LIKE many young urban blacks of the time Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole was hip - a dandy dresser with big dreams to match his fashionable wardrobe.

Growing up with local jazz maestro Julian Bahula, Kole had high regard for the music of Miles Davies, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane and other jazz musos who made the 1950s more palatable than the apartheid system had planned them to be.

In a yellow VW Beetle he had his life ahead of him and could only go one way - up.

One with an eye for a good picture from a very early age, he was just about to live his dream when he hit the offices of Drum magazine in Johannesburg. He was quickly taken under the wing of celebrated photographer Jurgen Schadeberg, who could smell talent a mile away.

This is the same famed era of such colossal photographers as Peter Magubane and Alf Kumalo, who could not hold a candle to young Kole in the area of snapping away to good prize-winning effect.

He could easily have survived to make a name for himself, the same way Schadeberg, Magubane, Kumalo et al have done.

Alas, the problem with Kole was that he was too damn good for a black man. He didn't know his place.

On top of his fine photographs, which chronicled apartheid South Africa and how it treated the black Africans. Kole, a cheeky native in the eyes of the racists who held sway at the time, wanted more. More of what apartheid could not grant him.

The native wanted to publish a book and engrave his name in the history books!

By the time House of Bondage was published Kole was in New York, a new black man called Ernest Cole. He'd given apartheid the middle finger.

This book, and every single picture in it, stands as a worthy artistic monument not only to Cole but every black talent apartheid had sought to destroy.