Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters

By William Finnegan

Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who—fearing government disapproval—may not print the stories these reporters risk their lives to get. William Finnegan revisited several of these reporters during the May 1994 election and describes their post-apartheid working experience in a new preface and epilogue.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.
Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who—fearing government disapproval—may not print the stories these reporters risk the

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520915695

William Finnegan

William Finnegan is the author of Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid (1986) and Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters (1988). He is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Book preview

DATELINE

SOWETO

Also by William Finnegan, from University of California Press

CROSSING THE LINE:

A Year in the Land of Apartheid

A COMPLICATED WAR:

The Harrowing of Mozambique

DATELINE

SOWETO

Travels with Black

South African Reporters

WILLIAM

FINNEGAN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

For my parents

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

A portion of this book first appeared, in slightly different form, as Getting The Story in The New Yorker.

First California Paperback Printing 1995

Copyright © 1988 by William Finnegan. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Finnegan, William.

Dateline Soweto: travels with black South African reporters /

William Finnegan, p. cm.

Originally published: New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-520-08979-0 (alk. paper)

1. Finnegan, William—Journeys—South Africa—Soweto.

2. Journalists—United States—Biography. 3. Journalists—South

Africa—Social conditions. 4. Soweto (South Africa)—Social

conditions. 5. Apartheid—South Africa—Soweto. 6. Riots—South

Africa—Soweto. I. Title.

PN4874.F45A3 1995

070’.92—dc20

[B] 94-22805

CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. @

123456789

Contents

Contents

Preface to the 1995 Edition

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 In KwaNdebele

Chapter 2 The Apartheid Press

Chapter 3 Gunfire and Jingles

Chapter 4 The Ghetto

Chapter 5 In Katlehong

Chapter 6 A Strenuous Profession

Chapter 7 Just Jon

Chapter 8 The Whiteness of the Star

Chapter 10 We Are Black Before We Are Journalists

Chapter 11 Abiding the Umlungu

Chapter 13 They Are Playing Marbles with Our Country

Chapter 14 Kidnappings, Bombs, and Dog Shows

Chapter 15 Back to KwaNdebele

Epilogue to the 1995 Edition

Index

Preface to the

1995 Edition

Images of Nelson Mandela had graced the world’s magazine covers for years. In 1994, when he finally became South Africa’s first democratically chosen president, Mandela covers were all but ubiquitous. Still, I was not prepared for the April, 1994, issue of Tribute, a glossy South African monthly, when I saw it on an airport newsstand in Johannesburg. There was Mandela, seated in a black leather chair, dressed in a dark business suit, caught by the camera in the middle of a sentence, with his hands spread to emphasize a point, and beside him, in red letters an inch high, it said simply, EK IS DIE BAAS. It was an outrageous cover, composed of too many layers of irony to count. The English translation, I am the boss, conveys none of the menacing resonance of the Afrikaans original: the powerful whiff of the farm foreman, the mine supervisor, the Afrikaner baas barking at his black workers. It was impossible to imagine the courtly liberator Mandela expressing himself so crudely, of course, and the historic election that would make him the country’s first black leader was in fact still several weeks away, which only gave the Tribute cover an added jolt of nerviness.

But the idea that Mandela might soon resemble the Afrikaner Nationalists who invented apartheid—the same men who had jailed him for twenty-seven years and banned his movement for thirty, violently oppressing the country’s black majority with no more justification, ultimately, than Ek is die baas; the same men whom Mandela and his comrades were now furiously campaigning to replace—this idea, when posed by Tribute, was not, I knew, a cry of white alarm or political opposition. For Tribute is a black-edited magazine, directed at urban black readers, most of whom were certain to support Mandela’s African National Congress in the elections. The cover expressed, rather, a wry, contrarian spirit—a spirit that I thought I recognized, if only because Jon Qwelane, who happens to be the main character of the book you are holding, had become, since my previous visit to South Africa, Tributés editor. The cover was ostensibly illustrating a story written by Qwelane, in fact, about a day he had recently spent with Mandela. I was shocked by the cover’s brilliant cheek, I realized, mostly because I had been away from South Africa for nearly eight years, and had become accustomed to getting my South African news from international sources. I had forgotten how cryptic and multifaceted the South African press can be, how dense with subtext and, for a foreigner, strange enlightenment.

This book was written on the hunch that a close look at a country’s newspapers might reveal something otherwise inaccessible about that country’s inner life. Its focus is narrow, concentrating on the lives of a small group of black reporters at a large Johannesburg daily, the Star During the great anti-apartheid uprising of the mid-1980s, their situation seemed to catch an unusual amount of the historical moment’s ambient light. That moment passed, and most of the reporters I write about here have, like Qwelane, left the Star\ some have left journalism altogether. The country itself is already vastly different from the embattled, repressive place described in these pages.

And yet the South African revolution of 1994 was only a partial affair. Remarkable as it was, it had none of the root-and-branch, Year Zero quality of other world-historical revolutions: 1789 in France, 1917 in Russia, 1949 in China. Most of the chief South African institutions, including the military, the civil service, the stock exchange, and the press, have remained in essentially the same hands. No significant transfer of economic power seems imminent. Of course, this high degree of continuity owes much to the fact that democracy’s triumph was, in the end, negotiated rather than won on the battlefield. (The acclaimed peacefulness of the South African transition was only relative, however: more than twenty thousand lives were lost to political violence in the last decade of white rule.)

The struggle for social justice will undoubtedly go on—peacefully, with any luck. My own parochial hope is that the censorship, the news blackouts, the official harassment of journalists described in these pages will seem, in a few years, like a dark chapter from a distant South African past. Certainly, a democratically elected government can be held accountable for its actions in ways that the apartheid state never could. At the same time, precious assets, such as press freedom, are always up for grabs. And this, it seems safe to say, was also part of the message in Qwelane’s deadpan EK IS DIE BAAS cover: a signal to the incoming government that the sweetness of liberation would not be allowed to dilute the acid of his editorial independence.

The deep divisions within the South African press were on vigorous display during the election season. The black press was, on the whole, unabashedly ecstatic about the election. OH, HAPPY HAPPY DAY! was the headline over the page-one endorsement of the ANC in Johannesburg’s City Press. We thank God Almighty, that editorial concluded. Let us go to the polls on Wednesday and vote for a party we can trust with our lives. Sunday Nation began its page-one endorsement of the ANC, We have come to the eve of our liberation and stand ready to reclaim a right we have been denied for centuries—the right to vote and take charge of our destiny. Meanwhile, the Afrikaans-language press, a bulwark of white-minority rule under the National Party since 1948, inveighed almost as sonorously against the ANC: Rapport, the largest-circulation Afrikaans paper, opined that Mandela’s party, if elected, might reveal the face of a Lenin or a Stalin. And the white-edited English-language papers, such as the Star, virtually all supported the Democratic Party, the long-shot liberal alternative to the ANC and the National Party.

Within these predictable alignments, however, there were a thousand shadings, nuances, exceptions. The Sowtan, the country’s largest black daily, split its endorsement between the ANC and its longtime rival, the Pan Africanist Congress. The Nationalist papers, following the National Party itself, conspicuously abandoned their traditional devotion to group identity as they sought to reach black voters with a new, post-apartheid message. State-controlled television and radio, also in the midst of major self-reinvention efforts, endeavored to deliver fair and impartial election coverage—after decades of service as government mouthpieces. The South African press was as multifaceted as ever—it was still a rich trove of social and political information—but the facets themselves were visibly shifting.

Being back in the country for the election, I found myself a member of an invasion force of thousands of foreign journalists. It was a force that tended to mass instantly wherever Mandela or his chief opponent, the incumbent F. W. de Klerk, appeared, or wherever a bomb exploded, and to mill restlessly betweentimes, hungry for fresh angles but often uncertain where to find them. Many local journalists went to work for the visitors, who were paying extremely well. And the technical sophistication of some of the foreign news crews seemed to overawe some of their South African counterparts. At the same time, many local reporters were nonplussed by the tenacious, even exclusive, interest in political violence and famous faces among much of the international press. While the world spotlight worked, inevitably, to flatten the South African election story, oversimplifying or sensationalizing events for distant audiences, it also served as a sort of object lesson in journalistic self-absorption for local hacks. Having a foot, in effect, in both worlds, I found myself obliged to explain to incredulous local reporters how it was that Dan Rather might indeed have a dimple on his chin redrawn by a makeup artist before each broadcast.

The split in my own journalistic vision was, in fact, pervasive. After a televised debate between Mandela and de Klerk that had been broadcast worldwide, for instance, I called an editor in New York who reported that he and other Americans had been incredibly moved by a handshake, initiated by Mandela, between the two men near the end of the debate. I was speechless, mainly because the group with whom I had watched the debate, a group made up of local journalists and ANC supporters, had hooted and booed the handshake as hackneyed, unnecessary, and obviously scripted. What was more, I had shared their cynical view. This was a group of South Africans whose collective joy over the approaching election was deep and abiding. The televised handshake had simply not meant the same things to them—or to me, as it happened—that it evidently did overseas. I mumbled something to the editor about trying to work the handshake into a column I was writing. (I didn’t succeed.) My split vision, contracted in part while researching this book, could be inconvenient; still, I was not unhappy to note that after only a few weeks back in South Africa I was already immersed in local ambiguities that could not be neatly summarized.

In an epilogue to this edition I try to summarize, neatly where possible, recent events in the lives of the main characters of Dateline Soweto, as well as developments in some of the communities and institutions that figure in the book. I am delighted to admit, incidentally, that one prediction of mine, about the likely future course of events in South Africa as a whole, looks to have been far off the mark. At the end of Chapter 9, while dismissing a business executive’s rosy, neo-colonial fantasy of what the country might look like in the year 2000, I wrote that the blasted, war-torn land of J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K provided a more plausible forecast. It did not. (Nor, as a work of the imagination, was it meant as a simple forecast.) I will leave this blaring misjudgment, along with its less obvious cousins, in place on the theory that the main body of Dateline Soweto should be read as a product of its time, as testimony from an apocalyptic period, with all the distortions that implies. What has actually happened in South Africa since then—the swift, unstoppable transition to true parliamentary democracy—has been more stunning, more dreamlike, than anything anyone could imagine even a few years ago.

Acknowledgments

This book sidled more than it marched into existence, and it received more than its share of help along the way. Mary Painter and Bryan Di Salvatore pointed me in the right direction. William Shawn gave me the wherewithal to do the reporting, and the confidence to give the story its head. In South Africa, I relied heavily on the kindness of Sylvia Vollenhoven, Robyn Rafel, Lauren Gower, Mike and Colleen Taylor, Hilary Saner and her family, Katharine McKenzie, and Aninka Claassens. Then there was the haven for writers provided by Harriet Barlow and Kaye Burnett at Blue Mountain Center in upstate New York, and the work of the Transvaal Rural Action Committee, the Surplus People’s Project, and Eric Goldstein at the Committee to Protect Journalists. Among the books from which I have drawn, I want at least to mention Total Onslaught: The South African Press Under Attack, by William A. Hachten and C. Anthony Giffard (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), and Mabangalala: The Rise of Right-Wing Vigilantes in South Africa, by Nicholas Hay- som (Centre for Applied Legal Studies, Johannesburg, 1986). Bill McKibben, James Lardner, Lawrence Weschler, Tony Peckham, Daniel Ben-Horin, and Deirdre McNamer read Dateline Soweto in manuscript and made many valuable suggestions. At The New Yorker, my unwieldy work was improved immeasurably by John Bennet, Robert Gottlieb, Peter Canby, Hal Espen, and Eleanor Gould Packard. Next came Terry Karten, at Harper & Row, and Amanda Urban, my agent, who both saw the book in all this before I did. The debt of gratitude I owe to the many South Africans who took the time to talk to me will be obvious in the pages that follow—my greatest debt in this regard is to the reporters at the Johannesburg Star, whose willingness to share their world with me was truly remarkable. Finally, in the category of inexpressible thanks, there are my parents, Pat and Bill Finnegan, and the light of my life, Caroline Rule.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

—A. J. LIEBLING

Chapter 1

In KwaNdebele

Early July, 1986, was a bad time in KwaNde- bele. It was an especially bad time to be lost in KwaNdebele. A state of emergency had been declared throughout South Africa the month before, suspending most of the country’s few remaining civil liberties, and the emergency regulations for KwaNdebele—a small bantustan, or black self-governing state, northeast of Pretoria—were particularly harsh. They barred all nonresidents from the territory and effectively placed KwaNde- bele’s 500,000 residents under house arrest between the hours of 9 P.M. and 5 A.M. A Johannesburg newspaper headline had declared KwaNdebele A NO-GO AREA. But we had gone there anyway—Jon Qwelane, a reporter for the Johannesburg Star; Herbert Mabuza, a photographer for the Star; and I—and now we were lost.

I had wanted to bring along a map, but Qwelane had insisted we leave it in the city. If they find that sort of thing on us, they’ll just throw us straight in jail. Mabuza had said he knew the way to the mission station we wanted to reach, but it seemed that he had dozed past the junction. I drove swiftly down a two-lane highway, swerving to avoid goats and donkey carts and burned- out cars. Low hills of stony semi-desert, some of them covered with shacks and tents, all of them bone-dry in the rainless highveld winter, rose and fell around us. Thorn trees grew in the gullies. We overtook a van and signaled the driver to pull over. The man’s eyes popped when he saw me, a white man, driving. He pulled over. Qwelane went back to speak to him. Mabuza and I waited in the car, watching the rear-view mirror and chewing on the dried beef we had bought at a country store north of Pretoria. When Qwelane returned, he was shaking his head. That poor guy was so scared he could hardly speak. Qwelane sighed. He thinks it’s back the other way.

I had been lost a lot over the preceding six weeks. I had been spending time with some of Johannesburg’s black newspaper reporters, trying to understand something of what their lives were like, and one thing I had learned was that they spent a large part of their professional lives asking people for directions. Nearly always, their beats were the black townships and the bantustans—places not known for street signs or house numbers. Maps tended to be useless as well as dangerous. Black reporters and their drivers either developed remarkable powers of intuitive navigation or else they missed their deadlines. Just asking people for directions required special skills. Around Johannesburg, it had to be done in any of six or seven languages, and, in the extremely tense atmosphere of the past couple of years, it had to be done very sensitively. Black people’s first assumption was always that strangers worked for the system—that is, the police. Strangers in cars were especially suspect, and the Star’s bulky Toyotas bore, in addition, an unfortunate resemblance to unmarked police cars (except under the hood, where they carried weak engines that the paper’s black reporters hated with the fine passion of soldiers issued weapons that jam in combat). People tended to shy away from the cars, and even to bolt when one pulled up beside them.

The best way to get around was to have a local person, ideally a respected political activist, along as a guide. Arrangements were often made to pick up such a person en route to an interview or event. With me along, convincing strangers that we were not police was made even more difficult by the fact that I am white.

Black men and white men driving together in the townships are nearly always police. The drivers at the Star, who are black, would see me arrive in their basement garage with one of the black reporters, shudder, and immediately announce that they were all busy and we would have to drive ourselves. The only words I could understand in the ensuing arguments were unrest and necklace and self-drive, but the problem was clear: the drivers considered it too dangerous to have me in their cars. When we showed up saying that we wanted to go to KwaNdebele, the howls of self-drive were especially piercing. One old fellow kept running his finger around his neck, indicating the necklace—the gasoline-soaked burning tire used by angry mobs to execute suspected enemies. We couldn’t spare the time to wrangle that day, which was why I was doing the driving as we wandered all over the blasted, frightening landscape of KwaNdebele.

It looked as though a war had been fought there. The few shops we saw were all gutted. There were those burned-out cars. A beer hall fronted by a primitive arcade had large black tongues of charred paint licking up its turquoise walls from each arch of the arcade. More alarming than all the signs of recent violence, though, were the communities of KwaNdebele themselves. They seemed to be nothing but immense shantytowns, sprawled across the bare hills: a vast forest of poverty, with the houses packed as densely as in any urban township. Most of the houses were makeshift concoctions of cardboard, plastic, and corrugated metal. Many were simply packing crates with a door and a smoke hole cut out. Rocks anchored the roofs against high winds. Clearly, there was no electricity, no plumbing, no running water: everywhere, women and girls could be seen trudging down the dusty lanes with plastic water jugs on their heads. There were obviously no jobs in the area. Hundreds of thousands of people were marooned out in these huge bush ghettos. And they wonder why we call this country a concentration camp? Qwelane muttered. These people truly have nothing left to lose.

KwaNdebele had put Qwelane, who was normally the most entertaining of men, in a terse, uncommunicative mood. In the morning, he had been amusing Herbert and me with stories inspired by the country we drove through: a yarn about children who hate cabbage after we passed a truck full of cabbages; memories of various close calls on assignments in this district; a rhapsody about the beauty of the eastern Transvaal. True, Qwe- lane’s description of the eastern Transvaal, its flowers and waterfalls and peaceful villages, had, after building to a climax of bucolic images, hovered, and ended: Then along comes a Boer to spoil the whole effect. But that ration of grimness was there in any black South African’s view of his country. Now he slumped in the back seat, drumming his fingers lightly on a slim yellow box (Mills: England’s Luxury Cigarette), chainsmoking, and watching the landscape grumpily.

Qwelane had a reputation for being able to spot the authorities—the police, the Army—and take evasive action before anyone else knew that anything was up. You must be able to sniff a cop in a crowd of a thousand people, he had once told me. And I had seen him do it. But that was in town, where there were crowds and alleys and doorways to duck into. His intimate knowledge of every street in Soweto was of no use to us out here. And even Qwelane had not always managed to elude his enemies. He had a habit of turning his head to one side when others were talking, for he had been deaf in one ear since 1978, when he received a brutal beating from two off-duty white policemen.

Qwelane was thirty-three and looked older. From some angles, his face reminded me of Nelson Mandela’s—as Mandela appears in photographs taken when he was over sixty. He had strong cheekbones, narrow eyes, a small head, powerful shoulders, the beginnings of a belly, milk-chocolate-colored skin, a sparse mustache, and a very sparse collection of chin whiskers. Qwelane’s father was Xhosa-speaking (their family name is pronounced Kwe-LAH-nee, with a distinctive Xhosa click at the beginning), and he is classified Xhosa under the apartheid system of racial and ethnic classification, but his mother is Tswana, and Tswana is his mother tongue. (Qwelane speaks six languages: Tswana, Xhosa, Zulu, South Sotho, English, and Afrikaans.) Besides his deaf ear, the marks of the kind of life he leads included a slight limp—the result of a gunshot wound that left him with a steel pin in his leg—and a missing left front tooth, which gave him a great raffish grin. On that day in KwaNdebele, he wore a well-cut gray-blue suit, with his necktie loosened in the manner of serious journalists everywhere. Except on weekends, I had never seen Qwelane in anything but a suit. It was one of the small things that distinguished him from his fellow black reporters, who all wore multipocketed canvas safari jackets, which they called lumberjackets.

Qwelane is the senior black reporter at the Star. Officially, he is on the staff of the Sunday Star—its only black reporter—and in that capacity he usually tries to bank stories for the weekend, as he puts it. In practice, he works closely with the staff of the daily Star, and his stories often appear there, too. He enjoys an unusual amount of job freedom, partly because of his anomalous staff position, partly because of his seniority, but mostly because of his temperament. He is not known, to put it blandly, for his deference to authority. Indeed, Qwelane’s editors had refused him permission to go to KwaNdebele, citing the danger and the official restrictions. That was why we had been in such a hurry to leave that morning—the editors were in a meeting and Qwelane wanted to be gone before they noticed he was missing.

The government’s reluctance to have conditions in KwaNdebele exposed was understandable. This self-governing state, which is somewhat smaller than Long Island, had been nothing but white-owned cattle farms until 1975, when the government began buying up land, but it had since become a major dumping ground for black South Africans displaced by a variety of causes, including the mass eviction of farm workers from their homes after the abolition of the tenant-labor system, the forced removal of black residents (including landowners) from areas designated for whites only, the persecution of non-Tswana residents in the Bophuthatswana bantustan, and the chronic, deliberate (it was part of government policy) shortage of housing and land in the urban townships.

The rationale for the bantustan system (over half of the 24 million Africans in South Africa1