‘To fight with my camera, to kill apartheid’: Peter Magubane – a life in pictures

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A man stands in front of the Djingareyber mosque on February 4, 2016 in Timbuktu, central Mali.
Mali's fabled city of Timbuktu on February 4 celebrated the recovery of its historic mausoleums, destroyed during an Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 and rebuilt thanks to UN cultural agency UNESCO.
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January 12, 2024

Magubane photographed Nelson Mandela outside the Drill Hall in Johannesburg during his first treason trial in 1958. (Peter Magubane/Drum/African Pictures)

Born in Johannesburg in 1932, Peter Magubane documented the brutality of apartheid and suffered from banning orders, solitary confinement and beatings as a result. From teaching himself as a boy with a Brownie camera, he went on to work for the influential magazine Drum and became Nelson Mandela’s official photographer. He died on New Year’s Day aged 91.

The Guardian took a look at Magubane’s remarkable career.

The Soweto uprising on 16 June 1976, when more than 15,000 children protested against an edict making Afrikaans the medium of instruction in black schools.

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