White reporter in Black hell

HEADNOTE

WAR OF WORDS: MEMOIRS OF A SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNALIST

BY BENJAMIN POGRUND

SEVEN STORIES PRESS. 379 PP. $26.95

Viewed from afar, across the Atlantic, say, it appears at first recollection that

South Africa did not issue up much by way of journalism during its hellish days of apartheid. What reputations were made, accrued, for the most part, to foreign newspapers and their correspondents, many of them Americans such as Jim Hoagland, Michael Parks, Joseph Lelyveld, and reporters from smaller newspapers who were spared the Pulitzer Prize.

Foreign correspondents accept that their foraging is often done as scavengers feeding-, in part, off the plates of local reporters. Unlike the cheetah, if we are to place such reporters on the playing fields of the Serengeti, they seldom get to run down their own quarry. Usually arriving late for a breaking international story, frazzled, and with the wrong language, these skilled swashbucklers find themselves hampered abroad by the bluntness of government tyranny and lacking contacts and the subtleties of culture that back home allowed them to master the journalistic access so vital to prying out information for significant stories.

Thus the work of the foreign correspondent, no matter how determined, is invariably indebted to the digging of local reporters. These unsung yeomen, sometimes hired as fixers and translators, are seldom attributed, poorly paid, and most often underestimated. In South Africa, these local reporters, many of them blacks with easy access to Soweto and other off-limit townships, helped lay the foundation for what solid reporting came out of that republic during those tumultuous apartheid days.

In addition to foreign correspondents who made their reputations, there were local, white, mainstream South African reporters who, beginning in the late 1950s, distinguished themselves with courageous journalism that informed the world about the government's racial barbarism. Some of these mainstream names we have come to know, men such as Donald Woods and Allister Sparks. Now we have also been offered the memoirs of one of the bravest journalists of the lot, Benjamin Pogrund.

Pogrund opens his book, War of words, with a 1961 telephone call from underground fugitive Nelson Mandela, known as the "Black Pimpernel." The young reporter's newspaper, The Rand Daily Mail, relying on erroneous government and police estimates, had just helped squash a Mandela-masterminded black labor strike. While African workers had not responded in the numbers Mandela sought, the first day of the three-day strike was not the bust registered in the Mail's headline: OFFICIALS SAY-STAY-HOME UNSUCCESSFUL.

Still, Mandela held blameless the young beat reporter who covered black politics for the liberal Mail that was so influential among blacks that its headline put a significant damper on the strike. "Benjie-boy," Mandela said, "I

IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH 7

Police (two men at right) question Pogrund (left) about a Rand Daily Mail report

know it wasn't your fault." For the record, Mandela gave Pogrund a quote for the Mail saying, "We are not disheartened, even though the people did not respond to the stay-at-home to the extent to which we expected them to do." However, in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela wrote that, as a result of the strike effort, "I felt let down and disappointed by the reaction."

In a later telephone call that night, the much-hunted Mandela told Pogrund that government "intransigence, backed up by the military might of its police force," had soured his organization on nonviolence. Indeed, in his own book, Mandela, referring to his telephone call to Pogrund wrote, I suggested that the days of nonviolence were over." The next day, Pogrund published a story quoting Mandela, from underground, as saying, "I don't think, speaking for myself, that I can continue speaking peace and nonviolence in the light of the methods adopted by the government to suppress our peaceful protest."

Mandela, of course, would slip out of South Africa to drum up ANC support in Africa and Britain, and upon his return would get arrested for illegal departure as a prelude to his Rivonia treason trial. Lively charges have persisted over the years that the CIA assisted the South Africans in tracking Mandela. Pogrund offers that "there is no certainty about who tipped off the police as to where to find [Mandela]." Within weeks of his conversation with Pogrund, the ANC adopted its policy of armed struggle, formed Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation), and took up arms against the apartheid government of South Africa.

Pogrund was just this close, as close as a white reporter could get, to the beginning of Mandela's long, difficult journey from armed struggle, through twentyseven years of imprisonment, and finally, to the South African state house as president of the republic.

Wisely, Pogrund's book is not about Mandela. That body of work is being compiled by other writers. The memoir at hand is rather about the struggle of his newspaper, The Rand Daily Mail, and his twenty-six-year association with that liberal journal as reporter, government target, and night editor. As a young reporter, with college degrees in psychology and social work, Pogrund would, in addition to Mandela, establish as sources such other luminary black leaders as Nobel laureates Albert Luthuli and Bishop Desmond Tutu, as well as Mandela's colleague Robert Sobukwe.

The story of the Mail, which was closed in 1985, is an instructive account of a liberal newspaper challenging a bare-knuckled, whiteminority government during a critical time in the 1960s and '70s. Though laced with details and energy, Pogrund's account, read abroad by non-indigenous readers, lacks a certain adequacy of context. Despite that, the journalist's personal experiences, recollections, and perspective are clear, sometimes moving, and not as distancing as one might expect from a foreign source.

Pogrund's rendition of the apartheid superstructure his newspaper is up against takes a measure of the triplecanopy of societal reality that characterized so much of South African life. The social contract was not simply blackwhite, but one dictated by a South African government controlled since 1948 by an Afrikaaners Nation party that gave the majority Dutch-descendants political dominance over the minority English-speaking whites who controlled the private economy.

This white construct led to a bifurcated media that produced two sets of newspapers, one in Afrikaans, the other in English. A third group of papers, such as the Sowetan, all white-owned, were published in English for African readers in the townships. While the Boers' newspapers sternly supported the apartheid government, the English papers stood not nearly so sternly in opposition. However, Pogrund's Rand Daily Mail, in the early days at least, stood a lone and determined journal of the opposition to the apartheid government.

Campaigning Mail editors such as Laurence Gander, who wrote a bold antigovernment commentary, and Raymond Louw are credited with allowing Pogrund to pursue his ground-breaking reporting. Both journalists gained international reputations in America and Europe for their own fearless stand against the South African government.

Pogrund covered the government that fathered such grand schemes as a final solution, under "Separate Development," calling for African fragmentation and tribalism, and that enforced a policy of petty strictures against interracial sex, dancing, and work equity. As a labor writer, he disclosed the ridiculous attempts by unions, even in the face of white worker shortages, to restrict positions to whites only under the outmoded "Job Reservations Act." One such decree mandated that, although blacks could apply prime coats of paint, the final application had to be done by white housepainters.

Even the Mail, its liberal perspective notwithstanding, had to do business within the superstructure of apartheid laws. The races had to be separated in all matters. Early on, the Mail hired blacks only as menial workers, not as reporters, photographers, or other professional staffers. Pogrund does not shy away from the fact that after blacks were finally hired as reporters the Mail discriminated against them.

"Apartheid could not be avoided even in our [newspaper] offices," Pogrund writes. "The toilets had to be segregated by law..., separate cafeterias were also required by law, and their existence was reinforced by the white production workers."

The most treacherous apartheid minefield Pogrund had to traverse - the one that would land him in jail for eight days and, later (1969), after an eight-month trial, find him guilty of giving false testimony - concerned the practice of a type of journalism that challenged the government's sense of itself.

Pogrund spent a career at the Mail trekking the veritable mountain range of laws the blunt Boers government promulgated against press behavior and that of the general citizenry. One was the Official Secrets Act, which "sought to protect information affecting the security of the state. By 1965, the nationalists added the phrase 'police matter,defined as 'any matter relating to the preservation of the internal security or the maintenance of law and order by the South African Police.'"

Two other laws, the Native Administration Act (1927) and the Riotous Assemblies Act (1956), gave the government ominous powers to "ban any newspaper or any other 'documentary information' that was 'calculated to engender hostility' between blacks and whites. " In practice, the high-minded possibility of these acts had the effect of punishing actions that might bring the races together across ethnic lines.

The towering apartheid law Pogrund ran afoul of with his best-detailed story in the book is the Prison Act. To document prison conditions, Pogrund settled on a single, white ex-inmate named Harold "Jock"Strachan. The thirty-nine-year-old former air force pilot had tangled with amateurish revolutionary activity and had served a stretch as a political prisoner. After persuading Strachan to tape some 35,000 words about prison conditions, Pogrund took them to Gander, his editor.

"If what [Strachan] says is true," Gander said, "our jails are nothing less than concentration camps"

The 12,000 word, three-part series detailed a prison system rife with brutality, terror, and senseless deprivations. Articulate and with a sharp eye for detail, the ex-political prisoner, whose account was run in the first-person, carried the following detail:

"We had a flush toilet in the cell, which is quite unusual as far as prisons I have been in. But an interesting thing about this toilet was that you didn't only defecate in it, but you also washed in it; you brushed your teeth in it."

Treatment for black prisoners was even more severe: "Non-European prisoners who had to see the doctors were brought out at about 6:15 in the morning, and it could be freezing cold in Pretoria. They stood naked: sixty, seventy, eighty of them at a time. Huddled up like birds trying to keep warm. Like poultry. Stark naked. They had to stand with frost thick on the ground barefoot, clutching each other to keep warm. Shivering"

The South African government put heavy pressure on The Rand Daily Mail to stop Pogrund's newspaper series. Failing at this, they proceeded to place Strachan under house arrest. The government branded the series a calculated, if not treasonous, attempt to embarrass the republic. Despite this, the series was reprinted in the London Daily Mail, The Guardian, Africa Today, and The New York Times Magazine.

Sources mentioned in the series were pressured to change their stories and dragged into court to testify against the Mail. In their patented clumsy way, the government had witnesses on the stands and in the newsholes of their Afrikaans newspapers painting far too rosy a picture of the states prison system to be believed.

"The government seems determined to portray the prisons as pleasure resorts of such exquisite refinement that any normal South African would be tempted to a life of crime," wrote Joseph Lelyveld, then the resident correspondent of The New York Times.

Pogrund fell under a heavy twentyfour-hour police watch, and his passport was taken away. Eventually he and his editor would be hauled into court and offered a plea if the Mail would print an apology - which they refused. Both were put on trial and ruled guilty of publishing "false" information about South Africa's prisons.

As the officer in charge pressed Pogrund's fingerprints during booking, the journalist asked about the lengths the government had gone to to get them for publishing the series of prison stories at home and abroad. The saga had taken four years, including an eight-month trial that featured 105 state witnesses.

"You are the enemy," said the officer, Major Johan Coetzee, who would later become the commissioner of police. "We'll stop at nothing to get you." Pogrund was sentenced to six months imprisonment, suspended for three years. Gander, the Mairs editor in chief, was fined $33 with imprisonment of six months if the fine were not paid. The fine was paid; neither served jail time, though the Mail never recovered from the blunt government attack. Gander was fired and Pogrund, the star reporter whose prison series had indeed brought improvements for inmates in the republic, was eased into the chair as night editor. From this ringside seat at the Mail, Pogrund watched and, in the most insightful material in the book, shares - the historic events of modem South Africa, starting with the 1976 Soweto uprising that set the republic irreversibly on the road to democracy under black majority rule.

AUTHOR_AFFILIATION

Les Payne, an assistant managing editor at Newsday, has reported extensively from South Africa.