Omar Badsha (born 27 June 1945) is a South African documentary photographer, artist, political and trade union activist and an historian. He is a self-taught artist. He has exhibited his art in South Africa and internationally. In 2015 he won the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Art. In 2017 he received an honorary doctorate Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil), for his groundbreaking work in the field of documentary photography in South Africa. He was also awarded a Presidential honor The Order of Ikhamanga in Silver for "His commitment to the preservation of our country’s history through ground-breaking and well-balanced research, and collection of profiles and events of the struggle for liberation" Early life Badsha was born in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal on 27 June 1945. He is a third-generation South African of Indian origin and comes from a Gujarati Muslim Sunni Bohra family. His father Ebrahim Badsha was one of the South African pioneer black artists and a founding member of Bantu, Indian, Coloured Arts (BICA) organisation started by Durban artists in 1951. His artistry was impacted by his father's zest for Arabic calligraphy, the artwork of Cecil Skotnes and later, in life by the work of Dumile Feni. Contributions In the early 1960s, Badsha produced "resistance art" and won a number of awards including Sir Basil Schonland prize in 1965 and the Oppenheimer award in 1969 after his work was featured in the Johannesburg exhibition Artists of Fame and Promise. Badsha's art has featured in many exhibitions in 1970, his first solo exhibition was held at the Artists Gallery in Cape Town. He became an anti-apartheid activist during his high schools days. He was one of the activists who revived the Natal Indian Congress in the 1970s and the independent left-wing trade union movement that grew out of the famous 1973 Durban strikes. Badsha established and was the first secretary of the Chemical Workers Industrial Union. During this time he was detained and harassed. He was denied a passport and never allowed to travel outside the country until 1990. In 1982 Badsha cofounded the multiracial organization Afrapix. They took photojournalistic photographs of effects and impact of apartheid with the aim to create a picture library and "stimulate documentary photography". In 1987 helped establish The University of Cape Town's Centre for documentary photography. Badsha was the head of the photography unit of the Second Carnegie Commission on Poverty