Thursday 4 January 2024 

The South African Communist Party (SACP) conveys its heartfelt message of condolences to the family of Peter Magubane (18 January 1932 – 1 January 2024), a renowned chronicler of the South African anti-apartheid struggle.

Passing away at the ripe age of 91, Magubane worked closely with many liberation struggle stalwarts in the struggle against apartheid as well as with the younger generation which took forth the bearer of liberation after our 1994 democratic breakthrough. Through his work behind the camera, he chronicled the repressive character of the capitalistic apartheid regime and opened the world’s eyes to the atrocities committed by the regime through all those decades of apartheid. If today the struggles of Black South Africans are understood worldwide, it is due to the contribution of Peter Magubane, amongst other iconic photographers, who stood in the line of fire to document their struggles.

Peter Magubane’s dedication was not without risks, however. His humanistic approach attracted the repressive apparatus of the apartheid state. The regime moved forth to arrest, interrogate, torture and place him in solitary confinement for 586 days, among a host of other repressive measures against him, for his work to showcase the truth about Black South Africans’ lives under apartheid South Africa.

Peter Magubane went on to manage a group involving yet another iconic South African performer, Julian Sebothane Bahula, who passed away on 1 October 2023 at the age of 85, to whose family the SACP also pays special tribute and conveys its heartfelt condolences.

Julian Bahula was a world celebrated musician and activist who consciously promoted African music, arguably the first to introduce indigenous African drums to South African jazz.

Bahula was forced to exile in 1973 following his refusal to abide by apartheid directives to tone his music down from conscientising the masses of our country, and indeed the world, of the atrocities that were taking place in South Africa. Notwithstanding extreme exploitation by monopolistic record companies over many decades, who did not pay him his due royalties for his sterling work, Julian Bahula was not demotivated from producing more conscious compositions which awoke the people of the world to apartheid atrocities. He, together with his music groups over the decades, managed to sabotage the apartheid regime by their practical work in the underground anti-apartheid struggle, helping to smuggle documents to exiled ANC fighters in exile inside his drums.

In 2012, the South African Presidency awarded Julian Bahula the Order of Ikhamanga In Gold for his exceptional contribution to and achievement in the field of music and the arts and the struggle for a free and democratic South Africa.

In tribute to the icons of our liberation struggle, Peter Magubane and Julian Bahula, the SACP reiterates its calls for the chronicling of South African struggles through the arts, and this being done in both the media and schooling system. This demands the leading role of the state to ensure that the education system and all information dissemination centres continuously remind the masses of our country about our past struggles while at one and the same time empowering them of the fight that still has to be fought, in the here and now, for the total emancipation of our people. In this regard, the SABC, as a public broadcaster, must be empowered, financially and organisationally, in the main, to showcase South African art from an emancipatory trajectory.