NEW YORK - The apartheid regime would not tolerate printed truth about itself.
And the reporter from New York had caught the Boers government in a lie. Police gunmen, he discovered, had killed some three times more blacks than the number released as the official death toll for the 1976 Soweto uprising.
With Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders imprisoned for life, young African students had stepped up to revolt against the European settlers controlling their country and its vast mineral wealth.
In this journalism era before computers, foreign correspondents composed their stories on noisy word-processing machines with no spell-check, called typewriters. The articles were then delivered to the local telex office where
operators transmitted the copy electronically to the home office back in the U.S.
The Johannesburg station served “whites only.” So as the lone African-American correspondent on the Soweto story, the New York reporter had to improvise. He either phoned his stories to a Newsday transcriber back home, or slipped a copy to the telex operator at the Carleton hotel for transmission.
His exclusive on the Soweto body-count was certain to alarm the hotel operator. Already, management had judged one of his dispatches “anti-government” and flatly refused to transmit it.
So the reporter recruited a random passenger on a Johannesburg-to-New York flight to deliver his exclusive story to a Newsday clerk who met him at JFK Airport. Photographers overseas routinely used such envoys to deliver rolls of film back home for breaking news stories.
This was the age before communications satellites when a cell phone, if anything, was the landline device that inmates dialed up when making that one call from jail.
Upon reading the Soweto story, Newsday editors judged that the body-count story was too sensitive to be published—even in New York — until their reporter had departed South Africa safely.
Why the grave concern?
South Africa, which supplied 80 percent of the Western World’s gold, used its influence and power to suppress the truth about its racist excesses. Despite its brutal crackdown on the children of Soweto, the apartheid regime was defended to the hilt by its superpower ally, starting with the top 350 U.S. corporations, the CIA, the sitting GOP President Gerald Ford and, later, Ronald Reagan.
Ruthless against the press, the South African government did not permit local newspapers to quote or print photographs of Nelson Mandela. And local black reporters making their rounds on the Soweto story came in for special censure, imprisonment, and head-knocking.
The actual Soweto death-count was a state secret.
As the anti-apartheid movement escalated, the white-minority regime spent millions in the U.S. projecting a benign image, even, of its murderous police crackdown. After months of firing at will upon unarmed students, the Boers grudgingly allowed that “only” 200 blacks had been killed.
Blindly accepting this government tally, the foreign media seemed as indifferent to the depth of the slaughter as Justice Minister Jimmy Kruger, who was notorious for devaluing black life.
Contrariwise, the lone African-American correspondent was singularly shocked by this complicity of his white colleagues.
He had been determined to cover the Soweto revolt from the very first day, on June 16, when police gunned down 13-year-old Hector Pieterson. The breaking, international story was far too significant, he felt, to be left up to the American routine of lily-white, foreign coverage. This very urge to use his talent to help ease racial suppression is what moved him to enter journalism in the first place.
Indeed, as noted by journalists John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish in their 1827 Freedom’s Journal, he felt that, “too long have others spoken for us.”
Inspired also by the determination of Frederick Douglass to “labor to use my voice, my pen …to advocate the emancipation of my people,” this lone, black reporter sensed that the struggles waged by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, and Nelson Mandela—and presently that of the Soweto students--were somehow connected with the long struggle of African-Americans fully to liberate themselves in America.
Fair, balanced and courageous reporting, he felt, was the precise weapon – a weapon with which the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter had armed himself – needed to inform the world about the Soweto Revolt.
But first, he had to get South Africa to grant him a work visa to cover the story.
The apartheid republic had effectively barred all African-American correspondents initially. Thomas Johnson, for example, the black, New York Times bureau chief in Nigeria, was consistently denied entry for the duration of the Soweto conflict.
Upon investigating the enterprising Newsday reporter, the South African Consulate sought to deny his entry. However, with the help of international tennis star Arthur Ashe, he finally wangled a visa by playing Pretoria off against the consul-general in New York. [The teaching point here is: when the cause is just, never take “no” for an answer.]
Though his colleagues had a three-month head-start on the story, none of the 400-odd foreign reporters had access to the African majority. The regime had guarded against such reporting by placing “off-limits” all townships, where the 80 percent black majority lived. Airtight policing of this exclusionary policy was enabled by the foreign press. With apartheid policies of their own, they had assigned only white reporters who would stand out in the black townships like grizzly bears in Antarctica.
Even the enterprising white reporters were thus reduced to relying mainly on government sources to leak them confidential, though highly inaccurate data that, as H. L. Mencken once noted, the journalists would proceed to mangle beyond recognition before publishing it in their newspapers.
Unlike his colleagues, the lone African-American reporter on the Soweto story forged full access to the black majority in the townships. Daily, after evading his shadowing government agent, he drove a rented car into Soweto and other restricted zones, waving at the road guards like a local resident. Luckily, police never asked him to speak Xhosa or Zulu.
In addition to daily exclusives, the Newsday reporter found grieving African families frantically searching around the clock for their missing children at hospitals, police stations, morgues, shanty towns, even at relatives’ homes in neighboring countries; all in hopes that their loved ones had not been mass buried by the government in unmarked, paupers graves, or secretly dropped from police helicopters into the sea.
The lone black reporter perceived it as a responsibility of journalism to report the depth of the slaughter fully and accurately; and to inform the families seeking closure and the world seeking answers. Accordingly, every, single victim killed by the South African police, he felt, must be tallied and reported abroad and their names published in the local newspapers.
The three-week investigation entailed knocking on the doors of the township funeral homes; talking to gravediggers, funeral directors, and morticians; verifying the circumstances with frightened eyewitnesses; and double checking the body count against police ledgers, and the secret
have others spoken for us.”
Inspired also by the determination of Frederick Douglass to “labor to use my voice, my pen …to advocate the emancipation of my people,” this lone, black reporter sensed that the struggles waged by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, and Nelson Mandela—and presently that of the Soweto students--were somehow connected with the long struggle of African-Americans fully to liberate themselves in America.
Fair, balanced and courageous reporting, he felt, was the precise weapon – a weapon with which the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter had armed himself – needed to inform the world about the Soweto Revolt.
But first, he had to get South Africa to grant him a work visa to cover the story.
The apartheid republic had effectively barred all African-American correspondents initially. Thomas Johnson, for example, the black, New York Times bureau chief in Nigeria, was consistently denied entry for the duration of the Soweto conflict.
Upon investigating the enterprising Newsday reporter, the South African Consulate sought to deny his entry. However, with the help of international tennis star Arthur Ashe, he finally wangled a visa by playing Pretoria off against the consul-general in New York. [The teaching point here is: when the cause is just, never take “no” for an answer.]
Though his colleagues had a three-month head-start on the story, none of the 400-odd foreign reporters had access to the African majority. The regime had guarded against such reporting by placing “off-limits” all townships, where the 80 percent black majority lived. Airtight policing of this exclusionary policy was enabled by the foreign press. With apartheid policies of their own, they had assigned only white reporters who would stand out in the black townships like grizzly bears in Antarctica.
Even the enterprising white reporters were thus reduced to relying mainly on government sources to leak them confidential, though highly inaccurate data that, as H. L. Mencken once noted, the journalists would proceed to mangle beyond recognition before publishing it in their newspapers.
Unlike his colleagues, the lone African-American reporter on the Soweto story forged full access to the black majority in the townships. Daily, after evading his shadowing government agent, he drove a rented car into Soweto and other restricted zones, waving at the road guards like a local resident. Luckily, police never asked him to speak Xhosa or Zulu.
In addition to daily exclusives, the Newsday reporter found grieving African families frantically searching around the clock for their missing children at hospitals, police stations, morgues, shanty towns, even at relatives’ homes in neighboring countries; all in hopes that their loved ones had not been mass buried by the government in unmarked, paupers graves, or secretly dropped from police helicopters into the sea.
The lone black reporter perceived it as a responsibility of journalism to report the depth of the slaughter fully and accurately; and to inform the families seeking closure and the world seeking answers. Accordingly, every, single victim killed by the South African police, he felt, must be tallied and reported abroad and their names published in the local newspapers.
The three-week investigation entailed knocking on the doors of the township funeral homes; talking to gravediggers, funeral directors, and morticians; verifying the circumstances with frightened eyewitnesses; and double checking the body count against police ledgers, and the secret records the government maintained at the Johannesburg Inquest Court and other files scattered about the bureaucracy.
The detailed investigation disclosed that the government-based 200-odd death toll cited by the foreign press was under-counted by a factor exceeding 350-percent! The reporter listed 853 names, ages, dates and circumstances of Africans killed by police during the protests.
Some 80 percent of the victims were less than 30 years old; with 35 percent of them teenagers; at least 10 younger than 12; and the slain included a 6 year old, two 4 year olds and three 5 year olds, one of whom police shot squarely between the eyes when she raised her tiny hand in what was said to be a “black power salute.”
The body-count story – published in Newsday upon the reporter’s return to New York – embarrassed the correspondents who had accepted the government’s lie. The findings prompted The New York Times’ copy desk, without attribution, to increase the death toll cited in its subsequent stories, from some 250-odd to “more than 600.”
The reaction of the outraged South African government, which did not dispute the Newsday death count, justified the prior concern about the sensitivity of the story and the safety of its reporter.
The apartheid regime jailed and tortured the African journalist who printed the Soweto victims’ names in a local newspaper, in which many families learned the fate of their missing relatives for the first time. The Newsday reporter, back in New York, was cited as something of a co-conspirator under the state security act for publishing material harmful to the government.
Not only was the offending reporter banned from South Africa for life, the consulate in New York informed Newsday that none of its journalists, whether black or white, would be granted a visa to cover stories in that republic—as long as the African-American reporter worked for the paper.
8
Morticians helped piece together details about government killings in Soweto.