Beating the censors: SA’s press under pressure for 200 years

Two weeks ago, ANC chair Gwede Mantashe casually dismissed the plethora of reports about the Gupta family’s influence over the government, published as far back as 2011.

Alex Freund, evidence leader at the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture, put it to Mantashe that "those allegations were not taken seriously, and we are all paying the price".

But, said Mantashe, the ANC reckoned the reports about the Guptas came from a media with "a racist stance".

It’s a revealing insight into the hostility the governing party reserves for the media — frequently refusing to answer legitimate questions, and instead expecting fawning coverage — as we celebrate World Press Freedom Day on May 3.

But despite this hostility, SA’s media remains among the most free on the continent. And it is, with the judiciary, one of the few institutions that has largely remained strong in recent years — despite an unprecedented commercial squeeze on newsrooms.

Last week, the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index of 180 countries ranked SA at 32. That’s considered "fairly good", putting it in the top 20% of countries globally.

On the flip side, it isn’t a coincidence that economic basket cases such as Zimbabwe (130) — where journalist Hopewell Chin’ono was arrested for exposing Covid fraud in hospitals — were near the bottom. Among the worst performers were Sudan (159), Rwanda (156) and Eswatini (141).

Eritrea, at 180, was worse even than North Korea (179) or China (177), where President Xi Jinping "has taken online censorship, surveillance and propaganda to unprecedented levels". Thanks to an army of "censors and trolls", the country stifles information flow to its 989-million internet users, spying on and tactically spreading its propaganda on social media. Compared with these sorts of curbs, SA is a shining light, certainly among developing countries, where it is far ahead of its other Brics partners, Brazil (111), Russia (150) and India (142).

Speaking of SA, the report said: "An investigative journalism culture is well established but apartheid-era legislation and terrorism laws are used to limit coverage of government’s institutions when ‘national interest’ is supposedly at stake."

So, in the shadows, the State Security Agency (SSA) spies on journalists, while others are "harassed and subjected to intimidation campaigns if they try to cover certain subjects involving the ruling ANC, government finances, the redistribution of land to the black population or corruption".

The index singles out Julius Malema’s EFF, which was warned by the high court in 2019 for hate speech against journalists. The party’s supporters also routinely mock, insult and threaten journalists on social media — particularly women journalists.

Yet SA’s media continues to perform well — and SA’s ranking was considerably better than in 2013, when it was placed at 52 of 180 countries, or in 2014, when it ranked at 42.

Many South Africans don’t realise how rare this is.

This year’s index reported that "journalism, the main vaccine against disinformation, is completely or partly blocked in 73% of the 180 countries ranked by the organisation".

Yet in SA we still have a diverse range of media groups, newspapers and magazines. And in the past 27 years journalists and editors haven’t been banned or held under house arrest. No legislation, barring the Covid law on "fake news", has been passed to limit freedom of expression.

This doesn’t mean the ANC hasn’t tried. Former president Jacob Zuma’s government made various attempts at passing the Protection of State Information Bill, which contained some deeply alarming clauses about the arrest and imprisonment of journalists and whistle-blowers, and had no clear public-interest clause.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has sent it back for "reassessment" — so, hopefully, it will die there.

SA’s media is also not free from a more insidious problem: publications being manipulated to suit the agenda of the owners.

This demagogic menace was evident in the Gupta-owned New Age newspaper and TV channel ANN7. It was also evident at the SABC, when Hlaudi Motsoeneng interfered to make overtly political news decisions. And it’s an allegation levelled against Iqbal Survé too. In 2012, he bought the Independent group, which owns the Cape Times, Cape Argus, Pretoria News and The Star. Many journalists who engaged in honest reporting were axed, or forced out. Disturbingly, at the state capture inquiry in January, allegations emerged that the SSA provided R20m so Survé could launch the African News Agency, ostensibly to publish "positive" stories about SA.

The Guptas’ ANN7 and New Age were widely distrusted for their content. But in a tactic indicative of the more subtle ways in which the message is manipulated, the government sought to boost the Guptas by placing many adverts in them them (much as Paul Kruger pushed government advertising towards Dutch publications in the late 1800s).

There have been other fractures: concerns over stories manipulated by shadowy characters led to claims that the SA Revenue Service ran a "rogue unit" (since disproved), and revelations that some journalists from otherwise trustworthy publications made up stories haven’t helped.

Still, all this must be measured against the job the media has done with, for example, its untiring investigations into corruption and state capture. It’s noisy and far from perfect, but it’s still an asset to SA’s democracy.

While many see the recent problems with SA’s media as heralding a more ominous era, there have been darker times in the history of the SA press. A trip down memory lane shows why, despite the fissures, SA’s media has rarely been in a better place.

Pressing for freedom

The story of press freedom in SA started in 1824 with the hopes and dreams of two immigrant Scotsmen. Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn believed fervently in freedom of expression: the notion of a closed society without the liberty to express oneself was abhorrent to them — and they sought to overturn this in their new home in the Cape.

But Lord Charles Somerset, the arch-conservative who ran the Cape Colony, was a firm believer in autocratic rule.

In the autumn of 1824, after their first attempt to start a free press, Pringle was summoned to the colonial office in Cape Town. There, he said, he found Somerset with "a storm on his brow, and it burst forth at once upon me like a long-gathered southeaster from Table Mountain. ‘No Sir!’ he began, ‘you are one of those who dare insult me and oppose my government!’ … He launched forth into a long tirade of abuse, scolding, upbraiding and taunting me, with all the domineering arrogance of mien and sneering insolence of expressions of which he was so great a master."

Pringle and Fairbairn might have given up their attempts to start a free press, were it not for the printer George Greig. His arrival in Cape Town, with skills and equipment, spurred them to seek permission from the colonial office in Britain to start a literary publication. This was granted, but they could not cover "topics of political or personal controversy", nor anything "detrimental to the peace and safety of the colony".

Greig, Pringle and Fairbairn started both The South African Magazine, a literary journal, and the SA Commercial Advertiser, the first independent newspaper in the colony.

They accepted the demand not to engage in party politics, and abstained from covering issues such as slavery and the treatment of the indigenous population. But they did introduce the practice of reporting in the courts, which heard a series of corruption and slave-abuse cases brought against Somerset by an extrovert lawyer called William Edwards. (It turned out he was not a lawyer but an escaped convict from Australia.)

Edwards’s wit and showmanship was the perfect tonic for a nascent press, and the reporting of his cases caused a great stir. He was imprisoned, and Somerset ordered that the press be destroyed. Initially, officials sealed the printing press but did not confiscate the type, so Greig was able to print handbills, titled "The Facts", about the press’s closure. As these circulated in Cape Town, the governor ordered that Greig be banished from the colony.

But Somerset would not have the final word. He was recalled to London, in part because of what Greig, Fairbairn and Pringle had printed. While Pringle gave up on his dream and went back to Britain, Fairbairn stayed in the Cape and the SA Commercial Advertiser became the colony’s greatest advocate of slave emancipation (achieved in 1834) and a nonracial democracy (achieved in 1854 and lasting in some form or another until 1936).

Eugène Marais and the ‘Hou-jou-bek’ law

Perhaps surprisingly, Kruger’s ZAR (1883-1902) was blessed with a thriving and vocal print media. In general, the loudest progressive voices could be heard in the Joburg-based English papers. Dutch papers from Pretoria tended to favour the government, and Kruger pushed significant government advertising their way, sometimes even funding them outright.

But towards the end of the 19th century there was vociferous Afrikaner opposition to Kruger’s outmoded leadership. This was epitomised by 18-year-old Eugène Marais.

In July 1890, the owners of the Transvaal Observer bought the ailing Dutch paper, Land en Volk, to advance the progressive cause among Dutch readers.

Marais, who had already made a name for himself as an outspoken columnist, was soon appointed editor. Using the pseudonym Apteker (pharmacist), he dispensed biting criticism of Kruger, the Volksraad and the concessionaires via his "Swart Pilletjies" (black pills) column.

On July 7 1891, Marais and his friend Jimmy Roos bought Land en Volk for £500.

In the lead-up to the hotly contested 1893 presidential election, Kruger passed a law curbing freedom of speech and editorial expression that was, in Marais biographer Herman van Niekerk’s words, "clearly aimed" at Marais.

He, however, spotted a loophole: the ruling didn’t apply to readers’ letters. Suddenly Land en Volk was awash with angry letters from someone called "Afrikanus Junior".

As Van Niekerk writes: "The typesetter at Land en Volk informed Marais that a government official [had] offered a considerable reward to him for revealing the identity of ‘Afrikanus Junior’. It was clearly a witch-hunt by Kruger. Marais set a trap for the government official and supplied him with a bogus name of a farmer in [the] Waterberg. Marais subsequently wrote a juicy article in Land en Volk about the matter. Much to the embarrassment of Kruger, [Marais] donated the reward to a local hospital."

Land en Volk was later bought by a consortium funded by anti-Kruger mining magnates Julius Wernher and Alfred Beit for £2,500. Marais went on to relentlessly expose the corruption that was part and parcel of Kruger’s concessions policy.

After the Jameson Raid, however, the magnates, mindful of the potential for a PR fiasco, handed the paper to Marais for free. A year later, Kruger passed yet more press legislation, which Marais dubbed the "hou-jou-bek wet" (shut-your-mouth law).

This new law, combined with the death of Marais’ wife and both his parents in the space of a year, caused him to put an end to his editorial career at the age of 24. But his extraordinary life — as a poet, lawyer, morphine addict and naturalist — was only just beginning.

Rhodes to corruption

With the discovery of diamonds, the latter half of the 19th century became a golden age for the press in the Cape. On March 27 1876, Frederick St Leger published the first edition of the Cape Times. And in 1881 Francis Dormer bought the Cape Argus and founded the Argus Company.

As it turned out, the purchase came with some strings attached. Dormer, who had no money, bought the paper after secretly being given a bag containing £6,000 (about R14.8m today) in the middle of the Grand Parade by an anonymous agent of Cecil Rhodes.

By 1895, Dormer left the Argus Company "bitterly convinced that Rhodes’s influence in newspapers was driving the country to disaster", writes author Wessel de Kock. "Too late, Dormer realised that the threat against the press ... could assume many shapes and need not necessarily wear the uniform of officialdom."

As prime minister of the Cape, Rhodes put his stealth weapon to good use, most notably in the Logan corruption scandal of 1892. The scandal revolved around Rhodes’s political ally, James Sivewright, who had illegally handed his friend James Logan the colony-wide railway tender for food and beverages.

When politicians John X Merriman, JW Sauer and James Rose Innes blew the whistle, they were lambasted in the Argus, which referred to them as "the three mutineers", motivated by personal jealousy. The independent Cape Times supported them, saying they "made the most eloquent argument for an honest cause". It did them little good; Rhodes won the next election by a landslide.

Ahead of the 1898 election, Rhodes sought to clandestinely buy out as many papers as he could.

But there was one that stood out against him: John Tengo Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu.

At the time, a significant number of black men were on the Cape’s voters’ roll and their vote could often swing seats in the Eastern Cape — seats Rhodes desperately needed. Jabavu, it seems, turned down an offer by Rhodes to "fund" his paper.

Then, in 1898, a new Eastern Cape newspaper, Izwi Labantu, was founded by people sympathetic to Rhodes’s Progressive Party. As historian André Odendaal puts it: some of the capital needed to start up the newspaper "seems to have been provided by Rhodes".

Izwi’s editorial line in the leadup to the election was sternly pro-Rhodes. Despite it all, Rhodes narrowly lost the election. As for the journalists who ran Izwi, they went on to form what would one day become the ANC.

From editor to prime minister

The Afrikaner press and Afrikaner nationalism in the early 20th century were like the proverbial chicken and egg. As William Hachten and Anthony Giffard write: "The Afrikaner press was a creation of Afrikaner political aspirations, established by the National Party [NP] to spread its message and strengthen its power base. Unlike virtually all the English papers, not a single nationalist newspaper began as a commercial venture. They were intended to sell not news so much as a party line."

In 1915, a year after JBM Hertzog founded the NP, De Burger (renamed Die Burger in 1922) was established under the editorship of DF Malan. One of the first things the paper did was to raise funds for the legal costs of boer rebels who had refused to enter World War 1 on the Allied side and taken up arms against the state.

While there was no legal contract between the NP and Die Burger, the fact that many nationalists, including Hertzog, owned Naspers shares could not be ignored.

Malan’s dual role as editor and leader of the Cape National Party meant that, according to Piet Cillié (who became editor in 1954), "in the eyes of the public, Die Burger was in fact Malan".

When the Labour-NP government came to power in 1924, Malan resigned from Die Burger to join Hertzog’s cabinet. His replacement was his lifelong friend and diehard nationalist Albert "Ysterman" Geyer. Under the "Iron Man", cartoonist DC Boonzaier continued to lay into the Anglo-Jewish capitalist classes, espoused by the fictional "Hoggenheimer".

In the leadup to the 1929 elections, Geyer pushed the nationalists to use "swartgevaar" (black peril) as a campaign issue for the first time. Die Burger claimed that if Jan Smuts got his way, "white SA would be drowned in the black north".

The paper made sure as many people as possible received this message, leaving free copies at schools, colleges, shops and boarding houses.

One cartoon depicted SA as a tiny white spot on the tail of a black dog; another painted a supposedly dystopian future that included a Griqua soldier with a white bride.

Thanks in part to Die Burger, the alliance did so well in the election that it was able to abandon its plans to extend the coloured franchise across SA, and focus instead on building a "white SA".

In 1935, aware that his predominantly Cape-based party lacked upcountry support, Malan set about establishing a paper in the Transvaal. A group of mainly Naspers men managed to persuade a wealthy Transvaal farmer named Pieter Neethling to put up £5,000 on the condition that 1,000 others would donate £100 each. Appeals in Naspers papers buoyed the fundraising effort, and in 1937 Die Transvaler was launched under the editorship of Stellenbosch sociology professor Hendrik Verwoerd.

The Cape founders of the paper would soon regret choosing a staunch Broederbonder as editor: Verwoerd took Die Transvaler in a direction even Malan could not condone. In the first issue, he wrote a violently anti-Semitic article, and he routinely used racist epithets to refer to black South Africans.

In the 1940s, the paper backed the fascist Ossewabrandwag.

Verwoerd did, however, manage to significantly grow upcountry support for the nationalists. So when the party took power in 1948, he resigned as editor to become an MP, and in 1950 Malan appointed him minister of native affairs.

Like Malan, Verwoerd would go on to become prime minister and, in addition, be known as the architect of grand apartheid.

The ‘redeployment’ of Laurence Gandar

Anti-apartheid activist and politician Helen Suzman once said that her good work would not have meant much "if it hadn’t been for the English-medium press".

The towering force behind her Progressive Party in the 1960s was Rand Daily Mail (RDM) editor Laurence Gandar. He not only took on the government regarding the capture of the state by the Broederbond; he also published journalist Benjamin Pogrund’s exposés on prisons. Pogrund had got the gory details of police brutality and the beatings of black inmates from ex-political prisoner Harold Strachan, and found several others to corroborate the facts.

The apartheid government had passed strict laws against this: any news piece had to be "confirmed" by authorities at the prison service before publication. But, believing there was a loophole, Gandar "confirmed" the evidence with sources other than government officials.

After publication, the security branch raided the RDM. After being charged with publishing "false information", Gandar received a R200 fine and Pogrund a six-month suspended sentence.

Gandar also encountered problems with the owners of the newspaper. In the mid-1960s Sir De Villiers Graaff’s opposition United Party (UP) swung radically to the right to find traction with voters — so much so that its weekly mouthpiece, Ons Land, claimed the NP was cosying up to black South Africans by forming the bantustans.

Gandar duly launched an attack on the UP, accusing the party, as journalist Allister Sparks put it, of being "bereft of any new ideas in a changing environment". This did not sit well with Clive Corder, one of Graaff’s oldest friends. As a board member of SA Associated Newspapers (Saan), which owned the RDM, and as chair of the Syfrets Trust, which had a controlling interest in Saan, he pushed to have Gandar removed as editor.

Corder’s initial attempts to replace Gandar with the more conservative Johnny Johnson were met with strong objections from journalists. Instead it was agreed that Gandar would step down, but be made editor in chief.

Though Raymond Louw — Gandar’s choice as successor — became editor, the interference "from above" was nevertheless considered a dark moment in media history.

Black Wednesday

On Wednesday October 19 1977, one month before the elections, justice minister Jimmy Kruger announced the banning of three publications: The World and Weekend World (both owned by the Argus Group), and a Christian journal called Pro Veritate.

The Argus titles’ editors, Percy Qoboza and Aggrey Klaaste, were arrested and imprisoned for "contributing to a subversive situation" (no charges were ever brought against them).

Qoboza and The World had, the year before, brought to a broader public the details of the Soweto uprising and had published the famous image, by Sam Nzima, of the dying Hector Pieterson being carried in the arms of Mbuyisa Makhubu.

Pro Veritate, which was run by Beyers Naude and the Christian Institute of SA, had published an editorial on Steve Biko, in which it argued that all people who voted for the apartheid government "share the responsibility for the deaths it causes".

Naude was banned and placed under house arrest for seven years.

On the same day, Daily Dispatch editor Donald Woods was pulled off a plane bound for the US and banned for five years, essentially for having befriended Biko.

Suzman came out swinging, calling the bannings and imprisonments "a complete admission by the government that it was unable to govern without resorting to absolute despotism".

It was perhaps the gravest attack on press freedom the apartheid regime had launched. But what was arguably its most interesting attack on the truth was running parallel to these events.

In 1975, The Citizen emerged under the ownership of fertiliser baron Louis Luyt — with right-winger Johnson at the helm. A like-minded audience lapped it up.

The Citizen’s editorial line read like an English translation of the pro-government Afrikaans newspapers. Its front page often featured "leaks" that portrayed the government in a rose-tinted light. It also "investigated" organisations alleged to be anti-SA, like the Rockefeller Foundation. One of its most atrocious lies was its claim that Biko died as the result of a hunger strike.

Almost a year to the day after "Black Wednesday", the Sunday Express revealed that The Citizen was the fake-news front of the apartheid regime. Luyt was exposed as a government stooge who had pocketed nearly R13m of taxpayers’ money, investing it in his own company.

In the end, it turned out a R64m "propaganda package" of taxpayers’ money had been poured into the venture by Eschel Rhoodie, the infamous head of the information department.

In the inquiry into this "information scandal", it was revealed that Rhoodie, Prime Minister BJ Vorster, Connie Mulder and "Lang" Hendrik van den Bergh, the malevolent head of the Bureau of State Security, were at the centre of a web of media manipulation, locally and abroad.

It involved US-based PR companies, European magazines and large international TV corporations.

‘The editor’s indecision is final!’

In the 1980s, in a bid to convince SA and the world that he was interested in genuine reform, Prime Minister PW Botha proposed a tricameral constitution that would allow white, coloured and Indian voters to elect parliamentary representatives. Black South Africans would be fobbed off with self-determination in the "independent" homelands.

Anti-apartheid activist and politician Helen Suzman once said that her good work would not have meant much ‘if it hadn’t been for the English-medium press’

Botha gave white voters the chance to accept or reject his plans via a referendum.

Both the liberal-leaning Progressive Federal Party and the diehard Verwoerdians of the Conservative Party opposed the proposal — for very different reasons. As Suzman put it: "We objected to the exclusion of blacks, who were more than 70% of the population, whereas the Conservative Party objected to the participation of coloureds and Indians."

The Nats ran a "slick" campaign with loads of newspaper and TV coverage (having Naspers, Perskor and the SABC in their pockets helped) and a simple and effective slogan: "A step in the right direction."

Some liberal English papers, including the Sunday Times and the FM, swallowed at least the hook of the fetid redbait on the end of Botha’s line, and ended up urging their readers to vote "Yes".

The Star advised its readers to abstain, resulting in one journalist expressing displeasure by sticking up a newsroom notice saying: "The editor’s indecision is final."

While Botha won the referendum by a landslide, the implementation of the tricameral parliament probably hastened the demise of apartheid, both because it spawned the United Democratic Front (an unprecedented, multiracial extra-parliamentary opposition) and because it brought into stark relief — in SA and abroad — the absurdity of apartheid.

‘I aged 10 years in a month’

Ahead of the 1999 elections, the FM came out in support of Bantu Holomisa and Roelf Meyer’s United Democratic Movement.

Not that the endorsement was intended entirely seriously — editor Peter Bruce described it as a "jolly jape designed to shake things up a little".

At the time, Cyril Ramaphosa was the chair of Johnnic, which held a 50% stake in Business Day/FM (BDFM). He didn’t see the funny side, calling Bruce to demand the right to reply. The editor who had "never, ever been spoken to in that way before" conceded, allowing Ramaphosa to write a forceful rebuttal in the next issue of the magazine.

Ramaphosa was, according to political science professor Anthony Butler, "roundly and sanctimoniously condemned".

While Bruce admitted the episode caused him to age "10 years in a month", he also believes Ramaphosa was not speaking his own mind but acting on his investors’ urging.

Either way, Butler says, Bruce "was firmly backed by BDFM’s owner … and the general consensus in the industry against editorial meddling was bolstered". It was not the first time a media owner had crossed the line on editorial independence, and it wouldn’t be the last. But it’s one of many storms SA’s media has weathered, and emerged from still standing, if sometimes a bit battered.

*Blackman and Dall are the authors of Rogues’ Gallery: An Irreverent History of Corruption in SA, from the VOC to the ANC. More detail on Pringle and Fairbairn, Marais and Kruger, and Luyt and The Citizen is available in the book

The battle for press freedom in SA has a long history, with some of the darkest periods being experienced in the apartheid era

—  What it means: