Gille de Vlieg
Gille de Vlieg (born 26 July 1940) is a photographer and anti-apartheid activist. She was born in England and moved to South Africa with her mother when she was 3 years old. During apartheid she was a member of both the Black Sash and one of the few women members of the Afrapix photography collective. Her images have been published in newspapers, magazines and books nationally and internationally. Unlike many of her counterparts, de Vlieg received little public acclaim for her work up until recently. About her work, she says, "I wanted to make a contribution to an alternative view of South Africa, a view not seen on the South African TV screen then." Her images cover the following topics: land removals, rural lifestyle, township lifestyle, gender lifestyle, United Democratic Front (UDF), anti-harassment campaign, police violence, protests against death penalty, funerals, Black Sash, protests against incorporation into Bophuthatswana; Release Mandela Campaign, End Conscription Campaign (ECC), conscientious objectors, African National Congress (ANC) Welcome Home Rally, Day of the Vow (Geloftedag), street children, and homeless people. Life Gille de Vlieg was born Gillian Ruth Hemson in Plymouth, England in 1940 during a Nazi bombing raid on the city. After losing their home in a later bombing raid, she and her mother relocated to Durban, South Africa in February 1944. Her father had been sent by the Admiralty (Royal Navy) to work on radar installations at the Simon's Town Naval Base and later on Salisbury Island, Durban. In 1958, de Vlieg was trained as a nurse at Greys Hospital in Pietermaritzburg. After finishing her diploma, she worked in London and met her first husband, Iain Paton Millar, a journalist. After a short period in Katanga Province of the DRC she moved to Johannesburg in 1963, where her daughters Ruth and Katherine were born. Katherine died when nine months old and her marriage to Iain disintegrated just prior to the birth of her son, Andrew. She lived for a time in Botha's Hill and Durban where she met and married Rob de Vlieg, a sail maker. They moved back to Johannesburg to set up his business in 1975. It was not until 1982 that she joined the Johannesburg Black Sash as a volunteer and she was soon put onto their regional committee and became a vice-chairperson. It was during the height of student riots in Tembisa in 1984 that Gille de Vlieg first made contact with Greg Thulare, an organiser for COSAS in Tembisa. She was slowly introduced to the politics of the UDF and ANC during this time. One of her responsibilities at Black Sash was to work with rural communities which were threatened with removal to the homelands, and she soon became interested in taking photos. When Paul Weinberg asked her to join Afrapix, she replied, "Okay, I will come to work for Afrapix, but I'm not working as a secretary, I want to be a photographer." She had a camera and a couple of lenses but knew very little about photography.