/ 23 June 2004

An editor unrivalled

Editor of The Star, Moegsien Williams, once told me about his arrival at the Sowetan in 1992 to take the job of night editor. The then editor, Aggrey Klaaste, told him: ”If you want to understand this paper, look in this folder.”

Leafing through the contents, Williams began to read piles of letters addressed to Klaaste. They were written on scraps of paper, in uncertain script and in unsophisticated language. These were not your conventional ”Letters to the Editor” — those pompous opinions by professional letter-writers. They were appeals for help with schooling, pensions, health, housing, bureaucratic indifference, problems with wayward teenagers, and so on.

That readers of Sowetan saw their paper as an advice office was a consequence of the aura projected by Klaaste. Upon his death this weekend, it is time to appreciate and celebrate his life.

Klaaste was almost the last of generation of journalists who was shaped by the 1950s. His youth in Sophiatown and his BA at Wits University in 1962 are experiences that few contemporary scribes will share. It was a context that shaped him and defined his contribution in the subsequent years, making him different to those who came later.

Like others in his generation, Klaaste had a top command of English, having been at school prior to Bantu Education. I recall how, in the 1970s, young activists expressed their admiration for Klaaste’s command of the language — which he wielded without any concession to their lesser levels of fluency.

Like many of his 1960s writing colleagues, Klaaste also became an alcoholic. But in contrast to many peers, he was able to beat the bottle, thanks in part to his joining Alcoholics Anonymous. This enormous personal success combined with a strong Christian ethos (which, incidentally, made him non-racial in his judgement of white individuals) made for a man who really believed in the possibilities of reform.

It must have been tough to hang on to this during the 1970s, when police massacred more than 800 scholars in Soweto, when the World and Weekend World were banned, and when Klaaste himself was imprisoned for seven months. On the other hand, repression would also have brought home to him the high institutional and personal costs of direct confrontation with the state.

As a senior figure on Sowetan, the immediate successor to the banned World, Klaaste joined a delicate path of keeping credibility with the community, while not challenging apartheid to the extent of jeopardising the paper’s survival. In later years, he would oversee Sowetan‘s annual commemoration on October 19th of National Press Freedom day — the anniversary of the banning of the newspapers.

It showed that he did not forget what had happened. He may have wanted to forgive too, and accordingly chose a very particular way to fight.

When in 1988, he became Sowetan editor, his style was to dodge direct politics, although he condoned the newspaper’s reflection of the overwhelmingly black consciousness perspectives of its staff. The result was a paper out of kilter with the growing political success of the UDF’s non-racialism, the repopularisation of the Freedom Charter, and the rise of the ANC.

And yet, despite its politics, Sowetan under Klaaste was not out of kilter with ”the people”. His focus — and arguably the key to the circulation growth of the paper — was social. It was this reformism that proclaimed the publication as a ”nation builder”.

The phrase ”nation” referred to Africans alone, again differentiating it from the broader interpretation of the UDF and ANC. What really annoyed activists across the spectrum, however, was that Klaaste would not follow either Africanist or ”Charterist” politics. He operated outside the ambit of the power plays of both state and those in the resistance.

Never a political animal, it tore his heart to see the way that apartheid could work to turn people in the black community against each other, and all the more so when it came to violent rivalries between the opposed political tendencies of the black consciousness movement, the ANC and Inkatha.

At the time, it also seemed almost utopian for Klaaste to stress laying down non-political community building blocks for a post-apartheid future. There was a gulf between his approach, and the politicised building of ”organs of people’s power” for enduring governance, in the shape of street committees, people’s parks, civic associations, scholar structures, unions and the like.

One effect of this was that, for all its popularity, Sowetan in the 1980s and 1990s never commanded the political clout of its 1970s predecessors. Nor was its existence seen as obviating the struggle’s need for a vibrant alternative press. As a participant in that press, I recall how Sowetan was seen as inconsequential. Aside from its unrepresentative black consciousness orientation, the paper did not break big anti-apartheid stories. It seemed to be part of the mainstream press, owned as it was back then by the Argus company in a wider stable where it played minor fiddle in relation to flagship organs like The Star.

In short, Klaaste’s ”nation-building” paradigm appeared to be a distracting conservatism during the late 1980s and early 1990s. And yet it was also precisely this paradigm which resonated with many readers — and especially with those sceptical of political rhetoric and tired of militant youths without responsibilities. Sowetan became ”embedded” with the masses because it had a figurehead who was positive, expressly moral and a pointer to practical changes (albeit changes within the broad limits of apartheid).

Whether it was Sowetan sponsoring choral contests, celebrating role models, or hectoring parents to pay more attention to educating their kids, the publication reached out uniquely. Through its pages — and in many other practical ways — it appealed to thousands of ordinary people who longed for cohesion rather than chaos and ungovernability.

Although the heyday of ”nation-building” was before democracy, its success as a campaign ensured that Klaaste was still a figure to be hailed in the streets of Grahamstown almost a decade later when he came to the city to receive an honorary doctorate at Rhodes University. By this stage, he had already been in the back seat of the paper and, to a large extent, out of the main editorial limelight for a couple of years. Yet, his reputation persisted.

However, the man had already begun to be squeezed out the paper when it was sold by Argus to Dr Nthato Motlana and New African Investments Limited (Nail) in 1998. The new ANC-aligned owners made him editor-in-chief, and installed a younger figure as editor — one who was closer to their political vision, Mike Siluma from The Star. They also purchased the former alternative weekly paper, the pro-ANC New Nation. When it folded a number of its ANC-aligned staffers joined Sowetan.

By then, it seemed, Klaaste’s orientation looked in danger of becoming quaint, especially given the changed political landscape and the prospects opening up for a black middle class. When Siluma became worn down by internal politics within the paper, and moved on to run Nail’s radio assets, the paper remained headless for about a year. Once Saki Macozoma became chief executive of Nail, he hired former Business Day deputy editor, John Dludlu, to run the show.

The new mandate was to move the paper with the fast-changing society. Sowetan had not been sold well in the city of its name, where aspirations ran well ahead of the paper’s contents. Instead of the collective sentiment of ”build the nation”, the motto under the masthead now became ”power your future”.

Indeed, Dludlu’s task was to take the publication upward. As more readers became middle-class and moved out the townships into the suburbs, the strategy was to upgrade the paper to serve their changing interests and circumstances.

It was, and remains, a difficult transition, and it lost the paper a lot of working class readers. Deftly exploiting the gap, Nasionale Pers launched the Sun newspaper — an apolitical tabloid that carries some of the grassroots news Sowetan used to cover, although with the added sizzle of sex which Klaaste’s conservative legacy had precluded.

By this point, Klaaste had been elevated further upstairs into Nail management itself, from which vantage point he continued a number of nation-building initiatives. But cut off from the paper, they lacked the profile and impact of old.

Now this veteran journalist has passed away, and the driving force in today’s newspapers is indisputably commerce. Notwithstanding its circulation-building success, ”nation building” was never intended as a promotional strategy; it was Klaaste’s honest and spontaneous response to the societal challenges. The same thrust is probably unlikely to succeed in today’s conditions, although there still remains space for a socially-conservative working class paper (a ”Mirror” for the ”Sun”).

In today’s commercial climate, we can celebrate Klaaste as part of a generation for whom making money was not the main purpose, nor the main utility, of a newspaper. Times have changed, but his community values are still a valuable reminder that there should be more to media than the service of mammon.