On Friday July 14 1985, a scraggly new publication was offered for sale on random street corners in Johannesburg. Its appearance was unexpected, particularly by those who had produced it. Sober observers predicted its likely demise before the month’s end.
The headlines were uniformly depressing, even those that just listed the movies. There were a few pictures, whose contents could be vaguely discerned amid greyish murk. There were two advertisements, both paybacks for favours rendered.
This modest event would long have passed from memory, were it not for one inexplicable fact: the newspaper is still with us. The Weekly Mail, later the Weekly Mail & Guardian, and later still, the Mail & Guardian, is 20 years old.
The heroic version of the paper’s early history runs thus: in 1985, the world-famous Rand Daily Mail closed down. A group of unemployed but enterprising young journalists gathered over a table full of beers, agreed to pool their retrenchment money, and started an anti-apartheid weekly in a two-roomed office painted, appropriately, bright pink.
For 10 years they thumbed their noses at authority, and survived some thrilling scrapes including bannings, court cases (most of them lost, but gloriously so) and the detention of contributors. There were journalists who spent months on the run from political rivals or police, a mysterious bomb blast, and the attempted murder of a reporter in the paper’s basement. It could make for a good movie, and perhaps one day it will.
The revisionist version runs thus: journalists are great whingers, but not great doers. Only two of the founding group were journalists; the rest were lawyers or accountants. Most of the money was begged or blackmailed from relatives, the fathers of ex-girlfriends, or strangers who made eye contact. The pink paint was a leftover from the previous tenant, a hairdresser. The apartheid regime had many opportunities to close the paper, but chose to let it live. The paper’s most dangerous foes were not security policemen, but bank managers.
The year 1985 is but 20 years distant, yet it belongs to another era. It is hard now to conjure up the fears of that time, when “unrest” simmered all over the country, funerals became staging points for political clashes that could end in murder — spawning yet more funerals — and revolution seemed close at hand. Six weeks after the Weekly Mail was founded, president PW Botha declared a state of emergency, giving himself the power to do, essentially, whatever he pleased. The most repressive period in apartheid history had begun.
This was not the way it was seen at the time, at least not by the daily press: “We have an army trained to win the hearts and minds of blacks … from all reports they seem to be doing a reasonable job,” said the voice of the common sense, Business Day.
Out on a distant limb, the Weekly Mail was one of the few media voices of dissent. But Botha had done the paper a backhanded favour. He had given it a reason to exist: to report from the township battlefronts, to keep faithful records of detentions and bannings, and to defy the government’s increasingly elaborate machinations to silence reporting.
The government was surprisingly slow to act against the press, perhaps because most local newspapers were so well behaved.
In the face of censorship, new forms of coded journalistic language evolved. Articles were worded so obliquely that their meaning had to be inferred from what was unsaid. A report that police denied having raided a school at 8.35pm, denied beating up pupils holding a secret meeting, and denied taking five of them into detention, could be read as confirmation that the event had occurred.
Some of the more infamous editions of the Weekly Mail were defaced with black strips and white spaces, ostensibly acts of self-censorship. Placed with some care, the blanks were designed to reveal all to those with patience.
One of the state’s most valuable propaganda weapons was the claim that South Africa was a parliamentary democracy with freedom of the press. To the Thatcher and Reagan governments, a free press was an essential justification for their continued support for the Botha government.
Closing down newspapers, then, was tactically risky. A curious system of media “warnings” evolved. A paper would be warned, three times, by letter, that it had transgressed the regulations. If the editors considered a warning unfair, they could write back in their defence. Only if a publication persisted in its folly in the face of all this good advice, would it be closed.
The Weekly Mail‘s turn to be closed came in October 1988, its last edition reporting the mysterious firebombing of a dissident church group. The uproar that followed the ban took the government by surprise. The paper had by now earned an international reputation.
The ambassadors of the European Union issued a “demarche”, one of the highest forms of diplomatic rebuke. The United States Congress voted to send funds to assist the paper. The Botha government said nothing, but a month later, the Weekly Mail was back in business.
The Weekly Mail‘s commitment to honest reporting — as opposed to its commitment to the struggle — was put to the test a year later, when it broke the story of Winnie Mandela’s links to the disappearance of child activist Stompie Seipati. Winnie Mandela was then the unsullied icon of the struggle. Her serene face was much photographed, but her words could not be quoted, and this silence endowed her with an aura of mystery and wisdom.
To criticise Winnie was blasphemy. There were elements of the African National Congress who never forgave the paper.
This attitude was by no means universal. When Nelson Mandela was released he granted his first press interviews to only two newspapers: the now defunct New Nation, which was considered the ANC’s “own” paper; and the Weekly Mail.
But the abiding problem at the paper was one never discussed in public: money, or the lack of it. The funds raised at the beginning were exhausted by the year’s end. From then on, the paper relied on the philanthropy of a small group of wealthy liberal sympathisers, first in South Africa, then abroad. Each would pay over his share, expecting nothing in return. Each time, the money ran out earlier than planned.
It was not that the paper was spendthrift. It paid the worst salaries, worked its staff the longest hours, rented the shabbiest offices, and provided not a single perk. No one drove a car less than 10 years old. The Weekly Mail was a calling, not a job. But even slavery can break the bank.
The most dramatic change in the paper’s history came with the arrival of the British Guardian newspaper group. The relationship began as a modest agreement to enhance the paper’s value by carrying the Guardian Weekly as an insert, much as the Sunday Times today carries The New York Times supplement.
As The Guardian executives came to know the paper better, they became convinced of two things: first, that there were opportunities opening up for them in post-apartheid South Africa. Second, that with their publishing experience, they could solve the Weekly Mail‘s business problems. Both proved mistaken.
The Guardian never did make it big in South Africa; the rival Independent group got in first. And The Guardian‘s attempts to improve the paper’s business prospects had the opposite effect. New people arrived from London, bringing a new culture. The old people upped and left, and some took with them skills not easily replaced. The name changed, money poured in, salaries and staff complements rose, better equipment and premises were sought, the paper grew fatter. And the red ink kept mounting. What began as annual losses in the low hundred thousands became losses in the millions.
The Guardian endured seven years of mounting defeat. Remote control from London, which increasingly reached into every aspect of the paper’s inner workings, made no difference. Yet The Guardian never did what almost any other company might have: closed the paper and walked away. Its respect for the paper’s editorial role kept it alive. It sold to Zimbabwean publisher Trevor Ncube three years ago, putting ownership in black hands for the first time.
The Mail & Guardian is not the Weekly Mail. The Weekly Mail ethos could not endure beyond the era of protest. Not one of the original staff is still on the paper. The only feature to endure is the Krisjan Lemmer column, which itself has gone through many hands. The paper’s range has broadened; there were no motoring, lifestyle or travel pages in the politics-fixated original. Yet on every page, one can hear echoes of the old Weekly Mail: a take-no-prisoners style of critique; a sense of nose-in-the-air superiority; an obsession with either political intrigue or with sex; a caustic wit; an abiding hatred of anyone wealthy or powerful.
What remains most deeply embedded is a personality disorder: this paper has never been capable of polite consent. Other papers: Business Day, Die Burger and The Star, voices of the old establishment, have effortlessly transformed into voices of the new. The Mail & Guardian remains where it began, on the outside, a lone voice of contrariness. Long may it remain there!
Irwin Manoim was joint founder and editor of the Weekly Mail, along with Anton Harber, still his business partner 20 years later.