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Opinionista

The path carved out by the Weekly Mail

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Ismail Lagardien is a writer, columnist and political economist with extensive exposure and experience in global political economic affairs. He was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy.

I have always believed that newspapers are good measures of the places where they are published. Mail & Guardian is still the best print newspaper in the country after thirty years. Long may it last.

It is summer here, in Bonn, where the waters of the River Rhine run steadily towards the North Sea. It is officially the first day of summer, and the longest day of the year. It’s cold and rainy; miserable, like Cape Town in winter.

I have gone through the Sunday papers. Well, at least the parts that are available online, and will start reading a week-old copy of the Mail & Guardian, that most trusted and respected source of South African news and analysis for the past 30 years – at least to me it has been. A colleague arrived in Germany this week and brought me a copy. Whenever anyone asked what they should bring me from South Africa, during the times that I have lived and worked abroad, I always asked for a copy of the Mail & Guardian, or the ‘Weekly Mail’ as I often still refer to it. It’s an old habit. The paper has special place in my heart, and an important place in the history of the past three decades of South African media.

I remember, quite vividly, the winter of 1985 – thirty years ago, last week – when the Weekly Mail, the forerunner of the Mail & Guardian, was born. When we set out to produce the Weekly Mail, one of the main objectives was to produce a newspaper that could be read for at least five or six days after it was first published, on Fridays.

The reference to ‘we’ is simply because of my presence, at its birth. If the truth be known, I was merely a saamloper. What, you may ask, is a saamloper? When I was a child there were children who started school at the age when they qualified for enrolment. Those who reached the qualifying age after the cut-off date could attend classes, but were never, officially, enrolled. These children were known as ‘saamlopers’. Those who walk along with others.

By the time I joined the folk at the Weekly Mail, I had battled along as a junior reporter and photographer for four years or so, eking out a living on a very basic retainer with SAAN. My joining them was quite fortuitous, it should be said. I was in the Rand Daily Mail’s newsroom when the announcement was made that the newspaper would fold, and right then a solidarity was born among a handful of us. Fast forward to a couple of months later, and we sat on that tacky orange carpet in the Weekly Mail’s first offices in Braamfontein, plotting the impossible. Someone once said it is only impossible until it’s done. We did it.

Over the first two years of the Weekly Mail I took average pictures, did the listings (very badly), and on Thursday nights I pretended to work ‘on stone’ (being at hand when the presses ran) in Springs, drove the load of freshly printed papers, first, to drop off a few bundles at the airport, then drove to our offices in Braamfontein, where a few of us, including partners and friends, sat on the newsroom floor labelling and bundling subscriptions, and, by four in the morning, sometimes accompanied by Jeff Zerbst, I would drive off to do home deliveries across the suburbs. We would return to the office by seven or eight, in time to take a load of freshly labelled bundles and packages to the post-office. After that, the working day would start, seamlessly, in preparation for the next edition… On Saturdays I would work for the Sunday papers of The Argus group – to pay the rent – and on Sundays I would be back at the offices of the Weekly Mail, working on the listings. It was all a terrible blur, with the Cherry Faced Lurchers somewhere in among it all.

During those early days the Weekly Mail was like our destiny each week. What Stendhal wrote about books (a book is an event) was true about the Weekly Mail; it was always a weekly event in our lives. We looked forward to it. With trepidation we looked forward to putting it together, and enjoyed it for a few hours after the paper came out, and then it was back to the agony of the next edition.

Back to the future, and among the print media, the Mail & Guardian is still the best-read of the week. It still sets the standard for journalism, writing and investigation in the printed media. The thing that was almost ingrained (by accident or design) in the Weekly Mail, was the lack of a competitive edge at the time. Of course, the editors of the Weekly Mail may disagree. I would insist, though, that there was such a yawning gap for critical alternative journalism during the mid-eighties that we did not have to compete with other newspapers. Once we settled into that gap, we competed only with ourselves, to be a better newspaper every week. We did not always get it right, but we established a space, in South African journalism, which the Mail & Guardian, today, holds, and for which there are no challengers.

After the first two years, I joined Sowetan, writing, full-time, and later became the newspaper’s political correspondent. I stopped taking pictures and focused, with Aggrey Klaaste (may his gentle soul rest in peace) and Joe Thloloe, on making Sowetan the best newspaper in the country. We got masses of readers, but struggled with the content. Of all the arguments I had with Klaaste, over the seven or eight years I worked on Sowetan, the one we had over writing excellence was always the most difficult. Aggrey and Joe had objectives and targets that were different from my own. They had to make the paper commercially successful, and I had the privilege of idealism. I believed that a newspaper’s success was measured in one thing only – good writing, not free give-aways. I still battle to write well, and may, yet, become a good writer. I continue to believe, though, that good writing is what makes a good newspaper, not gimmicks and supplements or handouts and flyers. We did a lot of that on Sowetan. The Weekly Mail has been steadfast in its beliefs, though. Successive editors always placed a premium on high quality journalism.

Although the Weekly Mail shifted to the right, notably under Howard Barrell, it has remained focused on critical journalism and good writing. It is still the best print newspaper in the country, never mind the quarter-life crisis stilyagi, and the living-life-cynically-hipsterati. Then again, in an earlier incarnation they may well have been irascible drunks who perceive themselves radical, irreverent and unreliable. I have no doubt that there would have been times when, as Gilbert Chesterton wrote about Thomas Carlyle, they may have battled with the truth of their message, with what they sought to write about, the accessibility of their message, and they may, from time to time, have attempted to explain their gospel in terms of their livers and their demons. That, anyway, was the way it was with us, during the first cold winter of the first state of emergency, and the birth of the Weekly Mail thirty years ago.

I have always believed that newspapers are good measures of the places where they are published. Outside Britain, especially London, South Africa has an extraordinary range of newspapers. It’s not clear where printed media will be in a decade or so, and how the shift to online media will affect journalism. What does seem clear is that online journalism will remain in our future, and go from strength to strength. In South Africa we will continue along the path established by the Weekly Mail. DM

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