(Author: Irwin Manoim, Vol. 73, No. 1, Pesach 2018)
Do Jews control the newspapers? Type that question into Google and you will enter a netherworld of conspiracies in which the ‘Jewish’ media magnates Anton Rupert, Trevor Manuel, Harry Oppenheimer and Alec Erwin conspired with the CIA double agents FW de Klerk and Pik Botha to betray South Africa to the Zionist puppet master Joe Slovo.1
Alternatively, you could buy a stack of South African newspapers published in Joburg and Cape Town and Durban and Port Elizabeth and flip through page after page in search of Jewish-sounding journalist names. If you concentrate really hard, and really long, you might find three or four or five. How many Jews edit major newspapers? None. The editor of Business Day goes by the name Cohen, but, fine chap that he is, he’s not Jewish in any way that would convince a rabbi. You could check the share registers of the big media houses to find out who owns those newspapers. Any Jewish names? Not likely. Jews barely feature in the newspaper business today.
But even that answer would be misleading. Jews of one kind or another, some heroes, some villains, did indeed play an important and undervalued role in building up this country’s newspaper industry. Many major institutions that don’t look in the slightest bit Jewish today owe their roots to Jewish entrepreneurship and chutzpah. What I’d like to present here is the real history, largely forgotten, of the Jewish role in publishing newspapers.2
The word “media” covers newspapers, magazines, television, radio, satellite, websites, YouTube, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Given that Jews have stuck their schnozzes into every one of these areas, I am obliged to narrow down my subject matter. So I will stick with the printed newspaper business and ignore the obvious facts that the Kirsh family are big in radio and consumer magazines, that Johnny Copelyn has a firm hand on eTV and that Jane Raphaely pretty much invented modern women’s magazines. Nor will I talk about South Africa’s Jewish community press, a fascinating story, but an entirely separate world: very few Jews associated with the mainstream press worked with the community press.
Here’s the basic theory. Jewish immigrants to this country in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, much like Jewish immigrants to the USA, were quick to spot opportunities in new and marginal and high risk enterprises, moved in quickly, dominated the market and then, having laid the groundwork, got bulldozed aside by more powerful interests. One good example of that was the newspaper business.
Let’s take the case of the first Jew to run a newspaper in this country. Joseph Suasso da Lima was a Sephardic Jew with a Portuguese name who founded the first Afrikaans newspaper in this country. Even more remarkable, he did so at a time when printing newspapers was still illegal and dangerous.
The Dutch East India Company’s officials, who controlled the Cape Colony for the first century and a half, were a particularly uptight and verkrampte breed. They banned Jews and Catholics from the colony. They banned not only newspapers but printing in any shape or form. And when the British took over, for the first thirty years they found it convenient to do as little as possible to change that.
Those Jews who set foot here did so by converting, or at least pretending to convert, which is what Da Lima did. He joined the Dutch Reformed Church a few weeks before he took the ship to South Africa in 1818, to take up a job teaching the Bible to the children of slaves. Why he chose to come to the Cape is a mystery. He was a high-brow in a low-brow town, a liberal with some sympathy for the slaves, wrote poetry and and his Christian peers refused to believe that his hurried conversion was in any way genuine. Da Lima was fired from his job, ridiculed in public and nicknamed De Joodse Dwerge (the Jewish Dwarf) because he was a hunchback. An early history of the Cape had this to say about him: “Mr J Suasso De Lima was a Dutch lawyer, a clever man, and a linguist. He was always in trouble, never paid anybody, especially his house rent.” A more kindly reviewer, SA Rochlin, who compiled an overview of Jewish literature in South Africa, had this to say of him: “Powerful in intellect, eccentric in manners, courageous in defending his particular causes.”3
In either 1826 or 1828, Da Lima founded a newspaper called De Versamelaar, written in a dialect called Cape Dutch. Many years later, Cape Dutch became known by a simpler name, Afrikaans. The paper pre-dated the formal lifting of press censorship, somehow slipping past the British at a time when English papers were still being banned.4 Da Lima is said to have published an even earlier paper called The Cape Koerant, but no copy has ever been found. De Versamelaar lasted 22 years, but Da Lima went bankrupt within two or three years and the paper passed into the hands of one of his most hated rivals. Years later, when a Jewish community was finally established, Da Lima, now an old man, gave money to it, but he was nonetheless buried in a Christian cemetery. So it can be said then that a Jew, or perhaps an ex-Jew, founded the Afrikaans press in this country.5
My next example was also a liberal and intellectual, also had an ambiguous relationship with the religion he was born into, and was also described by his enemies as “the Jewish Dwarf”. Saul Solomon was born in 1817 on the island of St Helena to a wealthy merchant family who happened to own the local newspaper. At age five he was shipped off to the UK, where the Chief Rabbi personally circumcised him and put him in a Jewish boarding school, both of which experiences may have coloured his attitudes to his ancestral religion, and also to the British. He developed rheumatic fever, and the appalling medical practices of the time, which forced him to wear splints for years, permanently stunted his growth.
In 1831, his family immigrated to the Cape, where he trained as an engraver in one of the earliest print shops before taking over his employer’s business and becoming a successful printer to the government. He launched the Mercantile Advertiser, the first example of a local knock-and-drop newspaper: it was delivered free to every home in Cape Town, a winning formula. Alas, too winning: lots of others copied Solomon’s idea and drove him out of the market.
Solomon imported the first steam-driven press into Cape Town. It could print far more pages far more quickly than the old hand presses, making a genuinely mass media possible. The first to exploit this opportunity was one Bryan Henry Darnell, who in 1857 started the Cape Argus, with Solomon as his printer. Six years on, Darnell ran into financial trouble and was forced to hand the paper over to Solomon.
Solomon had become a Member of Parliament, the Helen Suzman of his day, an often lonely liberal voice in favour of black rights, anti-British imperialism and pro-local self-government. The paper became a vehicle for his strong views. He also improved on the content by subscribing to the first foreign telegraph service. Thanks to the steam press, the Cape Argus could appear three times a week – its rivals appeared only once a week – and also print more copies, making it a huge success, the leading paper in the colony.
When it came to religion, Solomon played both ends against the middle: he attended church very publically along with his fellow MPs, but when the first rabbi was installed at the Cape he attended Pesach seders at his house and gave generously towards the building of the first synagogue.1
What finally broke Solomon was a Cape Argus expose of a massacre of Korana and San rebels by ill-disciplined government troops. The Prime Minister, Gordon Sprigg, retaliated by stopping all government advertising in the Argus, the major source of its revenue. Attorney General Thomas Upington sued Solomon, and the long-running court case left him penniless. Solomon sold out to his editor, one Francis Dormer, a liberal like himself.2 But unknown to Solomon, Dormer had a secret backer – a certain Cecil John Rhodes, not yet as famous as he would become, who shifted the paper in a pro-imperialist direction. Solomon left the Cape and died poor and forgotten in Scotland.3
We come now to Emanuel Mendelssohn, something of an anomaly in this story. Firstly, he was of normal height. Secondly, he was an actual practicing Jew; indeed he was founder, president and a major power in Johannesburg’s first synagogue, the Witwatersrand Old Hebrew Congregation. 4A German Jew who had first immigrated to Australia, he arrived in Johannesburg within a year of the town’s establishment and helped develop the area that is today Hillbrow, where Caroline Street is named after his wife, a famous soprano. He co-owned the Standard Building Company which built the Standard Theatre, the leading theatre in early Johannesburg, in which his wife played a prominent role. He also owned the Standard and Diggers News, a morning daily that is entirely forgotten today, but was once the most powerful English newspaper in the Transvaal.5
Mendelssohn was a divisive figure, not only among the Johannesburg Jews (he was right in the middle of the various religious feuds that split the early community) but also in society at large. In a city of ‘uitlanders’ hostile to the Boer government, Mendelssohn was an ardent supporter of President Paul Kruger, an outspoken critic of the mining capitalists, and a populist voice on behalf of the “small man” – the diggers, prospectors and shop keepers. He called for heavier taxes on mining profits to reduce the tariffs on everyday goods. He described mining capital as the “chief enemy” of the country’s independence. He was not entirely uncritical of Kruger, urging him to make concessions to the uitlanders and criticising the state’s increasingly heavy-handed restrictions on the press, which included a three month ban on his main rival, the pro-British afternoon paper, The Star, controlled by Rhodes.
In return for his loyalty, Kruger granted Mendelssohn generous government printing contracts and advertising notices; indeed the paper styled itself “The Authorised Government Gazette for the Witwatersrand”. Mendelssohn won himself the sole right to pipe fresh water to drought-stricken Johannesburg, a huge contract which he later sold to Barney Barnato at a handsome profit. Kruger also gave Mendelssohn the concession to supply sanitation to the city. This ran into fierce opposition from the town council and Mendelssohn’s many enemies, and Kruger was forced to cancel it.
Mendelssohn also used his newspaper to squeeze both friends and foes for payments. Those who regularly advertised their prospectuses, notices to shareholders and company reports and who also paid him discreet under-the-table cash subsidies received flattering press coverage. What made this particularly useful to those seeking investment was that in 1895 Mendelssohn established a London edition of the paper.6 Those who refused to play along with him, for example Barnato, who fell out with Mendelssohn over the water deal, and the Standard Bank, which refused to lend him money to build a bigger plant for the Standard and Digger’s News, were subject to vicious attacks. But this tactic eventually backfired on Mendelssohn – his most dangerous foes, the powerful German-Jewish firm of Wernher Beit, retaliated in early 1899 by starting their own newspaper, the ardently pro-imperialist Transvaal Leader, which quickly captured half the Standard and Diggers News circulation. But for a while, both the major morning newspapers in Johannesburg were controlled by rival Jewish interests.
Then war came to Mendelssohn’s rescue. When the Anglo-Boer War broke out in October 1899, Kruger banned the pro-British newspapers. That left The Standard and Diggers News in the marvellous position of holding a monopoly on all news in the middle of a rather newsworthy war. Sadly, this lasted only eight months, as the British captured Johannesburg in May 1900 and lost no time shutting the paper down. The military confiscated the printing plant and used it to produce their own newspaper, the Johannesburg Gazette, as well as all their stationery and notices. They imprisoned Mendelssohn, eventually deporting him to England for the duration of the war. The military played rough with the equipment, damaging both the building and the printing plant. Mendelssohn spent years campaigning for the payment of £20 000 which he felt he was owed, but never received a cent.
Another fortune hunter, even closer to Kruger than Mendelssohn and even more prone to winning and losing fortunes and entangling himself in corrupt relationships, was Alois Hugo Nellmapius, a Hungarian immigrant. Nellmapius is often described as Jewish, and indeed had a Jewish father from whom he inherited a decidedly Jewish appearance. But he was brought up a Christian and married in the Anglican Cathedral in Durban. Nellmapius, who arrived in the Transvaal in 1873, long before most other “Uitlanders”, figures here for reasons other than his religion. He built the first railroads for Kruger, the first factories (dynamite and steel) and founded Irene, home to an experimental farm, where he produced a dubious but explosive brandy from mielies. He also launched two newspapers – not with any great enthusiasm, but at the president’s insistence.
In 1889, Nellmapius was instructed by Kruger to launch a rival to the republic’s leading newspaper, Land En Volk, which had infuriated the president by favouring his rival, General Piet Joubert. At Kruger’s suggestion, it would appear weekly in Dutch, and be called Die Pers, and twice weekly in English, named The Press. Nellmapius was obliged to buy premises and set up a printing plant, at his own expense, but hoped to win favours in return. The editor of the English version was one B Gluckstein, previously editor of The Bulletin, an early Johannesburg paper. Two years later, Gluckstein fell out with Nellmapius, and retaliated with a bitter attack in Land En Volk, describing how he was fed false and deceiving information by Kruger and his senior officials, whom he labelled a corrupt “concessionaire-clique”.7 Gluckstein’s name inclines one to imagine that he was Jewish. But what makes this puzzling, is that he repeatedly attacked his successor as a Jew. “A Jewish lithographer from Port Elizabeth, Weinthal, was put in my place”, he wrote, and “as to be expected, the Jewish lithographer is no more than a stooge;” and “the Jew, Weinthal, is also correspondent for the Diggers News in Johannesburg, a paper that gives false and lying information against General Joubert.”8
Leo Weinthal, who is the main reason for this diversion, was a German Jew, born in 1865. Arriving in Port Elizabeth, he worked as photographer, then moved to Kruger’s republic in 1887 as a state lithographer, before quitting and becoming an accomplished local correspondent for Reuters, the Daily Telegraph and The Times. Appointed editor of The
Press in 1891, he faithfully supported the Kruger government until the unexpected early death of Nellmapius, aged only 46, in 1893. Weinthal persuaded JB Robinson, one of the few mining magnates who supported Kruger, to take over the paper, which progressed from twice a week into a daily. But after the Jameson Raid, when Kruger imposed press censorship, Weinthal fell out with him and quit the paper. Two years later, in 1898, he launched his own daily paper, which he called The Pretoria News. Weinthal thus joins the modest pantheon of Jews who founded newspapers that have not yet closed down. He did not stay with the paper long; when the British seized Pretoria in 1900 he left for London, where he launched various illustrated news weeklies covering Africa, and also wrote African travel books and a biography of JB Robinson. An enthusiastic supporter of Kruger in his youth, he became an ardent British imperialist in middle age, and champion of a Cape to Cairo railroad.1
Joseph Suasso da Lima, pioneer of the Afrikaans language press
Parliamentarian and Cape press founder Saul Solomon
Standard & Diggers’ News owner Emanuel Mendelssohn
Leo Weinthal, editor, journalist and founder of the Pretoria News.
I W Schlesinger, cinema, radio and newspaper mogul
But we must return to Mendelssohn, who had backed the losing side in the Anglo-Boer War. Soon after the war ended, he visited Heath’s Bar on the corner of Pritchard and Von Brandis in Johannesburg. There he met up with one Harry Freeman Cohen, to whom he poured out his sorry story.1 On the spur of the moment, Cohen offered to buy the business – at a knock-down price. Cohen was a British Jew who arrived in Johannesburg in 1888 and became a wealthy stockbroker, as well as a minor-league mining capitalist who controlled, for example, Rand Collieries. He was the brother-in-law of Harry Graumann, the first Jewish mayor of Johannesburg. Freeman Cohen was active in Jewish affairs, attending the inaugural meeting of the Jewish Board of Deputies and serving for a while as president of the Johannesburg Hebrew Congregation when a neutral person was needed to defuse yet another communal feud.2
A drawing of Freeman Cohen in the Johannesburg Public Library shows a dandyish man in a dress suit, smoking a cigar. I have found only one description of him, and it returns us to our theme of undersized Jews: “Harry Freeman-Cohen was a little man who had the face of a stage comedy Jew, but I never met a straighter, cleaner, or whiter man in my life.” The man who wrote that was the local correspondent for the London Daily Mail, one Edgar Wallace, who a few months earlier had introduced Freeman Cohen to the excitements of a certain kind of journalism.3
The British military censors had put a near total blackout on news of the Anglo-Boer War. Wallace alone among the war correspondents had sneaked around this. He had discovered that Freeman Cohen, as a stockbroker, regularly sent instructions to his brother in London about which shares to trade on the London stock exchange. Wallace invented a code whereby certain buy and sell messages had secret meanings relating to the progress of the war. In this way, the Daily Mail managed a number of major scoops, to the bewildered fury of the British military command.4
Wallace’s greatest triumph was being first with the news of the final peace treaty, a mystery to all because he had not even bothered to hang around the military camp where the talks were being held. Twice a day during the long period of the talks, he would ride a train past the camp. There, a soldier – an old mate of Wallace, who had been a soldier himself – would pretend to blow his nose into a handkerchief whose colour could mean, for example, a peace treaty has been signed. Then Wallace would visit Freeman Cohen, and a coded message would be sent. The Daily Mail broke the story before many members of the British government knew about it.
So when Freeman Cohen bought The Standard and Diggers News from Mendelssohn, he naturally approached Wallace, the only journalist he knew, to be the editor, offering him around six times his current salary. Wallace accepted on the spot and suggested renaming the paper the Rand Daily Mail in honour of his former employer. The Rand Daily Mail, started in September 1902, quickly became Johannesburg’s biggest-selling newspaper thanks to Wallace’s feel for popular journalism, not to mention his vivid imagination – one story that particularly annoyed Lord Alfred Milner claimed that he had secretly bought Mozambique. Freeman Cohen took no interest in the editorial content; indeed his lack of interest might be revealed by this sentence from his own newspaper: “One might have expected of the Imperial Government to think twice before offering finalities for the overrunning of one of our most promising colonies with the very class of people that is being so strongly objected to in the mother country.” The people referred to here are of course Russian Jews.5 Cohen did however fall out with Wallace after a mere nine months, but it was over the matter of the editor’s reckless spending. He sacked Wallace, who attempted to kill himself with a revolver in his own office, was restrained by passers-by and left the country.6 We should not mourn for Wallace who, capitalising on his flair for fiction, went on to become a world-famous author of detective novels, churning them out at a rate of one every three weeks. They remained international best sellers in multiple languages for the next sixty years.7
A year later, Freeman Cohen died, and his brother sold the paper to a mining magnate, Abe Bailey, who wasn’t in any way Jewish, and used the Rand Daily Mail as a platform to build his own publishing empire. Between Bailey and Rhodes and their successors, mining magnates would own every major big city English-language newspaper for the next ninety years. A Jew founded the Rand Daily Mail, but no Jew ever became its editor.
Continuing on the theme of undersized Jewish upstarts who smoked cigars, Isidore William Schlesinger measured 5 foot two and a half tall (1.57 metres). He was born in New York in 1871, and immigrated to South Africa at the age of 23, arriving with one suitcase filled with bars of the latest American fad, chewing gum. He sold them all and on the basis of that success, started one business after another. First, an insurance company called African Life Assurance which used aggressive American sales techniques. Then a property company called African Realty which developed such Johannesburg suburbs as Killarney and Orange Grove. Over time he came to own Johannesburg’s finest hotel, the Carlton, where he lived for many years, the finest hotel in Mozambique, the Polana, and Zebedelia, the largest citrus farm in the world.8
Schlesinger was fascinated by what we would today call the media. He was an early pioneer of movies, which he quickly dominated in South Africa by using the same technique as his Jewish counterparts in Hollywood: he bought up every aspect of the business. He owned the biggest local film production company and studio, a network of cinemas around the country and the rights to import Hollywood movies. He further started one of the world’s first newsreel companies, African Mirror, bought up and merged a string of advertising agencies until his was South Africa’s largest and pioneered what was perhaps the most shameful visual pollutant of all, outdoor billboard advertising. In 1930, Schlesinger bought out a string of small and failing local radio stations and merged them into a viable nationwide broadcasting company, the African Broadcasting Company. Alas for him, it was successful enough to be nationalised by the government in 1936 – it was renamed the SABC.
In 1935 Schlesinger bought his first newspaper, the Sunday Express. It was owned by Arthur Barlow, an opinionated and eccentric politician who hated all things British, had started his own political party and was in some ways the Julius Malema of his day. Barlow was not Jewish, but he had a Jewish wife, Lily Nathan, whose family owned the Cecil Hotel in Bloemfontein. It was she who came up with the idea for his newspaper. Lily was extraordinarily energetic, and a genius at advertising sales, but despite her efforts, the newspaper quickly ran out of money. Barlow persuaded Schlesinger to bail him out, telling him he would become the Joseph Pulitzer of South Africa. Schlesinger kept Barlow on as editor, and let him write whatever he wanted with only one proviso: he wanted extensive and flattering coverage of his movies.9
Barlow was the only newspaper editor of that era to hire a number of Jews as reporters. Whether his wife was the hidden hand behind this, we do not know, but it is worth pondering some possible reasons. Low pay might be one. Barlow’s writers were generally unschooled, from the poorer homes, and he required them to work appalling hours at the lowest of salaries. They were cocky street kids, who differed from their Jewish contemporaries only in their lack of interest in business and social status. They probably could not get jobs down the road at the Anglo-dominated The Star. Unlike their parents, their home language was English, not Yiddish.
The big mainstream newspapers, owned by the mining magnates, behaved as monopolies do, and tried their best to stop Schlesinger. They blocked his access to the newswire services and the national distribution system run by the CNA. They poached his senior staff by offering higher salaries. That would have been enough to kill off almost anyone else, but Schlesinger merely treated it as a challenge. He started his own news wire service and his own newspaper distribution company, bought his own building and installed his own presses. In 1937 he launched a daily version of the Sunday Express in competition with The Star and then a daily and Sunday newspaper in Durban, the Daily Tribune and the Sunday Tribune. A Brooklyn Jew named Hank Margolies, a living embodiment of the Hollywood tabloid journalist, was imported to teach American-style populist journalism. Very soon, the Schlesinger papers became a significant threat to the long established, rather staid newspapers owned by the mining houses. Given a few more years, Schlesinger might well have become the Jew who owned the South African press.
But that never happened. It was the late 1930s, the height of the Nazi period, and antisemitic sentiment was on the rise. Schlesinger came under attack in parliament and in the local and British press, accused of fleecing widows and orphans with worthless insurance policies. The Jewish Board of Deputies, convinced that Schlesinger’s provocative newspapers were making antisemitism even worse, pressured him to sell out to his rivals, which he reluctantly did in 1939, for £300 000.10 Four months later, war broke out. If Schlesinger had held on just a little longer, everything might have been different. Instead he was soon forgotten; his name barely features in South African press histories. But his most lasting effect on South African culture was that he took a staid, Anglophile colony, and Americanised its culture across all race and class barriers.11
From what I can tell, only three Jews became editors of mainstream white English newspapers during the 20th Century. Two of those three started their careers as apprentices to Arthur Barlow. We’ll start with the one who didn’t, Joseph Langdon Levy, a portly and aristocratic English-born Jew, who edited the Sunday Times in a sober fashion for 32 years, a South African record. Levy loved theatre, books and the arts and cared rather less about politics. Despite having hardly any staff, he took the Sunday Times circulation to over 100 000 copies, until Barlow came along and ripped a giant gash in his sales.12 The other two Jews who became editors were Joel Mervis, who for 18 years was editor of the Sunday Times, and Meyer Albert Johnson, better known as Johnny Johnson, who for two decades was editor of the right-wing, government sponsored Citizen. Both started their careers under Barlow, Johnson as a teenager, but Mervis as a young lawyer who had become bored with lawyering.
Mervis was the reason that the Sunday Times became known as the Jewish newspaper. If you needed to advertise a Jewish event, or a birth, wedding or death, there was no question: you put it in the Sunday Times. Mervis wrote a weekly column called The Passing Show, which included a cast of wise guys like Oscar Wildebeest, Ossip Broz and Skopl Topl, who to a Jewish ear, were quite obviously old Yiddlach, cracking Jewish jokes. Jews loved it; the English, in my experience, never quite got the point.13
Mervis was one of the most successful editors in South African history, turning the newspaper into a national institution, its circulation way ahead of any rival. He stuck to the political centre where his readers were to be found. But he clashed constantly with a thin-skinned government because he kept going after politicians for the sins of greed, corruption or lying in public. Among the paper’s most famous achievements was blowing the cover of the secret organisation behind the National Party, the Broederbond. This began with a lucky accident: the Broederbond were accidentally sending their secret correspondence to a non-member who obligingly shared it with the Sunday Times. The first Broederbond exposes were the work of a Jewish reporter named Charles Bloomberg, who came under threat and found it prudent to leave the country in a hurry. He ended up in the UK where he helped write the popular World at War television series.14
Joel Mervis ought to have gone on to the editorship of the Rand Daily Mail, the Sunday Times’ sister paper and the company flagship. At one point he had been that paper’s deputy editor. Given his commercial success and middle of the road politics, Mervis should have been the favourite. Yet he was not even on the short-list. And the talk was, there was a reason for this: no Jew would ever edit the Rand Daily Mail.
If Mervis was bitter, he kept it to himself. The claim that he had been denied the job because he was Jewish remained nothing but rumour until 2007, long after Mervis had died, when the last editor of the Rand Daily Mail, Rex Gibson, published a book that blew open more than one company secret. “In many ways, Mervis should have been the ideal candidate,” said Gibson. “He had been deputy editor of the RDM and had the brains, the flair and the presence … There was only one thing standing in the way of his appointment. He was Jewish. Anti-Semitism on the conservative board was entrenched and the idea of a Jew editing the flagship newspaper was unthinkable. Why, the man might not even be allowed to join the Rand Club.”15
Joel Mervis, editor of the Sunday Times 1959-1975
The curious irony was that a decade later, when the Rand Daily Mail job came up again, a Jew very nearly did get it. Or to rephrase that, he got it and instantly lost it. Meyer Albert Johnson was editor of Barlow’s old paper, the Sunday Express. He followed very closely in the mould of Barlow, making the paper rather brash and trashy, full of divorce scandals, crime and quite likely fiction, somewhat right-wing, and very successful. He called himself Johnny Johnson, which helped to hide his Jewishness. He was known to be a terror to work for.
One floor down at the Rand Daily Mail, Laurence Gandar, an editor far too liberal for the establishment, was about to be fired. The job was offered instead to Johnson, whose politics suited the board, and whose discreetly hidden Semitic origins may have been unknown to them. What lost Johnson the job was a furious fight-back from Gandar, who pointed out that replacing a liberal editor with a right-wing one on the eve of that paper receiving a World Press award for courageous journalism would not be smart public relations.1 So Johnson was instead made a promise: he would get the Sunday Times when Mervis retired. It took a good few years before Mervis finally stepped down. But corporate memories are short, and the promise to Johnson was forgotten: he did not get the job. Foiled twice, he quit the Sunday Express in a rage. The paper became a rather more respectable under his successors, but it says something about Johnson’s flair that the circulation dropped steadily from that moment on.
Not long after, Johnson, still unemployed, was the ideal candidate for the editorship of the newly launched Citizen, the first pro-apartheid English-language newspaper, which he edited for the next two decades with the relish of a man who had finally got his revenge. Johnson was hated in liberal circles for his unwavering enthusiasm for PW Botha’s belligerent regime. He was also admired – at a distance – for his workaholic ability to produce a daily newspaper on almost no resources, because only the desperate were willing to work for him. A few years after the Citizen launched, it was exposed as a government funded front deliberately set up to destroy the Rand Daily Mail. The journalists who broke the story, which became known as the Information Scandal, were Johnson’s own former staff at the Sunday Express.2 The expose did nothing to damage Johnson’s editing career, which lasted well into the mid-90s. The Citizen is still published; the Rand Daily Mail has been dead for over three decades.
Were there no women in all this, you may be asking? Well, there were no women editors of any major newspaper until the 21st Century. Indeed, even when I started as journalist on the Sunday Times in the seventies, women were largely confined to writing light features and fashion. There is of course the exceptional case of Jane Raphaely, who as a publisher of women’s magazines, falls just outside my subject matter. Still it’s worth noting how different her career has been from all the Jewish men I have mentioned. When she launched Fair Lady in 1965, she largely invented modern women’s consumer magazines in this country. When she followed up with Femina, Cosmopolitan and O Magazine, she came to own the territory. She avoided being eaten alive by her partners, Nasionale Pers. She even steered a surprisingly liberal course with her magazines, given that Nasionale Pers were the official voice of Cape Nationalism, and this was the very height of the apartheid era.
Ruth First is known these days as a communist and a martyr, a white woman murdered by the apartheid security forces. But she began her career as one of the country’s first investigative journalists. She worked for a Cape Town-based radical newspaper called The Guardian, arguably the most banned, most harassed and most courageous newspaper in South African press history, one whose entire staff was at various times in detention, one which had to keep changing its name and its editors – to New Age, Spark, Clarion – to keep one step ahead of the censors.3
In 1947, at age 22, Ruth First started her first job, as the Johannesburg correspondent on The Guardian. In her first month she exposed conditions in a municipal compound by creeping in at night with a torch, and by her fifth month she had discovered a topic that she would doggedly investigate for the next ten years: the brutal condition of workers on South African farms. A brief summary would be that corrupt police would arrest African men for pass offences and offer them the choice of either working on a farm for six months or jail for a year. Most made the wrong choice, were sent to farms where they were treated much like slaves, chained, whipped, sometimes to death, set on by savage dogs, forced to sleep naked in icy conditions, swindled out of their promised wages, starved and much more.
For her first article on the subject, First took along with her a crusading Anglican priest, Michael Scott, and the local ANC leader, Gert Sibande, who helped her sneak into compounds on three farms, interview the workers and take photographs. Her opening paragraph read: “It is not every day that the Johannesburg reporter for The Guardian meets an African farm labourer who, when asked to describe conditions on the farm on which he works, silently takes off his shirt to reveal large wheals and scars whipped on his back, shoulders and arms.”
But she had missed The Guardian’s weekly deadline – in those pre-email, in fact pre-telex days, she filed her copy by putting it in an envelope and posting it to Cape Town. Under pressure from Scott, who wanted the story published immediately, she took it to the editor of the Rand Daily Mail. He was sceptical at first, but it helped that First had an Anglican priest at her side. After some checking by his own staff, the editor ran the story at modest size on page seven, under the headline “Near slavery in Bethal district”.
Because the story appeared in the (then) respectably mainstream Rand Daily Mail, rather than the far left Guardian, it was noticed, becoming front page news across the country. Prime Minister Jan Smuts hastily ordered a commission of inquiry, and a battery of policemen and labour inspectors raided 91 farms. The local farmers were in turn enraged at this interference with an age-old farming custom and held huge protest meetings, one of which almost ended with the lynching of First and Reverend Scott, who made the reckless mistake of attending it.
The Smuts government had taken it for granted that they would easily win the 1948 general election, a few months away. Now it dawned on them that they might lose the Afrikaner platteland. The police were pulled back from Bethal and charges against farmers were dropped. But the cover-up didn’t help. In the election a few months later, Smuts lost the critical constituencies around Bethal, and the National Party scored a narrow victory. Such are the unintended consequences of journalism. A story by a young Jewish journalist, intended to expose farm brutality, instead brought the National Party to power.4
Five years later, in 1952, a magazine called Drum, aimed at an African audience, ran an expose of the same Bethal farm brutality. The reporter, Henry Nxumalo, nicknamed Mr Drum, actually worked as a farm labourer and barely escaped with his life. More has been written about Drum magazine than any other South African publication because it became a showcase for some of the most talented and courageous African writers. What is seldom mentioned is that Nxumalo started his career on The Guardian, working with Ruth First. What is also very rarely mentioned is that Sylvester Stein, the former political correspondent of the Rand Daily Mail who edited Drum during one of its most creative periods in the mid-fifties, was a Jew. It was Stein, for example, who spotted and hired Nat Nakasa, the magazine’s most famous journalist. It was also Stein who encouraged Drum’s literary fiction, now much admired as South African classics, but which were stopped when he left. And he came up with such escapades as sending Mr Drum to a series of white churches and photographing him being chased down the streets by his fellow Christians. It was also Stein, in an article about the Olympic Games, who pointed out that the rules did not permit racial discrimination. Only then did anti-apartheid activists wake up to the possibilities of an international sports boycott.
South Africa’s iconic Drum magazine. This issue includes a feature on the Bethal farm labour scandal.
But he is best-known for the manner of his departure. In October 1957, Stein planned a magazine cover showing the first black woman to win at Wimbledon, Althea Gibson, being kissed by her white runner-up Darlene Hard. In 1957 South Africa, this was a picture too far to risk. As Drum’s owner, Jim Bailey explained in his autobiography: “Sylvester, encouraged by his heady successes, intimated to me that another major feature or so from him would topple the government. I thought … that if anyone was going to be toppled it would be me and Sylvester.”1 Stein was fired and the cover was changed. Stein gave the story of his demise to the news agencies. When Bailey arrived in Lagos a few days later to launch a Nigerian edition, he was met with hostile press accusing him of racism. Stein spent the next year writing a satirical novel about black life under apartheid, Second Class Taxi, which won wide critical acclaim. It also earned the government’s own ultimate accolade: being banned immediately.
In 1955 Bailey launched what he called a “racy, modern, hard hitting and honest” Sunday newspaper called Golden City Post, a distant ancestor to today’s City Press. In nine months, the circulation topped 100 000, a remarkable feat for the time. The editor, Cecil Eprile, was a Scottish Jew, who arrived in South Africa in 1936, just in time to work for Arthur Barlow on another of his publications, Arthur Barlow’s Weekly. He later became chief sub-editor of the Sunday Times, and for a longish interregnum, acting editor of the Sunday Express.2 His deputy on Golden City Post was Hank Margolies, the same cigar-chomping, Brooklyn Jew who had been brought out by Schlesinger. Eprile and Margolies made Golden City Post into what may have been the most scurrilous tabloid to appear in South Africa, obsessed with tales of blood, sex and magic. It became the second largest newspaper in South Africa, with only the Sunday Times ahead of it. No subject matter was too sordid for Post. With one exception: it stayed clear of politics.3
One gets some idea of the atmosphere of Post from this account by Stan Motjuwadi, a reporter under Eprile and later editor of Drum himself:
“How can you take yourself seriously when you have to work with such loveable eccentrics like editor Cecil Eprile? This is how a day would go by when I was news editor:
“Lloyd, where the hell have you been and what …”
“Well, Cecil, the thing is …”
“Never mind, you’re fired!”
Half an hour later. “Stan, where is Lloyd?” “But Cecil, you fired him half an hour ago.”
“Find him!” As I’m going out to find Lloyd at the Classic (a local shebeen) he’s shouting: “Find him or you’re fired!” … Everyone enjoyed being fired by Cecil because it meant a day off.”4
There is no evidence that Bailey had any fondness for Jews, but here in the late-fifties his three most senior editorial staff on Drum and Post, namely Stein, Eprile and Margolies, were all Jewish.5 Why was this? My guess is that a skilled, white Anglo-Saxon journalist was less likely to take a job on a black publication. Drum shared premises with the Rand Daily Mail, and there are various anecdotes about how its journalists were treated as second-class by their neighbours. Whether Jews were any less racist is debatable, but since they were marginal themselves, were never likely to rise to the editor’s chair at a ‘respectable’ white newspaper, they were more willing to move into marginal enterprises.
In the late fifties, then, the editors of the three largest circulation newspapers in the country, the Sunday Times, Golden City Press and Sunday Express, and the editor of the largest English language magazine, Drum, were all Jews. What they had in common, and this is essential in a successful mass market editor, was an acute instinct for the popular taste. The daily newspapers of the time, with their Gentile editors, were more likely to reflect the society values of the Rand Club.
The Rand Daily Mail never had a Jewish editor, but it had a surprising number of Jewish deputy editors. Mervis has already been mentioned. He was followed by Lewis Sowden, who unlike most of the Jews mentioned previously, was an intellectual rather than a street fighter. Indeed Lewis Sowden, MA, and his eccentric and frequently turbaned wife Dora, the Rand Daily Mail’s music and arts critic, were between them the social hub of Jewish intellectual life in Johannesburg.6 Lewis was a prolific writer of poems, non-fiction books, novels (at least seven of them), plays (six of them) and biographies. The kinder critics of his day compared his work to Nadine Gordimer. Dora wrote several studies of Jewish contributions to South African culture. Lewis Sowden’s problem, not unusual among editors, was controlling his temper. One night when a visiting foreign musician made unflattering remarks from the stage about Dora (provoked by her unflattering review of his work in that morning’s Rand Daily Mail), Lewis attacked the man in full view of the audience. He was later sent to New York to cover a speech to the United Nations by Foreign Minister Eric Louw, and halfway through, unable to contain himself, Sowden shouted from the gallery: “Half-truths, half-truths!” This outburst became a major political scandal at home, with Sowden accused of near treason. The Rand Daily Mail was obliged to demote him to a mere arts correspondent. His replacement as deputy editor was Ivor Benson, an avowed antisemite and good friend of the British fascist leader, Oswald Moseley.7 The third Jew to be deputy editor was Ralph Cohen who, never fond of his own paper’s liberalism, made the mistake of absconding to the Citizen when it launched. He soon clashed with his fellow Jew, Johnson, and quit. Persona non grata at his old paper, he edited the Jewish Herald for a while, making him the only ‘mainstream’ Jewish editor to cross into the community press.8
But the most famous of the deputy editors never to become editor, was the longest serving of them, Benjamin Pogrund. In the late fifties, Pogrund became the first reporter on a white newspaper assigned to cover black politics. This sounds odd today, downright colonial to use current jargon, but in the fifties it was a bold step. Pogrund, a former Liberal Party member, became friendly with all the ANC leaders, and with Robert Sobukwe, leader of the PAC, about whom he wrote a book. But he was most famous for his prisons exposé.1
The Prisons Act, born out of government spite following another Drum exposé 2, was designed to make it almost impossible to report adversely on prisons conditions. But the Rand Daily Mail, under the liberal editorship of Laurence Gandar – by the way, another Schlesinger protégé – decided to risk it. Many of the black leaders whom Pogrund met had been in jail, and their stories were horrific. He spent months researching the topic, talking to both prisoners and prison warders, before writing a three-part series. The centrepieces were a 2000-word statement from former political prisoner Harold Strachan, and the confessions of former head warder Andries Theron, an honest man with a conscience. Prime Minister John Vorster, a former Minister of Prisons himself, demanded retribution. Strachan and Theron were both charged and convicted, and Strachan banned for years thereafter. Pogrund and Gandar faced an eight month trial during which a procession of more than a hundred state witnesses brazenly lied, frequently contradicting one another. The judge sentenced Pogrund and Gandar only to a fine – the trial had drawn international attention and a prison sentence may have been too risky politically – but the costs of the case were so prohibitive that no newspaper dared expose the prisons for another 25 years. Gandar lost his editorship; Pogrund was never forgiven. The last editor of the Rand Daily Mail, Rex Gibson, wrote that on his appointment, the board gave him only one instruction: Get rid of Pogrund. Gibson ignored the order.1
Meyer Albert (‘Johnny’) Johnson, Sunday Express Editor and first editor of The Citizen
Drum editor Sylvester Stein
Dora Sowden, music and arts critic journalist
Ruth First, crusading investigative
Benjamin Pogrund (right) with Laurence Gandar, photographed while on trial for the publication of an exposé on prison conditions.
Sometime in the 1960s, the kind of people who gravitated into journalism changed. It had been a largely male, largely lower-class, largely self-taught occupation. But in keeping with trends elsewhere in the world, it became increasingly professionalised. The people who arrived in newsrooms now had university degrees, which exposed them to the scorn of their seniors, who considered the school of life superior to any tertiary education. Worse, there were increasing numbers of women, who spilled out of the fashion pages into such male domains as politics. The university graduates were considered effete liberals, a not entirely inaccurate description, because a great many of them entered journalism as a social calling, a way to make a difference. The differences in attitude precipitated frequent clashes between youthful reporters and their grey haired editors. And although most of these graduates were not Jewish, a disproportionate number were, and they were to be found in particular at the Rand Daily Mail, writing about apartheid injustices, politics, feminism, consumer, health, education or labour issues. But that group were significantly weakened and dispersed by the death of the Rand Daily Mail.
The Rand Daily Mail had become too liberal for its white audience and lost readers and advertisers, many of them to Johnson’s rival Citizen. In 1985 it was closed down, along with its sister paper the Sunday Express. Large numbers of journalists were put out on the street, many of whom emigrated. Among the ranks of the unemployed were Anton Harber, political reporter of the Rand Daily Mail, and myself, assistant editor of the Sunday Express. The two of us decided on a whim to start our own newspaper to fill the political gap left by the death of the Rand Daily Mail. We put together a team: a lawyer, an accountant, a fund-raiser and a businessman. They had this in common: they knew nothing about newspapers and they were Jewish. The money they raised came, not surprisingly, mainly from Jews who had been shocked by the closure of the Rand Daily Mail. Half the Johannesburg Bar – or at least the Jewish half – contributed. Tony Bloom of Premier Milling and Isaac Joffe of Cape Gate were contributors. One of the most generous backers was a Cape Town property developer who had never met us, Benny Rabinowitz, who wisely said, “I won’t treat this as an investment.” A few years later, the largest investor became Joel Joffe, later known as Lord Joffe, who had been Nelson Mandela’s attorney during the Rivonia Trial, before making the same hurried exit for London as many of his clients. The only printers brave enough to touch this high-risk enterprise were the Dannheiser family in Springs, Jewish of course, owners of the last small independent newspaper left in the Transvaal, The Springs Advertiser.1
We named the newspaper The Weekly Mail in honour of the Rand Daily Mail. The paper was far more high-brow – and expensive – than any other, which narrowed its appeal, but of those who were willing to pay for it, many were Jewish. After our first issue appeared, a café owner, who could claim some expertise in the matter of newspaper sales, wrote to us: “I see your paper. I give you two months.” He was wrong, but only because, shortly before those two months were up, PW Botha declared a State of Emergency and clamped down heavily on the press. This gave us a reason for our existence. We spent the next five years playing cat and mouse games with censorship, trying to tell stories that could not be told, often using the act of censorship itself as a critique of censorship.
Part of a Weekly Mail report, showing censored sections.
One of the big stories was a five part series written by a man who had shared a cell on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. It was the first prisons exposé since Pogrund’s, 25 years earlier.1 We also produced an exposé of slave labour conditions on Eastern Transvaal farms – unaware of the work forty years earlier by the banned and forgotten Guardian. Nothing much had changed. But in our case, the reporters actually bought three ‘slaves’ and took them to Johannesburg, where they were housed for some time on mattresses spread out on the newsroom floor.2 Some of our reporters were jailed or shot – Philip Van Niekerk took a bullet straight through his jaw, missing his brain by a centimetre; Gavin Evans was shot from point-blank range from behind a pillar in our basement, but the gun jammed. The would-be killer was a policeman. Anton Harber spent months in the dock and built up quite a splendid charge sheet, including some Victorian-era offences previously only used in prostitution cases. My bedroom and kitchen were firebombed one night; fortunately, neither was in use at the time. In 1988, after a long and public feud with the government, the paper was banned. An international outcry followed, with questions asked in the US Congress, and six weeks later we were allowed back on the streets.
The author (standing, with Weekly Mail co-founder Anton Harber.
After nine years we hit the same problem as all our Jewish predecessors: we ran out of money. Apartheid had ended, and the generous donors around town no longer felt a need for protest journalism. We were lucky to find a buyer: the British Guardian. They renamed the paper the Mail & Guardian and in traditional colonial fashion, shipped in their own people to take charge. Three of the directors, all Jews, myself among them, were quickly eased out. There was some schadenfreude to be enjoyed in that the British experts lost thirty times more money than ourselves. The paper changed hands yet again, and today there is not a single Jew on the staff.1
Some of you will have noticed a strong Gauteng bias to this story. Surely there were prominent Jewish editors and owners elsewhere? If so, I have not come across them. In the official history of the Cape Times by Gerald Shaw, the only Jewish staffer mentioned is a proof-reader named Finkelstein, who achieved momentary fame when a practical joke proclaimed him in print as the first man to reach the moon.2 In the autobiography of Horace Flather, who in a long career edited major newspapers in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg, the only Jewish journalist to creep into the 200 page narrative is his rival, Joel Mervis, making a shamefaced confession at an editors’ dinner that his wife bought his shirts.3 I have at times occupied desks at the Natal Witness in Pietermaritzburg, the Sunday Tribune in Durban, the Daily Dispatch in Grahamstown and Die Volksblad in Bloemfontein. Only at the latter did I encounter a Jew: the in-house graphic artist shyly revealed her Boere Jood lineage and asked me to keep her secret to myself.
How many Jews are there in South African newspapers these days? Hilary Joffe and Alan Fine were once deputy editors at Business Day, the last remaining hold-out for Jewish journalists. John Perlman was a feature and sports writer on the Weekly Mail before he absconded to radio. Jeremy Gordin was the publisher of the Daily Sun, a re-incarnation of the muti, gore and tokolosh formula of Golden City Post. In its heyday, in the days before poor people became too poor to buy the news, the Daily Sun was the largest-selling paper in South African history.4 There are indeed some outstanding Jewish journalists right now, like Richard Poplak, Kevin Bloom and Mandy Wiener, but they do not work for newspaper companies. The Jews have left few footprints in the South African media. But they did take many of the first steps, played an important role as initiators of new media and as exposers of injustice, and this role deserves to be honoured.
Irwin Manoim is a retired former newspaper editor who teaches media theory in the Journalism Studies programme at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is working on a Jewish history research project through the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Cape Town.
