The Repression Press and Propaganda and In WilliamA. The Hachten Press and and C. Anthony Apartheid Giffard Repression and Propaganda With the editorial assistance In of Harva Hachten South Africa

M MACMILLAN Copyright © 1984 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, without written permission from the publisher Softcovcr reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1984 First published in the United States of America in 19114 by The University of Wisconsin Press

First published in the UnitedKingdom in 1984 by TIlE MACMILLAN PRESS LID Londsmand Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hachten, William A. The press and apartheid. I. Press-South Mrica-History­ zoth century I. Title II. Giffard, C. Anthony 079'.68 PN5474 ISBN 978-1-349-07687-1 ISBN 978-1-349-07685-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-07685-7 Contents

Introduction Vll 1 "Total Onslaught" against the Press 3 2 The Roots of the Conflict 2 I 3 The Press Council: Self-Censorship through Intimidation 50 4 The Steyn Commission and Three Concepts of the Press 76 5 Legal Restraints on Newspapers 102 6 Suppression of the Black Press 130 7 Censorship under the Publications Acts 155 8 The Press: Freedom within Commitment 178 9 Broadcasting: Propaganda Arm of the National Party 200 10 Muldergate: Covert Efforts to Influence Opinion 229 II Changing Media in a Changing South Africa 262 Acknowledgments 291 Notes 293 Glossary 309 Bibliography 3I I Index 327 Introduction

South Africa! That country has virtually become a synonym for anachronism in the twentieth-century community of nations thrust­ ing toward liberation, self-determination, and majority rule. The name alone evokesimagesof racialstrife and discrimination, of a band of determined white men defying both a disquieted nonwhite major­ ity and the opinion of most of the world. After deadly riots and demonstrations , South Africa in the I980s has been marked by a rising level of urban terrorism and violence. Bombs have exploded in the busy centers of Pretoria and Bloemfon­ tein, and South African Defense Forces have carried out punitive raids in neighboring Mozambique and Lesotho against suspected bases of the African National Congress, the exiled arm of black opposition. This low-level civil war of majority blacks against en­ trenched whites has been watched with increasing dismay by the outside world. As one South African newspaper editor put it, "We're the polecat of the world." In this nation under stress--and South Africa is surely that-the press and mass communication in generalare caught up in events and, at times, become actors in the Greek tragedy so inexorably playing itself out at the southern end of Africa. This is a study both of measures taken by the South African government to control its mass media and of the efforts of its journal­ ists and others to express their views and resist those restraints. Essentially, the media have been-and are being-subjected to two vii viii Introduction kinds of government controls: coercive and manipulative . Coercion includes legislation that determines who may publish and what may be published as well as less direct measures, such as intimidating the press into self-censorship. The manipulative controls comprise the extensive state machinery used both to suppress unfavorable information and to promote a positive image of official policies at home and abroad. Some of these activities, like those of the government information services, are overt. Others, like government controls over the broadcasting sys­ tem, are more subtle. But in the face of hostile world opinion, the South African government has also resorted to illegal and clandestine operations to promote its point of view. The abrasive relationship between the media and the government must be seen in the context of contemporary social, economic, and political forces rooted deeply in the history of South Africa. For that reason, our analysis of the contemporary conflicts between authority and the different media and the constituencies they serve will be presented in terms of their historical development. This, in essence, is a case study of officialexercises of power over public communication in a modem nation. White South Africa shares many characteristics with other Western societies--parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary, a tradition of press freedom, and an educated and affluent populace. Yet black South Africa shares many attributes of much of the third world-impoverished, illiterate, malnourished, and politically powerless. And in this context, free­ dom of the press, as well as civil liberties generally, has been de­ teriorating. What has happened and continues to happen could occur in other modem societies as well. In many ways, however, South Africa is a special case-"a very strange society" with its white affluence and black poverty-and hence fascinating to study . The Republic of South Africa is a deeply divided, multiracial society of great complexity, controlled politically and economically by a minority white population. Thewhite minority in tum is broadly split between English speakers, mainly of British heritage, and the Afrikaners of Dutch, French Huguenot, and Ger­ man descent. The Afrikaners' National party has held political power for over thirty-six years. A tangle of laws, administered by a mam- ix Introduction moth bureaucracy of civil servants, police, and security forces, has since 1948 maintained harsh and enforced separation of the races, known as apartheid, that has assured continued white privilege and prerogatives in an increasingly affluent economy in which compara­ tively few nonwhites share. Because race or skin color permeates all aspects of South African life, the population totals of ethnic groups involved are important. There are about 5 million "whites" of whom about 2.5 million are Afrikaans-speaking Afrikaners, and about 1.5 million are ESSAs (English-speaking South Africans). In addition there are about 1 million other "Europeans," mainly recently arrived Portuguese, Ital­ ians, and Greeks, who are largely inactive politically. Among non­ whites or "blacks" are about 21 million Africans (Zulus, Xhosas, Sothos, Tswanas, Swazis, Vendas, Ndebeles, Shangaans, etc.), 2.7 million racially mixed "Coloureds, " and 840,000 "Asians," mostly Indians . To help retain political domination of both the privileged white minority and the unfranchised majority of nonwhites, successive National party governments have implemented wide-ranging restric­ tive controls over all forms of public communication (see Chap. 5). Most have been directed at the print media, the principal means of expressing political opposition and dissent. (Radio and television broadcasting have long been firmly in the hands of government supporters, and hence require few controls.) Historically, the massmedia in South Africahavemainly served the whites, and the earliest newspapers, started in the nineteenth cen­ tury, were in English. In fragmented, cellular South Africa, the media have long reflected linguistic and ethnic divisions as well as white domination. The first radio service in 1927 was directed at white English speakers, and the first television service introduced in 1976 was for whites only. Through much of its media history, the "non­ Europeans" have been eavesdroppers. That has changed. Today, a majority of newspaper readers and radio listeners are Africans, Col­ oureds, and Asians. Special publications and separate radio and tele­ vision channels are directed at different racial groups. Diverse South Africa is served by twenty-one general daily news­ papers, eight Sunday or weekly papers and a hundred weekly or x Introduction biweekly country papers . About five hundred periodicals, from spe­ cialized journals to family entertainment magazines, are published in South Africa. In addition, hundreds of publications are imported from Britain, the United States, and Western Europe . Newspaper publishing is dominated by four groups-two each publishing mainly in English or Afrikaans. Largest and most power­ ful is the Argus Printing and Publishing Company which controls seven dailies-the Johannesburg Star, Durban Daily News, Argus, Pretoria News, Bloemfontein Friend, Kimberley Dia­ mondFieldsAdvertiser, and the Souietan which is edited for Africans in the Johannesburg area. Argus also puts out two weekend papers, the CapeHerald, oriented toward Coloured people in the , and the Sunday Tribune of Durban. The other English medium group, SAAN (for South African Associated Newspapers), includes four dailies, the Rand DailyMail of Johannesburg, the Eastern Province Herald and EveningPost, both of , and the Cape Times, plus two weekend papers, the Sunday Times and SundayExpress, and the Financial Mail, a weekly. The daily Natal Mercury of Durban is mostly owned by SAAN. There are two independent dailies, the DailyDispatch of East London and the Natal Witness of Pietermaritzburg. Argus and SAAN are financially linked, with Argus holding 40 per cent of SAAN stock and SAAN holding a somewhat smaller part of Argus. Both publishing groups are financially tied to mining and industrial interests, and their interlocking ownership makes them vulnerable to government charges of monopoly and concentration of ownership. The two Afrikaans press groups, Perskor and Nasionale Pers, not only are financially unallied but are highy competitive and represent different factions within the National party . Nasionale Pers owns the dailies Die Burger of Cape Town, Die of Bloemfontein, of Johannesburg, and Oosterlig of Port Elizabeth. Perskor had long owned the Johannesburg dailies Die Transvaler and Die Vader­ land,as wellas two small dailies in Pretoria, Hoofstad and Oggendblad. As a result of the intense competition between Beeldand Die Trans­ valer, Die Transvaler was moved to Pretoria in early 1983 to merge xi Introduction with and replace Hoofstad and Oggendblad. Both groups jointly own the successful weekend newspaper Rapport. A significant characteristic of the South African press is the clear predominance of the English-language newspapers. Although Afri­ kaans-speaking whites outnumber English-speaking whites by a ratio of six to four, the English papers account for three-quarters of total daily circulation and two-thirds of Sunday circulation . A great many Afrikaners , as well as nonwhites , read the English press, but few English speakers or nonwhites read Afrikaans papers. The only English paper supporting the Nationalists was The Citizen, which was started in 1975 with secret government funds . After the government involvement was revealed during the Mulder­ gate scandal (see Chap. 10), it was taken over, at least ostensibly, by Perskor. The black press has been severely eclipsed in recent years (see Chap. 6). Yet weeklies aimed by white publishers at specific racial groups have been a fast-growing aspect of South African journalism. The Cape Herald intended for coloureds in the Cape Town area had a 1982 circulation of 50,000. The PostlNatal in Durban was edited for Asians and had a circulation of 34,000. Ilanga, published in the Zulu language, sold 107,000 copies a week in 1982, and Imvo Zabantsundu, a Xhosa-language paper in the Eastern Cape, had 50,000 circulation the same year. Historically, various groups in South Africa-mainly some En­ glish-speaking whites, the defeated Afrikaners after the Boer War, the urban Africans, and, to a lesser extent, the Coloureds and Asians--have utilized newspapers and the printed word to express their political aspirations and to contest at times either English or Afrikaner domination. This political discord is further reflected in three distinct concepts or theories of the press--Afrikaner, English, and African--coexisting uncomfortably within South Africa. The Afrikaner press has historically been an instrument of National party political aspirations; it served to bring the National party to power and generally supports goals of the Nationalists . The English press concept, anchored in private ownership and reflecting Anglo­ American traditions of press freedom, calls for an informational and xii Introduction critical role. The English press regards itself as the unofficial"opposi­ tion"-a check on the abuses of authority. However, radical critics, including some blacks, argue that the English press is itself a part of the white power structure and by its token opposition actually legiti­ mizes the apartheid regime. This is one reason black journalists have become alienated from the English papers which both employ them and oppose apartheid. Finally, the African press, harassed and sup­ pressed by the apartheid regime, has in recent years increasingly identified with "thestruggle" and sees the printed word as one tool for bringing about basic political change and ending white hegemony. The conflicts and clashes between these three irreconcilable approaches to journalism are themes running through this study . (See Chap. 4 for a more extended analysis of the three concepts.) ForSouth Africa, it may be argued, has never become a true nation, in large part because the xenophobic, closely knit Afrikaner "tribe" has never really accepted the hated British or the despised blacks. (In this study, the term "blacks" usually will be used for all those discriminated against under apartheid: Africans, Asians, and Col­ oureds. The frequently used terms "nonwhites" or "non-Europeans" carry a negative connotation but will be used occasionallyfor clarity.) For that matter, Afrikaners have not welcomed any other "Uitland­ ers" encroaching on their exclusive "volk" concept of nationhood . The National party government, in fact, emphasizes differences among ethnic groups, especially between the African tribes, as part of a strategy of divide and rule. The mass media further this policy; for example, vernaculars are used in radio broadcasting, and there are separate television channels for white and black viewers. Although this study focuses on government pressures and stric­ tures on the press and mass communication since the Nationalists took power in 1948, newspapers have been embroiled in South Af­ rica's divisive and complex politics since they were first established a century and a half after the Cape settlement wasfounded in 1652. The origins of the dispute between press and government go back to the early days of the white settlement at the Cape and the historical hostility between the Dutch and English settlers. In the early nineteenth century, for example, some English journals at the Cape campaigned against slavery-the abolition of which was one reason xiii Introduction for the Boer trek to the interior in 1836. Later, when the discovery of gold brought a flood of immigrants to the republic the Boers had established in the Transvaal, the English-language newspapers there became a mouthpiece for immigrant grievances. In the events leading up to the Boer War, the leading English paper, The Star, was impli­ cated in a conspiracy to invade the Transvaal Republic and overthrow Afrikaner control. After the Jameson Raid failed in 1896, the Kruger government passed a law giving the president the right to ban the distribution of newspapers that were "contrary to good morals or dangerous to peace and order in the republic." Through the years, newspaper owners and editors-British, Afrikaners, and blacks­ were far more than passive chroniclers of events; they were politically engaged and used their presses to pursue their own economic and political goals. For their part , the various rulers, whether British colonial gov­ ernors, presidents of , or Afrikaner prime ministers, provided ample precedents for the official suppression of expres­ sion. Chapter 2 shows that when the National party took control of the government in 1948, the rules of the game already were well estab­ lished. The censorious and repressive measures that followed were not something new, but a continuation of a historical process. Through more than a hundred laws, Nationalist-controlled parlia­ ments have closed off from press and public scrutiny large areas of important information, especially concerning police, prisons, mili­ tary, and security matters. Political critics have been harassed, banned, detained, or imprisoned under a policy that equates normal (by Western democratic standards) criticism, dissent, or even re­ peated expressions of black political aspirations with disloyalty, sub­ version, or treason. Black journalists and black newspapers have been singled out for particularly harsh treatment. One tragic consequence of this continuous repression of expression has been the near demise of any kind of meaningful public dialogue between the white minority and the nonwhite majority. Another result is the virtual obliteration of any black political expression through either print or electronic media that is of, by, and for the 24 million-plus Africans, Coloureds, and Asians. Furthermore, the opposition English-language newspapers have been subjected to xiv Introduction mounting pressures and restrictions from newly passed or threatened legal controls or from governmental intimidation and harassment. The long saga of the Press Council, discussed in Chapter 3, illus­ trates the presures and intimidations directed against the press by successive National party governments and the newspapers' re­ sponses to those pressures. From 1952 to 1982, the same political drama has been played out again and again: first come harsh official criticisms directed at newspapers, followed by threats of new statu­ tory controls if the press does not "discipline" itself. The newspaper publishers have responded by first establishing a press council and then modifying it over time to fit government requirements. Some regard this as abject self-censorship by the newspapers to appease their Afrikaner masters and so protect their financial interests. By "feeding cookies to the tiger," the press has placated the government on each occasion, but at the same time has given awaymore and more of its freedom and independence. As for other important forms of expression-books, motion pic­ tures, ephemera, and university publications-they have long been subjected to censorship, based primarily in the past on the religious and moral precepts of the Afrikaners as taught by the Calvinistic Dutch Reformed church and several fundamentalist offshoots. More recently, censorship of erotic and literary expression has eased some­ what while suppression of politically relevant expression has in­ creased. (see Chap. 7, Censorship under the Publications Acts.) In the area of officialinformation and propaganda, National party governments have used public communication to persuade and in­ fluence, both at home and abroad. Traditionally, the Afrikaans­ language newspapers, as primarily political instruments of , have been financially supported by Afrikaner interests and regional party groups and, therefore, have operated without the commercial constraints of the independent English-language news­ paper enterprises . Major National party leaders, including Daniel Malan, J. G. Strijdom, Hendrik Verwoerd, and P. W. Botha, have been closely identified with newspapers such as Die Burger, Die Transvaler, and Die Vaderland, longtime steadfast advocates of National party policies. Since becoming more successful as commer­ cial enterprises, the Afrikaans papers are showing more editorial xv Introduction independence on specific issues, but are still essentially loyal to the National party. Two small but notable exceptions are DiePatriot and Die Afrikaner, mouthpieces for ultra-right-wing Afrikaner parties defying the Nationalists. (See Chap . 8 for an analysis of the changing Afrikaans press .) Similarly, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has long functioned as a propaganda tool of the National party. Though the SABC is operated by a nongovernmental body patterned after the British Broadcasting Corporation, the dominant Afrikaner elites, operating through the secret Broederbond, gained control of it years ago and have used the radio and, since 1976, the television broadcast­ ing monopoly to further the goals and interests of the government and the National party. SABC's pervasive and technically efficient broad­ casting system runs sixteen radio services and three television services broadcasting a total of 2,269 hours a week in seventeen languages, making it a powerful force for molding public opinion in South Africa. (See Chap. 9). The National party has also drawn on the full resources of its government to influence opinion at home as well as abroad and to counter what it considers hostile and distorted news and information about South Africa's system of apartheid. (The American and British press and their correspondents based in Johannesburg are particu­ larly blamed today for South Africa's negative image in the world.) The surprising dimensions of these covert and often illegal propa­ ganda efforts were revealed by the opposition English-language press in the Information Department scandals of 1978-79, popularly known as "Muldergate." The Muldergate revelations showed the English press at its investigative best , but the price ofits journalistic enterprise has been increased hostility from National party leaders as well as further restrictions on news gathering. (See Chap. 10) . Today's mass media of communication, whether independent of or closely identified with government, are business enterprises that seek ever wider audiences, that sell advertising, and that try to make profits for their proprietors or stockholders. Changes in the sales, readership, and circulations of newspapers and other publications or in the audiences and use of radio and television have important political implications since these factors often determine what kinds xvi Introduction of media will prosperand survive to tell what version of events. Notall pressures on the media are political and direct; some are subtle, indirect influences of a financial and economic nature. Some news­ papers are finding that their profits diminish when they strongly criticize government policies or report what some white readers and advertisers consider "too much" news about the black community or about continuing racial tensions. (See Chap . II). A central thesis of this study is that freedom of the press-the right to talk serious politics and to report and criticize government with impunity-now nonexistent for the black majority, has been steadily declining for the white population as well. Some South African jour­ nalists believe that the indistinct line between meaningful press free­ dom and unacceptable government control has already been crossed. The general election of April 1981 revealed the strong hold that the most reactionary and intransigent elements of the Afrikaner elite hold over the National party. And the car bomb attack of May 20,1983, in downtown Pretoria, which killed 17 people and wounded 188, was only one of a series of events that have escalated the deadly confronta­ tion and hardened the lines between two nationalisms-Afrikaner and African. For to the beleaguered Afrikaners, survival is first and foremost. Further, it must be survival on their terms-with no basic dismantling of the apartheid apparatus and no real sharing of political power. But the black majority will settle for nothing less and is supported in its political goals by all of black Africa and much of world opinion. White South Africa, in its unswerving maintenance of its "way of life," has been evolving into a militaristic state, with totalitarian overtones. Prosperous and technologically sophisticated though it may be for a minority of its citizens, the only freedom of expression may in time be the freedom to support and applaud an increasingly repressive and arbitrary government whose racial policies have made it a unique pariah of the contemporary world. How government and media relationships have evolved to this current state of affairs is what this book is about.