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Its first three years have offered a broadcasting policy characterized by a pro-government stance and programming for the white majority.

(1979). Black journalists under apartheid. Index on Censorship: Vol. 8, Kruschev In Retirement, pp. 43-48.

Pointing out how the press itself can utilize the machinery of government to bring about the continuing adjustments necessary to maintain its freedom and vigor, a Wisconsin scholar urges further studies so that the political theory of the government and the press may be restated in more realistic terms.

Black journalists and what is called the black press are at the cutting edge of the confrontation between Afrikaner nationalism and black nationalism. The government’s primary motivation for repressing political expression has been to prevent blacks from speaking (or writing) to other blacks about political alternatives or using the printed word to report in any depth their serious affairs and describe their common problems.

The censorship of literature, films, and various forms of creative expression has long been an integral part of the maintenance first of white domination and then apartheid and of the failing attempt to promulgate the morality of the Afrikaner brand of Christianity. Novelist Nadine Gordimer has written: “We shall not be rid of censorship until we are rid of apartheid. Censorship is the arm of mind control and as necessary to maintain a racist regime as that other arm of internal repression, the secret police.”1 A student of censorship, Dorothy Driver, writes: “Censorship in South Africa is part of apartheid; it is an authoritarian strategy that imposes on the public an ideology that is Calvinist, capitalist, racist and increasingly militaristic.”2 According to South Africa’s best-known Afrikaans writer, Andre Brink, “the history of censorship in South Africa upholds the belief that it is primarily a political weapon.”3

The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) provides the most pervasive and technologically advanced radio and television services in all of Africa. Over 9.5 million South Africans listen daily to its radio programs and almost 70 per cent of the country’s whites sit before television sets each evening. With its sixteen radio services and three television channels broadcasting a total of 2,269 hours per week in seventeen languages, the SABC clearly has a large, loyal audience among whites, Africans, Coloureds, and Asians.

Underlying the continuing controversy over the Press Council has been one persistent policy of the Nationalists: to bend the English press to its will, to find a way to make it conform to the concerns, and even the world view, of the ruling Afrikaners. Nationalist prime ministers from Malan to Vorster have sought to “discipline” the pesky opposition newspapers into being “responsible.”

The persistent tensions between the ruling National party and the press are rooted in South Africa’s turbulent history of long-standing economic, ethnic, and political cleavages. The press, reflecting as it does the clashing views and political differences within the Republic, becomes inextricably enmeshed in the news and comments it reports and, in so doing, becomes the target of repressive efforts designed to resist change. For as the South African government comes under increasing pressures from opponents of apartheid at home and abroad, so does freedom of expression within South Africa diminish.

“South Africa has the freest press in Africa.” Sometimes uttered as a boast by progovernment supporters and sometimes as a grudging admission by government critics, that statement is heard again and again inside and outside South Africa. Visitors to the country are invariably impressed with its outspoken and lively newspapers, particularly the English-language ones, especially when they are criticizing or jousting with the National party government.

Few things illustrate more graphically the pressures on the South African press than the continuing saga of the Press Council. The council was established in 1962 in an attempt to forestall direct government control of the press. Threatened with legislation to establish a statutory press council, the Newspaper Press Union (NPU), an organization representing most of the country’s newspaper publishers, decided that self-discipline was preferable to government censorship. The first body they set up was the essentially harmless Press Board of Reference. It could impose no sanctions; the code of conduct it administered comprised little more than a series of platitudinous statements no self-respecting journalist could object to.

As immediate as are the tragic difficulties facing the diverse peoples and the press of South Africa, it is important to realize that the causes are embedded in South African history. The further one goes back in South African press history, the clearer it becomes that little has changed. From the earliest days of the colonial press, newspapers in South Africa have been identified with one or other of the dominant white language groups, with their very different cultures, political philosophies, and economic interests. They have reflected, and been a part of, the struggle for power between these groups. No matter what government happened to be in power at any given time, one section felt it was not represented, and expressed its opposition vociferously through its newspapers. The continuing gulf between the population groups has meant that the country’s newspapers have never outgrown the stage of a highly partisan press. (The black press—newspapers and other publications primarily intended for the African, coloured, and Asian communities—developed along such different lines that its historical background will be considered in Chap. 6, Suppression of the Black Press.) So conflict between the government of the day and the newspapers has been inevitable.

Freedom of speech in the West means “the right to lie, deceive, and distort,” the South African minister of foreign affairs, R. F. Botha, told a nationwide television audience in March 1983.1 Botha was reacting to an article in Newsweek magazine that argued that blacks still suffered ill treatment in South Africa despite the government’s proposed constitutional reforms. The article, said Botha, was “dripping with enmity and hate.” Others took up the cry. The Afrikaans Sunday paper Rapport complained that the article was a “reprehensible and deliberate denigration of efforts to build a better South Africa … part of a campaign that has been waged in so many different ways for so many years.” The Johannesburg daily, The Citizen, characterized the Newsweek article as “mischievous, one-sided and written to detract from the genuine reform plans of the government.”2 What Botha and these newspapers chose to ignore was that the Nationalist government itself had, just several years before, engaged in lies, deception, and distortion to promote its policies at home and abroad. And the sanctimonious Citizen was one product of that effort.

The Republic of South Africa, with its deep divisions and racial tensions, is in the early 1980s a dynamic and changing society. Among the black majority, the powerful influences of demographic change, increasing urbanization, continued industrialization, rising personal income, and spreading education and literacy are affecting all facets of the society, including mass communication. The press and other media, quite independently of the pressures from the Nationalist government, have been undergoing far-reaching modifications in their content, the nature and size of their audiences, and their relationships with each other.

For many years Nationalist attempts to muzzle the press were aimed at the English-language opposition newspapers. And it was those papers that virtually single handedly tried to fight off further restrictions. More recently, however, the country’s Afrikaans newspapers, once completely subservient to the ruling Nationalist party, have become dynamic political institutions in their own right.