When South Africa Called, We Answered: How the Media and International Solidarity Helped Topple Apartheid

By Danny Schechter

There were two battles against apartheid—a political campaign and a media war. The political story has been told, and now you can read about the media effort. As South Africa marks in 2014 its 20th anniversary as a democracy, its transformation is still hailed as a "miracle." Most of the credit for the region's massive changes is awarded to towering leaders like the late Nelson Mandela. But the freedom fighters didn't achieve it alone—they had active solidarity from a global anti-apartheid movement, with a media component that showcased the struggle and kept it visible worldwide. "News Dissector" Danny Schechter reveals the inside story of what he calls a "Media War" in When South Africa Called, We Answered. He presents journalism as activism and displays the determination and dedication of journalists worldwide in exposing and eradicating apartheid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cosimo Books
• Release date: Jan 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781616409524

Danny Schechter

Danny Schechter is a veteran journalist who writes and speaks about economic and media issues. He is a multiple Emmy Award winner, having been a producer for ABC News, CNN and other major networks. His daily blog 'News Dissector' appears on MediaChannel.org, the website he edits, with weekly online commentaries on Huffington Post, Buzzflash, Alternet, Global Research, ZNet, CreativeI and many others. He has directed numerous films including In Debt We Trust and Plunder: The Crime of our Time.

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PART 1

Immersion: What Drew Me In

Danny Schechter at the funeral of ANC President General Albert Luthuli, Natal, South Africa, 1967

POLITICS IS ALWAYS PERSONAL

Going Underground: Why I Went in 1967 and Never Really Came Back

THERE WAS A CERTIFIED LETTER WAITING FOR ME WHEN I returned from filming Nelson Mandela across the United States on his triumphant tour in 1990, just months after he won release from a 27-year prison ordeal. I was convinced that after that reception, apartheid had to be on the way out, and that the government was changing.

But change was moving at a snail’s pace. The letter was from the South African Consul in New York. It read as follows:

Dear Sir:

Your application for a visa for the Republic of South Africa has reference.

The Department of Home Affairs, Pretoria, has informed this office that your application has been unsuccessful. Yours faithfully,

Vice Consul (Migration)

After that lovely word faithfully, there appears a chicken scratch signature that would do any Park Avenue doctor proud. Apparently, New York consular employees never gave out their names for security reasons, as I found out when I tried to reach this mysterious Vice Consul who handles would be ‘migrants’ like myself. I agreed to call her Miss Smith, a not a very Afrikaner sounding name. She had no explanation to offer for the rejection of my visa application, It was done at a higher level, she finally admitted.

Earlier in the year, in late January, I had received an identical letter when I had hoped to go to cover Mandela’s release. I joked with my ANC friends that no sooner were they unbanned, than I was banned.

After complaining to the State Department, and being urged to reapply since the country is changing, I received a third rebuke on September 4th. If each one of these requests didn’t cost $18 in the application process, I would go on collecting them to wallpaper my office.

It seemed obvious: some South Africans don’t want me there. I finally got backin, but only for ten days. I had to agree that I would do no reporting, a pledge I found difficult upholding.

I am sure that part of the reason for this official hostility had to do with the television program I produced. They didn’t like our weekly series South Africa Now, and for good reason, but my file in Pretoria’s intelligence archive must have more than that one entry.

I am not sure when their intelligence apparatus picked me up, and added my name to what must have been quite an international enemies list.

Was it in 1985 when I helped produce the Sun City anti-apartheid record featuring 54 well known musicians? Or does it go further back to a past littered with published articles about apartheid, and as many protest meetings. I was definitely a blip on their radar screen. Perhaps they had access to my CIA files as well.

Could they have been on my case way back to 1964 when I was part of an anti-apartheid sit-in outside the Chase Manhattan Bank in lower Manhattan with SDS colleagues? I was a lot thinner then, and South Africa was a much more distant abstraction.

Or did they become aware of me first in England two years later when I attended the London School of Economics and befriended a fellow student, Ruth First? Ruth was a legendary South African journalist forced into exile with her husband Joe Slovo, then a leader of the South African Communist Party. He was for many years considered the country’s Public Enemy #1, and denigrated falsely as a KGB Colonel to appeal to cold war fears and make it appear the fight for justice in South Africa was all the work of commissars in Moscow.

Could they have been bugging the Slovo’s home in London’s Camden Town when I was a Sunday brunch regular back in the sixties where I watched them fiercely debate revolutionary politics, and was encouraged to join in?

It was Ruth who really taught me most, by her example and her brilliance, why South Africa was important to know about, and do something about. Pretoria hated her, and with more reason than they had for hating me. Moviegoers may know that it was her story that was dramatized in the film A World Apart, based on a screenplay written by her talented daughter Shawn. Ruth was murdered by a book bomb sent by a government assassination squad, while teaching in exile at the University in Mozambique.

Did the security police know of my friendship with Pallo Jordan, once a New Left activist in America who was to become the Minister of Posts and Broadcasting in the new South Africa, or my association with other ANC leaders, including Ronnie Kasrils, another LSE student who was also active in the ANC underground. He ended up spending years training the MK, the movement’s guerilla army, and became a Deputy Minister of Defence of the very Armed Forces he spent a lifetime fighting and Minister of Intelligence for Thabo Mbeki, until Mbeki was forced from office. But, perhaps, just perhaps, they remember me somehow from my first sojourn to South Africa in the summer of 1967? I was then 25 years old.

I went out to Africa then, as the English say, for a three-week holiday on a student fare. In some ways, I’ve never come back. I’m not sure what it is about that country that exerts such a pull, but I’m not the only journalist to whom it has happened. Joe Lelyveld, later the editor of the New York Times won a Pulitzer for a book about South Africa. In it, he wrote that no country he’d ever covered had the same personal impact on him.

I later had the eerie experience of interviewing Dirk Coetzee, an Afrikaner and former Captain in the Security Police who was part of the covert hit squads that targeted Ruth and many of her comrades. He knew he had blood on his hands, but actually defected to, and was embraced by, the ANC.

Joe Slovo died of cancer in 1994, after negotiating the deal that made democratic elections possible. He was Minister of Housing in Nelson Mandela’s government and consistently ranked #2, right behind Mandela, as the person black South Africans respected most.

In the late 1980s when people asked me when I was last there, I tended to say, this morning, because for so many years I have been deeply immersed in reading about, researching, reporting on, and, in effect, living with South Africa when I couldn’t travel there.

It was as if some South African gene had gotten mixed up in my DNA. I developed a passion for the country’s people and their struggle from a distance and it wouldn’t let me go. I realize now that the relationship has been unequal: I have received far more from the transaction than I have given.

South Africa is a special place, an eerie mix of the familiar and unfamiliar set against a landscape that is magical in its beauty. Every contrast there is pointed; every contradiction revealing. Horrible racial oppression co-exists with enough relaxed moments of racial interaction to make New York by comparison seem far more tense and polarized.

A black nanny has raised almost every white South African, while most blacks, except the generation born after 1994 (called the Born Frees) had been united by oppressive laws and attitudes. At the same time, there is an interracial intimacy there for many on a personal level that has always conflicted with the reality of apartheid that had disenfranchised the majority and institutionalized inequalities on a vast scale. Musician Hugh Masekela says blacks survived the assaults of apartheid by outsmarting their oppressors – by being wily and one step ahead. He credits a culture of resistance driven by humor and