Benjamin Pogrund
Laurence Gandar, who died in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, on November 14, was an unlikely South African hero.
Appointed editor of the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg in October 1957, nothing out of the ordinary was expected of him. Yet he transformed the newspaper into a vehement opponent of apartheid and gave hope of change to millions of South Africans.
Gandar paid the price for his radicalism and his daring: he was fired in 1969. The Mail continued the liberalism and fighting journalism which he initiated until it too was closed down, in 1985, by its owners, the Anglo American Corporation, under the pretext that its policies were causing it to lose too much money.
Gandar’s background did not promise any of what was to come. Born in Durban he grew up in the stronghold of English-speaking conservatism: he attended school in Natal, went to university, represented the province in hurdles and the long jump, and married a local schoolteacher, Isobel Ballance.
He went into journalism, rising in the staid Argus Company to the position of assistant edi-tor. Then he went still deeper into the white English establishment by becoming editor of Anglo American’s glossy magazine, Optima.
Nor did he look like a hero: he had an ascetic face, was quietly spoken, diffident and remote, almost cold, with people, and suffered from asthma.
Perhaps the penetrating green eyes under bushy eyebrows indicated that he was not altogether what he seemed. So perhaps did his record in World War II: Gandar enlisted in the ranks of South Africa’s volunteer army and by the war’s end he was a captain in intelligence.
When he took the editor’s chair at the Mail, there was every reason to believe that he would comfortably fit into the newspaper’s mould since its founding in 1902: fighting for the underdog – provided the underdog was white. This was in fact a contradictory reputation because in practice the newspaper, as Gandar later said, was “very Rand Clubbish and Chamber of Mineish”.
The Nationalists had come to power nine years before and were forcing apartheid laws through Parliament. The Rand Daily Mail supported the opposition United Party and condemned apartheid, but this outlook was based in the main on rejection of Afrikaners rather than any principle of ensuring rights for blacks.
Gandar began without any specific aims except that he wanted a better newspaper. He upgraded editorial quality and recruited new talented journalists. He also began to attack the sterility of the parliamentary opposition to apartheid in political commentaries written under the pseudonym “Owen Vine”, his middle two names.
The effect was electric. His cool, clear analyses cut through to the heart of the failure of whites to come to terms with the fact of the black majority. South Africa was a nation that had “lost its way”, he wrote in one of the famous articles that had the country agog: “There are two choices and only two. There is racial separation, with massive economic sacrifices – or there is economic integration, with far- reaching political concessions.” He went on to argue with devastating logic that economic integration and all that it implied for a racially mixed society was the only viable option.
There were already white left-wing and liberal voices but this new voice came from inside the mainstream press with its links and inherent obligations to the mining industry. The United Party complained angrily to the Mail’s owners. The criticisms were conveyed to Gandar; he ignored them.
He backed the dissidents inside the United Party who were calling for greater liberalism and he supported their breakaway, out of which emerged the Progressive Party. At the next election, the “Progs” were wiped out, except for Helen Suzman, who spent the next 13 years as the only MP of her party. Much of what she achieved in that time was made possible by the backing that Gandar and the Mail gave her.
Gandar encouraged entirely new reporting, giving attention as a matter of course to black politics and black living conditions. These had previously barely featured in the “white” press. Now, in an era when black resistance to white rule was on the boil, the Mail broke ground in reporting and explaining the turbulence.
“We must lose ourselves as members of different race groups in the larger unity of a common humanity,” he wrote. “Impracticable? Unrealistic? Unmindful of experience in other parts of Africa? Maybe. The truth is that most of the great evolutionary processes of human history started off in the face of precisely such obstacles as these.”
By present-day standards, it hardly sounds revolutionary. In the early 1960s it was far-sighted and brave, and he delivered his message with steely determination. His green eyes did in fact reflect a will of iron.
As a young reporter I developed the “black affairs” beat and Gandar published a series of my reports in 1965 exposing appalling conditions in prisons. The government went for us, claiming the reports were untrue. Over the next four years there were prosecutions of each informant and then of us. Perjured evidence was flung at us and, after a trial of eight months, we were found guilty; an unknown admirer promptly paid Gandar’s fine.
To Gandar’s critics, the conflict with the government was a chance to close in on him. They were fuelled by the decline in the Mail’s economics: as he transformed it into a fighting newspaper he shed white readers. The board of directors fired him, but retreated when senior staff threatened to walk out.
Instead, Gandar was made editor-in-chief and Raymond Louw became editor. The Rand Daily Mail flourished under these two. But as the prisons trials finally ended, the pressures were again on Gandar. The board fired him and this time made it stick.
Gandar went to Britain as the founding director of the Minority Rights Group, created to publicise the plight of oppressed minorities around the world. He returned to South Africa disillusioned, saying that, at any one time, half the world was being “perfectly beastly” to the other half. It was the view of a weary man.
He retired to the Natal South Coast. His wife Isobel’s death in 1989 left him bereft. His last years were made difficult by illness and by tragedy, because his only son Mark died earlier this year.
Gandar’s ultimate legacy rests in the new South Africa. This is what he wanted and its existence vindicates his editorship.