Planting a Seed   

My wife, Helen Sloane Dudman, and I spent three months in South Africa this year as Knight International Press Fellows. We were based in Johannesburg but spent much of the time in small, remote communities that had received little or no foreign assistance.

We found the minimal direction by our host organization, the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism, to be a help rather than a hindrance. We could use the institute's facilities, often eating lunch with the staff in the kitchen, while working out our own schedules. The head of the institute is Allister Sparks, an eminent journalist and a leading authority on South Africa's history and its peaceful transformation into a democracy. He advised us and helped by suggesting projects and opening doors for us all over the country.

Helen used her background as owner and general manager of radio stations in downeast Maine to train and coach the management and staffs of two dozen community radio stations. I drew on my experience as a Washington and foreign correspondent to train and coach reporters and consult with editors and publishers around the country.

A high point of Helen's fellowship was helping community radio groups in the black townships start to break loose from dependency on grants and subsidies and learn the value of advertising. Again and again she would tell them, "You are sitting on a gold mine." She coached the new stations in ad sales and production and in promotion, as well as in how to collect payment from advertisers and what to do about deadbeats.

My high point was working with a small semi-weekly in Middelburg, a conservative Afrikaaner city 100 miles from Johannesburg, where blacks and whites had negotiated creation of an interracial city council. While we were there, the tough black mayor, a former African National Congress guerrilla fighter, proposed that all city contracts be suspended and re-let with bidding open for the first time to black suppliers. White council members warned of possible legal liability and advised going slowly. The mayor thundered, "This is not the old South Africa. This is the new South Africa."

The reporter covering the council meeting said he planned to lead with other actions by the council. I asked the editor if the contracts issue was a sensitive matter. "It is," he said. The next issue of the paper had not one word about the matter.

hhe lead story in the following issue, however, was a detailed account of the debate over the proposal.

Later, I asked the editor what further coverage he planned. He said he would wait until a council committee made its report.

I asked whether the issue was the subject of a lot of talk in the community. It was. I suggested that the paper could do a service and appeal to reader interest by pursuing the story, giving details of existing contracts and interviewing present contractors and prospective bidders. The editor jumped at the idea, and he promised to fax me the story that would run in the next issue. But I received no fax.

Finally, I telephoned him. He was cordial and friendly, as usual, expressing the hope that I would come back someday. But when I asked what had happened with the contracts dispute, he said he was still waiting for the committee's report.

I said, "I have been wondering if I pushed you too hard."

He said, "You did."

I apologized and said I had violated my instructions: Fellows are supposed to supply the tools, not build the house, and he was the one who knew the territory.

I learned a lesson. I hope I planted a seed.