The South African exile ran the IDAF's photo operation in London, sending images of apartheid brutality to media and campaigners worldwide.
South Africa has lost a quiet warrior of the anti-apartheid struggle. Paddy Donnelly, who moved to London in the early 1980s and spent his working life backing the fight against white minority rule, has died at 70.
In London, Donnelly joined the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa (IDAF). The organisation paid the legal costs of people put on trial or locked up for anti-apartheid activity, so that those who stood up to the regime did not have to face the courts alone.
IDAF also held a large archive of photographs documenting apartheid, and Donnelly ran that side of the operation. He processed images of ongoing state violence and sent them out to media outlets, campaign groups and many other organisations. In an era of censorship and denial, those pictures helped put the regime's brutality in front of audiences far beyond South Africa's borders.
Donnelly was also an accomplished photographer, and many of his own photos sit in the archive he helped manage. His legacy is in the images that carried the story of apartheid, and the movement against it, around the world.
