Chapter 2
The Apartheid Press

In the ragged, slow-motion revolution that convulses South Africa, black journalists play a critical role. Their beat is the war zone: the townships and bantustans. It is virtually impossible for white reporters to cover the fighting. They don't speak the languages that are essential for getting around. The complexities of black politics and black society—not to mention the intricacies of township geography—are really comprehensible only to those who live among them. Also, of course, simply being white in a black township today is dangerous. Thus, local black reporters are often the only source of accurate news about the conflict in South Africa. The government is aware of this fact, and spends a great deal of time and energy harassing black journalists—jailing them, "banning" them, interrogating and torturing them, and closing down black community newspapers.

I had wanted to spend time with black reporters on a white liberal paper—the Star is such a paper—because their position seemed to me extraordinarily complex, placing them, as it does, among so many conflicting forces: the police, their editors, the paper's owners, and, above all, the black community, which is itself a complex network of competing political and economic forces.

Like the society as a whole, the press in South Africa exhibits an impressively divided personality. People like to say that one must read half a dozen different newspapers to have any idea what's going on in the country. Linguistic differences alone account for some of this fragmentation; South Africa has two official languages (English and Afrikaans) and nine or ten other languages are widely spoken. Of course, the press also reflects its owners: the country has twenty-five major daily and weekly papers, and each of them can be clearly identified with one of the country's two dominant white groups. There is no tradition of non-aligned newspapers in South Africa—no paper that can plausibly claim to be even its region's paper of record, let alone the nation's. Ethnic diversity aside, the political terra firma on which such a centrist institution could be constructed does not exist.

The Afrikaans-language press, which consists today of six major dailies and one national Sunday paper, had its origins, during the early years of this century, in Afrikaner political aspirations. Papers were launched not as commercial ventures but as organs of the National Party. They often carried little or no hard news; their editors were politicians, not journalists. The Afrikaans press played a crucial role in the National Party's rise to power, in 1948, on a platform it called apartheid. The first Nationalist Prime Minister, D. F. Malan, had previously been the editor of Cape Town's Die Burger , and H. F. Verwoerd, perhaps the most influential of Malan's successors as Prime Minister, had previously been the editor of Johannesburg's Die Transvaler . (Both men were Dutch Reformed ministers before becoming editors. Not surprisingly, neither distinguished himself as a newsman.) All the Afrikaans newspapers are owned by prominent National Party members, and their boards of control were until recently dominated by Nationalist cabinet ministers. In the last few years, the companies that own the papers have shown their first profits ever, but these are usually attributed to the lucrative government printing contracts—for telephone directories, school textbooks, and the like—that the companies are routinely awarded.

Also in the last few years, some Afrikaans newspapers have occasionally shown a small but unprecedented measure of editorial independence from the government, reflecting the intense debates taking place inside the National Party over "reform." And the two big Afrikaans publishing companies, Perskor and Nasionale Pers, are in fact associated with different wings of the National Party—Perskor with the party's Transvaal branch, Nasionale Pers with the Cape Nationalists led by P. W. Botha—and are surprisingly bitter rivals. Still, the Afrikaans newspapers address themselves exclusively to the ruling white Afrikaner community. Virtually no one else reads them, and other South Africans tend to see them as little more than government mouthpieces. (Actually, they are sometimes much more than mouthpieces. In 1986, the Johannesburg morning daily, Beeld, was discovered by the Observer of London to be actively collaborating in the government's campaign to get the African National Congress, South Africa's leading black-liberation movement, expelled from its offices in Britain. The Observer found that Beeld had been plotting to smear the ANC by secretly monitoring meetings in London between an ANC representative and a British gunsmith during which the gunsmith attempted to sell arms to the ANC. Beeld, whose editors were in cahoots with the gunsmith, planned to expose any sale, and thus increase the pressure on the British government to throw out the ANC.)

The one pro-government English-language paper, the Citizen, of Johannesburg, was launched with secret government funds as part of an ambitious domestic and international propaganda campaign in 1976. After the sources of its financing were exposed in the Information Department scandal of 1978, the Citizen was hastily bought by Perskor. Although its editorial line did not change, and its advertising-to-copy ratio suggests an ongoing financial hemorrhage, the Citizen has somehow survived, confounding widespread expectations that its credibility problem would prove terminal. Today the Citizen reigns as the only general-interest English-language morning paper in Johannesburg. Its tone is shrill, its format tabloid, and its small staff worked like drayhorses, despite the paper's heavy reliance on

wire-service stories to fill its pages. The Citizen, like the Afrikaans papers, supports P. W. Botha's government in virtually everything it does—its nickname among journalists is "the Government Gazette"—and usually appears to be addressed to an entirely white readership.

Radio and television in South Africa are state-controlled. Television was only introduced in 1975, after years of resistance to the idea from the leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church, whose influence in the National Party and the government is almost impossible to overstate, and who feared the moral decay, corruption, and subversive foreign ideas they expected TV to bring. Radio is broadcast on sixteen channels, in a variety of languages. Until recently, television was a whites-only affair, broadcasting half in Afrikaans, half in English, though three channels for blacks have now been added, broadcasting in vernacular African languages. The South African Broadcasting Corporation, which runs both TV and radio, is intimately associated with the National Party. Its top officials are all members. In fact, they are usually taken directly from the ranks of the Broederbond, a semi-secret Afrikaner leadership group to which every prime minister since 1948 has belonged. Although the SABC is ostensibly independent of direct government control, its true status sometimes appears even in the statements of government officials. Once, P. W. Botha was threatening the opposition press with further curbs, during a speech in Parliament, and mentioned that he would, for his part, be ordering the SABC "not to headline subversive or revolutionary elements."

No one has ever accused the SABC of giving prominence to such elements. Indeed, the picture of South African life available on South African TV and radio seems to bear only the most distant resemblance to what is actually happening in the country. American sitcoms and series (often dubbed into Afrikaans or an African vernacular) predominate on TV—The A Team and The Cosby Show are current favorites—and news reporting is selective and tendentious, customarily presenting only the government's view of events while attacking or ignoring its opponents. Most of those opponents consider the SABC to be worse than

useless as a news service, though I have also heard claims that certain programs offer inadvertent but helpful forecasts of the state's intentions. For example, immediately after a morning radio program called Comment attacked Dr. Allan Boesak, the anti-apartheid leader, for two days running in 1985, Dr. Boesak's home was raided and he was jailed without charges. Again, in May, 1986, Comment broadcast a host of accusations against some of South Africa's neighbors. Within days, the South African military had launched bloody raids against Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Botswana.

Within a divided press like South Africa's, there is often no agreement even about what constitutes news. On June 20, 1986, for example, P. W. Botha gave a speech at a graduation parade at the South African Police College in Pretoria. The Afrikaans press covered the speech in great detail, with some papers running page-one photographs of the State President. The TV evening news devoted considerable time to the speech. And the next day's Citizen outdid itself, running no fewer than four stories. One, headlined "PW WARNS AGAINST NEW PUBLIC HOLIDAY IDEALS," spelled out the dangers of the "new holidays which some people in South Africa want to introduce." A second story, headlined "CUBANS BLOCK PLAN FOR SWA," blamed the Angolan government for South Africa's failure to implement the UN Security Council's resolution on Namibian independence. Like the holidays story, this was wire-service fare from the South African Press Association and, again like the holidays piece, one had to read into the second paragraph to discover that the story was actually drawn entirely from the Police College speech. Then there was a straightforward article, signed by "Citizen Reporter," about the graduation parade, describing the ceremony and listing which awards Botha presented to whom and for what. Finally, there was a long, bylined piece with a large, bold headline: "PW TELLS POLICE OF 'THE GREAT LIE' ABOUT SA." This piece carried highlights from the State President's speech. "Our enemies latched onto the word 'apartheid' and in a sly manner transformed it into the strongest weapon in the onslaught against freedom and civilization in our country. A carefully calculated

propaganda game is unfolding against us internationally and even internally, specially with the assistance of some of the media," Botha said, clearly not thinking of the Citizen .

I watched the Police College speech on a television in the Star newsroom with a group of Star reporters and editors. They laughed at some of the more histrionic lines ("You stand in the front line against the forces of communist enslavement and crime," the State President told the new policemen) and at the figure Botha cut with his small black homburg perched on his large bald head. The next day's Star did not run a line of the Police College speech. None of the opposition papers did. As far as they were concerned, there had been nothing new or noteworthy in it.

It is one of the peculiarities of the South African scene that, although Afrikaans-speaking whites outnumber English-speaking whites three to two, the English-language newspapers dominate the press, even among whites, accounting for three-quarters of daily circulation. There are about twenty of them, and they are the largest and most successful papers and always have been. What is especially peculiar is that, while a sizable majority of whites, including many English speakers, support the Nationalist government, the English-language papers (except for the Citizen ) have consistently opposed it, often vociferously. In fact, the English press was responsible for uncovering the Information Department scandal, which brought down some of the highest figures in the National Party, including the then Prime Minister, B. J. Vorster.

The Rand Daily Mail of Johannesburg was, until its demise in April, 1985, the flagship of the English press and, it is safe to say, the government's least favorite newspaper. There are many explanations for the death of the Mail, but mismanagement is never far down anyone's list. The South African newspaper industry has been shrinking for the past decade, largely owing to losses of advertising to television. Two companies own all but a handful of the English papers, and the smaller of the two, South African Associated Newspapers, which was the Mail's owner, has had chronic financial problems. The larger company, the Argus

Printing and Publishing Company, continues to field nine major papers, six of them dailies, and to show a healthy profit. The Argus Company's largest and most successful paper—the largest and most successful daily in South Africa—is the Johannesburg afternoon paper, the Star .

The Star was actually founded in Grahamstown, in the eastern Cape, in 1871 as the Eastern Star, and moved to Johannesburg in 1887, only one year after the city itself sprang into existence on the site of the great Witwatersrand gold strike. Its early financial backers were the British-owned mining houses of the Witwatersrand; its first readers were the British miners who flocked to the region to seek their fortunes. Since both of these groups had fierce differences with the government of the time—the old Transvaal Boer Republic, which insisted on treating them as rightless aliens—the Star's role as critic of Afrikaner rule was established immediately. The paper was even implicated in an abortive British coup in 1897, and as a result was briefly shut down by the Boer authorities. The tensions between British and Afrikaners culminated in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, and there are those who say that the Star, in its opposition to the present government, is basically still fighting the Boer War. (The English-language press has actually been the nemesis of conservative Afrikaners since the first newspapers were established in the Cape Colony in the 1820s. The "liberal, philanthropic, independent press" was even blamed for driving a large band of early Afrikaners out of the Cape in 1834 on what became known as the Great Trek. This celebrated expedition of conquest and settlement in the African interior is more often seen, however, as a response to the abolition of slavery in the Cape.) Tensions reached another sort of pitch during the Second World War, when many Afrikaners, including H. F. Verwoerd, the future Prime Minister, were pro-German. After the Star ran an editorial, early in the war, attacking Verwoerd's paper, Die Transvaler, for publishing Nazi propaganda, Verwoerd sued for defamation. He lost the case, as the court found that "he did support Nazi propaganda, he did make his paper a tool of the Nazis in South Africa, and he knew it," and he was later jailed for

the duration of the war. Today, some of the changed terms of the conflict between the English-language press and Afrikaner nationalists are perhaps reflected in the penchant among government supporters for referring to the Star, with the Manichaean humor they favor, as "the Red Star ."

The Star's editors call constantly, in columns and editorials that are often eloquent, for an end to apartheid, and for immediate negotiations between the government and the leaders of the black majority. The paper's position is not always subtle. A recent page-one headline fairly roared, "FREE MANDELA NOW." The story beneath turned out to concern a demand by leading South African businessmen for the release of the jailed leader, but the Star 's endorsement of the demand was lost on no one. Whether the Star has been able to fill the Rand Daily Mail's shoes, politically and journalistically, is a much-debated point. Rex Gibson, the acting editor-in-chief of the Star while I was around, and a former editor of the Mail , says simply, "We have become the lightning rod."

At first glance, the Star looks like any British provincial evening paper. Color photographs and bright three-color ads for supermarket specials on Rhino Table Salt flank serious coverage of national and international news. The paper has a substantial business section, and a very substantial classified section, particularly on Saturdays, when the Property Supplement runs. The Sunday Star is two hours' reading for the moderately conscientious, and comes complete with a magazine. But, with a closer look at the domestic news, the Star 's homely familiarity dissolves. The staple stories and master images belong to a William Burroughs nightmare: restless natives, police snuffing out pockets of resistance, a daily stream of truly Fascist ministerial pronouncements. And this dark fare seems to spill its menace across the ads for fish, beer, duvets, lounge suits, microwaves, the "Maxiciser Home Gym," the pet-advice columns, the brief, affected book reviews. In this unsettling context, the fine cadences of principled opposition nearly always to be found on the Star 's op-ed pages, along with the contributions of the paper's black reporters—their African surnames fairly dancing on the

bylines—are a special relief: beacons in a racist darkness, sweet reason in the midst of major madness.

Overseas visitors to South Africa are invariably struck by the vigor and quality of the English-language press. In truth, the press is much freer to express opinions than it is to report facts. Censorship is a major feature of the South African political and cultural landscape. Thousands of books, films, magazines, and plays have been banned by the Nationalist government, for reasons ranging from the obvious to the incomprehensible. Journalists contend with close to a hundred laws restricting what they may report and with a fearsome array of measures that the government may take (and has taken) against journalists, including arrest and incarceration without charges, prosecution under a slew of sweeping security laws, and arbitrary "banning"—the peculiarly South African punishment, inflicted by the Minister of Law and Order, that amounts to erasing a person from society, with no reasons ever given. Banning orders usually run from two to five years, always forbid a journalist to work, and always include some form of house arrest; the practice has been described as "a jail sentence carried out without the expense to the state of feeding and housing the prisoner." Newspapers may not quote a banned person, or publish almost anything about the South African military, prisons, nuclear industry, or security police^[*] without official permission. A book called The Newspaperman's Guide to the Law, a 332-page litany of peril, written by a lawyer, is to be found on virtually every working reporter's desk (every reporter in the opposition press, that is—no one working on a government paper, or in television or radio, has, to the best of my knowledge, ever been prosecuted). What is more, all these laws represent press restrictions under "normal" conditions. Under the current state of emergency, extensive new curbs have been introduced.

Probably the most insidious press censorship of all, however, is self-imposed. For more than twenty years, no South African

* Sometimes known as the Special Branch, or the Security Branch, this plainclothes wing of the police deals only with "political" crime. Its size is a state secret, but its power has grown immensely in recent years.

newspaper dared to quote Nelson Mandela; then someone noticed that it was apparently not illegal to do so. The scope of the laws is often vague and arbitrary, and the perpetual uncertainty about what will be allowed leads to even more caution than is necessary. Thus, self-censorship is more effective than official censorship, which at least can't restrict expression it hasn't foreseen.

All the uncertainty is exacerbated by a widespread (and quite justified) suspicion among reporters that they are being watched. The police routinely tap the telephones of journalists—including those at the Star , Rex Gibson assured me—and, by the Minister of Law and Order's own admission, have informers in place in every English-language newsroom. "No journalist should be surprised or disappointed about that" Louis Le Grange, then Minister of Law and Order, told the Committee to Protect Journalists in 1983. "No journalist of any experience should try to bluff me and say that's not to be expected." Rex Gibson once suggested, only half-jokingly, to the Commissioner of Police that they really should stop double-paying certain members of the Star 's staff, but the effect of this situation on newsroom morale and professional solidarity is, of course, no joke. Neither does Jon Qwelane laugh when he talks about what he calls "The Pretenders"—police who masquerade as reporters and TV news crews, filming meetings and funerals and otherwise "making our job more dangerous than it already is."

Direct intimidation is also used at a surprisingly high level. The editors of all major newspapers are regularly compelled to attend meetings, called by the Cabinet or the police or both, at which the government makes known its views about the proper role of the press in combatting the "revolutionary onslaught" it is convinced it faces. That role does not include knowing a great deal about the government's operations. There is no Freedom of Information Act, or anything resembling it, in South Africa. There are, however, laws that require reporters to check any story concerning police actions with the police themselves, with the result that reporters spend an appalling amount of their time waiting for telexed replies to their telexed inquiries to police headquarters in Pretoria.

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Although the South African mass media have always catered primarily to white needs and interests, and reflected white views and values, the majority of the country's newspaper readers, radio listeners, and television watchers (not to mention people) are black. There is no black-owned general newspaper in South Africa, but there are a number of papers directed exclusively at black readers. The major black papers in Johannesburg are the Sowetan, an Argus-owned daily with a circulation of 120,000; City Press, which is owned by Nasionale Pers and puts out two editions a week, with a circulation of about 160,000; and New Nation , a church-owned bi-weekly with a circulation of 60,000. All these papers have black editors who, while they may operate without direct interference from their employers, know well the limits of free expression in South Africa. Each of them has spent time in jail. In fact, the claim so often heard that South Africa enjoys "the freest press in Africa" could never have applied to anything but the white press. Many small, independent papers have been banned or hounded out of existence. Those black community papers that survive are constantly seeing their editions banned, their offices burned down, their reporters and editors attacked and jailed. Four major papers, all of them predecessors of the Sowetan, were banned, each time costing the Argus Company large sums that it does not plan to pay again—with the result that the Sowetan is, in the words of its editor, "quite muffled."

The initial impression gained from a big-city newsstand in South Africa—of a rich variety of voices, the basic condition for a healthy press—is, therefore, largely an illusion. Only a relatively narrow band of opinion is allowed to publish. Still, the black papers are notably fiercer in their opposition to the government than any of the white papers. Black papers are understaffed, however, and lack the resources to do much beyond covering local news. Moreover, the white papers often compete for black readers by publishing so-called extra editions, for black readers. Traditionally, extra editions have been strong on sports, sex, crime, the sensational, and the supernat-

ural, and have been scorned by black spokesmen for their condescension.

The Star Africa edition has some of the quality of a traditional extra. It often replaces the first business page of the white edition with a page of letters from black readers, news from the rest of Africa, and a medical advice column directed at blacks. And its sports section, which replaces news of rugby, a predominantly white sport, with news of soccer, a predominantly black sport, has a distinctly downmarket tone. But the Star Africa edition distinguishes itself from the white editions primarily by its news selection. News from the black townships and the bantustans is given more space and prominence than news that is mainly of interest to whites. On June 4, 1986, to pick a day at random, page-one stories in the white edition about the failure of an insurance company and charges that the national rugby side had received secret payments for a match became, in the Africa edition, a story about blacks defying police restrictions on the funeral of an unrest victim and a story about four black administrators resigning under pressure from a government-sponsored township council. Sometimes the same story will run under different headlines in the different editions. Thus, when a black woman won a house in a white suburb in a sweepstakes, causing the authorities some consternation, the Africa edition of June 19 brusquely announced, "BLACK HAWKER WINS WHITE HOUSE," while the white edition went with the gentler "CONTEST WINNER WILL RECEIVE NEW HOME IN DAVEYTON."

Sometimes the differences between editions seem even more cosmetic. On June 3, both black and white editions ran page-one photos to illustrate the onset of cold weather, the difference being that the white edition used white subjects for its photo while the Africa edition used blacks. Even such innocent fare can become the occasion for sharp commentary, though. The white-edition photo showed two teenage girls looking darling in ski sweaters, ski caps, and wool gloves; the Africa edition photo showed a group of men, women, and children who had lost their squatters' shacks in police-directed vigilante attacks shivering around a fire in the rain.

Separate editions reflect the separate realities that black and white South Africans inhabit. (And comparing exclusively-black papers with exclusively-white papers provides far starker reflections. Thus, the large advertisements for firearms in Die Vaderland —urging whites, who are already the most heavily-armed population per capita in the world, to protect their families with yet more Lugers and shotguns—become, in City Press, small ads for toy pistols that make "a big sound just like a real gun"—real guns being effectively illegal for blacks to own.) Separate editions also carry heavy loads of implied information about the colliding passions and the vastly different priorities of oppressor and oppressed. In the white editions, the deaths of white soldiers are mourned and the rise of a far-right white political movement is carefully monitored. The Africa edition ignores the white far right—while reporting extensively on factional splits within the black resistance—and turns its attention to white soldiers only when they attack a black funeral. The white editions don't record the funeral, much less the attack, and most white Star readers don't know even the foremost figures or the basic issues in the debates that divide the black resistance. Papers like the Star are widely criticized for deepening the gulfs of apartheid with separate editions instead of trying to bridge them. But, while Rex Gibson, sensitive to this criticism, was trying to reduce the differences between his black and white editions, and declaring his intention of eventually unifying them altogether—spurning the commercial considerations that launched the Africa edition in the first place—reporters on the Africa edition objected to the idea. Most of the Star 's black reporters are assigned to the Africa edition (only one white reporter works there) and most of them believe that a unified paper will simply be a white paper again.

For all their crusading against apartheid, the white opposition newspapers are regularly excoriated by black South Africans. Bishop (now Archbishop) Desmond Tutu, in a speech to newspaper editors and publishers in Vienna in May, 1986, after dismissing the SABC as "a lickspittle sycophant of the government," and the Afrikaans papers as "propaganda agents for the govern-

ment," and the Citizen as "the shameless spawn of the Info Scandal," accused the English-language papers of having "sold their souls in exchange for immediate realizable advantages, mainly financial ones, which go hand in glove with popularity in the white community." The English-language press, according to Tutu, had failed in its historic mission by catering to white fears and prejudices, and failing to convey to the papers' white readers the reality of black experience. "They do not in their heart of hearts appear to believe that the present dispensation is on the skids, that change is going to happen and that when it does, there may have to be a day of reckoning when every institution and everybody will be judged and judged harshly about whether they advanced or hindered the liberation process." To Tutu, and to many other blacks, the opposition of the liberal press to the government has never gone far enough, never amounted to support for black liberation, to an unhedged demand for nonracial democracy—for, that is, one-person-one-vote in a unitary South Africa.

And it is not only blacks, or those clearly advocating the cause of black liberation, or the government, who take the English-language press to task for its role in the current crisis. Ken Owen, an influential conservative newspaper editor, in a recent essay flayed the Star for the meager coverage, in its white editions, of the fighting in the townships, contending that, "whether or not it was carrying out government wishes, the newspaper managed to deceive its readers about the extent and nature of the threat they faced."