Sam Nzima
Sam Nzima was the photographer for The World, the Black daily of Johannesburg, who on the morning of 16 June 1976 in Orlando West took six frames of a boy running with the dying Hector Pieterson in his arms and a girl screaming beside them, hid the film in his sock when the police searched him, and got it to the paper by lunchtime; the picture was on the front pages of the world the next day, the security police followed him until he left journalism, and the copyright was returned to him only in 1998. He was born in 1934 on a white farm in the eastern Transvaal, where his father worked the land, taught himself with a box camera, walked out of the farm labour he had been drafted into, and was a gardener and a waiter at the Savoy hotel in Johannesburg, photographing the guests, before The World hired him in 1968. He was one of the few Black photographers with a press card, which did not protect him. On the day he had gone to cover a march of schoolchildren against Afrikaans, saw the police fire, and was close enough to the child when he fell to see Mbuyisa Makhubo pick him up. He shot the sequence as they ran towards a car, and the frame with the sister's face is the one the paper's editor chose. The World published it that afternoon and the government banned the paper in 1977. Nzima was harassed, told by the police he would be killed, and went home to Lillydale in the eastern Transvaal in 1978, where he ran a bottle store and a photography school and did not take news pictures again. The newspaper group held the rights to the photograph and licensed it for twenty years without paying him. He got the copyright back in 1998, was given the Order of Ikhamanga in 2011, and died in May 2018. The photograph is on the wall of the museum that bears the boy's name, and the government lists it among the images that ended apartheid.
- Lived: 1934 CE – 2018 CE
- Nationality: South African
- Roles: photographer, journalist
