Book blurb:

From the day in 1954 when he first joined DRUM magazine, Peter Magubane never dreamed of becoming anything but a press photographer. Slowly, stage by stage. he worked his way up from driver to dark-room helper, and at last to taking pictures with the camera bought for him by his father out of his scanty earnings as a vegetable hawker

When he showed me his pictures for the first time in DRUM offices in 1958, it was plain that he had the cameraman's first essential - a seeing eye. Out of the confusion of everyday life his eye naturally framed pictures. Two - one of a small boy drinking from an open-air tap, and another of a child being taught to sing and play the piano - were enough to prove the presence of this priceless gift.

But within a week he showed that he had another, even rarer, gift a passionate eagerness to learn. He would learn from anyone who could tell him anything. When his photographs were criticised, he did not protest that they could not possibly have been taken any other way. He listened. and drank in what was said

However. if he was to attain the goal on which he had set his heart that of becoming a world-famous cameraman - Peter, as a black photographer operating in South Africa, needed a third quality without which he could never have survived: he needed the courage of a lion. On DRUM I worked in a small glass-sided office in the centre of the building. One morning as I was laying out picture pages, I noticed through the window a stocky figure with both hands bandaged and face invisible in a swathe of bandaging. 'Someone come in to report a beating-up"' I thought. one of the reporters will get his story', But after five minutes when no reporter had appeared. I went over and asked him what he wanted 'But don't you know me?' asked a familiar voice. Peter, on his way home in a 'second class taxi' with his month's pay, had been beaten up by the driver and his mate using an iron bar When I told Peter I was taking him straight home to our flat to be looked after for a few days, he refused flatly, protesting that he could see through his bandages enough to do his work.

I knew then, if I had not known already, that Peter would achieve his life's ambition. What I could not have imagined was all it was going to cost him in bodily and mental suffering - including years of prison with many months of solitary confinement But equally I could not have guessed the full extent of his achievement and the present world-wide spread of his name and reputation