AVAILABLE LIGHT, Omar Badsha and the struggle for change in South Africa

306pp., b/w & colour illus., maps, paperback, First SA Edition, Jacana, Johannesburg, 2025

ISBN: 9781431435739

First published in the USA in 2024.

Biography of South African activist, artist and documentary photographer Omar Badsha.

Omar Badsha was born in Durban in 1945 into a Gujarati Muslim family. He became politically active while at high school after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. He was Deputy Secretary of the Durban Students Union and joined the ANC underground. 

In 1981 Badsha was involved in the formation of the anti-apartheid photographers collective Afrapix. In 1982 he became the head of the photography unit of the Second Carnegie Commission on Poverty and Development and curated the exhibition and book South Africa: The cordoned heart. In 1984 he published his first photographic book Imijondolo, and in 1987 he established the Centre of Documentary Photography at the University of Cape Town. After the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, he became head of Western Cape Arts and Cultural Department, led the creation of the Federation of South African Cultural Organisations, and served on the political committee of the ANC’s Western Cape 1994 election campaign. In 2001 he published Imperial Ghetto, a study of life in the Grey Street complex of Durban, and edited With Our Own Hands, on the government's poverty relief programmes. In 2017 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Stellenbosch, and in 2018 President Cyril Ramaphosa awarded him the National Order of Ikhamanga (silver).

"In this outstanding book, Dan Magaziner provides a riveting portrait of Omar Badsha, one of South Africa’s great photographers and public historians, whose art and activism confronted racial oppression and forged non-racial realities. The book is a deep, sympathetic account of a complex, driven, and empathetic individual who was at the center of many of the major currents of South Africa’s resistance history. Available Light brings Magaziner’s formidable talents as a writer and historian to Badsha's compelling life and powerful art." Sean Jacobs, The New School, founder and publisher of Africa Is a Country

"Daniel Magaziner’s spirited and eloquently enthusiastic casting of Omar Badsha brings us to the brink of joy and sadness that preoccupied a generation of photographers, artists, and poets who indefatigably shaped and gave form to the struggle against apartheid. Guided by passion and politics, forged through networks that include luminaries such as Mafika Gwala and Dumile Feni, we encounter a weaving of an idea of non-racialism from strands of deep emotional ties and solidarities." Premesh Lalu, University of the Western Cape

Daniel Magaziner teaches South African and nineteenth- and twentieth-century African history at Yale University. He is the author of The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 and The Art of Life in South Africa.