Sparks: A fearless South African journalist
The day after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, the journalist Allister Sparks was spotted in the vast crowd outside his Soweto home and summoned inside.
The great man ‘‘greeted me with that famous smile and gestured to me to sit beside him,’’ Sparks recalled.
‘‘He began telling me how much my reporting and columns had meant to him and his fellow prisoners over the years . . . making me feel as if I had just been awarded the world’s greatest prize for journalism.’’
His work had undoubtedly made a profound difference to his era: for more than 60 years he chronicled ‘‘the rise and fall of apartheid and the rise and crisis of the new South Africa’’.
As a reporter and later editor of the Rand Daily Mail, the flagship of liberalism in some of South Africa’s darkest days, he helped to reveal some of the worst excesses of the apartheid regime and gave voice to the oppressed majority.
Under his editorship, the paper revealed that the black activist Steve Biko had been beaten to death in police custody.
It also exposed the Muldergate scandal – the regime’s use of a huge slush fund to soften apartheid’s image at home and abroad through a propaganda campaign.
It led to the resignation of the prime minster John Vorster.
It took courage to pursue and publish such stories in a police state. Threats and intimidation were routine. Arrest, a public trial and imprisonment were a real possibility.
‘‘When it came to investigative journalism in a country like South Africa, with a ruthlessly determined government that didn’t respect press freedom, it was not enough to ensure to your own satisfaction that your reporting was accurate,’’ Sparks wrote.
‘‘You would have to make sure before publishing that you would
In his garden, he told Sparks: ‘‘I can tell you Kruger (the justice minister) is lying. Biko didn’t die of a hunger strike. He died of brain damage. He was beaten to death.’’ Sparks and his paper then had to prove it.
be able to prove its accuracy in court, even a court that might be loaded against you.’’ Allister Haddon Sparks was born in 1933 on ‘‘the frontier’’, that is, the borderland on the banks of the Great Kei River in the Cathcart district of the Eastern Cape where his family had farmed for more than a century.
He had no siblings and the nearest white children were some miles away.
He spent his days with black children on the farm, all related to the headman of the farmhands, Mbhuti Lavisa, who became a sort of surrogate father to him when his own father went off to war in 1939.
The black children never came to the house; they knew their place.
He came to regard them as his ‘‘outdoor friends’’. ‘‘The frontier is what framed my life,’’ he wrote.
‘‘In the struggle of liberty against the racist crime of apartheid I participated not with the sword of my ancestors but with the pen.’’
He went to boarding school at Queen’s College in nearby Queenstown, leaving at 17 to become a reporter on the Queenstown’s Daily Representative. He moved to the Bulawayo Chronicle in what was then Southern Rhodesia, and on to the East London Daily Dispatch.
It was there that he met both Mary Rowe, a Cornish girl who became his wife, and Donald Woods, the great South African journalist and anti-apartheid activist who became a lifelong friend.
Sparks moved with his wife to London for a few years, working for the Reuters news agency, before returning to join the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg as a subeditor.
His first day there was scarcely auspicious. He arrived to find the editor, Laurence Gandar, had no idea who he was, and the managing editor who had appointed him in the midst of his farewell party, having been fired. Gandar went on to become Sparks’ mentor.
The Rand Daily Mail previously had a somewhat shameful record of connivance in the development of apartheid, but under Gandar and his successor, Raymond Louw, it became a champion of black majority rule despite strong opposition from both its owners and the political establishment.
Sparks was posted to Cape Town to cover the South African parliament, and his own views began to take shape.
‘‘Here was a house full of white people talking most of the time about black people, assuming they know all about them, their wants and wishes and traditions and what should be done for them, never with them,’’ he wrote. He rose through the ranks, won a Nieman fellowship to study at Harvard in 1962, and returned to a South Africa that had fallen under the iron rule of John Vorster and his security forces.
Undaunted, he managed to track down and interview two senior African National Congress (ANC) officials, Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe, in a remote Botswana hotel after they escaped from their police cells in Johannesburg, and the RDM published his several exclusive interviews with the pair in special editions.
As his professional career took off, Sparks suffered a private tragedy. Mary, with whom he had had three sons – Simon, Michael, and Andrew – died after an operation for a brain aneurysm.
In 1972 he married his second wife, Sue, a teacher of Swiss descent, by whom he had a fourth son, Julian. She later became a prominent member of the Black Sash, the white women’s antiapartheid organisation, until she also died prematurely, of breast cancer in the 1980s.
His son Michael had a close shave when he accompanied his father to cover a protest – ‘‘a fierce battle between armed police and coloured protesters’’, Sparks recorded in his memoir.
Michael was studying politics at the University of Cape Town at the time and wanted ‘‘to gather some real-life material for his studies’’.
He and Sparks met up with The Times correspondent Michael Hornsby, and the three were eventually forced to make a break for safe ground by sprinting through the crowd.
As the police fired shotguns, Hornsby was hit in the back, ‘‘shredding his shirt and ripping the flesh beneath it. He staggered from the force of the shot but kept going,’’ Sparks recalled.
Hornsby survived and the other Michael, who was unharmed during the protest, is now a secondary school teacher in London.
His brother Simon became a junior school teacher and still lives in Johannesburg.
Andrew is a university lecturer in Leicester, and Julian, who has been working as a civil engineer in Santiago, Chile, is about to start an MBA at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business.
In 1975 Sparks was surprisingly – given his liberalism – offered the editorship of the Sunday Express, the Rand Daily Mail’s right-wing tabloid sister paper.
He accepted only after refusing to guarantee that he would not change the Express’s political stance.
Two years later he was given the editorship of the Rand Daily Mail, which had distinguished itself with its coverage of the Soweto uprising the previous year — four of its black journalists had been imprisoned without trial.
Very soon Sparks’ Rand Daily Mail distinguished itself as well by exposing the true cause of the death of the black activist Steve Biko while in police custody.
Jonathan Gluckman, a pathologist who had been employed by Biko’s family to investigate his death, invited Sparks to meet him at his home after conducting a post-mortem examination.
In his garden, he told Sparks: ‘‘I can tell you Kruger (the justice minister) is lying. Biko didn’t die of a hunger strike. He died of brain damage. He was beaten to death.’’
Sparks and his paper then had to prove it.
In 1978 the Rand Daily Mail enjoyed another momentous scoop by exposing the Muldergate scandal – the regime’s use of secret slush funds to fight a propaganda war to improve apartheid’s image at home and abroad.
He died without ever revealing the identity of ‘‘Myrtle’’- the Deep Throat within the government who helped to reveal what was happening.
Under Sparks the Rand Daily Mail gained a substantial black readership, but that was not what its owner, South African Associated Newspapers (SAAN), wanted.
Clive Kinsley, SAAN’s managing director, told Sparks that he was after ‘‘white readers, especially white woman readers, who he felt made the key household purchases and interested advertisers’’.
In 1981 Sparks was fired and four years later the loss-making Rand Daily Mail was closed.
He returned to writing – for The Observer in Britain, the Washington Post and other foreign publications.
In 1983 he was charged with violating censorship laws by quoting Winnie Mandela, Nelson’s wife, in his dispatches.
His wife, Sue, was accused of helping to remove incriminating documents from his office, but the charges were eventually abandoned after international protests.
Sparks covered the violent antiapartheid struggles of the 1980s, often at considerable personal risk, and the unfolding political drama that culminated in Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. He proceeded to document the events that led up to Mandela’s inauguration as the first black president of a truly democratic South Africa.
He enjoyed unmatched access to Mandela, who once spent an entire day discussing his life and views at Sparks’ home.
The result was a 20,000-word article for the New Yorker. ‘‘Seldom can a journalist have been given such a vivid scoop in such a relaxed atmosphere in his own home as Mandela gave me that day.’’
Despite his success as a journalist he never forgot his humble beginnings and always felt more comfortable around ‘‘ordinary people’’, his son Andrew said.
After retiring he visited his children abroad at least once a year and, as a keen sportsman, loved to watch his grandsons playing football, hockey and cricket.
He founded the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in South Africa and wrote books on the transition from apartheid to democracy, notably Tomorrow is Another Country, and an autobiography, The Sword and the Pen.
In recent years he was the target of a Twitter storm after he was quoted as saying he believed Hendrik Verwoerd to have been a ‘‘clever’’ leader.
Bemused, he let his lifetime of dignified opposition to apartheid speak for itself. It did.