Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
The furore in South Africa over the right of the editor of the Financial Mail, Peter Bruce, to determine what political party the paper should support in the forthcoming election will amaze readers from the north.
You see, we are not at all used to freedom of the press. Our people use their money to establish newspapers for one of three reasons – to make money, to push a political cause or to acquire status.
Of course, the motives can get all tangled up. A social climber can develop political ambition, while a profit-conscious businessman discovers that the attentions of those who seek his paper’s support are every bit as seductive as a fat cheque book. The political pundit also realises soon enough that propaganda can’t pay for the printer’s ink.
Nevertheless, when the surface of the skins of all the various players is scratched, the type of reaction that Cyril Ramaphosa felt obliged to convey to Bruce is inevitable. In South Africa, the breaking point stretched as far as a declaration for a political party. In the north, even a mere editorial can earn an editor the sack, as I know to my cost.
In 1970, I was tempted from the freelance cushion on which I had been perching to become “guest editor” of Ghana’s leading newspaper, the Daily Graphic. Guest editor? Well, a new government had just come into power and had decided that it didn’t want the old editor of the paper, which was owned by the state. While looking for his replacement, they came to me.
Well, I had, for years, been preaching loudly that Ghana’s newspapers were useless. I mean one could “read” the Graphic in four minutes flat. The other government-owned daily, the Ghanaian Times, took two. The idea of getting an opportunity to demonstrate that publicly owned newspapers need not be disgorging only governmental views and funeral announcements was so attractive that I just couldn’t resist.
I worked my butt off changing the paper and the public supported the change. Circulation rose. Advertisers responded. Increased earnings meant I could bring in new staff, and soon the paper was singing. Within a month, I had been given the substantive post.
Our relationship with the government was friendly but distant. My view on state ownership was that it meant the paper belonged to the whole nation, of which the government was only a part. The government should therefore be “put on its toes” by the paper all the time. In doing this, the paper would be serving the government too, for if the government stayed on its toes and thereby satisfied the people’s needs, it would be re-elected!
All was going well when our prime minister, Dr Kofi Busia, decided that he would put Ghana on the side of the independent African countries that wanted to entertain “dialogue” with the apartheid regime of South Africa. “Dialogue” was in fact shorthand for diplomatic relations, and it was advocated by a group of what I regarded as “B-class” politicians – Busia, Boigny, Bongo, Banda, Bokassa – who couldn’t care a toss about the future of the continent.
The idea that Ghana, a name by which I knew South African and other freedom fighters swore; that Ghana, whose president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, had declared on the day of its independence: “The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the whole African continent,” should also sell out to apartheid was anathema to me. And I used the Graphic’s columns to say so. Loudly.
I wrote a front-page editorial entitled “Dialogue: Qui bono [Who benefits]?” which argued that if the apartheid regime really favoured “dialogue” with anyone in Africa, it would start with its own black people. But it had incarcerated the black leaders or chased them into exile.
If black Africa entered into “dialogue” with the apartheid regime, it would be stabbing our South African brothers in the back, for it would signal to their enemies that the freedom fighters were isolated in their struggle. International solidarity did not mean that others would do the brothers’ fighting for them. But it would boost the fighters’ morale.
Shortly after I wrote this, the London Financial Times reported from Johannesburg that the apartheid regime was greeting with “a nod and a wink” the statements of the black African leaders who were pushing “dialogue”. For the apartheid practitioners knew the African leaders were “after Pretoria cash”. This was, of course, referring to payments made to African leaders in what was to become known as the Muldergate scandal.
I reprinted the full Financial Times report in an editorial, and added that Pretoria cash was blood money obtained from the slave labour of the millions of blacks denied their political and human rights.
On the day my editorial was published, Busia went to Parliament to make a statement about his “dialogue” policy and was given a very rough ride. Opposition members heckled him with shouts of “Vorster! Vorster!”
The next day, I was told to proceed on leave, never to return.
But I had won the argument. Busia’s own foreign minister, William Ofori Atta, refused to vote for the “dialogue” camp when the Organisation for African Unity debated the issue. The policy was formally rejected.
And so when my feet touched South African soil for the first time in 1990, I was, in the words of the Caribbean poet, Martin Carter, so “fiercely happy” that I could have made “my shirt a banner for the revolution! A banner for the revolution!”