Paddy Donnelly obituary

Paddy Donnelly came to London from South Africa in the early 80s to work for the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa View image in fullscreen Paddy Donnelly came to London from South Africa in the early 80s to work for the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa Obituary Paddy Donnelly obituary My husband, Paddy Donnelly, who has died aged 70, was a South African who moved in the early 1980s to London. There he worked for the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa (IDAF), which funded the legal costs of people tried or imprisoned for anti-apartheid activity. In addition to its legal work, the IDAF had a large archive of photographs relating to apartheid, and Paddy ran that side of the operation, processing and distributing photos of ongoing state violence to media outlets, campaigning groups and many other organisations. He was an accomplished photographer himself, and many of his photos were held in the archive. He had begun ’s camps, and when he came to the UK he photographed anti-apartheid political meetings as well as visiting or exiled South African singers, musicians and activists. View image in fullscreen Paddy Donnelly’s photograph of the exiled South African musician Robert Sithole playing the pennywhistlePaddy was born in Germiston, south-east of Johannesburg, to parents of Irish descent: John, a bottle store manager, and Peggy (nee Sheridan), a yoga teacher. After attending the Christian Brothers school in Boksburg, near Germiston, he did national service in the Defence Force, where he avoided any serious soldiering by becoming a photographer. Afterwards he studied journalism and music at Rhodes University, Eastern Cape, before moving on to teach photography at Mafikeng College (now Mahikeng City College) in North West Province. In his early 20s, over a two-year period, his father, mother and sister Marge all died of cancer, and after their deaths he decided to emigrate to the British Isles, first to be a photographer in Dublin and then to London, where in 1983 he joined the IDAF. We met when I visited the IDAF to source some photos for the publications section of World University Service, where I worked, and after many years together we married in 2016. After four years at the IDAF, Paddy moved to the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod) in London, where for more than a decade he was their media officer, also briefing photographers who were sent to record projects that the agency supported around the world.