The Imagination of Rashid Lombard

Rashid Lombard, who died on 4 June 2025, documented apartheid’s struggle and later shaped Cape Town’s jazz and media, leaving a profound cultural legacy.

Rashid Lombard, New York, 1986, photographed by Ernest Cole.

Rashid Lombard was someone you’d always see when something important was happening that connected politics, media, and the arts. Whether with a camera documenting the struggle against apartheid or later, in a free South Africa, shaping the jazz culture of Cape Town (he launched the Cape Town International Jazz Festival), he seemed to be everywhere in and around the city. He had both national and international standing, but he will perhaps be best remembered for his role in shaping media and culture in that city.

On Facebook, Kesivan Naidoo, the drummer and bandleader who was close to Rashid and his family, posted about the impact of the Cape Town International Jazz Festival: “He gave us stages when there were none. He opened doors where only walls existed… Rashid created a platform that didn’t just showcase South African excellence - it nurtured it, protected it, celebrated it. For so many of us, that festival was the first time we were seen. Heard. Validated. He changed the course of our lives with that gift.”

We didn’t know each other well, though he had that presence, like an elder who encourages you with a wink and a nod and I had been to his house for a “function.” You couldn’t miss him: the effortless style, the rolling R’s. But I know his son, Shadley, and I’m thinking of him today.

Rashid was born in 1951 in a cosmopolitan part of Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha), in a multiracial community later destroyed by apartheid. He always had swagger. The cleric and poet Michael Weeder, writing on Facebook earlier today, remembered Rashid in this way: “The original clevah vannie Groot Baai” [The original clever from the Big Bay]. Rashid’s family moved to Cape Town when he was a young man.

According to an obituary released by his family, Rashid trained as an architectural draftsman and later as an industrial photographer before working as a news photographer, television sound recordist, and journalist with the alternative press. In a 2022 interview for the Johannesburg weekly, Mail & Guardian, the journalist and writer Niren Tolsi described anti-apartheid Rashid as: “A hard livings cat from a generation that loved and drank and danced and argued prodigiously and then stood up to the Man with the sort of fearless insouciance and fight rare in this age of superficial social media ‘politics’ and ‘activism’.”

After apartheid, Rashid continued his work in the media, including stints at two Cape Town music radio stations, Fine Music Radio and P4. In 2014, he was awarded the National Order of Ikhamanga in Silver by the South African government for his role in promoting South African jazz internationally.

Many profiles will be written about him, and Facebook will be filled with tributes to his extraordinary life. But it is worth contemplating the weight of his achievements: He was one of a generation of Black men and women who bore the full weight of apartheid—born into it, yet managed, despite the constraints placed in front and above them, to resist and break free from its constraints while oppressed by it, to imagine and then work to construct an alternative society on its ruins.

His most enduring legacy for future generations is the Rashid Lombard Archive at the University of the Western Cape. (I’d recommend reading that Tolsi interview with Rashid about its launch.)

Ernest Cole photographed by Rashid Lombard.

Rashid has the distinction of being the last person to photograph Ernest Cole, the legendary South African photographer behind “House of Bondage” (1967), one of the earliest and most important photographic records of apartheid. Cole had fled South Africa with the negatives and published the book in the US. It contributed to his exile. In the early 1970s, he photographed the American South and New York City, but that work had hardly been seen publicly. By the 1980s, Cole was mainly living homeless or in shelters and in failing health. In 1986, while on an internship with Magnum Photos in New York City, Rashid was introduced to Cole by musicians Abdullah Ibrahim and Sathima Bea Benjamin. The two men spent a considerable amount of time together, as South African black creatives and intellectuals often do when they encounter each other outside the country. Wondering through the city, Rashid took several photos of Cole.

During one of their meetings, at the apartment where Rashid was staying, Cole asked to borrow Rashid’s camera and confessed that he hadn’t touched a camera for at least a decade. He took a few images of Rashid and handed the camera back. The photograph, above, that survived posterity, shows Rashid, looking very calm and staring at a light meter, and part of his face reflected in the mirror.

Rashid and Cole’s meeting became a key part of Raoul Peck’s 2024 documentary “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.” According to a February 2025 interview with Peck and the film’s editor, Alexandra Strauss, the images Rashid took of Cole enhanced the film’s emotional quality:

“We had [Cole’s friend] Struan [Douglas]’s photos of Ernest from the [early 1960s] because there were not so many portraits of Cole. But there is a series of pictures of Cole—the last pictures taken in the ’80s by the South African photographer [Rashid Lombard]. At first, we had only two. By the end of the edit, we discovered nearly ten photos of him. It changed the sequence of their meeting in New York completely, because the photos were so amazing … It became one of the most beautiful sequences. We discovered [Cole] suddenly as an old man, and rewrote the voiceover with what Rashid Lombard told us. ‘The camera is cold’—that line came from what Ernest said to Rashid. It allowed us to tell the moment from Ernest’s point of view.”

This morning’s obituary noted that Cole’s decision to photograph Rashid could be interpreted as “a gesture of deep respect and recognition.” I agree.

It feels right to end with what Rashid told Niren in that 2022 interview:

“Our archives tell our story in a language of our own; a language that is not the conqueror’s language — if we don’t tell our story, especially to the children and those to come, it will be told by others and our historical narrative will lose its truth. This will leave our children indelibly disconnected — a great tragedy that must be circumvented. That is why it is essential to preserve archives.”