PHOTOGRAPHER James Oatway’s remarkable photographs of the murder of Emmanuel Sithole in Alexandra, which appeared on last weekend’s Sunday Times front page, will be seared into our collective mind. These images will dominate our memory of the violence of the past few weeks.For the first time, the targets of the violence had a face, a name, a life and a personality — the humanising elements that have been absent in much of the coverage.Dealing with President Jacob Zuma’s criticism of the pictures as damaging to SA’s international image, and his request for a new "patriotism" among journalists that would have us conspire to hide such things from the world, is easy. It would be a false patriotism that shielded us from our responsibility to confront this head on. Mr Zuma is using the language of the apartheid government when it denounced the powerful images from the township uprising of the 1980s, and US president Richard Nixon on the terrible images of the Vietnam War that helped turn ...
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