Special Hearings — Trojan Horse Hearings — 1997-05-20

DENNIS CRUYWAGEN: I shall go ahead.  I just want to make one or two observations before I begin.  Next to me sits probably one of the best photographers we have seen in this country.  Reference has been made to Peter Magabani who I know very
well, but Willie de Klerk is right up there.
 He has been here for a good few years, recording what has happened and never officially recognised for recording history.  He is a great photographer and a great newsman.
 Secondly, I don't want to dwell on the Trojan Horse because I am going to speak on how the Argus covered that event in Cape Town, but I do want to say that from my view it was a deliberate attempt and the intention I think, was to go out there and punish Black kids.  I shall begin now.
 I think I want to pay tribute to the young children of South Africa who were at school during the 1980's and who made a major contribution to our freedom.
 They were braved young people, armed with nothing more than stones, tyres, which created useful roadblocks I must say and (indistinct) of black smoke when set alight.  The desire to end apartheid was most probably their most powerful weapon.
 The streets of this suburb, I lived here, formed one of the many Cape Flats battlegrounds on which the faces the forces that the National Party had sent out to crush the resistance.  Back in 1985, it seemed that they clashed almost daily.
 Youthful anger as stones and tyres were no match against tear gas, rubber bullets, naked police brutality which knew no bounds.  There was no state of emergency in the Western Cape at that time, but police acted as if they were above the law.
 As reporters we witnessed these one sided exchanges and we were drawn in, we too had to take sides, because these were our children.  And these were our suburbs, and these were our people who were being beaten, sjamboked, shot at
with bird shot, assaulted and killed.  This happened in front of us and we were powerless to stop it.
 We often had to load people into our staff car and get them out of trouble spots, whether that was to safe houses or to hospitals.  It was part of our job and part of our duty because it was happening in our community.
 We thought I think foolishly then, that since the pen is mightier than the sword, we could write about the struggle and the price the youth had to pay.  We though we could expose police brutality, detention without trial and so-called public violence cases. 
 We thought too that our newspapers would not doubt our integrity and publish our accounts of what was really happening in our country.  After all, or so we thought, the English newspapers with their liberal traditions and opposition to the National Party and apartheid, would be just as shocked as we were and even pained and angered.  We thought too that these newspapers would support us. 
 I am afraid to say we were terribly wrong.  I am still angry when I recall the Trojan Horse incident.  Others have told you how it happened.  Willie next to me, had to fight with the then editor of the Argus to use his pictures the next day, he wasn't interested. 
 Maybe because White children weren't involved or killed.  No one said it but I got the impression that the official view was that Shaun Magmoed, Jonathan Claasen and Michael Miranda were shot and killed because they were doing something wrong in the eyes of the Argus then.
 I was then asked to write a first hand account of what had happened in Thornton Road.  Think about the many times when the South African government sent its troops across the
borders to raid ANC or PAC camps, and think of how the newspapers like the Argus, ran these reports and the headline and contrast that to how they covered the Trojan Horse.
 And it is clear where they stood and what they thought about this war which was raging out on the Cape Flats and on other parts of the country.
 But do not think that I condemn White journalists as a whole, there were committed White journalists on the Argus, they shared our anguish and our pain, they went out at night with us, or early morning and covered some of these events.
 But maybe I should pay tribute to someone like Gay Davis, Vernon Matzofolous, Pipa Green and Howard Harving.  We were a small group and often we came close to being killed.  But we did what we had to do because we believed in what we were doing and we believed that the struggle out there was the right thing to do.
 And also there are these people called drivers, often unpaid and while the journalists and photographers got the headlines, they took us into troubled spots, stayed up late with us and on occasions when Willie rather felt like partying, they stayed up late and took him and me home.
 And then Cris may not have been aware of that, but actually an Argus driver took the footage of the Trojan Horse to the airport.  His name is Bernie Cloete, he died last year and if the Argus had found out that we, Willie and I had told him to take it to the airport, all of us would probably have been fired.
 But he did it because we wanted the world to see the footage.  Similarly the Mail and Guardian, the Weekly Mail as it was known then, on that Friday ran the only first hand
account in print of what had happened in this country or here in Athlone, and I wrote it.  I didn't get a byline, because I would have been fired by the Argus, but the Argus did not want that account and I had to write it so that people could read what had happened.
 Our job really wasn't easy, we weren't welcomed on the Cape Flats, it was difficult to explain to people why we reported the unrest.  What the Argus often published was the official police account.  But still we went back there day after day because we had to do it, it was our job and as I said it was our people who were suffering.
 On the paper I think there was a culture of not rocking the boat, you know, of going along, of closing your eyes, there was a policy for argument sake if I could just digress for a minute, if you wanted to be a police reporter, you had to get official police accreditation.
 Newspapers did not resist it, they went along.  Similarly if you wanted to be a military correspondent, you had to be cleared by the military, the English press went along, I can't speak for the Afrikaans press because it was their government. 
 When a colleague Riana Rossouw was detained under Section 29 of the Internal Security Act, we were instructed not to link her with the newspaper when we wrote stories about her because we shouldn't embarrass the paper.
 She was later told that her political activities and involvement should stop.  Years later there was chap called Gregory Flack who was a police spy  and he confessed that he had been ordered to spy on me.
 The paper did nothing, you know.  Didn't run this story as prominently as it had been running say Vrye Weekblad.  It
was just another thing.  No wonder then that the Argus was known as a conservative paper.  No wonder too that today we have cries of despair that the standard of journalism is declining.
 I wish to say what standards.   We were not debriefed after the tear gas or rather the Trojan Horse, not after one of the many funerals that we went to cover.  In a nutshell we had a choice, we could stay and write about what was happening and hope that something would be published or we could leave for what was then known as Cape Town's biggest but probably  most conservative newspaper and continue to write and record history. 
 We stayed.  Willie and I formed the team and worked together for about five years.  Today we are free, thanks in part for the contribution of the young people.  Let us remember them with a simple plaque.  Their victory is our victory.
 It is ironic too that Black journalists today, the very same ones that had incurred the anger of the State and the displeasure of the newspapers, are now occasionally targeted by members of the new government.  Maybe we learnt then how to be brave and how to be forthright.
 And also ironic how some of these great White liberal newspaper editors of the past, are rushing to defend their contribution to the struggle against apartheid.
 We know better, we were there, thank you.