Victoria Brittain

Unlike the previous speakers, what I want to do is to go for a very narrow focus and concentrate on what I really know from my own personal experience. So I am going to talk about the Western media, and specifically the written media in the 1980s when I first came to London after nearly a decade away. I had spent the previous six years in Africa where of course the prevailing climate was automatically and viscerally opposed to apartheid South Africa and in automatic solidarity with the ANC and SWAPO. Unlike
the kind of popular consciousness that Stuart Hall was talking about in the 1980s, in the liberal media it definitely wasn't there. What I found was an extraordinarily hostile and ignorant climate. And, as Abdul said last night, it is a bit mysterious and difficult to remember, now that the ANC is so fashionable, just what that hostility was like. And in that climate the AAM was completely identified with the ANC and SWAPO; within the media I would say that its information was totally discounted as propaganda by the
news desks.

I will just give you three small examples of that. In my early days I remember going to one of those Royal Commonwealth Society lunches in that gloomy basement where Trevor Huddleston gave one of his absolutely impassioned performances, having just come back from Southern Africa. He talked about how Nyerere and Machel were warning of the escalating hidden war. It was completely electric and I rushed back to the news room very anxious to write about it. I was greeted with 'Well, is it news? Is it worth reporting? Of course it's not. You're naive'. And that was within a liberal broadsheet.

To illustrate again the hostility and the ignorance I will give some more examples.

During the 1980s I worked for a Foreign Editor who believed that South Africa's future lay with Inkatha. I remember being confronted by a Managing Editor who asked me to put some quotes from UNITA into an interview with the MPLA's Lucio Lara. Of course I did not. And I remember that the Guardian, to its shame, carried a long article about the ANC which was so insulting to Oliver Tambo that I hate to even to remember it. Everyone who ever met or interviewed Oliver Tambo could not but know that he was a person of both extraordinary sweetness and extraordinary seriousness. The first time I interviewed him, Frene Ginwala took me his hotel room, which was a tiny little monk's cell, with nowhere to sit. So the three of us sat next to each other in a row on the bed and Oliver Tambo started by touching me on the arm and saying 'Don't worry if they don't print your article about me. Noone ever does'. In fact they did because at that time I was the editor of Third World Review, a page in the Guardian which managed to escape from normal Western media values, but that was the only reason it got printed.

After 1985 South Africa had the most draconian censorship laws in the world and there began to be a consciousness in the media that there was a serious reporting problem. A high level conference in London was hosted by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Association of British Editors and paid for by the extremely well-funded Afro-American Institute. I remember the conference well because all the luminaries of the US press scene and the big-name British reporters came from South Africa. For two days we were holed up in the Commonwealth Secretariat where the most striking thing was the self-criticism of the Americans, and particularly the American networks, as against the British complacency. I want to quote from what I wrote after it:

Since Richard Cohen, a senior producer for CBS and at the time responsible for foreign coverage wrote an article in the New York Times suggesting that TV networks should pull out of South Africa instead of continuing, as he put it, playing an insidious game of video appeasement with the Government, a mood of self criticism has swept many US newsrooms. Cohen said the story is not being seen. 'By staying there the public thinks we are covering the story. But we're not. And that's the dirty little secret that journalists don't want to discuss.' They certainly did refuse to discuss it. Even for writing that article I got a bit of a hammering.

The last event of the conference was an extremely glamorous lunch where all these well-known journalists were sitting and enjoying themselves and the main speaker was South Africa's new President, Thabo Mbeki. I remember well the absolute scorn and discourtesy with which these people listened, or rather talked through, Thabo Mbeki's speech. That was the kind of climate that we were in.

Of course the media reflects society in its dominant power and the dominant power of the 1980s was Thatcher. Mr Reddy this morning touched on the influence of BOSS and the AAM. Patsy Robertson spoke about the poor reporting of Commonwealth initiatives. We have to remember when we look at what was happening in the 1980s in newsrooms about South Africa and about reporting of the liberation movements that the role of the security forces here was very strong.

Despite everything that Stuart Hall has said today about popular consciousness, I think that society in the 1980s was complacent about apartheid. Noone really cared or took in that the UN had pronounced apartheid to be a crime against humanity. That seems ironic now, when human rights is such a buzz word and you can even have humanitarian wars. (Of course South Africa was not a case for a convenient humanitarian war as the liberation forces were on the 'wrong' side.) But in the current climate, where history is almost forgotten, I think an attempt is being made to rewrite the history of that period and to forget just how complacent most of society, and particularly the media, was. South Africa was just another country, with nothing special about it, and there was no outrage except in the Anti-Apartheid Movement. One thing that the AAM did that I think was incredibly important was that in a situation where the reality of the region and the reality of South Africa, which was reflected in the British media, was utterly unrecognisable to the majority of South Africans and Mozambicans and others, it was the AAM's great imaginative contribution, unappreciated by the press, to offer another reality which you could actually write about from here and reflect on from here. I will give two examples.

In April 1984 Mohammed Valli was the first UDF leader to go abroad. (He was the only one in the leadership who had a passport, and it was about to expire.) So he came to Britain and what he had to say, on behalf of 500 organisations, was in fact pretty simple stuff. But it was absolute dynamite in the context of how successful the South African government had been in selling the new constitution abroad.

He talked about a rally in Cape Town with 15,000 people and described the atmosphere as being totally feverish. The only parallel in history, he said, was 1955 and the Congress of the People. The way he described the UDF and the sort of organisation he and his comrades were setting up should have been known to everyone because it had been going on for at least a year. But nobody had written about it. After I wrote my article some of the South African based correspondents wrote to my editor saying that I should be stopped from writing this stuff because I obviously didn't know what was going on. How could I - they asked - I had never been to South Africa. In fact I was quite surprised that Mike Terry asked me to cover Mohammed Valli's visit. It was practically the first thing I had ever written on South Africa. But later, when I began to understand more about the general style of reporting from South Africa, I understood why a journalist who knew practically nothing about South Africa but had written extensively from Angola about South Africa's hidden war and about its lies and its hidden propaganda was actually
quite an obvious choice.

My second example is another person who the AAM had invited over, a woman called Fawzia Lowe. She was the mother of a political prisoner from the Western Cape and she gave what was to me the most heartrending interview which it has ever been my privilege and my nightmare to try to do justice to. She talked about her son who had been tortured and she gave the kind of detail that we only got 10 years later from the TRC. Fawzia Lowe had a huge eight-room house and a life of tupperware parties and trips to Europe and costume jewellery before her son was arrested. She said:

To those people who say he was looking for trouble, I want to say how much I pity them for their limited views. I salute my son for his courage. I admire my son for living up to his convictions and as a mother I am proud of being part of the struggle and to have given birth to such a fine young man.

Those are just two small examples. But those two were part of a procession of people - from the UDF, COSATU, churchmen, lawyers. I shall just name some of them: Murphy Morobe, Albertina Sisulu, Frank Chikane, and political prisoners like Raymond Suttner, whom I am happy to see is here. All these people were guests of the AAM. And they provided a completely different picture of South Africa and of the balance of forces within the society. There was an endless stream of conferences and seminars and briefing papers both in London and all over Britain. And I think that the other world that the AAM made it possible to know about was a kind of revelation for many people, and that
is what produced the popular mobilisation that Stuart Hall spoke about.

Lastly I want to take up something said by Abdul Minty. He talked about the links between the AAM and the liberation movements. For an outsider who was trying to understand the alternative picture, these things were absolutely crucial. And of course it was not just the liberation movements. Kader Asmal was in Dublin instructing you to speak here or do that; there were people like Frene Ginwala and Ruth Mompati and others, and then there were constant visitors from Southern Africa. There were also some very important people from the front-line states. The Tanzanian High Commissioner at the time, Tony Nyaki, was an absolutely key figure in this web of alternative information. There was never a time when Nyerere came here or when Salim Salim, then Tanzania's Minister of Defence, came here when Nyaki did not arrange for people to see them.

I would like also to pay a small tribute to Mr Reddy's UN operation, which was actually much more creative than he very modestly made it out to be this morning. In my personal case I went to Angola every year for 10 years and my newspaper paid for me to go once. One of the ways that I used to go was that SWAPO would somehow organise a conference in Luanda which it was imperative that I should address and suddenly a ticket would appear, nearly always for the next day. Immensely creative work was done by this whole web of people. It is also hard now to remember how absolutely desperate the situation was in Angola and Mozambique in 1985 and 1986. (The fact that it has deteriorated every year since in Angola is also part of the story.) But that picture was actually available to the media here and there was no excuse for their not knowing. I think it will be seen as a shame on the media that most people chose not to know.

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