Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

mechanisms for self-expression will have to be created. If there are whites
who don’t like this, they had better go and find what they want elsewhere.
In the long run, South Africa has a great future for all of us provided
whites are willing to educate, qualify and recognise the non-whites …
so that they may walk side by side into the dawn that has broken over
Africa, a dawn which in South Africa will not turn again to darkness.”
The vicious state reaction had an immediate, chilling, impact. Freelance
photographer Alf Kumalo had handed me a stunning, but politicallyprovocative,
photograph that no other publication had dared print as
the townships blazed during the fragile days after June 16. I had already
placed this image – showing the bodies of two dead Africans lying in
front of a ‘hippo,’ an armoured combat vehicle extensively used by the
security forces in black townships – as a double-page spread in the early
pages of the September issue.
15
After the banning, I killed the feature, but held on to the photo for several
months, before splashing it across two pages to open Drum’s January,
1977 photographic round-up of the year, under the heading, Year of
The Hippo. Then we held our breath, hoping it would slide past the
government’s unpredictably censorious gaze. Fortunately, it did …
from ColdType, June 2016
Read more, see more photographs … some of this article is an edited
The South African state’s reaction to the next, August, issue amazed
us all: it was judged to be so inflammatory that the government didn’t
just follow its usual practice and ban the issue from sale, but made
possession of it a criminal offence.
mid-June 2016