Veteran journalist and former Sowetan newspaper editor Aggrey Klaaste died in the Garden City Clinic in Johannesburg on Saturday morning, aged 63.
Klaaste was editor of the Sowetan in the stable of New Africa Publications between 1988 and 2002, taking the newspaper into a democratic South Africa in 1994.
Klaaste’s son Peter said on Saturday his father died, but could not disclose what his father had died of.
Klaaste’s wife said on Thursday her husband had been in the intensive care unit at the clinic for nine days, fighting a lung infection.
Upon assuming leadership of the Sowetan, he introduced the concept of ”nation building” and invested much of his time and energy in promoting the idea.
Klaaste did not hesitate to seek support accross old divides for his campaign. Those he approached included senior Cabinet members of the former apartheid government.
The effects of a divided South African apartheid society hit the young Klaaste squarely when he began studying at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1958.
He was not used to being among whites, and described his surroundings as ”just a sea of white people”.
”It was a helluva disconcerting experience,” Klaaste said in an interview last year.
He encountered extreme racism at the university, and remembered how ”a group of white guys in engineering wanted to attack us”.
A highlight of his campus days was an address by Pan Africanist Congress president Robert Sobukwe.
”Man, it was quite something, the whole law department attended the talk. I don’t remember what he said but it was just wonderful,” Klaaste recounted.
He was among the last group of blacks who completed a degree at Wits before it was closed to black students because of apartheid laws.
Klaaste graduated in 1960 with a BA degree, and started working as a journalist.
Questioned on his move into journalism, he laughed: ”Because of booze. I started drinking at Wits and starting hanging out with the wrong crowd — the boozers. And the boozers were often journalists.”
Klaaste got a job with Drum magazine, and from there moved to The World (which was banned in 1977), and later The Post, which became the Sowetan in 1981.
In 1977 he was arrested along with The World editor at the time, Percy Qoboza. Klaaste spent nine months in jail.
This brought him to one of the lowest points in his life, he said.
”I was never very brave, and was never as frightened as when I got arrested by these Boer guys.”
Klaaste, one of eight children, was born in Kimberley, but spent most of his life in Johannesburg, a city he described as ”the passion of my life”.
His parents moved the family to Johannesburg when he was three, and his father became a clerk on the mines. They lived in Sophiatown.
In 1955, when Sophiatown was dismantled, he moved with his family to Meadowlands, Soweto.
Klaaste counted as the highlight of his life the time when Nelson Mandela visited him at his house in Diepkloof, shortly after Mandela was released from jail in 1990.
”It was an unbelievable thing, everybody came to my house. It was just tremendous,” Klaaste recalled.
He started working on his autobiography last year, also serving as executive with black empowerment company New Africa Investment Ltd.
In July last year, Johannesburg’s executive mayor, Amos Masondo, appointed Klaaste chairperson of the newly-created Johannesburg Tourism Company.
More information on Klaaste’s career is available on www.joburg.org.za. – Sapa