We write what we like
IT IS 40 years today since Black Wednesday – October 17, 1977 – when the apartheid regime struck, banning Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) organisations, activists, publications including the World newspaper and the SA Christian Institute, and detained a number of journalists and activists. It followed within weeks of the killing in apartheid police detention of BCM leader Steve Biko.
As Horst Kleinschmidt, one of those bravely involved at the rock face of the Struggle at the time, puts it on our op-ed page: “Events 40 years ago this week influenced the way we are today. Apartheid power and violence was reaching its pinnacle, inflicting war on its own citizens and on neighbouring countries. On October 19, 1977, a resurgent internal opposition, as had happened in 1960, was driven into the underground.”
It was an unashamed bid by a despotic, despised regime. Its efforts failed. Our people and our media emerged into a liberated nation with constitutionally guaranteed protection.
Those have proved vital in the decades that followed, but the goodwill of the drafters of the constitution have been repaid with interest by the work of intrepid journalists, often at great personal risk, to uncover corruption that threatens the very fabric of society.
Our media might be free, but that does not mean we are not under threat. There are perennial attempts by unscrupulous and opportunistic politicians to curb the rights the media enjoy, notwithstanding the widespread and very effective common law remedies that exist for those who feel they have been wronged.
This newspaper has been banned by the premier, for instance, from provincial government departments.
A free and independent media is the lifeblood of any democracy. We must cherish and nurture that which we have – and in so doing properly honour the legacies of so many who sacrificed so much for each journalist to be able to declare today, “I write what I like”, as Biko put it all those years ago.
And those who today sink so low as to ban a newspaper, just like apartheid did, must know that as with apartheid, they are acting out their own eventual downfall.