20/01/2023, 22:05 Ernest Cole: South Africa's most famous photobook has been republished after 55 years
Page 1 of 4 https://theconversation.com/ernest-cole-south-africas-most-famous-photobook-has-been-republished-after-55-years-197647
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Kylie Thomas
Senior Researcher, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Photographer Ernest Cole was born in 1940 in the Pretoria township of Eersterust, just before apartheid
was formally introduced in South Africa in 1948.
He was 20 when thousands of people gathered outside a police station in Sharpeville township to protest
against being forced to carry pass books by the white minority government. On that day at least 69
people were shot dead, hundreds were injured, and a state of emergency was declared. The Sharpeville
Massacre is regarded as a turning point in the struggle for liberation in South Africa. It marked the
beginning of a decades-long period in which images of human rights abuses in South Africa would rarely
be out of the international news.
Men wait for at a railway station for transport to a mine. Ernest Cole/© Ernest Cole Family Trust/Courtesy Wits Historical Papers/Photography
Legacy Project
Ernest Cole: South Africa’s most famous photobook has
been republished after 55 years
Published: January 20, 2023 9.37am CET