The government shut down The Weekly Mail for a month in November 1988. Two days after the ban, co-editor Irwin Manoim made this speech to a press freedom rally in Johannesburg, describing the machinations of the state’s censorship apparatus.
As any schoolboy knows, there are times when one can tell more about a document by counting the pages than by reading it. Perhaps the finest examples. are the Emergency Regulations, which, when read, merely cause headaches, but when their text is ignored and their pages counted, suddenly reveal their true purpose.
The core of the latest set of Emergency regulations, the section dealing with unrest and with security force action, is seven pages long. The two sections dealing with restrictions on education and with the conditions of Emergency detention are, together, about six pages long.
But the section dealing with curbs on the media is almost 18 pages long, or, put another way, longer than all fire other regulations put together. What deeper meanings lurk within this apparently useless set of statistics?
That the focus of fire regulations has shifted from the elimination of the deed, to the elimination of its shadow, from the suppression of unrest, to the suppression of speech itself. Our rules cannot tell a tea party from a riot.
When a group of people gather in Johannesburg’s unrevolutionary far-northern suburbs for a party in honour of Nelson Mandela’s birthday, it prompts a military operation of war-zone proportions. They cannot tell the celluloid from the real.
When a film on the life of Steve Biko is passed by the censors, the government hesitates less than an hour before overruling its own officials, for violence on screen is but one with violence on fire streets.
They cannot tell subject from object. When the editor of the Sowetan debates an idea he calls ”nation building” in his columns, he is aroused at midnight and interrogated as if he were the leader of an underground guerrilla movement.
In this context of generalised insanity, the crackdown on the media this year, illogical by any other yardstick, begins, if not to make sense, at least to make no less sense than the rest of society. The charge against the press is that it promotes violence and fans revolution.
We know now that in our fictionalised world, this is mere pretext, that not even the government imagines that the readers of The Weekly Mail, say, having had their Friday fix of the polemics of hate, rush out on to the streets and stone passing buses. No, the problem with the opposition press is that it remains a thorn in the side of our emerging fictional consensus.
When the government says: ”It is thus”, there are still voices to say: ”It is not thus and it never was”. The so-called alternative press consists of a variety of newspapers with very little in common, bar a lack of enthusiasm for the machinations of ”reformâ€, a willingness to push the edges of what may still be said and to provide platforms for all the spooks in the government’s demonology, the Tutus, the Boesaks, the Chikanes.
This we can understand, but what is more bewildering is why, then, the government does not shut down this pesky press once and for all, in the grand tradition of Police Minister Jimmy Kruger, who shut down the Soweto newspapers World and Weekend World on a single afternoon, 10 years ago, with a mere pen stroke.
The reason is that, unlike Jimmy Kruger, the government of today has caught itself in a double bind. It has created the notion of a society based on consensus, of fair and free elections, of free speech. It has done so in part to placate its critics at home, but as important, to placate its critics abroad.
For the government knows only too well the symbolic power of a free press in London, Bonn and Washington. The importance of this crucial element in the government’s armoury is to be measured by the number of times Cabinet ministers tell us we have the freest press in Africa.
It is this double bind that explains the bizarre ritual invented by Stoffel Botha, whereby he smothers the press slowly and gently, a ritual designed to remove inconvenient voices without the inconvenience of too publicly being seen removing
them.
It is a ritual which explains why the minister only acted against the first newspaper to be suspended, New Nation, when a supreme court judge had first given his action judicial sanction; why he closed the second paper, South, for less than a month; and why he hesitated so long, 13 months, before closing the third, The Weekly Mail.
Shortly before last Christmas (1987), when the rest of the world was filled with the spirit of goodwill, the Minister of Home Affairs had darker thoughts on his mind.
He sent The Weekly Mail a letter of warning, advising that he had read several copies of the paper and considered it a threat to public safety. This was to prove the first in a lengthy correspondence.
Our lawyers replied with a document of encyclopaedic length, arguing that the minister was mistaken in his interpretations, illogical in his methods and gently suggesting that perhaps he should actually read the newspaper. There was a flurry of public indignation and letters of protest poured into the Home Affairs office.
The minister retreated into silence. For months, not a word. Then another letter, complaining that our first reply was unsatisfactory. Another lengthy reply was despatched in return. Silence.
In May, the minister published a notice of warning to the newspaper in the Government Gazette, part of a peculiar ritual of his own invention, in which grievances are formalised by appearing in the solemn grey uniform of the government printer. There was a huge public outcry, both here and abroad, which took the newspaper by surprise and the minister even more so.
The Weekly Mail, which Botha assumed to be the almanac of stone-throwers and petrol bombers, turned out to be read by company chief executives, professionals and diplomats.
The minister responded with a series of ferocious speeches, both in Parliament and on television, in which he coined such memorable term as ‘revolutionary journalistâ€, ”organised hysteria†and ‘media terroristâ€.
The newspapers prepared their obituary notices for The Weekly Mail. But they were mistaken. When the minister is at his most bellicose, he is least likely to act.
The weeks went by … and nothing happened. Amnesia set in. The minister seemed to forget about us, and we, about him.
Until two weeks ago, when an artefact from a bygone era arrived, a letter with a familiar accusing tone, warning us that there would be no more warnings. Again there was a public outcry, again the captains of industry, diplomats and the media rushed to our defence.
This time the minister was saying nothing. With Stoffel Botha silence is bad news. Days passed and interest waned—and then, a week after he was expected to act, the minister spoke.
He declared The Weekly Mail undesirable for the month of November although it may return to respectability in December. After all the hue and cry, it seemed to many a mere wrist-slap.
Notice, then, the pattern. There is no apparent grand strategy, just a sortie here or there, probing for a weak spot. If the minister meets resistance, he withdraws. If not he strikes home.
The effects, intended or otherwise, are more insidious. The heart of it is confusion. No pattern is discernible outside the walls of the Union Buildings.
We have no idea why the minister acts now and not yesterday, why against this victim, but not that one, why this article offends, but that one does not.
When the real and the unreal merge, who can tell where the axe will strike next?
There has not been a month this year when the press has not faced some threat, whether the registration of all journalists, or the registration of only freelance journalists, the closure of one newspaper or another, the seizure of publications or raids on newspaper offices.
The pressure cannot but have its effects. It drains energy and resources. Editors become part-time journalists and full-time lawyers or lobbyists.
Planning becomes impossible when the unknowable future shrinks to just a fortnight away. Morale sags.
How do you inspire a staff when you’re not sure whether the newspaper they’re toiling over will reach the printer?
This government does not have a difficulty with The Weekly Mail. It has a difficulty with reality. To report on stone-throwing is tantamount to throwing stones, to warn of looming crisis is to precipitate it. This is a dangerous strategy.
When dissent is outlawed, it simply changes its form. When debate ceases to appear in newspaper columns, it moves on to the streets.
Those who objected to the elections last month registered their votes in a more savage form: with the limpet mine. Those who objected to the boycotters registered their votes in the same way: with petrol bombs in church halls.
If the government cannot tell ideas from deeds, then it cannot express astonishment that its rivals on both left and right cannot tell the difference either and choose to write their ideas, not in the columns of the newspapers, but in blood.