Margaret Smith: Journo who suffered for shielding activists

1930-2015

MARGARET Smith, who has died in London at the age of 85, was a news editor of the Sunday Times and also the first woman news editor in Africa.

In 1964, while working as a political reporter for the Sunday Times, she was detained under the dreaded 90-day act, which allowed for detention without trial for 90 days, repeatable, as the then justice minister John Vorster boasted, “until this side of eternity”.

She was detained because she refused to give evidence against her close friend Bram Fischer, who was leader of the SACP.

Smith formed close friendships with the underground leadership of the banned ANC and SACP. She hired a the scenes by the then Sunday Times editor, Joel Mervis.

Her ordeal left her with severe neurotic anxiety that still plagued her 30 years later.

In December 1976, she fled to England with her daughter Sally (her other daughter, Peta, was already there) and two suitcases, after being tipped off that she was to be called as a state witness in a trial against her long-time friend, Joe Gqabi.

She got to know Gqabi when she was a reporter on the Sunday Times and he was a photographer and reporter for the SACP journal New Age, edited by her friend Ruth First.

Gqabi had already spent 10 years on Robben Island when he was rearrested. Smith suspected that the state would do its best to “persuade” her to give evidence against him.

After being chief defendant in the Pretoria 12 trial in 1977, Gqabi was acquitted. He became the ANC’s chief representative in Harare, where he was assassinated in 1981.

It was a fate that met several of Smith’s activist friends, including First and Jenny Curtis. Curtis was blown up with her three-year-old daughter, Katryn, by a parcel bomb sent by the security police.

It was at Smith’s house that Curtis met former political prisoner Marius Schoon, who was staying with her after being released from jail. Schoon and Curtis skipped the country together and were married in exile.

The bomb that killed Curtis had been intended for Schoon, just as First was killed by a parcel bomb meant for her husband, Joe Slovo. Slovo, communist party leader and commander of the ANC’s military wing, was another good friend of Smith’s.

Other close friends included ANC Women’s League president Lilian Ngoyi and Winnie Mandela, who she remembered as a “gregarious” party animal and a “warm young idealist who became a ruthless politico”.

Before she left the country, Smith took the Mandela daughters Zenani and Zindzi shopping for jeans. “It was a gruelling experience”, because of how particular they were, she remembered.

Smith left South Africa after a horror accident in which her Mini was crushed between two articulated lorries.

She was nearly killed and had to be cut out of the wreckage by the fire department.

She suspected security police involvement, which reinforced her decision to get out in a hurry.

She subsequently regretted her decision. Nothing would have been as damaging and painful as her self-imposed exile, she wrote.

While working as a political reporter . . . she was detained under the 90-day act Her prison ordeal . . . included a hunger strike and ‘unending interrogation’

She went into a deep depression that lasted nearly 17 years and only lifted, she said, when Mandela was released from prison and she, a prohibited immigrant, was allowed to return.

She didn’t stay, however, preferring to be with her family in England.

Smith (née Welsh) was born in Johannesburg on October 25 1930. She married and divorced South African journalist Ken Smith, the father of her two daughters.

After she left for England he developed cancer of the face. The South African authorities refused her appeals to be allowed back to see him. He shot himself in the mid-’80s. Her second husband, Gordon Sanderson, an assistant editor on the Sunday Times, died in the mid-’70s. — Chris Barron