Irwin Manoim
In the paranoid final years of the PW Botha regime, the government had two tasks. The first was to suppress dissent; the second was to pretend there was no dissent. The latter, perhaps the more difficult task, fell to Stoffel Botha, former minister of home affairs, who died this week aged 67.
It is Botha’s misfortune that history will remember him chiefly as the man who shut down newspapers, thus immortalising the phrase ”to stoffel”, meaning ”to snuff out”.
History is less likely to recall that during the other 65 of his 67 years he devoted his time to quieter accomplishments, as one of Pretoria’s leading attorneys, administrator of Natal, patron of the arts, trout breeder and indigenous tree farmer.
The press in the middle Eighties was by and large well behaved. The only annoyance was a pesky faction known as ”the alternative press”. Botha was required to silence the alternatives, while making it appear that press freedom flourished.
What distinguished Botha from his Cabinet colleagues was that he was not inclined to swing the club. Ever the lawyer, he preferred to ensnare the enemy in a thicket of legalese, innocuous on the surface, lethal underneath.
There is no space here for a detailed discussion of the convoluted strategies he deployed against the press. One was the state of emergency, which outlawed reporting on police brutality or township dissent. Another was a register of journalists, ostensibly to improve standards, in reality to root out dissent. A third was a committee of anonymous experts to read the newspapers each day and note articles of subversive intent.
But it was Botha’s fourth strategy, the ”warning system”, that brought him the greatest notoriety, a fact which continued to surprise him since it seemed so reasonable. Newspapers that displeased the anonymous committee were given three ”warnings”, which, as Botha was often to point out, gave them ample time to reform.
Those who continued to transgress had therefore stubbornly chosen of their own accord to be suspended.
A handful of newspapers were shut down – or more properly, given Botha’s more gentle hand, suspended for periods of one to three months. One of them was this newspaper, in its previous incarnation as The Weekly Mail. Our crimes ranged from a picture of Winnie Mandela cutting a cake labelled ”Happy Birthday Oliver Tambo”, to white spaces cut into text as a sign of protest.
The joint editors of this newspaper, my colleague Anton Harber and I, went to meet Botha, taking along our lawyers for self- defence. Botha’s department inhabited a suite of offices lined with photographs of cultural events, particularly the Natal Playhouse, his personal monument. I read this as a signal that the minister’s private enthusiasms were at odds with his job.
We arrived with a vast file of newspapers going back a year, having spent a weekend being schooled by our lawyers on defences for every seemingly subversive article.
The minister showed no sign of ever having read our newpaper. He devoted the meeting to an analysis of public speeches the two editors had made, each of which had ridiculed him in the unkindest terms, one of them the speech in which Harber coined the phrase ”to stoffel”.
Botha did not close us down after that meeting, nor the next month nor the next. He waited until the year’s end, when we had quite forgotten him. But it was a pyrrhic victory: he managed to keep us closed only a month, while we raised so public a storm that he was obliged to retreat.
The PW Botha era ended a few months later. One of the first ministers to depart was Stoffel Botha, heading for Natal, where he established himself as a successful farmer, his name never to re-appear in a newspaper until this week.
Perhaps another era will remember Stoffel Botha as the man who created the Natal Playhouse. This generation will remember only the white strips in the newspapers.