The Press: Apartheid for Newsmen

Last June, the truncheons of 500 South African police beat down a native riot in Cato Manor, Durban’s tin-roofed apartheid shantytown (four dead, 24 injured), and produced the kind of international story that the xenophobic South African government hates most to see in foreign print. Reading exported accounts of the riot, External Affairs Minister Eric Louw issued a threat of reprisal against “offending foreign newspaper correspondents who are not Union nationals.” Last week. Louw’s truncheon fell on a victim not only obscure but innocent. Peremptorily ousted from the Union of South Africa after eleven years’ residence was London-born Freelance Photographer Henry Barzilay, 38, who sells his footage to any cash customer, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Movietone News, and NBC.

Beyond labeling Barzilay “undesirable,” the government refused to explain the deportation. Explanation was unnecessary. Day after the South African Information Office called Barzilay’s wife to ask if he worked for NBC, Minister Louw pointedly observed in a speech that NBC coverage of the Durban riots was “especially bad.” When the deportation order followed in due course, Barzilay protested that at the time of the riots he was not even in the country. The government rejected his appeal, gave him ten days to get out.

Among those protesting the deportation of Photographer Barzilay was the South African Society of Journalists, whose members, being Union nationals, generally stand on the balmy side of Minister Louw’s temper. Said Society President Hendrik D. Wannenburg: “The mere fact that the government is tampering with internationally recognized freedoms is likely to cause more harm to the Union abroad than the unfavorable publicity it is trying to suppress.”