'Hiding Our Snickers': 'Weekly Mail' Journalists' Indirect Resistance in Apartheid South Africa

In the mid- to late 1980s, the challenges facing the editors and journalists working for the South African antiapartheid newspaper, the "Weekly Mail," were formidable. In addition to the more than one hundred censorship laws already in place, the apartheid government had declared a series of states of emergency in a final and desperate attempt to maintain power. To prevent those in the South African media from reporting on the massive violence that the security forces were using to try to crush the liberation movement, the government enacted a series of emergency regulations. This article examines the tactics of indirection used by the "Weekly Mail" to convey essential information about the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The success of the newspaper was predicated precisely on the notion of "collective agency": journalists who wrote articles venturing into the gray areas of the censorship restrictions, attorneys who assisted them by developing creative legal justifications, and, finally, editors who had sufficient courage to publish these risky articles. (Contains 9 notes.)