Alf Kumalo - Telegraph Alf Kumalo was born on September 5 1930 and spent his formative years in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra then at Evaton, a town to the south of the city. There he attended the Wilberforce Institute, a high-achieving church school set up by Charlotte Maxeke, the first president of the Women's League of the African National Congress, where he is said to have stood out as a particularly bright pupil. Growing up, he mixed with the jazz greats Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela. Like them, he took pride in his appearance and was always impeccably turned out in well-cut suits, ties or cravats and a panama hat. He started out working as a court reporter for the Bantu World newspaper, where he would watch with admiration from the press benches as a young black lawyer named Nelson Mandela grilled bemused white witnesses. In the 1950s, having discovered photography, Kumalo went to work for Drum magazine, which celebrated black culture at a time when the apartheid authorities were seeking to paint the country's majority inhabitants as primitive "hewers of wood and drawers of water." His work took him around the country, and the continent. In Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1974 he photographed the world heavyweight champion George Foreman's defeat by Muhammad Ali in the "Rumble in the Jungle" - and reportedly later turned down a request by Ali to become his personal photographer. But his most critical role was at home, where he stayed close to Mandela's young wife Winnie as she endured the casual brutality of the security forces, and charted the lives of the children the jailed freedom fighter never saw grow up. When Mandela was released in 1990 - his face by then globally recognisable - Kumalo photographed him playing with his dog outside his Soweto home before accompanying him on trips to Buckingham Palace, New York and Norway, where Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As Kumalo's fame grew, he picked up numerous awards and won commissions for The New York Times and The Observer. The African National Congress said that the ANC and the people of South Africa were "forever indebted to Alf Kumalo for being at their service and striving to expose a system that was inhuman." In his later years, Kumalo continued to teach photography to young enthusiasts in Soweto. He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, their two children, and by seven children from a previous relationship and marriage. Alf Kumalo, born September 5 1930, died October 21 2012