Allister Sparks: Legendary editor who courted contention
ALLISTER Sparks, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 83, was the editor of the Rand Daily Mail who sat on one of the biggest stories in the history of South African journalism until it was broken by the much smaller Sunday Express.
His crack investigative team had led the so-called Muldergate investigation for more than a year and were the first to discover that the pro-government Citizen newspaper was financed by taxpayers’ money channelled through a secret government fund.
Sparks was afraid that if they published this explosive story the Citizen would bring a libel action against the Mail which would be prevented by the sub judice rule from publishing all the other information it had collected about the Department of Information's unlawful activities.
Instead of publishing it, he kept this and all the other information the team had unearthed over the course of a year locked in a safe.
On October 29 1978, while Sparks hesitated, his wily opposite number on the Express, Rex Gibson, beat him to it.
Sparks, who was loath to say he was wrong about anything, confessed in his recently published autobiography that he had been badly wrong about this. He admitted it was a “bad mistake” which cost his team the scoop they deserved.
However, he argued that by breaking the story, the Express had “given us the green light we’d been waiting for” to publish everything else they had. This the Rand Daily Mail proceeded to do, every day for the next week.
Sparks felt it was the finest achievement in the history of South African journalism. It brought down the formidable prime minister John Vorster and rocked the political establishment to its foundations.
In 1981 he and Gibson were named joint International Editors of the Year by the World Press Review for their exposure of the Info Scandal. The Rand Daily Mail was named one of the top 12 newspapers in the world. Four months later, Sparks was fired. Four years later the newspaper was closed.
Sparks was born on a sheep farm in the Cathcart district in the Eastern Cape on March 10 1933.
He matriculated at Queen’s College in Queenstown and at the age of 17 became a reporter on the local newspaper, the Daily Representative.
From there he went to The Chronicle in Bulawayo, the Daily Dispatch in East London and Reuters in England before landing a job on the Rand Daily Mail under Laurence Gandar, who was his greatest mentor and champion.
In 1961 Gandar made him political correspondent and sent him to cover parliament. In 1962 he nominated Sparks for a Nieman Fellowship and he went to Harvard for a year.
In 1963 he was bundled on a plane to interview Harold Wolpe and Arthur Goldreich, who were hiding in Botswana after escaping from security police cells in Johannesburg. They had been arrested with the ANC leadership at Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia, and there was a national manhunt for them.
At 37 Sparks became deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail and two months later found himself acting editor when editor Raymond Louw went on long leave.
In 1974 he was made editor of the Sunday Express, where one of his best reporters was security police spy Gordon Winter. It was an open secret that he was a spy, but when Sparks confronted him he denied it. Sparks said later he never believed him, but he kept him on. And appointed as his personal secretary a woman recommended by Winter.
He took her with him when he became editor of the Rand Daily Mail and she remained his secretary during the Infogate investigation, close to him and his family. Then one day she disappeared, leaving a tear-stained confession that she, too, had been spying on him for the security police.
Sparks was unlucky when it came to spies. The villain of the Info Scandal, Department of Information secretary Eschel Rhoodie, told him that Sunday Times editor Tertius Myburgh was a security police spy too and had kept Bureau of State Security chief General Hendrik van den Bergh informed of the Rand Daily Mail’s investigation every step of the way.
Myburgh had been the main speaker at Sparks’ wedding reception and they were close friends. Everything he told Myburgh, said Rhoodie, went straight to Van den Bergh.
Sparks inherited the editorship of the Express from the politically conservative Johnny Johnson, who had turned it into a mouthpiece of the United Party old guard, which was barely distinguishable from the Nats.
Sparks was given the editorship on the understanding that it would follow a politically neutral line under him, which it did. The board of South African Associated Newspapers thought he would do the same at the Rand Daily Mail. And so, after firing Louw for his liberal politics, they offered the editorship to Sparks, whose politics were no different.
Sparks said he only accepted the job after being assured he could continue Louw’s liberal editorial policy.
Given that Louw had been fired precisely for following this policy, some believed Sparks was extraordinarily gullible to believe that the board wanted more of the same from him.
But Sparks was nothing if not ambitious, and the editorship of the Rand Daily Mail was a prized position in South African journalism.
He took over in 1977. Five months later Steve Biko was killed in detention. Justice minister Jimmy Kruger told parliament he had died as a result of a hunger strike.
After being asked by the Biko family to perform an autopsy, pathologist Jonathan Gluckman quietly contacted Sparks and told him Kruger was lying. Biko had died of brain damage, he said. He had been beaten to death.
Gluckman wanted Sparks to publish this, but not to quote him.
Needing an authoritative source to pin the story on, he sent his newly appointed political correspondent, Helen Zille, to Port Elizabeth to confront the three state doctors who had examined Biko in custody. Crucially, they refused to confirm Kruger’s hunger strike claim.
Sparks splashed the momentous story that Kruger had lied to parliament. Biko had not died of a hunger strike but a blow to the head. Sparks was not popular as an editor. He was considered abrasive, autocratic, remote, aloof and pompous. And he thought his view — on any subject — was final.
This attitude contributed to the death of Rand Daily Mail columnist Nat Nakasa. Sparks nominated him for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, which he was awarded. When the government refused him a passport, Sparks told him to leave on an exit permit, which meant he wouldn’t be allowed back. Nakasa was extremely reluctant but Sparks told him to go.
Homesick and disillusioned, Nakasa committed suicide in New York. Sparks said his death haunted him.
Much was made of the fact, not least by Sparks himself, that he was fired because of his liberal politics and strong anti-apartheid line which drew black readers while losing white readers, who were considered more valuable from an advertising point of view.
No doubt he was right. But his barely concealed contempt for management didn’t help his cause either.
When asked about the commercial aspect of the paper, he said it wasn’t his problem. It was an attitude that won him few friends and undoubtedly contributed to his downfall.
His Biko and Infogate heroics had made him world famous and he was quickly offered a freelance contract to cover southern Africa for The Observer in London and Washington Post.
Before this he had been a no-holdsbarred supporter of the Progressive Federal Party, convinced of its vital role in the country’s future. Now he became an uncritical supporter of the ANC.
When the ANC was unbanned in 1990, he told the then Democratic Party to form a pact with it.
He wasn’t amused when DP MP Harry Schwarz called his proposal a “Warsaw Pact”.
He said the “only logical role for white liberals” in South Africa was to join the ANC. Those who believed in the creation of a strong opposition to the ruling party were “spoilers”.
He warned that the DP was finished: “DP politicians who want to play a role in the new democracy have little choice but to bail out.”
When the DP got 1.7% of the vote in 1994 and returned just seven MPs to parliament, Sparks said this was because it hadn’t taken his advice.
If the DP wanted a future it would have to “find its place on the side of the liberators and builders of the new society, not against them”, he said.
Accusations that he was an ANC praise singer seemed justified when he accepted nomination for the ANC election list.
After being told that it was a conflict of interest for him to be a candidate for an ANC parliamentary seat while running the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism, which he had founded in association with the University of the Witwatersrand in 1992, he withdrew his name.
In 1995 Nelson Mandela appointed him to the SABC board and in 1997 he was made editor-in-chief of TV news. He left after a year.
Sparks committed a disastrous faux pas last year when he told a largely black DA audience that apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd had been one of the country’s most intelligent politicians.
Among others he listed was not a single black politician.
He was crucified in the court of public opinion and made to publish an apology on pain of losing his column in Business Day. He was devastated.
Sparks, who is survived by four sons, married three times. His first and second wives died and his third marriage ended in divorce. — Chris Barron