In the first edition of the Weekly Mail, the Mail & Guardian‘s predecessor, on June 14 1985, the page four lead was an analysis by Patrick Laurence on the report of the Kannemeyer inquiry into the shooting of 20 people by police in Langa three months earlier.
Laurence concluded: “Have the police learned anything about riot control since Sharpeville? The answer is unequivocably: No.”
In week two, he wrote about the South African Defence Force raid into Gaborone on the night the paper was launched, pointing out how it had smashed electronic equipment. “It was almost as if it were not enough to shoot down and blow up suspected ANC cadres. Anything that could transmit the ideas for which the victims stood — or for which the soldiers believed they stood or had been told they stood — had to be destroyed.”
The following week he described the 22 defendants at the Pretoria Treason Trial. Then there was a piece on how, despite the Nkomati Accord, guerrilla attacks were on the rise, though now they appeared to be driven internally rather than from across the borders. “Unquestionably,” he said, “the impatience of the black youth — is the main driving force of the new era that the struggle has entered.” In July he covered two funerals: one in Duduza, where he gave a chilling first-hand description of a near-necklacing, another in the Eastern Cape, where he noted how “funerals of unrest victims have become the major vehicle for mobilising blacks in the struggle against apartheid”.
He also previewed and then covered PW Botha’s “Rubicon speech”, which appeared under the headline, “PW tells the world to be damned”.
Then he was off to the funeral of slain activist Griffiths Mxenge, where he described the burning body of a black soldier and quoted a youth: “Kentucky. We shall burn them all.”
Laurence, who died last Thursday at the age of 74, has been praised this week for his commitment to truth in a long journalistic career, his sportsmanship as a runner, cyclist, tennis player and cricketer, and his courage, having twice been sent to prison for his work. I quote the stories he wrote in the first six months of the paper to illustrate the critical role he played in its formation.
When the paper was run by young upstarts, he was one of the few seniors who lent it his already considerable professional status. Week after week, for almost no money, he wrote some of the most important coverage of that turbulent time.
But something else comes through: his capacity to be both deeply committed to a set of fundamental values and yet be scrupulous about writing with fairness, balance and accuracy. These core values ran through all his journalism and the books he wrote, but he used this to enhance, not undermine, his authority. He showed us how to be committed and still write with pedantic accuracy.
And he demonstrated how the most telling analysis was rooted in on-the-ground reporting, how there was nothing to replace going out and getting the story and then carefully and thoughtfully explaining it. Laurence did it for five decades, with energy, consistency and an impeccable sense of right and wrong.
Anton Harber was one of the founding editors of the M&G