Visionary with a camera: Rashid Lombard's lasting legacy

Mail & Guardian

a day ago

Caption: Rashid Lombard at the Cape Town Press Centre in Shortmarket Street, 1989, photo from the Shadley Lombard archive.
Rashid Lombard was a legend among legends. A comrade, a stalwart, a hip jazz cat — he lived large, energetically, wildly seizing life by the horns, as if there was an urgency to do so.
Lombard was a photojournalist working for the foreign press, capturing the darkest days of apartheid South Africa, but also a major contributor to culture whose name was synonymous with jazz in South Africa. He died on 4 June, at the age of 74.
Tributes from all over the world poured from different aspects of his life — as a mentor, activist, photographer and organiser. All attest to his brilliant storytelling, because his life was so interesting and often unbelievable. His most striking characteristics were his charm, humour and how he was always working and able to accomplish a lot in a short time, making it impossible to capture all he did.
He said about his youth, 'I liked money and I liked shoes. At high school, during holiday time, I'd be working in the shops in Athlone. I always had a job. I'd always find something to do.'
Lombard was born in Port Elizabeth in 1951 and his family moved to Cape Town when he was 11 years old in 1962. His love for photography grew through art classes while attending Wittebome High in Wynberg and through an uncle interested in the art form.
Apartheid prevented him from studying photography, but because he loved drawing, he got into architectural drafting. He landed a job at the construction giant Murray & Roberts, as an industrial photographer of architecture, shooting buildings around Cape Town. He soon got hooked on photography and started photographing political rallies.
When we met for an interview at his home in Athlone, Cape Town in 2022, Lombard was joined by his daughter Yana, and the pair spoke as one unit, finishing each other's sentences. They were thick as thieves and partners in crime. To date, I have not witnessed a father-daughter duo so close and the interview was done jointly.
Yana knew the context of each image spoken about and Lombard had had an incredible memory for detail, with the ability to rattle off names and dates that is rare. They spoke about his life highlights — his extensive photographic archive, iconic gigs, Nelson Mandela's release, the country's first elections, photographing rallies in the height of apartheid, meeting musicians from all over the world. Their stories were endless.
Caption: Rashid Lombard greets his wife, Colleen Lombard on her release from section 29 at the Cape Town Courts after her successful bail hearing. Photo by Benny Gool.
Upon entering his home, iconic, historic images lined the walls, alongside books and records. Excitedly, Lombard guided me to a backroom filled with archives, posters and history, and then another room, showing me a reel of negatives. 'The thing about learning from a photographer's perspective, is you get to see how they think,' he said.
His negatives showed what his days would be like back in the height of apartheid repression. During the day, it was shooting at rallies and, at nights, in the smoky jazz clubs. 'That's why, in my contact sheets, you can see a funeral, then a party, then a gig. All the time I was photographing. I was at every gig,' Lombard said.
'The music was also linked to the political struggle. They were all involved. Not one musician ever said, 'No I can't play at this.' So you'd be at a funeral that afternoon and at night it would be a goomba [party]. We would be at a rally during the day, and then the jazz club at night.'
And it is this statement that encapsulates how South Africa's struggle for freedom is intertwined with a legacy of jazz and politically charged figures. As a photojournalist during the Eighties, he founded the Cape Town Press Centre in the city centre with renowned photojournalist John Rubython, and documented for BBC, NBC, AFP and local publications like Grassroots and South.
It was a facility where foreign media could come and work and they'd organised runners to guarantee safe passage into the townships. 'Everything was undercover. We ran that facility until Mandela was released in 1991.'
The centre was across an important jazz and hip-hop venue and club called Jazz Den/The Base where activists would hang out.
His peers were from the golden age of photojournalists, some have passed on: Peter Magubane, George Hallett, Omar Badsha, Rafs Mayet, Oscar Gutierrez and Gregory Franz.
Lombard was married to the anti-apartheid activist Colleen Rayson, and though she has been ill for many years, she would often accompany him to jazz concerts in Cape Town.
The couple met when she was 16 and the journalist Zubeida Jaffer describes them as 'a couple who were tied at the hip'. Lombard's three children — Yana, Chevan and Shadley — grew up with a great sense of photography and Shadley is also a photographer.
Tributes for Lombard poured in from musicians, and from political figures, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, the Democratic Alliance and The Good Party. In 2014, he was awarded the National Order of Ikhamanga in Silver in 2014 for his role working in jazz internationally.
Caption: The late poet James Matthews, writer & activist with Alexander Sinton High School students protesting outside their school in Athlone, Cape Town, during the nation-wide schools boycott in 1985. Photo by Rashid Lombard.
He gave us stages
Lombard loved music and, for as long as he was able to, he would attend gigs all over Cape Town. During his lifetime, he must have witnessed thousands of musicians playing. One of his greatest achievements is co-founding the largest jazz event in South Africa, now called The Cape Town International Jazz Festival. Originally called The North Sea Jazz Festival, he was director from 2000 to 2014, and Yana worked with him booking artists. He also co-founded EspAfrika in 1998, the company which runs the festival.
Prior to that he started a jazz club called Rosies at the V&A Waterfront, with Rubython and Jimi Matthews. Later, Rosies would become the name of a stage at the jazz festival. He also worked in radio at Fine Music Radio and P4.
On his tour to South Africa in May, drummer Kesivan Naidoo dedicated his performance at the Baxter Theatre to Lombard, based on their long friendship.
He shared this tribute: 'Today, we lost a giant. Rashid Lombard was more than a cultural icon, more than a mentor, more than a visionary. He was a father figure to an entire generation of South African musicians. A fierce believer in the transformative power of jazz. A documentarian of our stories. A builder of dreams. He gave us stages when there were none. He opened doors where only walls existed …
'Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for believing in all of us. May your journey onward be filled with light — and may we honour your life by continuing to make music, take up space, and tell our stories, boldly.'
Caption: Rashid Lombard with Kesivan Naidoo at The Bailey in Cape Town, January 2024. Photographed by Yasser Booley.
The Lessons he left behind
Lombard's skill was that of a brilliant connector; extremely driven and ambitious. In his presence, one felt that anything was possible and that there was a solution to every problem. He was deeply passionate about art, activism, education and photography and throughout his life opened doors for many and we owe so much to him for doing so.
He nurtured musicians, but more importantly, an entire arts community. He was passionate about education and he used the jazz festival as a medium for that to happen.
If it were not for Lombard, I would not be an arts journalist today. For many years, he ran two education programmes at his festival, one for arts journalism, taught by Gwen Ansell, and one for photography taught by many of his comrades, such as the late Peter McKenzie.
This course was essential to my education as a journalist and set the trajectory for the rest of my life. For a week, culminating in the festival, students would learn how to document jazz. I attended the arts journalism course in 2009. It was so good, I attended again in 2012, and later did the Arts Journalism Mentorship course taught by Fiona Lloyd.
About teaching this course Ansell says: 'Rashid was the reason the arts journalism course worked. He saw the strength of the idea immediately, and pulled out all the stops to make it work, including finding a budget for scholarships to draw in students from across Africa — and seeing visa issues for them were sorted out so they could negotiate sometimes difficult SA immigration procedures.
'And the first thing he agreed, right at the start of the very first programme, was that the festival would be totally hands-off on what students wrote, even if it was critical of the event. Not everybody else in festival admin agreed with him, but he defended that principle fiercely.
'That tells you about his politics — he not only understood, but lived, the role of the media as an agent of democracy and change. It really shows the decline of such political awareness since.'
Lombard also realised the importance of documentation and annually released a publication with images of jazz photography, these included;
Jazz Rocks: Six decades of music in South Africa
;
All That Jazz — a pictorial tribute
;
10th Anniversary of the Cape Town International Jazz Festival
and
Jazz, Blues, Swing: Six decades of music in South Africa.
An archive for all of us
Lombard's interest in archiving started in 1986, after being awarded a study and travel grant to work at the prestigious Magnum Photos in New York. From 1987, he was the chief photographer for
South Press
, the first alternative, anti-apartheid weekly newspaper in Cape Town.
Rayson worked with him, and started to help organise his archive but, soon after, she was detained by the apartheid authorities for five months. After she was released in 1988, she continued to organise the archive.
Caption: Rashid Lombard with Nelson Mandela in Soweto, three days after his release from prison in February 1990. Photo supplied by the family.
Our interview was about his passion and vision for a centre for photographers in South Africa — something that was desperately needed and an idea which Lombard worked on over the last decade of his life.
After leaving the jazz festival, digitising his archive became the top priority. He later partnered with the National Archives and the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture to make the collection publicly accessible online as a national heritage resource. His daughter Yana will carry on the mission to ensure this work continues.
Speaking about the memory required, and the need for photographers to have a personal hand in putting an archive together, Lombard said, 'You saw when I opened the file in the cupboard?
'I said, 'Oh there's Peter Magubane!' It does come back … I mean it's an important question. It's why it's so important to do this now with me, before I pass on. Let's face it, you're going to pass on at some time. So the urgency is now!'
Realising the lack of opportunities and support for photographers, Lombard's dream was to create a space to teach younger students and have a mentorship programme with older photographers. He wanted to preserve, digitise and move the entire archive into a building, which would also house a darkroom and other amenities affordable to photographers.
Caption: A group photo of South African photographers taken at Spier in 2021 including Fanie Jason, Oscar Gutierrez, Gregory Franz, Simon Shiffman, Aymeric Pelluguin and Siphiwe Mhlambi. Image supplied by Siphiwe Mhlambi.
His archive consists of 500 000 film negatives, alongside video, audio and posters, collected over 50 years.
'The idea was, instead of leaving all my archives to my kids — because it belongs to them, it's in the family trust — isn't it irresponsible for us to give them the task? They might want to do other things in life. But somebody has to look after it.
'And if a university is the custodian … for the next 100 years, maybe the university is still there, so that is a spot to leave it at. It's linked to the family and linked to me, but it's going to be around and will be accessible.'
For his dream, he said he wanted the best of everything: 'I don't touch anything if it's not state-of-the-art,' with the intention of setting up darkrooms and assuring, 'I will find the money for it.'
'We are writing a new curriculum, We are getting young people in to train them, we are setting up a darkroom, we're going to clean negatives. But we have complete control over it. We are going to set up a new centre. Get young people in to start looking at pictures, and work with older photographers.
'Get unemployed activists to look at the work and write about it. They might just look at the contact sheet and then take it further to younger people … How do you distribute that information by phone? So it's not just a place to study archives, it's a photographic centre.'
Lombard had taken part in numerous exhibitions since the Seventies and photographed some of the most important people in South Africa's history. In 1994, he was the personal photographer to Nelson Mandela during the election campaign.
Caption: Rashid Lombard, New York, 1986, photographed by Ernest Cole. Courtesy of the Rashid Lombard Archive (RLA)
He made it a personal mission to seek out the great photographer Ernest Cole, and was one of the last to photograph him in 1986. Their touching meeting formed part of the 2024 documentary
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
by Raoul Peck. Cole, who had not held the camera for a decade, borrowed Lombard's and photographed him.
Lombard's presence and demeanor suggested that he was part of a different era. He lived through all the smoke, from the grit of smoky newsrooms, to running away from explosions and teargas, to the smoke of cigarettes blowing away at late-night jazz gigs. Through it all, his lens lifted the veil for the truth, of which we are so thankful for. We remember him for all that he taught us.