Cyril Ramaphosa
The Weekly Mail has in its short and dynamic history certainly contributed to a creative journalism in our country. Whilst saying this I need to add a word of caution, because occasions like these are not only to pat one another on the back. I believe it is also an occasion to critically examine the conditions in our country and the role of the media. It is a time when we reflect on whether the Weekly Mail, in its attempt to continue the traditions of its predecessor, the Rand Daily Mail, has extended the frontiers of our journalism, or whether it is no different from the rest of the commercial press in the country.
It is well known that the censorship laws in our country curtail the free flow of information. In addition, we also have self-censorship legislated by the newspaper barons and companies which control our media.
They (these two forms of censorship) are both designed to regulate what the public consumes and shape our perspectives. They are there to ensure that the conditions of domination which presently exist in our society are maintained and enforced.
If one puts it simply, repression alone cannot produce the relations of domination and subordination in our society. Legitimacy and consent have to be generated. The media in general play a crucial role in this regard. Many journalists, I regret to say, have become active agents in this process.
Under the guise of objectivity, they have been perpetrators of disinformation and blatant propaganda for the minority apartheid regime and the capitalist class in our country. Under the guise of presenting both sides of the story they delude themselves that there is such a thing as total objectivity.
It is important to remember what a distinguished liberal historian once said. He said, “How much of the mountain you see depends on where you stand”.
There are many people in this troubled country, some of whom are ordinary workers, some intellectuals, who believe the South African press has all along underestimated the brutality of the South African regime and its main allies, big business, and so ought to share the responsibility for what has happened in our country today.
To speak frankly, the system – I mean the regime and big business – cannot continue their crusade of brutality and exploitation without the help and support of the compromised press. The regime and big business need the press to explain and legitimise their brutality against the oppressed and exploited. These two allies achieve this through a high degree of collaboration. The one passes ridiculous laws to restrict the press, and when that does not succeed, the other shuts down effective newspapers and replaces them with faceless tabloids.
Bullets, Casspirs and purple rain aside, there are two ways to perpetuate a status quo. The first is to refuse people information;the second is to give people infonnation. The oppressor knows that he who controls the image and the source or information, controls the mind. And he who controls the mind has little to fear from the class he oppresses and exploits.
What I am concerned to emphasise here is that in our situation or violence, misinformation is a simple necessity of the system. And whether the system affords information to people or refuses them information, the aim and effects are the same: mystification and misinformation.
Bearing these things in mind, we can readily see that the press in a situation or oppression necessarily reflects the interests and values of the oppressive society. Press people who do not stand up to that fact by operating within a perspective which radically negates the system, find themselves serving the established order. And there are many of those today that we know.
A number of South Africans are today indebted to those journalists who serve on papers such as the Weekly Mail, the Namibian, the Indicator and the New Nation, for recognising that fact and for reporting within a new perspective.
Our country is descending deeper, and deeper into a hell of its own making and the press has helped a great deal to pave the way towards that hell by sins of omission and commission.
It is true that the regime is up in arms against the media, through the various ridiculous laws that have been passed to restrict the freedom and effectiveness of the press. It is also true that big business has muzzled the press and virtually destroyed the freedom of the press. One can go further and say the regime and capital are making attempts to reduce the South African media to pacifiers, mediators and interpretators of its policies.
The South African press is able to admit responsibility for noble acts, such as highlighting the plight of a stranded and abandoned cat belonging to Mrs Jones in the Johannesburg northern suburbs and starting a massive fundraising campaign to enable Mrs Jones to be operated on at a hospital near Groote Schuur.
However, the South African press must at the same time accept responsibility for the gross omission of not highlighting the plight of the downtrodden workers of this country. The press has done very little to question the captains of big industry about the low wages they pay workers when they speak about how they are helping to abolish apartheid.
The mining industry is left unchallenged by the press. The mining industry is least able to convince, people of its support for social change. It is the industry which provided the furnace in which race discrimination was baked and the press knows this. Today it relies absolutely on the exploitative migrant labour system and on police oppression to operate. It pays black workers the lowest wages of any major mining country in the world, with the exception of India. Yet the press has never highlighted this fact and has never really analysed it.
The mining industry employs public relations people, advertising agencies to try and whitewash the real facts. They make a big noise about the small amounts they spend from the Chairman’s Fund on education and money they give to the Urban Foundation, in the hope that no-one will look closely at the wages they pay their, which they keep secret of course.
Businessmen and, least of all, the mining industry, do not want economic reform. The mine owners have had the money, the resources and the opportunity to fight racial discrimination and to raise the wages of black workers substantially, but they have not done so.
All you ever bear the mining industry barons say is that they are hamstrung by the law. Big business has been breaking innumerable laws to make big profits, but they have avoided breaking unjust laws, that would help destroy the migrant labour system and allow workers to live with their families.
Newspapers always write about the billions that Ango American has made in profits. But they write it up in the business section, which workers do not read. The press does not analyse those profits and interpret them for the workers who produce the wealth.
If they did, we would all know that the mining industry’s profits in 1985 were R7,7-billion, which represented a whopping 78 percent increase in profit. In 1985 each worker contributed about R15 400 to gold mine profits and earned in return an average of R4 800, less than a third of the profits he produced. The press does not highlight these facts.
Our union has demanded a 45 percent wage increase, but the press which speaks for capital has rejected that demand as ridiculous, without analysing the facts.
Businessmen and economists are crying out for the government to reduce taxes to stimulate the economy and to jerk South Africa out of recession. What better way is there than for the mines to act unilaterally and to slash their tax payments by increasing workers’ wages. But they prefer not to so, to do so; they prefer to pay higher taxes than higher wages. Against this backdrop, the Chamber of Mines is today offering black miners a 14,5 percent wage increase when their profits have increased since 1975 by 70 percent and their profits for 1985 increased by 38 percent. Will anyone be shocked if there is a strike? Yes. there will be a total outcry from the press, which will accuse the NUM of being irresponsible and leading the country to bankruptcy. The forces of repression – the mine police, the SAP and the army – will crush the strike with impunity and the press will not even bother to find out what really happened other than to give a report that the forces of evil were successfully crushed.
Efforts such – as Project Free Enterprise, announced today, may have noble objectives, but the experience of the working class dictates that it is too late to save the free enterprise system in this country. The alliance between big business and the apartheid regime has gone on too long and is soaked with the blood of workers who have reaped nothing from the free enterprise system but poverty, low wages, massive unemployment, lack of housing, inferior education, malnutrition and inadequate medical care.
The working class wants a programme that will restructure the economy and society as a whole in such a way that the wealth of the mines, factories, farms and all the means of production, are democratically shared and controlled by all its people.
Because of its skills and resources, the media is the key to the transformation of South African society. This does not imply that the media is an elite group with an elite function. A new level of commitment by the media is necessary.
Harry Oppenheimer
May I thank you all at the Weekly Mail for having invited me to come and speak this evening. It is a great pleasure, and it is rather typical of you, I think, because you are a lively organisation. You have chosen to have your party in a lively place. You have chosen to bring Mr Cyril Ramaphosa and me together and that is rather fun and that again is original.
I differ a little bit from Mr Cyril Ramaphosa in thinking that this ought to be fun. I think it should be rather a cheerful occasion.
I know it is very difficult for anniversaries in South Africa nowadays to be looked upon as cheerful occasions because we are unfortunately living in a time when anniversaries of things which have been really important and good to the country, like the 100th anniversary of Johannesburg’s formation, have to be cast aside and condemned simply because times are bad. And yet that (Johannesburg’s centenary) was something very important just as
much for the people Mr Ramaphosa represents as for the people I am supposed to represent, though I am not really sure that I do represent them.
I think that the first anniversary of the Weekly Mail is something rather different. This is a rather happy occasion. Of course, it did grow out or a very unfortunate event indeed – the death of that great paper, the Rand Daily Mail. That was a very sad event, something which I think affected all of us.
But at least because of the initiative that was taken by the founders of the Weekly Mail, we can look back to that time, not simply as the death of the Rand Daily Mail, but we can look to it as the formation of a new organisation which gives us a new sort of hope.
Because, at that time, the founders of this newspaper showed determination and they showed courage. And whereas others just looked at the figures and lamented because they were so very bad, these were people who looked at the situation in South Africa and they acted. And they deserve congratulations for what they have done.
Now, I was very pleased to be invited to speak here this evening, obviously not because the Weekly Mail continuously and regularly reflects my views. Although it may reflect them a little more often than some of you may be inclined to suppose.
Anyhow, the very fact that Mr Cyril Ramaphosa is here to talk as he did talk tonight – a most touching and moving speech, made all the more touching by the neglect of some of the facts – the fact that we were both here to talk together is something which gives me very great pleasure or course, there are differences between me and Mr Cyril Ramaphosa and I don’t intend to go into them except in one respect. I think he is wrong not to understand that in some sections anyhow in private enterprise, he has powerful potential allies in his battle against racial discrimination.
And it is to my mind unfortunate to link that battle against discrimination with another battle against the free enterprise system, because I don’t believe these two things are tied together as irrevocably or as firmly as some of us may be inclined to suppose.
But whatever differences my friend and I may have, I think we are certainly as one in regarding a free and lively and brave press as an absolutely essential factor in the life of a free country.
Now, of course, you can easily say that this is just something platitudinous. It is platitudinous in almost every country in the world except in South Africa. But in South Africa it is not platitudinous to say that a free, a lively and a brave press is essential because we are ruled by a government that is inclined to think that any press which expresses any views strongly with which it disapproves must be a press that is unpatriotic and probably immoral.
Of course, we are a divided country. That is not the fault of any of us, or at least not the fault of any of us living now, not even of someone as old as me. But we are a divided country and of course if you have a divided country it is particularly important if you can get it to have tolerance. But of course, in such a country, to get such tolerance is a thing which is particularly and regretfully difficult to succeed in.
There are far too many people who think that firm expression of views with which they happen not to agree must be wrong, conducive to ill-will and probably conducive to violence. And let me say that this dislike of having views firmly expressed which are views which you don’t think happen to be right is an attitude of mind which is by no means confined to rightwing people. It is just as clear in the behaviour of leftwing people who prefer to shout down anybody who expresses views which they happen to think are wrong.
But my view, and l would suspect Mr Ramaphosa’s – I don’t want to put words into his mouth, but I would suspect that our views are the exact opposite. I think both of us would feel that the strong expression or differing views is something immensely important and something which, in the long run, makes for consensus about essentials.
I say particularly about essentials because you’ve got to fight about all sorts of things in any lively and free country. But you cannot, on the other hand, with safety fight about the extreme essentials in the life of a country. Democracy really is a system which calls for consensus about what is absolutely fundamental and extremely angry fighting about things which are not quite so essential. Of course, to start a new paper like this is a very brave and a very difficult thing to do. And in starting a paper, goodwill, however good the will may be, is not enough. It calls for great skills and it calls for judgement and these things were all present in the formation of this paper.
It calls for an understanding of the practical possibilities and in making the plans for this paper these were taken into account and that is why – not the only reason, but a very important reason – why after one year, the paper is flourishing instead of having died after a fortnight, as so many of the critics were inclined to think it would.
There has to be idealism of course. Without idealism the paper would not succeed and if it did succeed, it just wouldn’t be worthwhile.
But idealism has to be on a realistic basis. Perhaps I can take up my friend when he talked, I think rather scornfully, of a commercial press. I think a press, if it is going to be powerful for good, as well as for evil, has got to know what it is doing from a commercial point of view.
And this paper has known that and that is one of the reasons – perhaps not the most important reason, but an essential reason – why it has been a success.
The Weekly Mail is bringing a point of view which, as I have said already, I don’t always agree with. But I certainly agree with this paper far more often than I disagree with it.
I think this is a paper of real importance to South Africa as a paper which is going to help bring a new, democratic and more just society into being. I want to congratulate the founders of this paper very much indeed. I want to express to them my good wishes for many anniversaries.
I hope they will go from strength to strength. I think they deserve support from all sections of South Africa, from those who represent the workers, particularly the black workers of South Africa, and I think it deserves strong support from the business community also.