15 years after its birth in a tiny Braamfontein office, the Mail & Guardian is still going strong – winning awards and annoying the government of the day Barbara Ludman and Rehana Rossouw ‘I give your paper one year, no more.” The message from letter-writer J Paris of Berea, published in The Weekly Mail in mid- July 1985, was clear. It was also optimistic. Even the paper’s founders had been less sanguine. The lease they’d signed for their offices – two rooms in Braamfontein painted pink by the previous tenant, a hairdresser – ran for only three months.
By the time Paris wrote his first letter – he was a frequent correspondent that first year – the newspaper had hit the cafes for six Fridays in a row. Its circulation had soared to 4E000, its equipment had grown from a single PC to three early Apple MacIntoshes and a laser printer, its full-time staff had burgeoned from five to seven and it was well on the way to making publishing history. The Weekly Mail was founded on a capital investment of R50E000. The retrenchment payouts of its co-editors, former Rand Daily Mail (RDM) political reporter Anton Harber, then 26, and former Sunday Express assistant editor Irwin Manoim (29) didn’t go far. What made the difference were subscriptions sold in advance of publication to friends, colleagues and other supporters, and shares bought by generous members of the liberal community who must have considered the money spent as donations, not investments. “… You make same mistakes as Rand Daily Mail,” Paris complained. “Can’t you understand, in South Africa, all black people hate white people and all white people scorn black people. … You can do nothing.”
The Weekly Mail was launched on June 14 1985, six weeks after the RDM’s closure, to report on the reality other papers ignored: extra-parliamentary politics, life and death in the townships. “There was a serious reason to be considering a new newspaper,” wrote Manoim in You Have Been Warned, a history of the Mail. “In early 1985, South Africa was a frightened country, on the first part of a long slide into recession, violence and repression. White South Africa had locked itself away behind high walls. Outside, black South Africa was in rebellion, with a cross-country wave of strikes, boycotts and clashes with police that became bloodier each week. “The newspapers reported on this, sporadically; they called it ‘unrest’, a term which implied mayhem, crime and irrationality. We believed, instead, that this was the start of a full-scale insurrection, and it deserved more careful media attention. We would start a newspaper that told South Africans the unsweetened truth about the country they lived in, painful or otherwise. It was not expected to grow rich or famous; merely to be an honest spectator.” As big-name contributors filed more and more for overseas newspapers and less and less for the non-paying Weekly Mail, it seemed a good idea to train aspirant journalists who didn’t know what a journalist’s salary – or any salary, come to that – actually looked like. This scheme paid off immediately for the newspaper and, over time, for South African journalism in general. There are probably few newspapers or serious magazines that cannot produce one or more former Weekly Mail – or, later, Mail & Guardian – trainees among their top journalists. M&G trainees have gone into parastatals as well, into business, broadcasting, politics – even into the SABC. That the newspaper functioned at all under the circumstances is remarkable. For six weeks after its launch, a partial state of emergency was announced – a harbinger of a national state of emergency, declared the day after the Mail’s first birthday party. Censorship was a major government weapon. Newspapers were forbidden to name the thousands of detainees who packed prisons and police cells, to report on police action, to criticise the state of emergency.
When the Mail countered by pasting black tape over sentences and captions and pictures the lawyers said could be termed “subversive”, the government banned the use of black lines. Eventually, weary of plugging holes, the government began banning papers for up to three months. First was the New Nation – the Mail cheekily printed several pages devoted to “the stories the New Nation was planning to run” – and then South. Just before Christmas 1987, the government turned its attention to The Weekly Mail. When it came, the ban was almost apologetic – one month. There was a good reason why the government stayed its hand: the Mail quickly became famous. It was read by everyone from then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to the inmates on Robben Island, and the news that the Mail was about to be banned sent shock waves overseas. The development was discussed and deplored, among other places, on the floor of the United States Senate. The European Community issued a demarche – the last step before the withdrawal of ambassadors – to the South African government. The paper was read in South Africa and abroad because it made such remarkable breakthroughs, on a regular basis: l It was the first newspaper to cover the new South African culture. Arts editor Charlotte Bauer showed readers what was happening largely in the inner city, from protest theatre at the Market to fringe cabaret at the anarchic Black Sun, from jazz at Kippies and the music of disaffected young whites at Jameson’s to bubblegum at clubs in Doornfontein. l It was the first newspaper in decades to take readers inside South Africa’s prisons – first by sports contributor Gavin Evans, who was detained during the first state of emergency and then via the memoirs of a Mail reporter, Thami Mkhwanazi, who was hired in 1987 on his release after several years on Robben Island. l Its coverage of the general uprising was unmatched. Business Day editor Ken Owen said the first description he’d seen of necklacing was in a Weekly Mail story written by Patrick Laurence; the first the general public knew of toyi-toying was a story from the Eastern Cape by Mike Loewe which appeared in the Mail. Reporters and photographers were continually in the wrong place at the right time, particularly the Mail’s first full-time reporter, Sefako Nyaka, and part-time photographer Ismail Lagardien: at the siege of Cosatu House in Johannesburg, in the middle of pitched battles in the townships, at funerals, at marches cut short by police action, at bomb blasts in town. l In an era when mainstream newspapers regularly vilified the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress and their leaders as “terrorists”, the Mail talked to everyone – and in the process gave a human face to political leaders in South Africa and in exile. l Along with The Guardian in London, the Mail tracked security police funds being secretly channelled to Inkatha to block the ANC. Inkathagate was perhaps the best known of the Mail’s investigations, but there were others: the tragic story of young activist Stompie Seipei and his death at the hands of the Mandela Football Team; the expos’ of a trade in slaves from Mozambique; probes into dirty tricks operations within the security forces, from the Civil Co-operation Bureau to the Department of Covert Collections; a secret trust fund set up, without the knowledge of foreign donors, by Allan Boesak’s Foundation for Peace and Justice. That list skims the surface of two dozen or more investigations, most of them carried out with no funds, no extra help, electronic or otherwise, with much of the work done by trainees monitored by the rare available senior staff member. The method speaks of blind courage – indeed, a certain recklessness – but it worked. Turning a poverty-stricken weekly into a daily newspaper called for the same qualities -but that didn’t work. Wafted on a wave of optimism after the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990, the Mail launched its daily morning newspaper in mid-June. The afternoon Star, whose group MD had wished the co-editors well when they’d informed him of their plans, suddenly leaped into the morning market with a morning edition of its own, thus pretty much dooming the operation. But it was too late to turn back – and the Daily Mail, published with the support of some extremely generous backers in South Africa and the United Kingdom, lasted only 44 issues.
The daily was a watershed. The weekly newspaper might have looked much the same after the daily folded as it had before the venture began; but the organisation had changed, in significant ways. The “struggle mentality” had gone: no more single salary scale, with everyone, from cleaner to editor, earning the same; no more 16-hour days; no more entirely flat, democratic management style. There would have to be a managing director and a financial manager, and they would decide on matters commercial. Unions, considered unnecessary in “struggle” days – after all, the co-editors, the reporters, sub-editors and production people were all too busy fighting to keep the paper alive – suddenly appeared on the newsroom floor. The struggle days were over, in more ways than one. The participation of The Guardian increased at a time when its support was needed. Throughout the 1990s, its association with the Mail grew closer and closer – until mid-decade, when it became the majority shareholder. Today The Guardian owns 72% percent of what is now called the Mail & Guardian. Yet some things have stayed the same under the editorship of Phillip van Niekerk, who took over the reins of the paper in 1997. Investigations continue. The infiltration of notorious Liberian politican Emanuel Shaw II into South Africa’s state oil industry was exposed two years ago by current news editor Mungo Soggot; the call for a retrial of the three men found guilty of the Eikenhof massacre eventually resulted in their release from prison following the persistent probing of former assistant editor Wally Mbhele; likewise foreign affairs official Robert McBride was released from a Mozambican jail when Mbhele probed beneath the distortions published by other newspapers.
The manoeuvring behind the granting of the third cellular licence and the real story behind South Africa’s shady R32-billion arms deals are running investigations at the moment – and this list, like the earlier one, only skims the surface of M&G speciality.
The paper’s campaigning role continues despite the advent of democracy. Freelance writer Charlene Smith became a household name in South Africa when she courageously wrote of her rape ordeal. But this was more than a story: Smith’s campaign saw changes in the way all rape survivors are treated in South Africa. Democracy brought no guarantees of press freedom. In the past three years, the M&G has successfully defended its reputation and factual reporting in more than 30 cases that complainants have threatened to bring to court and the media ombudsman. The media ombudsman set new ground for all media when he ruled it was acceptable for a journalist to impersonate a member of the public when attempting to extract information from a civil servant. This was done to unmask officials in the Department of Trade and Industry who were pocketing funds from a business banquet. Former National Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk lost his attempt to get the ombudsman to punish the paper for posing him on the front page next to a flagpole with the heading “NP leader in bizarre sex probe”.
Likewise a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority for the poster “F**k you, Hansie Cronje” was dismissed. The paper’s most crucial defence against its detractors, though, was to the Human Rights Commission, which was “investigating” racism in the media – a charge first levelled against the M&G and the Sunday Times. Training of young journalists is still a priority, with year-long internships a feature of the newsroom. The newspaper still covers cultural trends so new that readers of other papers have never heard of them. It was the first paper to print the word kwaito. South African politics are still covered, along with environmental, development, business and labour news. There is still a concentration on news from the rest of the continent and on foreign stories. It is still a “writer’s paper”, with quirky columnists and excellent writing throughout, from the page one headlines to the sports pages at the back. The readers are the same: well-educated men and women of all races with a passion to know what is going on in the world.
And although the government has changed, it often seems as uncomfortable with the Mail’s lively, independent voice as its predecessor did in the 1980s. The paper and its staff continue to rake in awards for journalism: Van Niekerk is a recipient of the Ruth First Award for Courageous Journalism; Soggot was a runner- up for the Ruth First Award; Soggot and Mbhele were joint winners of the Foreign Correspondents Association Journalist of the Year Award. The paper has won awards for its arts supplement; as well as science and technology and personal finance reporting. It has also been awarded by the University of Missouri for Distinguished Service in Journalism; received two Loeries and won several awards for its environmental reporting. For more than 15 years after a crowded, noisy, joyous launch party in a former hairdressing salon in Braamfontein, the principles the co-editors established have continued to inform the M&G. “A venture to keep alive vigorous, independent journalism” was the headline on a May 1985 letter to prospective investors. The letter explained what it is they had in mind: the newspaper would cover politics, both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, Africa, foreign news and labour; it would offer intelligent and lively arts coverage and entertainment listings; it would include a satirical column or two. Most important, the newspaper would be “non-partisan and non-polemical … without affiliation to any political party or organisation. It will concentrate on critical, independent analysis.” A look at today’s edition will indicate how closely the M&G still adheres to those goals.