Ivor Powell
It was one of those acts of Sod, the unavoidable pitfalls of journalistic deadlines: the day that everything changed in South Africa fell on a Friday, the day of the then Weekly Mail’s publication.
So we had to wait another week before The Weekly Mail could respond to the drama that unfolded as former state president FW de Klerk, on February 2 1990, fired the starting pistol for a negotiated revolution.
In the meantime, The Weekly Mail had to live with a story reporting that fierce rows had ensued in the National Party Cabinet with verligtes fearing De Klerk was about to emulate his predecessor PW Botha’s notorious Rubicon speech and deliver rather less than he promised in terms of reform.
But there was a lot we got right in a world that seems so alien today you have to consciously remind yourself it really existed. In the same week we ran a story about two renegade cops from Piet Retief, exposing the cover-up of the killing of four African National Congress guerrillas, and recalling a macabre and drunken police party in the police morgue with the corpses in attendance. The name of their commanding officer was relatively little-known at the time – Eugene Alexander de Kock.
Another event – De Klerk’s appointment of the Harms commission to investigate (or cover up) dirty tricks in the security forces – would ensure that that name would become all too well-known in months and years to come.
In the same week, The Weekly Mail carried a story about a victim of police brutality approaching English cricketer Mike Gatting, the captain of the “rebel” side then touring South Africa in defiance of the international sporting boycott. “This is your fault, Gatting,” the man said, exposing wounds suffered as police cracked down on anti-tour demonstrations.
The following week, we exposed one of the stratagems the authorities used to downplay the effect of sporting boycotts. They had bused in 300 unemployed blacks as paid “spectators” to leaven the embarrassing lily-whiteness, as the first “Test” got under way at the Wanderers.
Meanwhile, another boycott was being challenged, with ANC stalwart Albie Sachs challenging the struggle orthodoxy by calling for a ban on the slogan “Culture is a weapon of the struggle”.
In the same week, the first conscientious objector was released after being imprisoned for refusing to do national service in the South African Defence Force, and a letter from novelist Nadine Gordimer put the objection into context, demanding that De Klerk put a stop to South Africa’s covert support for Mozambique’s Renamo rebels.
Meanwhile, South African and US-sponsored Unita rebels were fighting Angolan government troops in Mavinga in Southern Angola.
Inside South Africa, a bloody strike by the South African Railways and Harbours Union was drawing to a close, with 27 workers dead in clashes with police.
One hundred and sixteen people were in detention under emergency regulations that week, a poster showing a “naked woman kneeling on a striped couch with one breast visible in profile” was banned, and residents of South Africa’s townships were marching to demand lower rents – despite the fact that they were boycotting rent payments anyway.
And the Reserve Bank governor, Chris Stals, was propounding what was then a revolutionary economic strategy in the context of South Africa, arguing that political change and economic reform could lead together to prosperity.
As they say, the more things change … the more they change … and the more they stay the same.