Editor as Mediator: A Profile of Albert Cartwright in Early Twentieth Century South Africa
Authors: Gandhi Gopalkrishna 
Published: January 2023

As part of society, journalists and editors can play and often have played, in country after country, over different periods, crucial roles outside the columns of the newspapers or media platforms they work for. They can further causes, support campaigns, oppose the official and social establishments of the day. If and when they do that, they cannot but carry something of the stature of their profession on their shoulders, to the benefit perhaps of that role and to the augmentation of their public personalities.

Albert Cartwright (1868–1956) had worked in a number of newspapers in South Africa in the turbulent period around the Second Boer War and later, opposing the ruling order in some crucial respects, beyond the call of ‘editorial’ duty. As a friend of General J. C. Smuts, South Africa’s most powerful politician and of M. K. Gandhi, who was pitted in a steadily escalating struggle against the Smuts regime, Cartwright as the then editor of The Transvaal Leader mediated between the General and his Indian opponent during the gutsy barrister’s first incarceration (1908). This led to a thawing of the relations between the Boer and the Indian and the forming of a patently conflicted yet elusively cordial equation between them, which eventually helped in the reaching of the famous ‘Agreement’ (1914) on the Indians’ grievances in that country. I intend to explore that role played by Cartwright both to describe his character and personality and also to draw attention to the fact that freedom’s battles have been not un-often, fought and in some of their ‘theatres’, won, by individuals from the world of the Press who have worked, almost unseen, from the wings with the ‘pen’ goading the process.

Editor as mediator? Now what is that about? Editors helm newspapers and journals, they write editorials, sometimes fight their proprietors for their autonomy and more often capitulate to the owner’s control. They come thereby to be admired and respected or neither admired nor respected. They resist political authority and pay a price for that, or they ‘fall in line’ and pay a higher price in terms of credibility. But mediation? How does that become part of an editor’s role?

It can and does, because public life, as life itself, is not all black and white. There are areas which can be called a blend of both and are like black and white photographs and films are quite grey and misty, something that makes the films of Satyajit Ray, for instance, ring so true. And editors, who are not in politics but are situated on its rims, while not being players themselves are yet so close to the action that happens around them as to be indistinguishable from its voltage. They can find themselves sought for or seeking clarifications, being offered or offering suggestions. It is in them to exacerbate or alleviate tensions, encourage or discourage policy and programmes and indeed, action including belligerence.

While doing so they become mediators within themselves as well, mediating between their inner voice and prudence, the first impelling them to intervene and the second recoiling from overt action. That is the most difficult of the mediations they are called upon to attempt.

The ‘loci’ of this essay is South Africa and the role of the press in that country during the turn of the nineteenth century when war and brutality overwhelmed that part of the African continent. Two striking Africans appeared in the word of journalism there at the time. The first was John Tengo Jabavu (1859–1921) of the Eastern Cape who as a teacher began to write articles for some South African newspapers in English and after apprenticing himself to a printer, by 1884, founded his own newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (‘Black Opinion’). This appeared in Xhosa, a brave and pioneering venture. Jabavu found himself at the intersection of liberal ideas in the Cape’s South African Party and the repressive policies of Cecil Rhodes’s ‘Progressives’. The second was John Langalibalele Dube (1871–1946) of the Natal, an essayist, educator and articulate politician who with his wife Nokutela founded the first Zulu/English newspaper Ilanga lase Natal (The Sun of Natal) in 1903. Deeply influenced by Booker T. Washington whose work he knew at the first hand as a student in the USA, Dube wrote for and spoke to a mixed audience in South Africa, wanting to combine western education and mores with local customs and traditions.

Journalism, editorship and interventions by people of the eminence of Jabavu and Dube who belong to the place is important and impressive and impactful. But when the person concerned is an ‘outsider’, such a role gets invested with an additional stamp—that of a somewhat lonesome individuality.

This is what happened with two of Jabavu’s and Dube’s contemporaries, M. K. Gandhi (1869–1948) who founded and ran Indian Opinion from Durban and Phoenix in 1904, mainly on the issues facing the Indian South African community, and the British-born subject of Victorian Britain, and essentially a visiting Briton, Albert Cartwright (1868–1956).