Everyone in print journalism is raging against the dying of the light — but it takes an exceptional person to decide to put their money where their heart is and buy a newspaper to resurrect into a must-read weekly.
Two such people are Mathabo le Roux and Anneli Groenewald, who, in the middle of the pandemic, bought an ailing community newspaper in Bredasdorp — Suidernuus, or The Southern Post — and set about turning it into an exemplar of what small-town journalism should be.
About 90% of their motivation was to pursue journalism on their own terms, but at least 10% was the desire to own and operate a loud, steam punk-style German printing press from more than 60 years ago.
“We were quite in love with the idea of printing on an old Heidelberg print press,” says Groenewald. The previous owners had transitioned online, but she and Le Roux wanted print. “I realise it sounds crazy. We really loved the idea.”
“It was old school, an honourable tradition — we were quite sentimental,” says Le Roux, the editor, who runs the paper with one other full-time reporter-cum-photographer. The neglected Heidelberg printing press that came with the newspaper had to be scrapped, so she bought a refurbished second-hand one, a 1967 model they found in Boksburg. “It is so elegant,” she says.
Groenewald, who has kept her day job as lecturer in journalism at Stellenbosch University, grew up in Bredasdorp and knew the newspaper well. “When I was still at school, I walked up to the door and said: ‘I want work.’ So I started doing a school column and remained involved until I was at varsity.”
In 2020 she saw that the paper, and the associated printing business, were up for sale. “I knew the newspaper had a very long, rich history. I was worried this would be the end of it.”
So Groenewald called Le Roux — they had become friends 20 years earlier at Sake Beeld in Joburg. Le Roux was in Switzerland, where she had been living for about 10 years — most of that time working for the UN Conference on Trade & Development in Geneva.
“Twenty-four hours later Mathabo phoned me and said: ‘Anneli. I have a plan and you are not allowed to say no.’”
The idea was always to do a really worthy newspaper. Quality, quality, quality. Most community newspapers are jackets for ads
— Mathabo le Roux
Le Roux interjects: “I said: ‘I think this is a good idea, why not do it?’ And of course it’s a shit idea, we weren’t blind,” she says, referring to the business outlook for such a venture. “But I had gone through quite a transformation in my 10 years abroad, my way of thinking about the world; working nine years at the UN will do that to you.”
Le Roux had quit the UN job to study psychology in Zurich, the home of Jungian analysis. “It focused the mind very nicely on what is important.”
And what was important was running a newspaper.
“Why did we want to do this? You have certain life passions, ideas about things,” Le Roux says. “And the idea was always to do a really worthy newspaper. Quality, quality, quality. Most community newspapers are jackets for ads ... We wanted a chance to be independent, express ourselves creatively, write about issues that matter to us in a language that matters to us. It is bilingual, but with a bias towards Afrikaans.”
In the four years that Groenewald and Le Roux have been running it, Suidernuus has covered stories of national importance — including plans by TotalEnergies to explore for oil and gas off the coast between Agulhas and Cape Town and an abortive mineral exploration project around Swellendam. In 2023 Suidernuus broke the news of a mysterious application to look for gold outside Napier — a story that the FM also covered.
Given the forbidding environment for print journalism, it’s just as well Groenewald and Le Roux are not in it for the money. “It’s something else that’s driving us,” Le Roux says. If the profit motive is what drives you, “what is the meaning of life?”
There’s “something beautiful” about Suidernuus, which marks its centenary in three years. “It’s like honouring history and tradition and what people have suffered through before us. Is that not worth saving?”
She and Groenewald encourage visitors to the paper’s cramped offices in Bredasdorp. Most memorable of these for Le Roux was the writer and historian Dan Sleigh, who dropped in two years ago, three months before he died.
“He left us with beautiful words: ‘Julle laat my dink aan ridders wat uitry teen die ewige blerrie bose.’” (You put me in mind of knights who are riding out to fight eternal bloody evil.)
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