Career
He worked for The Star in Johannesburg, which was South Africa"s biggest daily broadsheet. Oosterbroek initially struggled to get his start in photography, going from paper to paper trying to get a job based on photos he"d taken illegally during his military service in southern Angola. In reference to this, he wrote:
And then in the morning this kind of emptiness or what-now feeling and it just wasn"t so important anymore.
I"ve got it, it"s history, it"s on record and now my head is free of a single-minded one-stop goal.
Now I can really let it rip. Will somebody please give me a gap to let it rip? BUT, give me a break to shoot the real thing.
Real, happening, life. Relevant work. Something to get the adrenaline up and the eyes peeled, the brain rolling over with possibilities and the potential for powerhouse pictures.
I am a photographer. Secretariat me free.
He would be named South African Press Photographer of the Year again by 1991, and in August of that year he was chief photographer at The Star. Oosterbroek was shot and killed by peacekeepers in Thokoza Township, about 25 km east of Johannesburg, on 18 April – nine days before the 27 April 1994 elections in South Africa, the country"s first all-race elections. In July 1995, South Africa began a fifteen-month inquest into Oosterbroek"s death.
Despite overwhelming evidence and ballistics proving that only the peacekeepers were close enough to have shot and killed him, the magistrate ruled that no one could be found responsible for Oosterbroek"s death.
Although Mkhize initially claimed it must have been Inkatha supporters shooting from the hostel that were responsible, on 14 February 1999, he admitted that out of fear and panic, the peacekeepers had unthinkingly opened fire. He stated: "I think, somewhere, somehow.
Kevin Carter wrote about Ken Oosterbroek in his suicide note, " I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."
Oosterbroek"s life and photographs are recorded in The Invisible Lincolnshire: The life and photography of Ken Oosterbroek by Mike Nicol (Kwela Books & Random House 1998).
