The Bang-Bang Club Read Online Free PDF

shying back as the curtains twitched. ‘Vula! Vula!’ They were demanding that whoever was inside open the door. But there was no response. When they tried to force the door open, it remained stubbornly shut. The door seemed not to be locked, but the
person inside appeared to be holding the handle up to prevent the men outside thrusting their way in.
    The mood outside the door seemed strangely jovial. The men did not seem too aggressive, except when they shouted, ‘Vula!’ with an explosive expulsion of breath on the first syllable. They smiled at each other and at me: ‘There is a Xhosa inside. He has been shooting at us,’ explained one. I had not heard a single gunshot in the time I had been at the hostel, but I felt that this was not the time to point this out.
    Slowly, the game turned serious. The men crowded at the door, trying to force their way in. The door gave and swayed slowly inwards, only to be jammed shut again. The contest was slow and deliberate, the strength of the men outside equalled by an unseen force within, as if the door had a powerful spring holding it shut. Eventually the door was pried open long enough for one Zulu to squeeze in. The door slammed shut after him. What was going on inside? The door continued to resist the men outside, but then another warrior managed to slip through. Once again, the door slammed shut after him. Then another warrior managed to slip in. The man inside was clearly weakening. A fourth man pushed through, yet there was still only silence from within.
    What grim battle was taking place inside, I could hardly imagine. Then the door was pulled open from the inside and a tall man with a woollen scarf wrapped like a turban around his head raced out, waving a broom. His eyes were wide open and wild, looking directly into mine, from just feet away, but there was no comprehension, no connection, just a desperate attempt to escape. His shoulders were pulled straight back and his knees pumping high as he burst through the men outside the door. ‘Maybe he can make it,’ I thought.
    The Zulus and I took off after him, a pack hunting its terrified prey. After just a few dozen steps he went down, but I did not see why or how. The attackers were instantly around him in a tight, voiceless circle, stabbing, slashing, hitting. My ears picked out the slithering, whispery sound of steel entering flesh, the solid thud of the heavy fighting sticks crushing the bone of his skull. These were sounds I had never heard before, but they made sickening sense, as if this were
exactly the noise a roughly sharpened, rusty iron rod should make when pushed deep into a human torso. The victim’s body quivered each time he was hit and jerked spasmodically when a jagged spear blade was tugged from the resisting flesh.
    I was one of the circle of killers, shooting with a wide-angle lens just an arm’s length away, much too close. I was horrified, screaming inside my head that this could not be happening. But I steadily checked light readings and switched between cameras loaded with black-and-white and colour, rapidly advancing the film frame by frame. I was as aware of what I was doing as a photographer as I was of the rich scent of fresh blood, and the stench of sweat from the men next to me.
    Some time during those minutes, the man on the floor passed from living to dead and the blows slowed from the frenzy of killing to a sadistic punishment he could no longer feel. Not everyone was silent; the man with the home-made horn I had followed through the hostel blew monotonously into his pipe, emitting a coarse, unearthly sound. It was not a call to battle, I now understood, but a celebration of death.
    ‘Mlungu shoota!’ one of the dozen killers exclaimed as they finally took note that I was taking pictures. The men sprang away, but within seconds they would surely realize that I was a defenceless witness to the murder. Fear swept over me. I prepared myself to do anything to survive: I thought of