The announcement was made in mid-March 1985: the Rand Daily Mail was to be closed down on 30 April.
The country’s leading newspaper was paying the price for being too tough in exposing and analysing the evils of apartheid. Its owners, Anglo American Corporation, under pressure from the government, decided to get rid of it.
Anton Harber was the newspaper’s political editor. I was deputy editor. He came to see me to tell me that he and other young journaliists were going to launch a new weekly newspaper to follow in the Rand Daily Mail‘s tradition.
I accepted that we were passing the baton to a new generation of journalists. I told him he could stop his daily reporting and concentrate on the new paper. A few days later a friend from Cape Town phoned me: Bennie Rabinowitz, a leading businessman and a friend from schooldays.
He wanted advice. He had been approached to invest in the new paper. Should he do it? “Of course you must,” I told him, “but it’s not an investment; it’s a donation. The paper needs your help but don’t bank on it being able to last.”
So he put in money and became a director — and has always told me it’s one of the best things he has ever done. So The Weekly Mail was rapidly put together. I was given the honour on the launch night of proposing the toast: standing on a chair in the entrance passage of the first offices, speaking to the crowd. It has been a long road since then.
The Weekly Mail was the bravest of the brave in recording the terrible events of the last years of apartheid. As the Mail & Guardian today, it continues to serve South Africa.