Bob Gosani

Bob Gosani (b. 1934 d. 1972) was a South African photographer.

Bob Gosani started off at Drum magazine as a messenger but soon moved to the photographic department where he became Jürgen Schadeberg’s darkroom assistant. He later became one of Drum’s best photographers. ^[1]

Schadeberg said that "Gosani stood out because in the early 1950s good black photographers and press photographers in particular were unheard of". ^[2]

Some of his pictures have become iconic images of the 1950’s in South Africa e.g. the picture of Women during the Defiance Campaign in 1952 ^[3], Nelson Mandela sparring with his boxing club's star boxer of the time, Jerry Moloi (taken on the rooftop of the South African Associated Newspapers office in Johannesburg) ^[4] and Nelson Mandela outside court in 1958, (triumphant because the prosecution had withdrawn charges in the Treason Trial). ^[5]

Perhaps his most famous sequence of pictures was the sequence he took of the humiliating and degrading Tauza dance that naked prisoners were forced to perform in the courtyard of the notorious Johannesburg prison, The Fort, in Hillbrow. This dance was a humiliating way of ensuring that the prisoners were not smuggling any weapons or contraband into their cells after a day’s hard labour. It essentially involved thrusting their rectums up into the air for inspection by the warders. Gosani managed to photograph the Tauza dance secretly from the top floor of a nurses’ home overlooking the prison. As a result of the pictures being published in Drum, there was a public outcry and the apartheid government was forced to act. ^{[6] [7]}

Tauza - Bob Gosani's People, Jacqui Masiza and Mothobi Mutloatse, Struik, 2005, ISBN 9-78-177007177-3