The Photo of Sam Nzima

I don’t think we can ever really understand a place until we move into its streets in the midst of its people and until we listen to what they talk about and what they remember.  Every place has experiences that have galvanized them as a people and moved things in a new direction.  Often the media plays a crucial role in framing these experiences in ways that crystallize a thousand thoughts and feelings into one clear understanding.

This week I was in Soweto and visited the moving Hector Pieterson Museum.  Hector Pieterson was a 13-year-old boy who was shot and killed in what most refer to as “the events of ’76.”  They are talking about June 16, 1976 when hundreds of school children protested being forced to be educated in Afrikaan by taking to the streets and walking to the place where they felt this wrong decision had been made.  The police responded with dogs and tear gas and then with bullets, firing at the children in the street.  It was a horrific moment.  Hector was, by all accounts, a shy boy --- perhaps not entirely clear as to why his classmates were gathering in the streets.

It was The World newspaper (which was forcefully closed the following year) that published photographer Sam Nzima’s moving photo of an anguished young boy cradling Hector Pieterson’s dead body with Hector’s sister running alongside that transmitted the horrors of the events in Soweto to South Africa and to the world at large.  It reminded me of AP photographer Nick Ut’s image of the naked 9-year old Kim Phuc, running towards his camera to get away from a South Vietnamese napalm attack. 

Images of hope are not always uplifting.  But they can change public awareness seemingly overnight and accelerate broad shifts in attitude and eventually policy, bringing hope in seemingly hopeless situations.