WeeklySA_AdminPhotos: Bongani Mnguni / african.pictures:: When Soweto erupted on June 16 1976, ace photographer Bongani Mnguni turned back to fetch his camera and captured history in the making. Fifty years later, his powerful images of courage, grief and resistance are emerging from a newly digitised archive…
By Rosanne Larsen
On the morning of 16 June 16 1976, Bongani Mnguni was taking his daughter to school. Along the way, he realised that something extraordinary was happening in the streets of Soweto.
He turned back, fetched his camera, and went out to photograph what would become one of the most defining days in South African history.
Born in Soweto in 1953, Mnguni spent that day and the months that followed recording the uprising with a directness that set his work apart, including documenting the violence of the police — photographs made at real risk to himself, documenting confrontations and their human cost in a way few others managed.
Later, he made his way to Baragwanath Hospital, photographing the wounded and the families gathered there.
Those images have only recently been digitised from his original negatives.
Shortly before his death in 2019, he entrusted his archive — thousands of negatives, transparencies, and digital files — to Africa Media Online. The work since has been painstaking: sorting, selecting, scanning, and cataloguing a lifetime of images.
The first images to emerge are – fittingly – those from June 16th. They can now be accessed through african.pictures, the picture library wing of Africa Media Online, where they are available for licensing for publication and broadcast.
The rest of the archive — Mnguni’s record of the years that followed — will continue to be published over the coming year.
“Bongani loved telling stories through his lens more than he loved talking about himself. Seeing his photos feels like hearing his voice again,” says Lucia, Mnguni’s wife.
“Photography was how he understood people and places, and we take comfort knowing his eye for beauty, light, and honest moments lives on.”
Half a century on from the uprising, his photographs still do what he intended them to do: they make it impossible to look away.
Mnguni’s archive can be viewed accessed on https://african.pictures/collection/680/
June 16 Photos Courtesy of Bongani Mnguni Archives/ african.pictures
