The people of the Karoo may soon find themselves even more isolated
Lynda Gilfillan
Karoo dorps – Burgersdorp, Jansenville, Murraysburg – may seem like one-horse towns to tourists speeding past the road markers on the N1, but a glance at a local weekly newspaper reveals deep undercurrents of tragedy and frivolity, politics, life and death.
An issue of Die Middellander, for example, carries the report of a farmworker who stabbed his wife to death while she was cleaning offal, then tried to hang himself from a tree in the veld, finally succeeding at another suicide attempt in the police cells. In what may seem an odd juxtaposition, the story shares the page with a photograph of three smiling women modelling hats for a Cradock Police Women’s Club hoedeparty (hat party), where the speaker dealt with women’s rights.
Over the page is an article about a local farmer charged with stock theft – R70 000 worth of sheep. Further back, we learn that a local man has had surgery on his leg and is recuperating at his sister’s house in Uitenhage.
There are stories of crop damage, local people making good, famous uitlanders visiting the area, births, marriages and deaths, entertainment news, school stories and church notices. For a window into a small community, nothing can beat a local weekly newspaper.
But some windows are closing. Earlier this month, the Grahamstown High Court granted an application for the preliminary liquidation of the Graaff- Reinet Advertiser, which owns 12 other country weeklies that report on the goings-on in 60 small Karoo towns.
The Advertiser has been going strong since 1860 when it was founded by locals in a far-flung outpost on the settler fringes of the Cape Colony. In the 1940s, Ronald Knott-Craig bought the Advertiser, the Aberdeen Pos, the Uniondale Medium, Oudts- hoorn Observer and the Willowmore News. His son, Alan Knott-Craig, bought or founded the rest of the stable and now faces the closure of a unique media “empire” in one of the most remote areas of South Africa’s interior.
The newspapers are staffed by an assortment of full-time and part-time reporters and correspondents. News ranges from the serious to the sensational to the downright silly, and articles from the gossipy to the informative. There are the inevitable pieces about locals lucky enough to be travelling abroad: the plaasjapie from Leeuwfontein getting married in France, a student off to Canada to attend a drama course, a local MPL attending an anti-corruption semi- nar in Germany.
Some locals also make good: a recent story urges townsfolk to attend the travelling Boswell-Wilkie Circus to see two performing fox-terriers, Tiekie and Kelly, recently bought by the circus from a local breeder.
Reports reflect important shifts in local attitudes: a growing environmental awareness is evident in the reluctance of farmers to deal with a recent locust plague by resorting to the traditional method of poison sprays.
Attempts at addressing the huge unemployment problem of the area are advertised: recently an arts and crafts school was opened in a collaborative effort involving various local Middelburg groups, including social workers and churches. Those involved hope to assist in the development of a range of marketable skills – and pledge not simply to multiply the number of wire windpompies that vendors foist on any car with a “foreign” number plate travelling through the main drag of the dorp.
Knott-Craig’s voice is heavy with disappointment as he recalls a journalistic career going back six decades to when he first reported for the Worcester Standard (edited by his father) at the age of 12, and the growth and decline of a family media business. “Local newspapers are the heart and soul of a community,” he said. “Without its own newspaper a dorp is just a dead duck.”
He cites factors such as the ripple effects of poor government administration and the ensuing gradual economic decline as causes of the threatened closure. Also, “there is no growth in rural towns, and with the change from livestock farming to game farming in the area, there are fewer local farmers around to spend money in the towns”. Clearly, things aren’t what they used to be.
However, Knott-Craig is not entirely pessimistic. He foresees growth in the local tourism industry, particularly with the rumoured expansion of the Addo National Reserve to the interior as far as Cradock, Graaff-Reinet and Beaufort West.
And he hopes that the newspapers will be rescued: “National newspapers have bought up other local newspapers in the past, and it is possible that a strong organisation will offer an umbrella so that the 13 newspapers are not only saved but thrive.”
In an area of widespread poverty and
declining income such as the Karoo, the closure of local news- papers is likely to have severe consequences. People who live there are already extremely isolated. Few can afford to join the global Inter- net community. As Knott-Craig laconically observes: “The print media in Karoo towns was never threatened by the impact of electronic media. We’re a different kettle of fish here.”
Most of those who live in and around the 60 affected towns are not on the information highway – indeed, for many, the only access to the world beyond the koppies is via ever-deteriorating gravel roads. Even regional news- papers such as the Eastern Province Herald have discontinued delivery to many of the towns.
Irene Cambouris, daughter of the caf owner in Middelburg, conveys the feeling of the townsfolk at the impending disappearance of the local weekly: “I’m so disappointed. People have been coming in here for years to buy Die Middellander, wanting local news. And now? How will we know what’s happening in town, or on the farms? It’s not good.”
Affected papers are the Graaff-Reinet Advertiser, Karoonuus Noord, Bo-Karoonuus, Die Middellander, The Colesberg Advertiser, The Cradock Courier, Die Burgersdorper, Aberdeen Pos, Die Murraysburger, The Jansenville Chronicle, Karoonuus Suid, Uniondale Medium and Die Beaufort-Wester.