Howard Barrell
OVERABARREL
‘Louis le Grange has approached a senior Argus executive, Howard, and demanded that the company’s newspapers no longer use your copy on the exiles.”
It was about 1983, and Gerry L’Ange, my editor at the Argus Africa News Service was in Harare, where I was based, telling me of another threat against the press – this one of immediate relevance to me.
“But,” Gerry added, “Harvey Tyson [then editor of The Star] and I told the executive to tell Le Grange to get stuffed because the exiles and their views are important, and we need to cover them.”
So I could continue to report on the African National Congress and other outlawed organisations. And The Star and its sister newspapers continued to carry those reports – to the very edge of what the law allowed.
It was a time when, to be an editor of a South African newspaper was, in the words of one of those editors, to “walk a tightrope, blindfolded, over a minefield”.
Tyson’s and L’Ange’s names are, regrettably, not often proclaimed in lights when people recall the war many in the press fought against racism and apartheid. But they played a significant role – motivated, I presume to say, by professionalism and simple human decency.
For others of us, our motivations were more distinctly political. From 1981, for example, I was an undisclosed member of the ANC, doing all I could to give it an image of efficacy. That was, probably, a betrayal of professional ethics – but it seemed justified in the circumstances of the day.
I know there were a few other ANC members in the press in the early 1980s, and that their numbers grew exponentially in later years.
But a more significant category of media people were the scores who, for motives varying from a leftwing commitment to social justice to Tyson’s and L’Ange’s professionalism and simple decency, used the press to advance the struggle against racism and apartheid.
Looking back at that time, in this latter category I think of the political space created for the emerging trade unions in the early 1980s through some very good reporting in the Financial Mail, Rand Daily Mail and Daily Dispatch by Stephen Friedman, Riaan de Villiers and Phillip van Niekerk.
I think of Joanne Collinge’s reportage in The Star on the struggles waged by poor rural communities. I think of how political journalists such as Patrick Laurence and Barry Streek contrived legal ways to bring vital news to their readers which might otherwise have lain secret.
I think of two editors of the Rand Daily Mail, Raymond Louw and Allister Sparks, who offered political vision and full backing to their journalists in difficult times.
I think of the courage of Anton Harber and Irwin Manoim who, when the Rand Daily Mail was closed, formed the Weekly Mail, the original incarnation of this newspaper.
I think of the exposs of the apartheid death squads by Max du Preez and Jacques Paauw in Vrye Weekblad, by Eddie Koch in the Weekly Mail and by Kitt Katzin in The Star.
I think of Donald Woods’s decision at the Daily Dispatch to give the black consciousness movement a voice – and his bravery in publicising the murder of Steve Biko.
I think of Tony Heard’s bravery at the Cape Times in deciding that his newspaper would carry an interview with then president of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, and bugger the consequences.
I think of the courage and guile shown by the journalists at Beeld and other Nasionale Pers titles who sought to prepare their readers for political change, so helping ensure the relatively peaceful transfer of power after 1990.
I think of the scores of other journalists who neither sought nor gained recognition or thanks for publicising the struggles of vulnerable individuals and communities.
What the hell, you may be asking by now, am I on about? Why have I chosen to shout out a roll call of anti-apartheid journalists, all of them white? Why am I not mentioning the many brave black journalists from the days of the struggle?
Simply this: five black editors have gone before the Human Rights Commission’s panel on the media and (let us hope, by default) portrayed white journalists, past and present, as uniformly supportive of the old racist order or insensitive to their quest for dignity and equality in the workplace, or both. In doing so, the five have taken a selective view of history which does neither them nor the struggle for national liberation in this country justice, for two of the greatest legacies bequeathed by that struggle are the experience of interracial solidarity and the objective of non-racism that characterised it.
A failure of moral imagination might have led some South Africans to conclude that a person of one race could not, with sincerity and real commitment, fight alongside members of another race who were the victims of a gross historical injustice. But experience proved them wrong.
If we are now to move ahead and forge one nation out of our many parts, we will need to ensure that we do not squander the interracial solidarity we achieved in previous decades.
Among other things, this requires of those ANC and other leaders under whose guidance the struggle for freedom was largely fought, that they now come out and express themselves on the growing chorus of slurs aimed at non-Africans which frequently purport to have their blessing or come from within ANC ranks.