Letter From South Africa
Johannesburg Spring   

South African editors are hopeful that the newly elected government under Nelson Mandela will liberalize the nation’s press laws. Meanwhile, white-owned newspapers vie for black readers.

The unthinkable happened last month. Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years, head of an outlawed political party, became the president of a new multiracial government in South Africa. What will this revolution mean for that nation's journalists?

South African editors say the government stopped enforcing its draconian press laws four years ago, at the same time it abandoned racial apartheid and released Mandela from prison. They hope the new government will at least continue the same policy, if not liberalize the country's press laws.

Mandela and other senior African National Congress leaders have made "a real commitment to press freedom," says Richard Steyn, editor in chief of the Johannesburg Star. "It will be very difficult for them to back away from what they have said."

Brian Pottinger, deputy editor of the Johannesburg-based Sunday Times, was similarly upbeat even a year ago. "We have 'Prague spring' at the moment," he said. "The government is not a problem."

But this isn't press freedom the way Americans know it: "Prague spring" in Johannesburg would be a cold winter in New York. The South African government controls all but one of the nation's handful of tv networks and can legally restrain newspapers, most of which are owned by one or two interlocking companies.

Optimists can look to South Africa's neighbor to the west, Namibia. Just a few years ago, Namibia was controlled by South Africa's white government. Namibian press laws were strict, and, as in South Africa, offending newspapers were banned. But today, four years after independence, Namibia's press is transformed, so much so that at this year's World Press Freedom Day, the country's press was rated as completely free. South African journalists, according to the 1994 rankings, were considered only partially free.

For South Africa, press freedom is one of two major questions. The other is economic viability. While alternative publications are struggling to stay alive, white-owned newspapers are fighting to attract black readers. As black income rises, media outlets and companies that buy advertising are beginning to take notice. In a country whose population is 87 percent black, economic survival depends on meeting this pent-up demand.

South Africa's press is relatively free from government control compared with just a few years ago, when the government could restrict papers in a variety of ways. But as Aggrey Klaaste points out, the government still can clamp down at any time. "We are not free," says Klaaste, editor of the Sowetan and the country's only black editor of a major daily. "The laws are still there."

Those laws give the government a broad arsenal of weapons ranging from prior restraint--preventing a newspaper from publishing a specific article--to prohibiting an editor from setting foot in the newsroom, to banning the newspaper itself by seizing all copies and removing it from newsstands, sometimes for months. The difference now is that the laws are not being enforced.

One editor, who requested anonymity, says his court convictions for publishing antigovernment articles add up to enough jail time to last the rest of his life, but the sentences were suspended--at least for now. If any judge finds a reason to send him to jail, he may be forced to serve time. Under South African law, he adds, the sentences must be served consecutively.

"Freedom is only relative," says Jim Jones, the editor of South Africa's financial daily, Business Day. "At present, we are less free than the American press. Our real concern is whether [official repression] will resume at a later stage."

In other words, Jones hopes the African National Congress will not do in the future what the white minority government did in the past. The instruments of government repression are still in place.

The ANC and Mandela have promised to honor the rights of journalists and a free press. But Mandela also made editors nervous earlier this year when he described South Africa's press as "shameful." And many journalists, including most black editors and reporters interviewed for this article, expressed concern that the new ANC-dominated government could be tempted by the existing instruments of press control.

"The ANC has been synonymous with the liberation struggle," says one prominent black political reporter. "So whenever we criticized the government, the ANC cheered. Now they will be the government. They will not cheer."

The future of press freedom hinges on the form the new South African government will take. Blacks are coming to power, or at least will share some of it. "Power sharing" is the phrase South Africans use in English, but in Afrikaans it is "power dividing," which has a very different meaning.

Blacks may only gain a share of power, but any share is greater than whites were willing to give just a few years ago. The white minority now wants to make certain the new government guarantees its rights by dropping mandatory licensing of newspapers and repealing the press ban laws still on the books.

Meanwhile, this extraordinary shift of political power is being accompanied by a movement of economic power, the growth of disposable income in the hands of black consumers. And South Africa's white-owned newspaper groups are jockeying to appeal to the untapped and potentially lucrative black market. Newspaper penetration of white households in South Africa, as in the United States, is off sharply from what it was 10 or 20 years ago. But unlike in the United States, most potential readers are black.

In March 1982, Nasionale Pers (National Press), the leading Afrikaaner publishing group, bought the two-year-old CityPress, a black-oriented Sunday newspaper that now has a circulation of 250,000. NP Chairman Ton Vosloo predicts it will be the leading newspaper in South Africa within a few years.

Times Media, one of the two major English-language newspaper groups, countered in December 1992 with Sunday Times Extra, a black-oriented edition of its largest newspaper, the Sunday Times. Deputy Editor Pottinger says black readership jumped 50 percent in the first four months of the new edition, and that on its own, Sunday Times Extra would have been the sixth largest publication in the country in the first quarter of last year.

White-oriented newspapers also are finding more black readers. For example, as of early last year blacks comprised 52 percent of those who read the flagship "white" newspaper, the Johannesburg Star. But blacks are hard to find on most newspaper staffs. Editor in Chief Steyn concedes the Star and other major publications are still "dominated by middle-class white males."

"This situation must change," Steyn wrote in an open letter to Mandela printed in the Star in early March, "if newspapers are to reflect more accurately the needs of the new society." He plans to hire more black journalists and has increased the Star's coverage of the black townships.

Then there is the Sowetan. The only daily edited by a black staff, the Sowetan quietly passed the Star in circulation in 1992 to become the nation's largest daily. Currently that circulation is only in the Johannesburg area, but soon the newspaper will be distributed nationwide.

Now for the punch line: The Sowetan and Star are owned by the same company, Argus, which in turn is controlled by Anglo-American, the South African mining giant. Times Media, Argus' only significant competitor in the English-language newspaper war, has abandoned general interest dailies to concentrate on its Sunday Times.

The largest shareholder of Times Media, however, is Argus, which also controls the newsprint supply, distribution and newsstands. And it's all legal. South Africa does not have U.S.-style antitrust laws, but the ANC is threatening to enact legislation to force Argus and dominant corporations in other industries to divest some of their holdings.

Last year, to blunt any future ANC action, Argus announced plans to spin off control of the Sowetan to a community trust headed by a board including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other black leaders. But after months of talks, Argus still holds the paper. And even if the plan goes through, the Sowetan's largest shareholder will still be Argus. Meanwhile, early this year Anglo-American suddenly put forward a plan to end its control of both Argus and Times Media--and then even more suddenly withdrew it.

Argus and the other major publishers also own the crown jewel of South African television, M-Net, the nation's only commercial television licensee and its most lucrative media venture. The government's broadcast arm, SABC, owns the other three television networks and all of the national radio networks.

SABC programming is similar to that of ABC, CBS or NBC, and includes many American shows, while M-Net resembles HBO, airing many of the same movies as the cable channel. It is a pay television network, so viewers must first purchase a decoder box and pay monthly fees. The most popular pay channel features movies, another has Indian programs, a third presents Portuguese-language shows, and the newest service, Shalom South Africa, offers programs for Jewish viewers. Last November M-Net took a step toward attracting a black audience by launching a talk-variety show starring Dali Tambo, son of ANC cofounder Oliver Tambo.

Although M-Net is owned by newspaper publishers, it doesn't broadcast daily news reports, so all televised news is controlled by the government. Before the recent election, the state-owned channels, not surprisingly, tended to favor the ruling white National Party, which from the first days of television controlled the SABC board and its staff.

All but one of the 61 SABC managers are white, all are male, and almost all of them speak Afrikaans, not English, as a first language. The editorial staff is almost entirely white: The head of SABC's news says he will not hire any reporter unless he speaks Afrikaans. That requirement eliminates just about every black candidate, whose first language is probably tribal and whose second language is likely English.

This has been such an area of concern for opponents of former President Frederik W. de Klerk that four years ago Mandela, then just released from prison, said the ANC would not begin an election campaign with television news in the hands of de Klerk's allies. But after intense multiparty negotiations and public hearings last spring, moves to reform SABC were set back when de Klerk rejected most of the proposed new multiracial governing board and substituted his own candidates. Early this year blacks were promised a few key posts, but the SABC remains overwhelmingly white.

There is another medium in South African journalism, but it is weak and withering: the alternative press. Begun in the 1980s and subsidized mostly by European grants, independent weeklies became known for their outspoken criticism of the government's policies, notably apartheid.

After Mandela's release, however, the subsidies all but evaporated because funders believed apartheid would soon be over and there was no need for an antiapartheid press. One of the four best-known independent weeklies has folded, and there are recurring rumors that another will not survive the year.

One expected survivor is the country's only black-owned national newspaper, the Johannesburg-based New Nation, which revamped its business and ad sales operations in 1992. Its editor, Zwelahke Sisulu, says the paper broke even last winter, and last August it began publishing on Sunday, repositioned as a primary paper rather than a supplement to the dominant Argus dailies, the Star and the Sowetan.

Another expected survivor is the Weekly Mail, a white-owned, liberal, muckraking tabloid. A major reason is its joint agreement with the London-based Guardian, which Weekly Mail officials say provides them with shipments of newsprint at lower prices than the local Argus supplier. The Johannesburg-based paper also is branching out into television. In March 1993, it won a rare outside contract with SABC to produce "Ordinary People," a half-hour documentary series that looks at current events through the eyes of South African citizens.

Most of the other alternative publications are feeling pressure from a continuing recession and from larger, white-owned media organizations, which have the financial resources to squeeze small-circulation publications by undercutting advertising rates.

"You have a case of media gangsterism," charges Tharni Mazwai, editor of Enterprise, a national black-oriented business magazine. "The big boys don't hesitate to use a six-pound hammer to kill a gnat."

Mazwai is hoping his magazine, which he compares to Black Enterprise and Ebony, can hold off the competition long enough to catch the rising tide of black entrepreneurial activity.

"It's a challenge for me," he says, and given the uphill struggle by even well-known publications, he knows he is not alone. Mazwai also realizes he and his fellow editors do not often have the public's attention, because, he says, South Africa's mainstream papers rarely report on the new black press unless the periodicals are owned by major publishers. Instead, the media often focus on violence, particularly political violence, and usually when the attacker is black and the victim is white.

Political violence in South Africa usually stimulates the continuing debate over what Americans would call the right to bear arms or, in South African parlance, the right to carry cultural weapons.

But in the new South Africa, the most powerful cultural weapons are not traditional Zulu spears or modern AK-47s. The most powerful weapons are the media, and for the moment, almost all of those cultural weapons are still in the hands of the white minority.