The Rand Daily Mail fought a lonely battle on the ‘slippery slope’ of opposition to the National Party government in the 1960s. In his memoir, War of Words, Benjamin Pogrund recalls what it was like to be part of this publication
The telephone on my desk in the Rand Daily Mail newsroom rang. I picked it up and heard the deep, warm voice of Nelson Mandela. It was midmorning on Monday, May 29 1961, and the moment I recognised the voice, I began to stammer an apology. “I am sorry, Nelson, that we reported so wrongly. I feel terrible about it.” He replied, “It’s all right, Benjie-boy, I know it wasn’t your fault.” That was a response of startling generosity. Only two hours earlier the Rand Daily Mail had dealt him a heavy blow, undermining his months of dangerous organising work against the South African government. Thirteen months before, in the aftermath of unrest after police opened fire on an unarmed crowd of black people at Sharpeville, killing 68, the African National Congress had been banned. Mandela, its leader in the Transvaal, had forsaken his family and his attorney’s practice and gone underground. Mandela became the mastermind of a nationwide strike call, urging black workers to stay away from work for three days starting on Monday, May 29. That was the week when whites – and especially the ruling Afrikaners – were to celebrate Republic Day. The entire police force hunted him. But, sheltered by supporters, he travelled around the country from his base in Johannesburg to plan, exhort and organise. He became known as the “Black Pimpernel”. I was a young reporter on the Rand Daily Mail and my specialised field was black politics. I had gotten to know Mandela and other leaders of the ANC since becoming a journalist on the Mail in 1958. During Mandela’s months of underground activity I had been meeting him secretly and, in part through my reporting, the Mail had published more information than any other newspaper about the coming strike. The first day of the strike marked the climax of Mandela’s months of work. South Africa waited to see what would happen: how many black workers would heed the call to stay home? Without the masses of blacks filling the low-grade jobs, would factories and offices be paralysed? If blacks proved their political clout, where would the next challenge to white authority emerge?
The Mail rushed out a special edition, sold in the city and in the black townships. “Most Go To Work: All Quiet” read the headline, and “Police Patrol Townships Before Dawn – Officials Say Stay-Home Unsuccessful”. The strike had failed, according to the report, which drew on quotes from the manager of Johannesburg’s Non-European Affairs Department, claiming that blacks were coming to work as usual. The police echoed this. In fact the headline and the report were fatally flawed, the result of rushed and sloppy journalism. Though the strike was not the total success Mandela had hoped for, it certainly wasn’t the failure that the Mail reported.
The effect of the Mail’s special edition was significant. At this point, the Mail was the country’s foremost newspaper; its breadth of reporting and liberal stance had earned it respect among many blacks as well as liberals in other racial communities. Its report of the strike’s failure would influence countless numbers of black people who were wondering what to do: if so many people were refusing to obey Mandela’s call, they would reason, then whatever minority stayed at home would have to face wrathful action, starting with instant dismissal from jobs. Yet here was Mandela on the phone exonerating me, holding me blameless for what my newspaper had done to the strike, and to him … The pressure on workers was a prime reason why the strike call had not enjoyed wider support, I wrote in the next day’s Mail. An increasingly common attitude was “What can we do against the government?” That is why Mandela was in a quieter mood when he phoned that night, still underground, hunted by the police, but as relaxed and friendly as ever – he was sending out orders for the strike to continue for the planned three days, he said, and on the “same basis” – in other words, nonviolence was to be maintained. My questioning him on this issue clearly caused him to think further, because he phoned again an hour later. He said he had terminated our earlier conversation because he had had to flee from the public phone booth. I thought it more likely that he wanted to clarify the nonviolence point, and indeed he gave me a more considered comment, which was a historical watershed as his first public espousal of violent struggle: “The events of today and the reactions of the authorities closes a chapter in so far as our methods of political action are concerned. I don’t think, speaking for myself, that I can continue speaking peace and nonviolence in the light of the methods adopted by the government to suppress our peaceful protest. The setback will not in any way deter us. The grievances against which the people are protesting still remain, and we will continue struggling to remove these grievances. I want to stress that it is futile to continue talking peace in the light of the show of force and intimidation put out by the government.” The strike fizzled out – Mandela called it off on the second day – but within a month he sat down with other leaders of the ANC, the Congress Alliance, and the Communist Party and argued that violent opposition could not be avoided. They created Umkhonto weSizwe to undertake military action. Mandela was appointed commander.
In 1965 the Rand Daily Mail published a series of searing reports written by me about horrific conditions in prisons. The government reacted angrily and prosecuted each of our five informants, and then also the Mail’s editor, Laurence Gandar, and me. The trials went on for the next four years. One of our informants was Isaac Setshedi. We found out that Setshedi had been arrested purely by chance. I was arguing with Lieutenant Barend Celliers [of the police] in his office and saw a clipping of the Mail’s interview with Setshedi lying on the desk. Taking a blind stab, I asked: “And what are you holding him for?” Celliers replied: “Murder, robbery, and assault with intent.” I nearly fell off the chair. Prison conditions were one thing, but I was shocked to be mixed up with murder and robbery. As it turned out, it was yet another police pressure tactic. Setshedi had in fact been arrested on a charge of robbery, and the police had tried to get him to make a statement against the Mail by threatening him with a trumped-up murder charge. The threat failed to frighten him and was subsequently dropped. He was then given treatment probably unprecedented for an accused black person in a South African jail: he was served fried eggs for breakfast and asked to cooperate with the police by testifying against the Mail. He refused and stood by his original story. The police interviewed him four times and took four sepa-rate statements from him. Setshedi never deviated from what he had told me. Setshedi believed implicitly in the rightness of what he was doing. Although much of his adult life had been spent as a robber, with lengthy spells in jail, he felt strongly about the inhumanities he had encountered and witnessed there. When I first met him, he confided that he was glad at long last to have found an “ally” – the Rand Daily Mail – in his campaign to get the jails cleaned up. He was in his thirties and had a quick, sharp mind. If he had been born into a normal society and had had normal chances, perhaps his life would have been different. In these fraught days he was in court pleading not guilty to publishing false statements about prisons and making false statements under oath. His story, which we had published, revealed that while he was working outside the hospital section at Cinderella prison, he heard screams inside. A short while later a convict whom he knew as Dan told him he had been “burned”. The state prosecutor, Dr Percy Yutar, set out to prove that the electric-shock machine was totally innocent. One of his witnesses was head warder Giliam Malan, who had been working at the prison for 27 years, the last five in the hospital section. He administered the machine under the supervision of another head warder. During the cross-examination, the defence lawyer asked Malan what he knew about physiotherapy. Malan responded that he was reading a book about it, though he could not remember the name of the book, its author, nor did he retain any of its information. Another, more crucial line of attack by Yutar was to deny that any such person as Dan existed. Warders and policemen described examining the hospital registers and not finding any trace of Dan. They had found someone nicknamed “Long Dan”. When confronted by “Long Dan”, Setshedi had denied knowing him. They had taken Setshedi around the townships, but he had been unable to point him out. With much passion and rhetoric Yutar said that Dan did not exist; he was a “myth”. However, “Long Dan” was indeed Dan. Setshedi had quickly and shrewdly assessed the situation when the police brought Dan to him: he had just been subjected to threats and blandishments, and he knew what pressures would be applied to “Long Dan” once he was identified as Dan. He thought that Dan might soon be telling a story to the taste of the police and to the detriment of Setshedi, so he calmly denied that “Long Dan” was Dan. The police dropped “Long Dan” and continued their search, naturally without success. Meanwhile, Setshedi kept in touch with Dan, who said he was willing to come forward, if needed, to tell the truth about how he had been shocked. As the trial got under way, and Yutar committed himself to claiming that Dan was a figment of Setshedi’s imagination, the police continued their investigation and became convinced that “Long Dan” was Dan. They extracted a sworn affidavit from him that he had never been treated badly with the electric machine at Cinderella. Here is where it grew complicated. The prosecution could not call Dan/”Long Dan” as a witness to say that nothing nasty had been done to him because Yutar had said he did not exist. But the prosecution wanted the defence to call him so that they could produce the police statement. If Dan deviated from the statement in any way, he could earn three years’ imprisonment for perjury. That was exactly why the defence could not call him. The police brought Dan to court and put him in the public gallery for two successive days, dangling him in front of us. Knowing what the game was, the defence did not take the bait. Dan sat in the gallery while Yutar continued to speak of the nonexistent Dan. Both sides knew that Dan was there, and both sides pretended that he wasn’t. Setshedi was found guilty on the fiction that Dan did not exist. The magistrate, in his judgement, found that Dan was “a mythical person”, and because Setshedi was untruthful, no reliance could be placed on anything he had said to me. “It is a made-up story,” the magistrate concluded. He sentenced Setshedi to six months’ imprisonment for making a false statement under oath, and the Mail, in turn, paid his bail. The one consolation for us concerned the electric-shock machine because the
magistrate said that “it must be conceded that such a machine, if it is misused – like anything else – can cause shocks and burns”. The Mail lodged an appeal for Setshedi. It was heard three years later. Yutar argued for the state, saying that if no such person as Dan existed, then it followed that what Setshedi had claimed about Dan must be untrue. But the two appeal judges rejected his argument and acquitted Setshedi. It was a victory on technical grounds and not the kind we wanted to vindicate our reports, but at least a brave man was saved from unjustly going to jail.
The government harassment never stopped. An Air Force Buccaneer bomber crashed, and we had a letter from the chief of the defence force criticising us because we had published the statistics of Buccaneer accidents, reminding us of a previous “friendly request” not to carry such details. We pointed out that it had been merely a “request” and that previous Buccaneer crashes had received extensive publicity, including the statistics. We could win only up to a point, because the “request” was “confirmed” at the next monthly meeting of the liaison committee of the defence force and the Newspaper Press Union [NPU, the organisation of newspaper owners], and we were bound by that. There were also repeated problems because the police demanded that every journalist produce an official Press Identity Card before they would speak to him or her, or allow admission to police-controlled areas. In a Terrorism Act trial the judge ordered that only journalists holding a card could enter to report the proceedings. The police issued the identity cards in terms of the agreement with the NPU, but arbitrarily refused to give them to some reporters, especially black reporters. The spreading resistance among blacks to the government gave rise to so many political trials that it was impossible to cover them all. The problem was compounded by the fact that the government moved the bigger trials to country towns, supposedly for security, though there was little doubt that a primary aim was to add to the defence’s strains and costs, cut down families’ and friends’ ability to visit the accused, and dim the publicity spotlight. For example, a trial of 18 members of the underground Pan Africanist Congress on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government went on in the country town of Bethal, two hours’ drive from Johannesburg, over a period of 18 months. The South African Press Association, Sapa, said it could not afford to provide coverage, so we put in our star political trial reporter, Pam Kleinot. She was the only reporter at the trial, and had to live in Bethal. This trial was so important that we were able to get Sapa to subsidise the cost of reporting it in return for handing over our daily report. We had to suffer the indignity of having The Star using our reports at greater length than we were able to do. The main person accused in that trial was Zephaniah Mothopeng, known as “Uncle Zeph”. He was a mild-mannered, diffident man. Yet his life was an epic of suffering and endurance. He had been a teacher, but was fired for leading his colleagues in opposition to Bantu education. He followed Robert Sobukwe into jail on March 21 1960, protesting against the pass laws, and served two years for “incitement”. A year after his release, while studying law, he was detained incommunicado: his treatment included being forced to wear a canvas bag over his head and endure electric-shock torture. While Harold Strachan was in Pretoria Prison, he saw Mothopeng in an inner courtyard, tied inside a straitjacket and rolling around on the concrete floor, screaming at the top of his lungs. He was later tried and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for working underground for the PAC. On the day his jail sentence was completed – with no remission – he was secretly taken to a remote place in the countryside and ordered to stay there. He was given an unfurnished shack and work as a labourer at a starvation wage. His family had not been advised of his whereabouts. After six months he was allowed to return to his home in Soweto, but stringent banning orders were imposed. When the bannings lapsed, he had five years of normalcy. Then, in 1976, when the “children’s rebellion” erupted, he was accused of inciting them and was detained incommunicado for many months before being charged in the Bethal trial, ending with a jail sentence of 15 years – he was 66 years old. In a smuggled note he wrote: “As the doors of prison lock us in, this time our spirits are very high because we realise that victory is in sight and freedom is on our threshold.” He was freed nine years later because he was dying of cancer.
Our own errors landed us in trouble, too, such as a front-page report that tears rolled down the face of a security policeman while he was under cross-examination during a Terrorism Act trial. It was such an inherently improbable scenario that our copy editors should not have allowed it into the paper. That morning we had a furious complaint from the security police about what they saw as an affront to one of their men. The commissioner of police lodged a complaint with the Press Council. The lawyer responsible for the cross-examination was George Bizos, one of the leading defence barristers in political trials and an old friend of mine. I phoned him and he said that much as he would have liked to reduce a policemen to tears, it had not happened. The reporter could not offer any explanation, and was fired. The police, mollified, dropped their complaint. We tried to be as careful as possible in picking our way through the myriad laws. There were now at least 100 laws that infringed press freedom, and the production line was still churning them out. There was always a new problem, such as the case of the man accused of murder who was committed for mental observation. We had a photograph of him and thought we could publish it since he was not actually in a prison or police station and thus did not come under the prohibition of photographs. We consulted our lawyers who advised that although he wasn’t actually in prison, he was considered to be in prison for our purposes and we should not publish. We took the advice. There was also the day that we carried an interview on page one with a Cabinet minister, Chris Heunis, about the price of petrol, a very sensitive issue because of the international sanctions that were building up against South Africa. It was a good interview and quite informative, or so we thought until we had an outraged call from the minister’s office denying that he had spoken to any of our reporters and threatening us with every possible unpleasantness. It turned out that our reporter had looked up Heunis in the Pretoria phone book and the person he spoke to was not Heunis the minister, but Heunis the plumber, who had gladly given his views on the crisis when asked. War of Words by Benjamin Pogrund is published by M&G Books and is available at all good bookshops