(Author Douglas Davis, Vol. 77, #2, Autumn 2022)
About a month after being thrown out of Rhodes University in the Sixties, I joined the reporting staff of the Pretoria News. Not because I had ink coursing through my veins but because I knew that a daily newspaper was one place where I would be able to quickly acquire the marketable, portable skills I would need to support myself in a competitive world. I calculated that I would have about three years in South Africa before I would have to leave. That projection was to prove remarkably accurate. In the meantime, I knew I would have to use every minute to build up a portfolio of skills and experience that would enable me to get a job when I left.
I did not have the luxury of progressing steadily up the ladder, and in the absence of anything more than the most menial assignments, I decided to up the ante by setting myself more demanding tasks than my news editor felt he could entrust to me. One of the more bizarre assignments I set myself was to write my own obituary. It was composed in a lyrical, romantic, triumphal style. I handed the copy straight to the chief sub-editor, who tossed it to a sub-editor for processing. Almost too late I realised that they had not understood this was a joke. The obituary had been assigned a place on page three and had been sent to the printers to be set in type. Just in time I confessed my prank and the chief sub pulled the piece. He was not amused.
As my assigned work continued to be undemanding, I seized every opportunity to volunteer for other chores on the paper. My main focus – my ‘core business’ – remained the daily grind of producing news, however modest, for that day’s paper. But whenever I did not have an evening assignment, I would do absolutely anything else. I wrote copious book reviews and launched a charm offensive to persuade the woman’s editor to open up the rich seam of theatre, film and concert reviewing. And when there was not a book, film, theatre or concert to review, I would hang around the empty office waiting for the phone to ring in the hope that something would present itself. The extra money I earned from these activities was useful, but the experience – and confidence – I gained was priceless. In the process, I became a news hustler, popping up at odd, mostly inconvenient moments.
But there was also time to indulge in a little private mischief. The paper was chronically light on news for the Saturday edition and, from Tuesday each week, there were persistent demands from the news editor to find ‘Saturday stories’ that were concocted in advance for the weekend paper. This opened up the sort of opportunities I sought. On one occasion, I called the Department of Justice and asked the spokesman whether there was any truth in ‘rumours’ that the government was planning to scrap the Immorality Act, which outlawed inter-racial sex. His vociferous denial gave me a great front-page story: ‘A senior government spokesman angrily denied that…’ A few weeks later I decided I was pushing my luck when I called to ask whether there was substance in the ‘rumour’ that the Group Areas Act was to be abolished.
On another occasion, I arranged to meet the chief censor to discover the intricacy of book censorship. The application of censorship was out of control, due largely to the fact that few of the books that caught the censors’ eye were actually ever read. The censors were invariably Afrikaans-speaking and, more often than not, low-grade, poorly educated bureaucrats. I guessed – correctly, as it turned out – that they would find the business of wading through English-language books a chore too far. This gave rise to some extraordinary anomalies.
Not without a little malice, I decided to investigate the process by which books were judged to be immoral, indecent or just plain subversive. By arrangement, I arrived at the huge warehouse of a major Pretoria bookseller where the chief censor was plying his trade. The entire space was inundated with dozens of trestle tables, each of which laboured under hundreds of titles that had just arrived. The chief censor, a government-issue clipboard tucked safely in his sweaty armpit, was already hard at work.
‘Well,’ I ventured as we wandered along the line of books, ‘how do you decide which books to ban?’
‘Anything that is immoral or subversive,’ he snapped back confidently, even cheerfully.
He spoke in a heavy Afrikaner accent. By his own admission he had no background in literature. He was, he told me proudly, ‘just a civil servant’. He might have been put in charge of street lighting or garbage collection or sanitation. Just his luck – and that of his countrymen – that he was in charge of safeguarding public morals as a book censor. I wondered how long it took this uneducated Afrikaner to plough through all the English-language material arrayed before him.
‘Do you read all these books to decide which is immoral or politically dangerous?’ I asked.
‘I don’t have to read the books,’ he replied triumphantly. ‘But I have experience, you see. ‘I can tell what is offensive – you know, books about race mixing, communism, revolution. And books with sex’. Then he uttered a line that became fixed in my memory. ‘I knows it in my instinctive’.
Judging by the speed with which he was moving along the trestle tables, stopping only to make entries on his clipboard, I doubted whether he had, in fact, read any of the thousands of books that he must have banned in the course of his career.
‘And how can you tell whether the books should be banned?’
‘That’s very easy,’ he replied, enjoying the limelight and celebrity of the occasion.
Well, would he share the intimate secrets of his trade? ‘I look at the titles of the books and look at the pictures on the cover. You see what I mean. That tells me everything I need to know’.
I picked up a book that looked suspiciously like the kind of material my censor was rooting out to protect the nation’s sensibilities.
‘How about this?’ I asked.
He snatched it triumphantly. ‘Yes! You see, that’s exactly what we’re looking for,’ his free hand scribbling enthusiastically on his grubby brown pad. To my amazement – and misplaced amusement – I had deprived South Africa’s business community of the opportunity to legitimately read the latest edition of The Managerial Revolution, then the state-of-the-art work on business management. Nor could the decision of the censor be easily overturned. The cost of hiring counsel to appeal against such decisions in the Supreme Court was prohibitive, and publishers and booksellers overwhelmingly chose the path of acquiesce in the arbitrary and quite ludicrous rulings of the non-reading censor.
I doubt whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover would have been banned if it had been called Lady Chatterley’s Gardener. Among the tens of thousands of other titles that found their way on to the banned list was Black Beauty, which was considered to be a salacious work that encouraged miscegenation.
Returning to Pretoria from university I was aware that the security police were taking an increasingly intrusive interest in my life. They bugged my home, tapped my phone, opened my incoming mail, attended the Liberal Party meetings I organised on Friday evenings. And they sat in their cars outside my apartment for what must have been hours of relentless tedium. But, in their view, they were doing God’s work and were a constant presence in my everyday life.
The high level of tension matched the fear. In those circumstances, the key to survival, even sanity, was a kind of black humour that matched the black mood which surrounded me. One day I wrote a letter, under a pseudonym, to the Rand Daily Mail, the main Johannesburg newspaper, in an attempt to provoke a debate and highlight the utter madness of Apartheid. I took an extreme pro-Apartheid position. When the letter was published and there were no readers’ responses, I decided to respond myself, under a different pseudonym, and taking an opposite point of view. And then a third. All were published, and I found myself in the absurd position of conducting a highly public, ferocious three-way debate with myself – I was a housewife, a mildly liberal young student and an African servant. Talking to myself was, in fact, a reflection of my own reality. Not too many people in Pretoria were available for rational discussion on the basis that I would find useful or even challenging.
Another letter-writing exercise involved a test of the alertness of the security police who read my letters. One inspired day, I wrote a letter to myself, also under a pseudonym, praising my political work and saying I was enclosing a donation of ten Rand – a decent amount of money in the Sixties – towards future activities. Of course, no money was enclosed when I posted the letter to myself. But when it was delivered, the envelope contained not only my letter but, presto, it also contained a crisp ten-rand note. Someone in the Security Police letter-opening department obviously assumed that the enclosed money had been pocketed, perhaps by staff lower down the food chain who steamed open the envelopes, and decided to ‘replace’ it in order to avoid suspicion that my mail was being tampered with.
Meanwhile, I continued with the more serious business of organising weekly Friday evening ‘study group’ meetings in a small, rented office in the Indian quarter of Pretoria. The meetings rarely attracted more than a dozen regulars, a couple of whom I was convinced were security police.
There was no strategy attached to these meetings, no grand master-plan for overthrowing the government. They were simply occasions – probably the only occasions in a city like Pretoria – when people of all races could meet, drink coffee and discuss politics for a couple of hours. From time to time, I invited guests to address the group on specific issues, but guest speakers were hard to find. Ultimately, the object of the exercise was to break down barriers and make inter-racial encounters as natural as possible. In the circumstances, it was anything but natural.
Even this modest activity was stretching the law to its limit. But it was all within the law and there was nothing the security police could do about it except sit in their cars outside – in an attempt to intimidate those who were attending – and seethe with anger. I was aware that such non-racial events would rile them. They could, of course, have complained to my paper (with potentially serious consequences for me), but that would have exposed the larger fact that I was under surveillance. Their anger, I was certain, would be avenged at a later date.
A couple of weeks after i started work, the news editor assigned me to cover the courts. This was normally considered a graveyard ‘beat,’ a dreary round of misery that was the traditional gulag to which the newest reporter was consigned to be tested and trained. I was showered with sympathy by my fellow reporters, but was actually delighted.
The court was, in fact, a large complex of about twenty courts. Two journalists were assigned to permanently cover the courts – a reporter from my newspaper and a reporter from a large Afrikaans-language daily. We got on well and collaborated on a number of stories, covering for each other when more than one court at a time demanded attention or simply helping each other with translations (hearings were in either English or Afrikaans, and while we were both fluent in each other’s language, there were occasionally areas of uncertainty and precision was essential).
But the key to the success of the journalistic operation was the office of the chief state prosecutor. We would meet him in his office before the courts sat each morning and he would outline the cases that would be coming up in the various courts so that we could judge what we thought should be covered and what could be ignored.
There was, however, one court which was never mentioned. We were never briefed about the cases coming up and my colleague never asked why. When, after a few briefings I asked her why she was silent, a sulky shrug her only response. Within a week I had discovered the answer. South Africa’s bizarre race laws produced some bizarre outcomes. This “invisible” court, I discovered, tried cases which would be embarrassing to the police or government, usually both. There was an unwritten agreement that it was off-limits to journalists. I chose not to play the game.
One of the first stories to emerge from the court involved the case of a white man who had been charged with the rape of a black woman. He had broken into her room in the servants’ quarters of a suburban white home and raped her in her room. She had immediately called the police and they arrived soon afterwards. She sat in their car as they cruised the neighbourhood until she spotted him. The man was arrested and, when he appeared in court, pleaded guilty to raping the woman. It was, as the Americans would say, a slam-dunk.
Not so. In South Africa, rape carried a death sentence, and it was inconceivable that a white person to be executed for a crime against a black. While the woman rape victim was giving evidence, the judge stopped the trial. He ruled that black women were inveterately promiscuous and it was, therefore, impossible to rape a black woman because she would always give her consent at the last minute.
He ordered her to be charged with contravening the ‘immorality act’ – the anti-miscegenation laws – and sentenced her to six months in jail. The white rapist was also charged with ‘immorality’ and also given a six-month sentence. In his case, the sentence was suspended.
Another bizarre case involved a judge who was accused of soliciting and receiving bribes from blacks who were accused of “petty” apartheid offences. The trial judge agreed with the defence that the accused, his colleague, was acting as a judicial officer, not an agent of the state, and was therefore immune from bribery.
My newspaper was at first reluctant to publish these stories – they simply sounded too fantastic. But I not only persisted in reporting the cases, I also insisted that they agree to publish them before I filed the bread-and-butter stories they were accustomed to receiving from their court reporters. To their credit, they agreed to take a chance on me.
I had two advantages over my Afrikaans colleague. Firstly, my paper had a dedicated office and telephone within the court complex from where I would write my stories in long hand (then, when I was ready, I would call the newspaper to send a messenger to collect the copy). Secondly, I was not afraid to embarrass the police or the government by avoiding this previously neglected court. On the contrary, it was my great pleasure.
In this court, I would often discover groups of African prisoners – five or six at a time – who were marched into the dock and accused of security offences, often of joining a banned organisations while they were in jail – the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress or the Communist Party. Just as invariably, they would decline to enter a plea on the grounds that they had asked to consult with a lawyer, but this request – their right – had been ignored by the prison authorities.
After noting the names and the charges, I would slip out of court and head for my office to call Ruth Hayman in Johannesburg. Ruth, a lawyer and a friend, worked clandestinely with the London charity Defence and Aid, which was founded and run by John Collins, the ‘Red Dean’ of St Paul’s Cathedral. Defence and Aid was banned, but Collins nevertheless found ways of getting funds into South Africa to remunerate lawyers who would defend political cases where no other defence was available.
When I called, Ruth would somehow, miraculously, drop whatever she else she was doing and dash to Pretoria. Thirty minutes later, she would stride dramatically into court and announce that she was representing the accused. The prosecutors and the police would be dismayed – and absolutely furious.
The phone in my office was bugged and the security authorities must have known from the outset that I was the ‘mole’ that was causing them the inconvenience of having to ‘prove’ their case. But even in this poisonous atmosphere, even in the mad world of apartheid, the niceties of the law, however outlandish, had to be scrupulously observed. They could not admit that they were breaking the law by tapping my phone, and so the arrangement continued for several months.
My contacts with Ruth, and my steady stream of newspaper articles on other politically sensitive cases, led to an unexpected summons to the office of the senior state prosecutor late one afternoon. Like a furious headmaster, he announced that not only was he withdrawing all co-operation with me but also banning me from entering the precinct of the court, except as an accused or as a witness under subpoena. No reasons were given. No appeal was permitted. Like a chastened schoolboy, I did not respond. I realised that this might be a career-wrecking moment, there was no point in protesting. Nor would I change the way I was reporting. Instead, I took great pleasure in almost tearing his door off its hinges as I slammed it shut behind me.
The activism of Ruth Hayman – and that of a small coterie of other lawyers – was extraordinary. They were all at the height of their careers and had spent years building substantial legal practices. Some would pay a high price for their principles. In Ruth’s case, the price came in the form of a banning order which not only placed her under house arrest (along with a slew of other restrictions) but also ended her law career. We were to meet again, under happier and very different circumstances, in London.
Meanwhile, as I returned to the office from my encounter with the state prosecutor I had real fears about my editor’s reaction when I told I told him of my bruising encounter at court. I knew that the accuracy of my reporting had never been challenged and that publishing my accounts of some of the more bizarre cases had involved both professional and personal courage on his part. But I wondered how he would feel about the fact that a reporter – his most junior reporter – had so grievously offended a senior state official. Had I taken a gamble too far?
Happily, my editor not only stood by me but, to my surprise, responded by telling me that he had nominated me to attend the Argus Group’s journalism school in Cape Town, then the only school of journalism in the country. Many of the group’s most promising new recruits were selected for the course, but most had to wait for years. I had received the nod after just nine months. I was, in fact, part of the first intake since I had joined the paper.
If I agreed, I would be leaving for Cape Town the following month – mid-January – to stay at a fine beachside hotel, all expenses paid, on full salary for six months while I attended the course. I would have to commit myself to attending daily lectures arranged by the company – on such subjects as shorthand and law relating to journalism. In return, I would have to undertake to work for the paper for a year after completing the six-month course. I agreed on the spot.
By the time I returned from the journalism course, it was as a fully-fledged reporter and I was thrown into the reporters’ pool. I also resumed my frenetic working schedule and seized on any opportunity to write, regardless of the subject. Running parallel with all this was my enthusiasm for the Friday evening ‘study groups’.
I grew up in a world where the reporter was required to act as a mirror; to passively reflect events as they occurred, to suspend personal prejudices in an attempt to present readers with the most objective possible account of whatever the editor deemed worthy of publishing. To some, that might appear to be an impossibly utopian ideal: Can it really be fair – even moral – to ask sentient human beings to suspend their moral judgement in the interests of objectivity?
As a matter of general principle, I believe it is an ideal worth striving to achieve, however imperfectly. By blurring the line between fact and opinion, the media inevitably compromise their credibility. Sadly, in my view, the current zeitgeist places a premium on the notion of ‘empathy’, of encouraging reporters to identify with their subjects and make at least a limited judgement of the events they cover.
This, I believe, has contaminated the purity of the profession. One result has been the need for reporters to identify villains and victims, to distort issues by painting their pictures in monochromatic tones. I accept the difficulties inherent in seeking to achieve the lofty goal of objectivity. And, as I know from my own experience in South Africa, the ideal is inevitably flawed by the reporter’s need to select what part of an event to report.
I was, for example, obliged to faithfully report a nauseous succession of election meetings, night after night, addressed by John Balthazar Vorster, then the Minister of Justice and chief enforcer of a political system that I found so repugnant. I walked a tightrope but performed this with the precision that my profession demanded – and my conscience permitted.
That did not mean a supine, craven obeisance to the overpowering state. There were cracks in which journalists like me could operate. It was not comfortable, nor was it particularly safe. But it was possible to play games which irritated the regime, sometimes gave it headaches, often drove it crazy. Much of my brief career in South African journalism was spent surviving in those cracks.
At Vorster’s election campaign meetings that I covered, for example, I regarded myself as an impassive, invisible observer. As a reporter, I had a seat at a table directly under the podium, in full view of not only Vorster but also of the entire, adoring audience. It was particularly chilling to know that every individual among the febrile mob which rose to greet Vorster, Nazi-style, when he entered the auditorium would instantly notice that I alone remained seated.
My lack of enthusiasm did not pass unnoticed by Vorster himself, who passed directly by my sullen, seated figure. On one occasion, he briefly broke stride to glare at me with an icy hatred. I remained sitting and mutely returned his glare. Then he turned to one of his flunkies: ‘Verweider hom’ – exterminate him. It was an order that was open to broad interpretation. In the event, I was roughly escorted out of the hall – and sent off into the night after some rough pummelling. That short, brutal encounter became my story for the night. Mercifully, I was spared another of his tub-thumping racist rants.
His tone was hectoring, mocking, bullying. During the 1966 election campaign, I sat through night after night of identical, mind-numbing mantras: ‘I can still hear those prophets of doom who warned of the terrible consequences that would follow if we declared a republic – doom, doom, doom,’ he would bark sarcastically at his adoring audiences. ‘They warned us that we would face political collapse, economic disaster, international isolation. They warned us that we would be expelled from the British Commonwealth of Nations.’ Then came his coup-de-grace: ‘Do you realise, ladies and gentlemen, that if South Africa was still a member of the British Commonwealth, our highest court would not be here in South Africa but the privy council in London. And Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa is a member of the privy council’. Angry jeers greeted the name of the Nigerian political leader, followed by thunderous, standing ovations for Vorster, the saviour of the nation.
The implication was that the Nationalist government had snatched South Africa’s sovereignty to safety from the hands of a primitive Nigerian politician who was one of the founders of the Organisation of African Unity. It was nonsense, of course, but it was precisely the nonsense that Vorster’s audience wanted to hear. They loved it. Vorster’s presentation fed all their favourite fantasies and fears: the idea of an African judge in a court that had jurisdiction in South Africa posed not only a dire threat to the continuation of Apartheid but, quite possibly, to future of White Civilisation as he and his followers knew it. Certainly, it would have opened the door to Communism.
Nor did I (alone among my colleagues) flinch from reporting the unscripted, antisemitic remarks of the head of the Security Police, Major-General Hendrik van den Bergh, the only man in South Africa who was more feared than Vorster. The occasion for his remarks occurred when he addressed an adoring audience of neo-fascists drawn from around the world at what was billed an International Symposium on Communism.
I chose to ignore the official script, printed and expensively bound in leather. My report focused instead – and exclusively – on Van den Bergh’s blatantly antisemitic extemporaneous remarks.
He warmed up his audience by telling a joke about a rabbi who interrupted a religious service so that he could take bets from his congregants on which dog would win the fight outside the synagogue. He went on, with evident pleasure, to describe the reaction of those supposedly clever Jews when they were detained by his security police. ‘As ‘n Jood skrik, dan skrik hy’ (when a Jew gets a fright he really gets frightened). Then he moved into more hard-core territory. ‘Every Jew,’ he told his audience, ‘is a Communist because Communism is the highest form of capitalism.’
The following day, my article was published not only in my paper but in every paper within the Argus Group throughout the country. An obviously embarrassed Van den Bergh took to the hills for an unscheduled trip to South-West Africa (now Namibia) and was unavailable for media comment for the next ten days.
I had broken the unspoken bond between journalists and officials in South Africa. When I returned to the convention centre the following day, accompanied by other journalists now, I was confronted and beaten up by a group of outraged conference organisers. They were a formidable bunch, all ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, led by the head of the church and brother of John Vorster, who had by this time succeeded the assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd as Prime Minister. Lying on the ground and looking up at my assailants, I was roughly told not to show my face at the convention centre again. Later, I was told by colleagues that an announcement had been formally made from the platform that I had been banned from attending further sessions. That was my story for the day.
These were rather innocuous events, but they would have certainly fed my notoriety at the Compol Security Police headquarters. I knew that reporting the extemporaneous antisemitic outburst of the security police chief, arguably the most powerful individual in the state, would carry a heavy price. But that was what I judged the story to be – not the platitudinous nonsense, bound in fine leather, which passed as his formal address. Nor was there any element of bravery in reporting his remarks. I was simply doing my job as well as I could.
In this way, the story told itself. It did not require my own overblown rhetorical flourishes. There was, I knew, a price to pay for professional honesty, for attempting to be a reporter, with all the rigour it demanded. The circumstances were difficult but I refused to play the game according to the peculiar set of cosy arrangements that governed relations between compliant South African journalists and the masters of apartheid.
I could understand that some of my fellow-journalists were supporters of the governing regime and had ideological axes to grind. I could also understand the position of others who were not particularly sympathetic to regime but continued to faithfully toe the line. I do not believe they acted less nobly, but rather accommodated themselves pragmatically to the reality. They had to live with these people, and their compliance was reciprocated with special access to important sources. At least, they had the decency to report on my beating and banning from the convention. I, on the other hand, knew I had no future in South Africa and was content to burn bridges – and potential sources – as often as necessary.
Sadly, the organised Jewish community in South Africa did not share my concern. Like most Jews of my political persuasion, I did not identify with the Jewish establishment and nor did the Jewish establishment want to be identified with me – or other Jewish anti-Apartheid activists.
Back at the office after my bruising encounter with International Symposium on Communism, I was besieged by opposition members of parliament asking me to sign affidavits affirming the accuracy of my report. I was happy to do so. But when the Jewish Board of Deputies was asked to comment on the affair, an official produced a short statement. The Board was certain the general had not been accurately reported. And if he had, the official continued, they were certain his remarks were not intended to be antisemitic. In any event, they were absolutely certain that the good general himself was not an antisemite.
The clock was ticking more quickly than ever, running down the time when I would have to leave South Africa. There was a limit to the patience of the security police and I knew I would have to take the initiative and leave before they decided it was time to haul me in. Ultimately, they won.
Douglas Davis, born in Pretoria, was exiled from South Africa in the mid-Sixties. He has since lived all over the world, including 10 years in Israel, where he was a senior editor of the Jerusalem Post. He was subsequently based in London as the paper’s European correspondent.
