The South African photographer who captured the famous black-and-white picture of a dying 13-year-old activist shot by apartheid police during the 1976 Soweto uprising has died. Sam Nzima died aged 83 in hospital on Saturday in the country’s Mpumalanga province, the presidency said on Sunday.

His photograph of a dying Hector Pieterson being carried away by a distraught fellow student after security forces opened fire on young people protesting in Soweto township on 16 June 1976 turned the world’s attention to the brutality of the apartheid regime. Those riots, led by high school students, became a watershed in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Over three days, at least 170 people were killed, with some estimates putting the death toll at several hundred over the following month.

Protests spread across South Africa and a new era of black activism emerged that eventually led to the fall of the apartheid regime and Nelson Mandela’s election as president in 1994.(theguardian)…[+]