Omar Badsha

Omar Badsha is one of South Africa's foremost documentary photographers, artists, political and trade union activists and an historian.^[1] He is an award winning artist and photographer and has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally.

Early life

He was born in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal on 27 June 1945. He is a third generation South African of Indian origin and comes from a Gujarati Muslim Sunni Vohra family. His father Ebrahim Badsha was one of the South African pioneer black artists and a founding member of Bantu, Indian, Coloured Arts (BICA) organisation started by Durban artists in 1951.

Contributions

Badsha is himself considered as one of the early pioneers of "resistance art" in the early 1960s. He became an anti-apartheid activist during his high schools days and he went on to play a significant role in that country's liberation history. He was one of the activists who revived the Natal Indian Congress in the 1970s and the independent left wing trade union movement that grew out of the famous 1973 Durban strikes. Badsha established and was the first secretary of the Chemical Workers Industrial Union. He was detained, harassed, and had a book of his "Letter To Farzanah" banned in the late seventies. He was one of those who was denied a passport and never allowed to travel outside the country until 1990.

He is the author of a number of photographic books and was the co-founder of the famous South African photographers collective, Afrapix. He is also the founder of South African History Online, South Africa's largest history website.

References