Health permitting, award-winning photographer Peter Magubane will join hundreds of graduates next month at the University of Pretoria (UP) to receive an honorary doctorate.
The 91-year-old, whose work has been featured in publications around the world, including The New York Times and National Geographic, has been actively working, albeit on a lighter schedule until 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic took a toll on his health.
Speaking to Sunday World, Magubane’s manager and family spokesperson David Meyer-Gollan said the celebrated photographer was capturing Soweto sunsets until about three years ago.
Meyer-Gollan said Magubane had half-committed to attending the ceremony due to his health.
It will be the ninth honorary doctorate conferred on Magubane, including those from the University of Cape Town, Wits University and Colombia College in Chicago, the US.
“His health is a bit up and down at the moment,” he said of Magubane, who stays with his eldest son Linda Magubane and his son’s wife Kate in Ormonde, south of Joburg.
Magubane has three other children; his eldest daughter Fikile and youngest son Ipeleng. His son Charlie was murdered in 1992 at the age 30 during the tumultuous period of violence after former president Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. He was missing for weeks and was later identified by Magubane at the mortuary with a gun shot wound to the head and hack wounds.
“It is still a sore point in his life that he doesn’t like to talk about,” said Meyer-Gollan, who has known Magubane for 25 years and has worked closely with him for 20 of those years.
“It was the highlight of my life working with him,” said the 50-year-old about working and travelling the world with his hero, mentor and friend.
Magubane will be conferred the degree on May 11.
The university is also showcasing an exhibition of his works titled “Magubane’s South Africa – A Retrospective from 1955-2015”, which started this week at the UP’s Student Gallery. It features 120 of some of Magubane’s iconic photographs that capture South Africa’s history. The official public launch is scheduled for May 19.
Meyer-Gollan said the exhibition features Magubane’s work when he started at Drum magazine in 1955 and covers pivotal moments that shook South Africa’s history. “You have the forced removals from Sophiatown that he documented,” he said.
Magubane was born in Vrededorp in Joburg and grew up in Sophiatown and was also forcibly removed to Diepkloof in Soweto.
Magubane also has first-hand experience of the brutality of apartheid. He was repeatedly arrested, interrogated and placed under house arrest between 1967 and 1976.
He spent 586 days in solitary confinement from 1969. He was even banned for five years.
“The exhibition also goes into the Women’s March of 1956; the demonstrations against the pass laws and pass arrests; Robert Sobukwe and the PAC’s leadership handing in their passes and being arrested; the 1960 Sharpeville massacre; Bantu education; child labour, the Soweto uprisings, state of emergencies and when Magubane was asked by Madiba to be his personal photographer – from his release until he became president,” he said.
Magubane has published 20 books.
UP’s Prof Lize Kriel said: “The UP School of the Arts and the faculty are humbled by his acceptance of the honorary doctorate.”
Award-winning photographer Ruth Motau – said she met Magubane in1993 when she joined the Weekly Mail as a young intern photographer.
“He did not only teach me photography but also how to be a businesswoman,” she said.
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