Gosani laid bare to the world the horrors of apartheid jail
Analysis by JABU MAKHOBA
WHO remembers Bob Gosani today: that darling Drum photographer of the roaring '50s and '60s, who became famous for the lenses he used, exposing the atrocities of apartheid to the rest of the world?
It is difficult to answer this rhetorical question; yet it is important to locate Gosani’s impressive photographic work in an epoch in which dedication to a just cause of liberation became a buzzword in journalistic circles of the time.
During those golden years of black journalism—of serious writing of the '50s through the '70s, it became the responsibility of journalists Gosani’s ilk to expose the dirty work of the National Party.
Gosani, unobserved by the hawk-eye of the apartheid police machinery, clambered onto the rooftop of a medical ward opposite the dingy jail that was Number Four.
From this vantage position, with his camera well cocked as one ready to release a round of gunfire on an enemy camp, he zoomed into Number Four prison, less than 100m away in a place that turned out to be a place of great shame, humiliation and horror for African inmates.
In a matter of time, the evil of injunctions that had been hidden from the world was laid bare. This, thanks to the courageous journalism of Gosani, who risked arrest or death.
As it turned out, the Tusas picture of 1954 earned Gosani an overnight arrest. But thank goodness the jail pictures were to become an antidote to ameliorate jail conditions.
The world was horrified and so in their embarrassment, the apartheid political leaders soon jerked into reflex action, forced to tinker with jail conditions as a way of improving them.
Through his pictures, the civilised world saw how savage and callous apartheid was, the grimness and cruelty of it all was exposed.
Standing atop the hospital building, to give the world the image of African inmates performing the “Tusa” dance, a type of strip-search technique that required the African inmate to leap in the air, span arms, and open their legs while clapping hands overhead.
They would descend then to the ground producing clicking sounds from their mouth and bending their bodies forward to expose their rectums to the laughing warders’ gaze for “inspection”.
The dehumanising and humiliating warder routine, a daily insult to “check for contraband and hidden objects inside the inmates' rectums.”
Believed to be one of the oldest buildings in Johannesburg, Old Fort Prison now forms part of the Constitutional Hill precincts and the Constitutional Court, it was built in the late 1890s by Paul Kruger as a military base but later transformed into a prison.
Women were also jailed at the Fort, including political and struggle heroines, like Albertina Sisulu, Deborah Masilela, Florence Mkhize, and poison murderer Daisy de Melher, the second woman in the country to receive the death sentence.
Gosani died at the young age of 28, having been born in 1934. He belonged to the top-class journalism era of the greats, Themba, Casey Motsisi, Stan Motjwadi “Doc” Bikitsha, and many journalism heroes of the time.
The younger folk will not know him nor his work. Better to listen to what the late Bloke Modisane wrote of him: “For the 26 years that Bob actively worked for the media, his pictures documented the social, political and economic aspects of our lives. And what shines through his work is ‘live fast, die young and have a great looking corpse’.”
Gosani may not have seen the dawn of democracy. However, I am certain his heart will be filled with great pride and joy knowing that through his pictures, he laid a stone in the creation of the democratic state.
Jabu Makhoba is a writer at TNA and ANN7.
