A Salute To The Mail And Guardian, Johannesburg

It is not easy to create a great newspaper; partly because it is so easy to set up what appears to be a newspaper, but what turns out, in reality, to be either, a propaganda sheet or a collection of commercial pull-outs masquerading as news pages.

A great newspaper is first and foremost, a paper devoted to real news. It seeks to tell its readers about something they did not know about before; and moreover, something they could not find in any other publication. How is that possible when some news items are circulated to every publication in the land?

The answer is that a great newspaper finds its own way of treating a story. It looks for aspects of the story that no-one else will have got because the great paper is the only one asking the intelligent questions about the story. In short, it creates its own angle to it; an angle which leaves the reader to say 'Hmmm? I wouldn’t have expected that to be the case!' It’s better still when the reader acknowledges the professionalism manifested in the story by asking himself, 'But how did they get that?'

They would have 'got that' by discussing the raw news item, tossing it about and finding questions to ask the actors on the phone, or of necessary, turning up on the doorsteps of their offices or homes, to interrogate them with special skills, including feigned sympathy, deliberately concocted 'facts' put to the actors to wring from them, the genuine article; and even an appeal to their humanity: 'Listen, my editor will kill me if you don’t tell me; I had to hitch a ride to this place and have been waiting for you all this time!' In police language, the reporter gets the would-be informant to 'crack'! And then, he has to get the story to the office before his 'deadline' runs out.

This is the aspect of their work which thrills journalists the most. They hate and fear deadlines, yet they beat a difficult deadline, they get a feeling that is almost orgasmic. For if you don’t get the information to meet your deadline, it’s of no use. You could get it tomorrow, right? Wrong! You see, your editor might read it in a rival paper and conclude that the paper’s reporter is more assiduous than you. Or he could hear much fresher info being reported and/or discussed on radio or television.

When I was appointed editor of the Daily Graphic in 1970, I went to the job after three years as a radio newsman. In the radio newsroom, we were obliged to read the papers to see whether they had managed to carry forward, the stories we had broadcast the day before. We scoffed at them often, for they would repeat, almost word for word, what the Ghana News Agency had originally sent, which even we, with our much shorter deadlines and more limited space, had tried to turn into stories with a proper background and context.

I told myself that the Daily Graphic, under my editorship would have to become a great news-paper once again. (it had been good for news in the 1950s, when it was first founded. It was, like its marvellous Fleet Street, London, 'mother', the Daily Mirror, generous in awarding bylines, and this inspired its reporters to turn in stories that had an individual touch: if you saw the name of S N Addo; Kofi Ahorsey; E W Adjaye; P. Peregrino-Peters or Anthony Mensah above a story, you would know that it would be original and thereby enjoyable.

I tried to inspire my boys at the Graphic to revive the old news spirit. When their curiosity let them down, I hauled them before the editorial meeting and got the whole group to grill them (to the annoyance of the production team, as this inevitably delayed their work schedule.) But we got some very good stories out, and I felt a special thrill whenever I had to go down into the hot printing house to okay stories on 'the stone' rather than wait for them to be brought up.

'Lock up!' the chief printer, a tall heavy man called Mr Lutterodt, would say, when the last corrections had been done. (Sometimes I felt he would like to punch me for delaying 'his' paper, and I always made sure he got a bottle of cold beer when he turned up in my office, sweat pouring from his large face, to find out how things were shaping up. We got on well: he appreciated my viewpoint that it was no use producing a paper on time, only to hand the readers a bland product, and he did everything possible to make 'lock up'’ time as painless to both of us as possible.

Readers appreciated our efforts and the circulation of the paper rose and rose. By the time I left the paper, names like Kofi Akumanyi, Ben Mensah, Teddy Konu, Vincent Vivor and Nana Daniels and many others had become recognisable by-lines.

Because of my interest in news, I avidly peruse publications all over the world. That’s how, in the mid-1980s, whilst practising journalism in London, I discovered that I could buy a South African newspaper called the Weekly Mail at Foyles Bookshop, not too far from Trafalgar Square. As Africa Editor of Index On Censorship - a magazine that devoted itself to recording attempts by the world’s totalitarian governments to censor the news, suppress news organisations or brutalise journalists, I found the airmail edition of the Weekly Mail to be an extremely rich resource. This was the time when the apartheid regime, under President P W Botha, was in its death throes, and fighting ferociously - like all dying animals - to hang on to political power through repression. Outspoken journalists were banned or harassed; newspapers were often prosecuted and banned - and the Weekly Mail gave me the raw material to report all these happenings.

The paper was founded in 1985 by Anton Harber and a few colleagues who courageously tried to fill the gap left by the apartheid government’s banning of two leading liberal newspapers in South Africa, the Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Express. The government, of course, tried to intimidate the Weekly Mail too by arresting its journalists, seizing individual issues and closing the paper for long periods. But Anton Harber and his colleagues stuck it out. The paper has since survived on a diet of accurate investigative journalism, enlightened comment, and a refusal to be dull.

I was thus excited when, on my first visit to South Africa in 1990, I visited the paper’s offices in the company of one of its star commentators, the poet Don Mattera. But I was not to know that I would soon become a columnist for it myself. It had changed its name to the Mail and Guardian, and when a weekly broadcast I was making for SAFM entitled Letter From the North was axed, I somehow managed to persuade the then editor of the Mail and Guardian, a very enlightened journalist called Philip Van Niekerk, agreed to run a column of mine under the same title.

Philip’s decision was an incredible one, for he was, in effect, placing before inward-looking South Africans on a weekly basis, the views of an African from the other side of the continent, who had who had never lived in their country. I used the column to tell them about the Africa they knew very little about. I also tried to titillate them with my take on world affairs: one piece I enjoyed doing, during President Bill Clinton’s much-publicised woes after he’d had his way with Monica Lewinsky in the White House, was one published in 1995 entitled If Clinton were an African.

http://mg.co.za/article/1998-09-25-if-clinton-were-an-african

The column ran until Philip Van Niekerk left the paper and was succeeded by Howard Barrel, who immediately killed it without saying even a word to me.

As the Nigerians would say, 'I throw a salute' to the Mail & Guardian on its 30^th birthday. Those who started it in 1985 could hardly have foreseen that apartheid would collapse as spectacularly as it did. Nor could they have imagined that the paper would become the main instrument of exposing the idiocies of the African government it helped to take over the reins of government from the apartheid racists in 1994.

From the irrational policy of then-President Thabo Mbeki on HIV/AIDs, to the rampant corruption that is being practised with impunity today by President Jacob Zuma and his sycophantic Government - as typified by the Nkandla scandal - the Mail and Guardian leads opinion in South Africa in trying to ensure that sanity prevails in the affairs of a country on which so much of the world’s emotions were once rightfully expended.

The Mail and Guardian is currently owned by a Zimbabwean entrepreneur, Trevor Ncube (87.5%) and the Guardian Media Group of London. This 'foreign ownership' is sometimes hurled at it as a last resort by those who seek to intimidate it. They do not, of course, care whether what it exposes is true or not; but no matter: many South Africans - both black and white - recognise that it speaks sincerely for all South Africans when it tries to stop their 'Beloved Country' from becoming another authoritarian, corrupt African state, waiting in the queue to become a 'failed state'.

Long may the M&G continue to be a beacon of light in a country once shadowed by an impenetrable political and social darkness! Long may it be a good example - in courage and literacy - to the media in the rest of Africa.

By Cameron Duodu
www.cameronduodu.com