As a rule, journalists prefer reporting the news to making it. Yet the press itself is making the headlines in South Africa just now. The editors of the Johannesburg Sunday Times, the Mail & Guardian and two other Cape Town papers have been threatened with jail if they refuse a summons to appear before the country’s Human Rights Commission, to face accusations of racism.
This is an alarming development. With its ugly echoes of the past, it sends a worrying signal for the future.
First, some full disclosure. The Guardian Media Group, which includes this newspaper (The Guardian), owns a majority share in the Mail & Guardian. But this goes beyond looking after our own. For all journalists, indeed all those who believe that a free press is a prerequisite of a democracy, have cause for concern here.
There is something totalitarian about demanding the minutes of editorial meetings, threatening searches of offices, seizures of documents and jail for editors – all because of what they choose to print in their newspapers. And there is something McCarthyite in hauling journalists before a panel asking them, in effect, ”Are you now or have you ever been a racist?” This is not the conduct of a new democracy, but a reminder of the worst days of apartheid dictatorship. That fact is underlined by the grim presence on the interrogators’ panel of one Leon Wessels, who served as apartheid’s deputy minister for law and order. Once he was the cat’s paw for racism; now he is the tool of the ”anti-racists” – but the methods remain thuggishly similar.
The post-apartheid Constitution enshrines freedom of the press as a basic right. But that does not mean our South African colleagues can rest easy. At the last election, the African National Congress fell just one MP short of the two-thirds majority it needs to rewrite the Constitution. There are enough persuadable MPs around to close that gap – leaving open the possibility that Nelson Mandela’s successor as president, Thabo Mbeki, could tinker with that irritating document any time he chooses. Perhaps he will hold back, not least for fear of the international backlash such a violation of democracy would trigger. But the current vendetta against the South African press, including a paper which fought so hard against apartheid, is a bad omen. It suggests a new regime which is taking a few too many lessons from the old.
This editorial appeared in The Guardian in London on February 15