonstration of its canine efficiency. Their bloodhounds were trained to sniff out and track down criminals and, in these theatrical re-enactments, the criminals were always black. When the dog had brought down its victim, it posed with the culprit – paws on shoulders to complete the humiliation – in front of the admiring audience. It was at the Rand Show in April 1960 that prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was shot at, twice, in an attempted assassination. He survived. The perpetrator was white.

By contrast it was possible for adults to be, literally, blind and yet to enforce their apartness in a way that was almost primitive. The force of racial segregation in South Africa is evident in this scene of a sightless white farmer from the town of Ermelo, being led at the end of a stick by an African. In the cities – all, of course, ruled by apartheid laws but with a veneer of civility – it was usual to see blind people being guided by German Shepherd dogs where in urban S.A. a human fulfilled that role.

Yet, in the same society, I saw how children could remain colour blind. Only as they grew up that the apartheid system changed their perception of the world. I accompanied an NGO which distributed meals in the Soweto township. The daughter of one of the organizers came along for the ride. Her meeting with black girls of her own age led to these spontaneous images. They’re amused and fascinated by each other. It’s not that they don’t notice the difference – it’s that it didn’t matter. This sort of encounter was rare in apartheid South Africa.

The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was a turning-point in South African history. A state of emergency was immediately declared and both the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress were banned. International condemnation focussed on the apartheid policy. This would eventually lead to insurgency within the country’s borders and sanctions implemented from outside.

One of the unintended consequences of those measures was that the country developed its own arms industry. South Africa’s military prowess was superior to its African neighbours and it made sure that the rest of the world knew it. A march-past such as this one in the 1960s demonstrated the discipline and determination of the armed forces that would keep apartheid in check for several more decades.

Such parades provided photographic evidence that the South Africa Defence Force, founded in 1957, was entirely white. In 1963 it consisted of 25,000 men. Military service became compulsory in 1967 for white men aged between 17 and 65. Conscription was initially for nine months but was extended as the authorities became entangled with anti-apartheid activists, African nationalism and Communism.

There were a few black tribal battalions but these had white commissioned officers. Authority remained in white hands until 1994 when the South African National Defence Force was founded.

In the authoritarian crackdown after Sharpeville, prime minister Hendrick Verwoerd appointed John Vorster as Minister of Justice. Vorster (above) was a far-right nationalist who’d been interned for anti-British agitation in 1942 during World War II. He always denied being pro-Nazi but his abilities had been honed during his time with Ossewa Brandwag - a pro-German organisation and in which he rose to the rank of general.

As this photograph illustrates, those early years clearly left him with a weakness for public posturing. It was Vorster’s agents who infiltrated the ANC and arrested Nelson Mandela (amongst others) during a farm raid that led to the 1963 Rivonia Trial, when Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Another assassin set out to eliminate Verwoerd, this time successfully. Once more, the assailant was white. Dimitri Tsafendas was born in Greece and worked as a messenger in the House of Assembly in Cape Town where on 6 September 1966, he fatally stabbed the prime minister. The message he hoped to send was that there “should be a government that represented all South African people”.

Two photographs I took the following day illustrate the country’s division. Seated on a privileged bench reserved for Europeans, a white South African scans an edition of The Rand Daily Mail with a front-page portrait of the assassin. The same paper is read by a black man seated on a wooden stool.

Ironically, for a few days after Verwoerd’s death the entire nation was united - in disbelief, if not exactly in grief.

Verwoerd’s state funeral took place on 10 September 1966 in Pretoria. The chief mourner was the woman in this photo – the former Betsie Schoombee who had been his wife for 39 years. They’d met while students at Stellenbosch University in the 1920s, married in Germany and went on to have seven children. After the first assassination attempt, it was to Betsie that Verwoerd had said from his hospital bed, “I heard the shots and then I realised I could still think, and I knew that I had been spared to complete my life’s work”.

The second assassin ended that mission.

One of their two daughters married Carel Boshoff. In 1990, he founded the segregated Afrikaner settlement of Orania in the Northern Cape province. He planned it for a population of 60,000; in the 2019 census it was home to 1,773. Holding out an early olive branch in his presidency, Nelson Mandela invited Mrs Verwoerd to tea in Pretoria. She was considered too frail to travel. So, in 1995, Mandela visited her instead. One visiting journalist described Orania as “one of the dullest and most achingly pointless places in Christendom”. It was here that a Hendrik Verwoerd museum was consecrated.

Ian Smith, the prime minister of what was then called Rhodesia, was a prominent presence at Verwoerd’s funeral. The previous year, in January 1965, Smith had been at another funeral: Winston Churchill’s in London, where he had met the British prime minister, Harold Wilson. The British government had made it clear that it would refuse to grant independence to Rhodesia unless Smith accepted majority-rule.

In November 1965, Smith unilaterally declared independence from the United Kingdom and immediately became an international pariah. When Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, with Robert Mugabe as its prime minister, Smith led the parliamentary opposition for a further seven years. He remained a vocal critic of the Mugabe government both before and after his retirement in 1987. Smith stayed on in Zimbabwe until 2005, when he relocated to Cape Town for medical attention. In his final years Smith achieved eminence among Zimbabwean opposition supporters, who came to see him as a defiant symbol of resistance to the Mugabe government.