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“If history repeats itself,” George Bernard Shaw once said, “and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must (humans) be of learning from experience.” This edition of the Columbia City Paper coincides with our second birthday. It is, also, the second time around for me on a fledgling alternative newspaper under conditions that are less than perfect…

By Ismail Lagardien

“If history repeats itself,” George Bernard Shaw once said, “and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must (humans) be of learning from experience.” This edition of the Columbia City Paper coincides with our second birthday. It is, also, the second time around for me on a fledgling alternative newspaper under conditions that are less than perfect…

More than 20 years ago, I joined a group of journalists on a venture that would redefine our craft in South Africa. Out of this venture came the Weekly Mail. Under the leadership of two of the finest people I will ever meet, Anton Harber and Irwin Manoim, the Weekly Mail would launch the alternative media in South Africa, restore to the craft the journalistic integrity, courage of conviction and intellectual honesty during a particularly dark time in the country’s history.

Rule By Fear

During the mid-1980s the South African government ruled by instilling fear in the white population; fear of terrorists, fear of communists, fear of dark skinned people, fear of losing their privileged way of life and fear of losing their hegemonic position on the continent. They were, indeed, a powerful, prosperous enclave surrounded by poverty and misery. At the time, the ruling National Party held onto power by developing a seize mentality among the population. This state of fear was reproduced by the mainstream press who simply rehashed government statements about threats or impending danger; some were real, some perceived and some were fabricated. During those dark days anyone who disagreed with the standard government line was accused of being an appeaser or in league with terrorists.

While South Africa before Nelson Mandela’s presidency in 1994 can never be said to have had any type of civil liberties equally spread across the population, the 1980s witnessed a particularly draconian clamp down on dissent within the country. This domestic tyranny was coupled with foreign military aggression including assassinations, abductions and the sabotage of neighbouring countries’ economies. Domestically, the state resorted to mass incarcerations – without habeas corpus. By 1986 an estimated 30,000 people were detained without trial – many of whom were tortured and/or abused. These conditions had a profoundly negative effect on journalism.

When All Else Fails, Attack the Press,

This overt and insidious repression of the media in South Africa peaked in the 1980s. It was not always the state apparatus that led the attack. Private corporations and individuals, almost all white, supported and enforced the apartheid state’s odious policies. Some unwittingly, perhaps, based on petty prejudices and feeling threatened by our newspaper, reproduced the obstruction of dissent and of critical journalism at a time when the country needed it the most.

Not unlike City Paper being called the “shitty paper” by a rival publication in Columbia, our competitors in South Africa during the 1980s would, when they delivered their product to newsstands, simply pile their newspapers on top of ours. Shopkeepers would refuse to sell the Weekly Mail, or simply hid it from readers who would be forced to buy other newspapers.

As working journalists, we faced the full force of the state’s security apparatus. For most of the 1980s, our newspaper was censored, restricted or banned from publication. Our journalists were threatened, beaten and incarcerated; most every one of us spent time in prison at some time or another – for daring to investigate, critically and independently, what was happening in the country. The Weekly Mail was often singled out by the state. We were a young upstart newspaper that had the courage of our conviction. We reported on those issues that others refused to, or didn’t quite get.

We would report, for instance, on the violent occupation of black residential areas by the South African Defence Force, and of the beatings, the torture of activists, the assassinations. We would not cover up or ignore the misdeeds of activists. There were times when we faced the State’s security apparatus, as well as groups of highly-strung activists. I recall a photograph I took, once, of Archbishop Desmond Tutu saving the life of a man whom a crowd of anti-government activists were about to beat to death. That same day I was picked up by the police and beaten to within a breath of death.

I should tell the story of journalists with whom I had worked, and broke bread with, who turned against their colleagues and against the victims of state terrorism. Some of them were completely dependent on government statements on the unfolding story in South Africa. When the government called someone a terrorist; some newspapers would simply repeat that loaded term. When the government reported that a building had been destroyed by terrorists; some newspapers would simply report government statements. I should make the point, here, that many of those claims, of “terrorist” activities may have been accurate. However, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would establish after the demise of the apartheid regime, there were instances when the police and/or military placed the bombs, or pulled the triggers – then passed off information to journalists about “terrorist” or “insurgent” activities.

Those were difficult times to be a journalist. It would have been easy, for instance, to accept state protection when reporting unrest or protests or military invasion of black residential areas. Indeed, during the 1980s there were journalists in South Africa who reported on the violence and repression from behind turrets on armoured personnel carries – embedded with the military. Some of us chose to stand by our principles. It was on that anvil of struggle where I formed an understanding that in journalism integrity and intellectual honesty almost always stumps notions of objectivity.

I raise these experiences in this issue of the Columbia City Paper because the U.S. has been led into a dark alley by our government in Washington and there seems to be no way out of the murder and madness of our times. Like those dark days in South Africa, our critical voices are shut by fear; by our own fear and by the fear of others. Unlike the Weekly Mail in South Africa (now the Mail & Guardian) the Columbia City Paper is a local publication. But, the three or four people who put together this newspaper every other week remind me of those courageous folk with whom I had the privilege of working in a craft that can be most rewarding.

George Bernard Shaw was certainly correct when he proclaimed that we, humans, were incapable of learning from experience. What Mr. Shaw missed was that some of us were simply not ready to forget the value of struggle. There’s a short poem attributed to the German writer Bertolt Brecht which I find most apposite:

“There are [those] men who struggle for a day and they are good. There are [those] who struggle for a year and they are better. There are [those] who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives. These are the indispensable ones.”

For their courage of conviction, the folk at the Columbia City Paper belong among the indispensable ones.

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