The Press: Beginning of the End?

South Africa’s new Ministry of Information was less than a week old when its boss rose last week to deliver an ominous message. Said English-speaking Frank Waring, 53: “South Africa is going through a critical period in her history, and it is the duty of all South Africans to call a moratorium [on criticism] until the crisis ends.” To South Africa’s English-language papers, there was no mistaking the Minister of Information’s intent: to lay heavy siege to South Africa’s dominant press and the most outspoken press in all of Africa.

Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who cannot tolerate criticism, has long been troubled by the English press, which has a daily circulation of 685,000 v. 175,000 for the Afrikaans press. Unlike the Afrikaans press, the English-language dailies boldly criticize the government, deplore apartheid, expose hypocrisy. The Johannesburg Sunday Times’s Political Columnist Stanley Uys, for example, recently called Verwoerd “a mass psychologist with a massive contempt for the English-speaking masses.”

Already, by loaded hints, veiled threats —and, more importantly, by infiltration —Verwoerd’s Nationalists have turned the South African Broadcasting Corp. into a docile propaganda tool. Up to now, Verwoerd has feared to risk unfavorable world opinion by openly muzzling the recalcitrant English press. But his flanking movements have had their effect. South Africa’s free press must follow a zigzag obstacle course past ten punitive national statutes. The government’s Special Branch, which serves as censor in everything but name, combs every issue of every paper for statutory violations. A government commission was appointed in 1950 with the avowed purpose of examining the country’s newspapers—but its members often acted like thought police. The commission once rebuked an English press reporter for writing more “nice” things about an opposition party than about the Nationalists.

When the English editors rejected a Verwoerd suggestion that they police themselves, Verwoerd decided to increase the heat with his new Ministry of Information, presumably as a first step toward government control. But Verwoerd may never have to go that far if he can exert enough pressure on the English dailies—and the business interests that own most of them—to make a chauvinistic moratorium on criticism stick. “Naturally,” says Johannesburg Star Editor Horace Flather, “it’s preferable for the enemy to commit suicide. Then you don’t have to murder him.”