Chapter 15 A black coup: Inkatha and the sale of Ilanga

Alison Gillwald; with content analysis by Cyril Madlala

In April 1987, Ilanga became the only commercial publication in South Africa to be owned directly by a political party. It was bought from the giant publishing house, Argus, by Mandla-Matla, an Inkatha-owned company under the directorship of its secretary-general, Oscar Dhlomo. All 21 editorial staffers refused to work as a result, demanding a reversal of the sale or transfers to other Argus publications. They were ordered to leave the building to make way for replacements. Describing the acquisition of Ilanga as a ‘black coup’, president of Inkatha, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, asked why black journalists were willing to work for newspapers owned by powerful white capitalist interests and which were substantially controlled by white political parties, but not for an authentic newspaper for the black nation. The journalists responded with an advertisement in local English language newspapers, after Ilanga refused to run it, explaining that it would be compromising to work for a single black political party in the current political situation in Natal. The need to be seen as independent in strife-torn areas of Natal was not merely a journalistic homily, but a safety device. Ilanga journalists said the sale made them ‘walking targets’ in recurrent township violence. At the time, three Ilanga journalists were in hiding after writing a series of articles about land transfers by Inkatha-linked town councillors.

This context of township dissent, reflected in the journalists’ dispute with management, is the background against which the takeover of Ilanga by Inkatha should be understood. Its first unofficial sortie into mass media had been with the Nation, distributed in lnkatha’s stronghold, the rural areas and which, after state harassment and financial problems, closed down indefinitely in 1980. With 58 per cent of Durban Africans sampled reading Ilanga and 45 per cent of Africans sampled in Pietermaritzburg, one might surmise that the takeover of Ilanga was part of Inkatha’s attempts to develop or secure its contested urban base.

Why did Natal Newspapers sell?

This fails to explain how Inkatha was able to acquire the largest vernacular newspaper in the country, with a small but consistent profit that serviced the only audience with growth potential ‒ the African market. It had a solid circulation of over 105 000 and, with readership statistics of over 1.2 million, it was the third most widely read paper in the country. Why did Natal Newspapers (NN), an Argus company formed in 1985 to incorporate the former Morning Group’s Natal Mercury into its Natal stable, consisting of the Daily News and Ilanga, sell to Inkatha? In his statement to the KwaZulu Legislative Assembly about lnkatha’s purchase of Ilanga, Buthelezi expressed gratitude to NN which he said:

were not anxious sellers taking the best offer they could get because they needed to sell Ilanga or wanted to sell it. I pay tribute to Natal Newspapers for their genuine interest in the development of the Press in South Africa. They saw the tremendous advantages which had accrued to Ilanga once we had taken over ownership of it. And they sold Ilanga to us because they believed that was the right thing to do for all Ilanga. Natal Newspapers must go down in the history of this country as the first newspaper company to give content to the concept of the quality [sic] of opportunity in SA.

While it would be nice to think Argus had acted benevolently, its record as a highly successful publishing company has been marked by often ruthless decisions motivated by profits. David Niddrie has suggested that the sale was part of a trend by the major press groups (Argus, Times Media Ltd, Nasionale Pers and Perskor) away from newspapers, to other media (M-Net) and non-media investments, and cites a rise to 32 per cent in Argus income from non-newspaper activities from 1985 to 1986. Certainly, since the introduction of television in the mid-1970s, newspaper houses had felt the struggle for advertising to be uneven and had felt compelled to diversify. But coinciding with this trend had been the expansion of a black market with rising incomes and educational levels, which was not nearly as saturated as is its white counterpart. It had relatively little access to television, making black newspaper advertising highly viable. The introduction of the Extra and Africa editions of the major dailies in the 1970s and efforts by managements in the 1980s to divert these into profitable area-specific knock-and-drops (advertising newssheets), demonstrates a decade-long struggle to reach target black markets without having profits eroded by costly legal and state actions arising from provocative editorial content. But advertisers prefer credible commercial publications with Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) listings and are prepared to pay more for space in them. The scramble for the anti-government City Press in 1984 when it was up for sale, and the somewhat anomalous and costly purchase of it by the pro-government Nasionale Pers are testimony to the belief that black editions were where profits could be extracted, despite the risk of government action. Although the management of City Press on occasion issued reprimands and policy statements on content to journalists, these were largely ignored and management seemed to tolerate the radical editorial position while circulation figures and, hence, advertising revenue rose.

The second reason Niddrie suggested for the sale was a trade-off, like the probably unspoken deal that led to the closure of the Rand Daily Mail and government granting the major newspaper groups a licence to operate M-Net. llanga was sold to Inkatha and the State kept its hands off The Sowetan. Such a deal suggests a degree of collusion between the State and Inkatha far beyond police turning a blind eye to vigilante activities. The disputes over editorial content before the sale were largely with Inkatha, not the State, and one would think the powers that be might find this pleasantly divisive. Also, if Argus needed to jettison problematic black publications, The Sowetan, one of the major victims of emergency press regulations, would seem to have been the obvious choice. Ilanga, started in 1903 as one of the first independent black publications, remained so for nearly 30 years before being taken over by Bantu World, which was bought out entirely by Argus in 1963, was one of Argus’s publications that did bring in profits and stayed within the bounds of the ever-increasing law.

Problems with Ilanga were rather internally focused and in 1985 a number of editorial members went on strike to protest about the news editor’s handling of copy, which they felt would make the publication appear pro-Inkatha. But this, even together with the speculation that NN might have feared becoming a boycott victim of Inkatha/United Democratic Front (UDF) rivalry, seems an unlikely explanation for the sale. Besides, given the inclusion of the Natal Mercury into NN, there would have been no alternative commercial news source to resort to during a boycott.

Niddrie seems to come closest to a likely explanation of why NN sold when he alludes to the rumoured low price and the depth of sympathy for lnkatha, both from Natal-based capital and the media, as indicators that Argus did not just want to sell Ilanga, but was keen to pass it on to Inkatha. But why were Natal-based capital and the press sympathetic to Inkatha? Had they always been? In numerous public addresses, Buthelezi and Oscar Dhlomo accused the local and international press of adopting ‘a deliberate and sophisticated strategy of stereotyping Inkatha as a violent, authoritarian and tribal movement’. 

The answer lies, if not directly in the KwaZulu/Natal Indaba of 1986, then in the climate set by the lndaba. The forerunners to the Indaba, the Buthelezi Commission of 1980 and the Lombard Plan, came and went with little attention from the commercial press, but the lndaba was the issue around which the Natal press attempted to mobilise readership. The Indaba topped its political agenda in an unprecedented way while the other two proposals barely made their way onto it. The Indaba cemented together senior editorial and newspaper managements and Natal capital in an indomitable band of consensus. Indeed, the relationship between the Indaba and Inkatha became so intertwined that Buthelezi explained opposition to the sale of Ilanga as indicative of the ‘extent to which divisiveness in Black politics is fostered by those opposed to the Indaba’, not lnkatha, although the implication was clearly there.

This explanation of the sale also takes care of the contention by media analysts in the commercial press at the time that the sale of Ilanga was determined by business interests and not political objectives, and that such deals need to be understood in terms of Argus’s commitment to profits.10 Explanations such as these fall into the liberal trap of seeing these areas as mutually exclusive. Commercial decisions are, of course, motivated by business interests, often longterm ones, which in turn are linked to political objectives.

'Ulibambe Lingashoni: A History of Ilanga Lase Natal Newspaper ' is published by Jacana Media