Mandela Remembered By Personal Photographer

Kumalo passed over a year earlier due to renal failure at the age of 82 on October 22, 2012. He made his name as a photographer for Drum magazine, initially a black lifestyle magazine that was notable for its reportage of township life under the apartheid state.Kumalo photographed some of the most significant moments of the liberation struggle including the student uprisings of the 1970s as well as capturing the images of Mandela.

One of Kumalo's most cherished memories was the day an assignment turned into a photo-call with two heads of state because Mandela pulled him out from behind his camera, to face the cameras himself.

So it came to be that on July 10, 1996, a shy and somewhat flustered Alf Kumalo was filmed and photographed between then British Prime Minister John Major and Mandela.

The spontaneous gesture and break with protocol was typical of Mandela, even in his time as Head of State, and something Kumalo remembered fondly when he spoke to Reuters Television.

"As we were shooting he just moved from where he was to my side," he said. "When I got between them I just lifted both their hands!"

For Kumalo, this moment was just one of many that underscored his unusually close relationship with his favourite subject.

Kumalo started taking pictures in Johannesburg in the 1950s, focusing both on his people's struggle for freedom, and on the private life of its most famous leader.

"We were close," he said. "I'd known him for years, and when Mandela was in jail I used to supply him with photographs of his family, of his wife and the children, so that he could assess as to how much they'd grown."

Kumalo turned his house in Soweto into a museum of his work, even if the walls can hold only a tiny fraction of the moments in South African history that he captured on film in a career spanning more than half a century.

His photographs include Winnie Mandela outside the courthouse during her husband's trial, causing a provocation by wearing Xhosa traditional dress; Mandela and Winnie with their baby daughter Zindzi, just a few months before Mandela went into hiding and was subsequently found and arrested in 1963; and many key leaders and moments in South Africa's struggle for freedom, from the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 to the Soweto Uprising in 1976.

More of Kumalo's photos are on display in Mandela's former house in 8115 Orlando West, Soweto, where Mandela lived with Winnie and their daughters until 1963.

The house is now a museum, and Kumalo agreed to give Reuters Television a guided tour of the place that he once visited as a family friend. All the photographs displayed on the walls were taken by Kumalo and give a rare insight into the private lives of the Mandelas before and after Nelson Mandela's arrest.

Outside, he ran into a group of acquaintances - young people who are the grandchildren of old friends; including Zondwa Mandela, Nelson and Winnie Mandela's grandson, who explained why Alf's pictures are so important to the family.

"It's like a still image, like a time capsule, like an archive of history," said Zondwa Mandela. "Getting the opportunity to look at it now, I think it's important because other than the stories you hear - but if the stories are accompanied by pictures, it makes those stories much more meaningful."

As well as setting up the museum in his house, Kumano founded a school for aspiring photographers. Never one to seek fame or recognition for himself, he took pictures of South Africa's history as it unfolded because he wanted to hold its architects accountable; and even in the freeSouth Africa that Mandela helped to bring about, Kumalo always hoped that today's and tomorrow's photographers will do the same.