John Grobler
Muckraking for fun and profit
As a newspaperman for some 40 years, Windhoek Observer editor Hannes Smith is no stranger to controversy or to charges of contempt of court – he has had more of those laid against him than he cares to remember. Controversy has always been the middle name of his weekend tabloid – there aren’t all that many newspapers in this part of the world that run headlines like “Farmer, 59, tells of sex escapades with girl, 14”.
This week Smith found himself at the centre of yet another storm when he refused to hand over military intelligence documents to the Namibian judicial inquest into advocate Anton Lubowski’s 1989 assassination, quixotically insisting that his credibility would be destroyed if he revealed his sources.
A self-made publisher, his problem now is also self-made. Early last year he published an article alleging the assassin’s name had been given to him, but did not publish it. With little new evidence in the case, Namibian High Court Judge Nic Hannah ordered him on Tuesday to hand over his documentation, failing which he would “certainly face prison”.
Born in Grootfontein in 1933, Johannes Martin Smith (“Smittie” to those who know him, “Mal Smit” for those who hate him) left school in standard six, forging his father’s signature to get a weekly job on the railways. Eager to improve his lot as the son of a bywoner, he moved on to a job with a Windhoek car dealer. On October 1 1957, he started out as a cub reporter on the Windhoek Advertiser. The Advertiser has since died – but Smith appears as indestructible as ever.
By 1978 he had become the editor of the paper, but the new conservative German publisher would have nothing to do with his firebrand journalism, so he started his weekend Windhoek Observer with “a typewriter, no desk and one bicycle”.
His two small daughters, Karin (8) and Yanna (6), sold his newspaper for him on Windhoek’s streets. It was a stroke of genius, he says: “They made more from tips than we could make from selling the paper.”
A workaholic who has yet to take a single day off since he started the Windhoek Observer on October 1 1978, he demands the same from his underlings. Office hours are from 7am sharp for advertising staff, and if the production is behind schedule reporters can expect to be called from 2am.
His temper tantrums are legendary – on a bad day, you can hear him go off in the office block next door. “The poor man’s Johnny Johnson,” someone once called him.
By the late 1980s, his newspaper had been banned several times by the South African authorities, ostensibly for his Back Page column, after he started publishing full- frontal female nude studies next to personal sexual reminiscences, with the models’ private parts and nipples covered with paper panties and stars cut out by the compositing room staff.
But the real reason for all the bannings, he said, was that he was considered to be “keeping Swapo’s [the South West African People’s Organisation] flag flying”. Haunting the courts for copy, he was the first to start publishing accounts of security forces’ atrocities along the Angolan border, and the Windhoek Observer appeared regularly with blank spaces marked “censored” as the South African Defence Force’s media watchdogs forced him to drop countless stories.
Unlike any other editor, he still covers most stories himself, with his dishevelled figure and wild hair, trailing several camera bags, stomping up and down the courthouse corridors, collecting copy to be dictated to a high-speed typist later – which accounts for the often odd English employed in his lurid weekend exposs.
He won the high court legal battle that allows him to publish divorce court results, and few have been spared the embarrassing details of adultery or unsatisfactory sexual performance, still a staple of his paper.
One of the most bruising battles was against arch-conservative Afrikaans dominee Chrisjan Putter, who successfully sued him for libel for alleging he had extra-marital dalliances. “A week after the judgment, Die Beeld published a story showing he had sex 33 times with this Stofberg girl – but it was too late for me,” he recalls, pacing up and down in characteristic fashion in his newspaper’s archives room.
“I once got charged by one of those tribunal courts we used to have, for one pubic hair that showed on one of the Back Page girls. Justice Diemont, of the Cape Supreme Court, fined me R4 000, a great fortune in those days. I mumbled under my breath, ‘If I get R4 000 for one hair, God knows what he’ll give me for the whole bloody bush’ – and he heard. He was going to send me down for three weeks!”
In early 1990 he lost control of the Windhoek Observer in a bruising shareholders’ battle. But the winner could not step into his shoes, and the paper was closed down a few months later. In 1994, he bought back the publishing rights – and despite a few hiccups, he has regained full control over what must be one of the world’s unique publications.
This week, however, he faced the sternest challenge of his newspaperman’s life: he had to hand over his documents relating to the assassination to the inquest court, or face jail until he is willing to do so.
“I shall be the judge of the relevance of the documents, Mr Smith – not you,” Judge Hannah said this week, as Smith protested that his documents were “irrelevant” and would only incriminate persons not present in court and therefore unable to defend themselves.
When I left him on the stairs of his Windhoek offices early on Wednesday morning, he seemed more troubled than I have ever seen him in the seven years I have known him. Good luck, Smittie.
Vital Statistics
Born: 1933 in Grootfontein, South Africa
Defining characteristics: Workaholic, irreverent
Favourite car: All of them – his Audi A6, BMW 525 and Volkswagen Jetta
Favourite people: Namibians who misbehave and lend themselves to front-page stories
Least favourite people: Every judge he’s ever faced in court
Likely to say: “We’re running out of time! We’re running out of time!”
Least likely to say: “Man, I need a break”