The author of a letter recently published on these pages claimed that during his youth in the 1960s the repressive media legislation of the National Party (NP) ensured that the only reliable sources of information in South Africa were international publications such as Time. ‘The government’, he said, ‘had a complete stranglehold on news.’

The writer of the letter must have spent his youth illiterate or asleep. Neither in the 1960s nor at any other time did the NP government have a stranglehold on news. Ministers threatened the Press, sometimes they enacted curbs, but mostly they never succeeded in keeping the facts about their policies out of the news. Newspapers had their faults but failing to expose apartheid was not among them.

An editor once said that running a newspaper in South Africa was like walking blindfold through a minefield, so every senior journalist kept a copy of Kelsey Stuart’s ‘The Newspaperman’s Guide to The Law’ next to his typewriter. Sometimes (certainly not always) boards of newspaper companies were timid. One of the bravest editors, Laurence Gandar, was fired. After an exposé of conditions in prisons in 1965 so disgusting it made you want to vomit, journalists and their sources were prosecuted and reporting on prisons was effectively prohibited. You could not reveal whence South Africa was getting oil, nor could newspapers disclose the invasion of Angola by the South African Defence Force in 1975.

Yet despite all of this, and other forms of harassment or restriction, there were few aspects of NP policy and practice that were not exposed and denounced by the English-language Press. This applied not only to all facets of racial policy but also to the arsenal of security legislation designed to curtail opposition. Newspapers also exposed some of the workings of the Afrikaner Broederbond, the secret society that was supposedly the real source of power in the country.

Newspapers not only did their own reporting, they also gave extensive and sympathetic coverage to the activities and opinions of some of the organisations exposing injustice and seeking change. Journalists worked with doctors and lawyers to use the courts to highlight the treatment of detainees. Helen Suzman’s voice in Parliament was magnified by the coverage she had in liberal newspapers, as she always acknowledges.

As authoritarians, the NP were a curious bunch. South Africa had no bill of rights guaranteeing a free Press, so the NP could have enacted legislation to impose comprehensive Press censorship. But usually fulmination rather than legislation was the order of the day. The story of apartheid was told under their very noses while they were still in power. Daily they read about the impact of their policies in the newspapers. Daily they were confronted with reports on how these policies were hated. Over the years this helped to undermine their confidence in these policies, especially when the Afrikaans Press, which had generally been supportive of NP policies, followed the lead of the English-language papers and began to question some of those policies.

Reports in our Press were picked up by other papers around the world. This helped prepare the way for the steadily growing success of the African National Congress (ANC) and others in bringing international pressure to bear against South Africa.

The NP’s single most important attempt to counter the influence of the liberal Press ended in disaster for itself. This was when a group of cabinet ministers secretly misappropriated R32 million in public funds to launch The Citizen newspaper in 1976. The whole affair was exposed by the liberal Press, notably the Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Express.

Among those deployed to cover up the scandal was the universally-feared head of the Bureau for State Security (BOSS), General Hendrik van den Bergh. He proved no match for the Press or for a courageous judge, Anton Mostert. In the end, the exposé by the Press was vindicated by a commission under another judge, Rudolf Erasmus, which found that John Vorster had played an instrumental role in the covering up of gross irregularities in the channelling of secret funds to The Citizen while he was prime minister. The once-mighty Vorster, who had in the meantime become state president, resigned in disgrace in 1979.

In the history of newspapers this was an achievement greater than that of the Washington Post in bringing down Richard Nixon, for, unlike those in the US, South African newspapers enjoyed no constitutional protection.