Copyright 2004 Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University  

South African democracy is just ten years old, and the shift from apartheid has been wrenching, both in the streets and in the newsrooms

By:  DOUGLAS FOSTER;
Douglas Foster is an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He supervises internships of journalism students at newspapers and broadcast networks in South Africa, including several of those mentioned in this article.

It's shortly after 9 a.m. on a cool April morning in Cape Town, the cusp of winter here, just one day before South Africa's third national democratic election. I'm here for a few days before heading on to Johannesburg. From the steps of the L-shaped building that serves as headquarters for Cape Town's two English-language daily newspapers, you can look south over your shoulder toward the craggy slopes of Table Mountain.

Ride the ancient elevator up to the cavernous newsroom that serves both the morning Cape Times and the afternoon Cape Argus. Through lead-framed windows, snatches of matte gray sky and the blue-green waters of Duncan Dock are visible. Farther out to sea lies Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned from 1964 to 1990.

It used to be illegal for newspapers like these to print Mandela's name or publish his photograph. Older reporters and editors in the room remember when "Whites Only" signs were posted at the entrance to the toilets. It's a brand new country, they'll tell you. These days it is opponents of the African National Congress, Mandela's party, who complain -- not about the threat of arrest, but rather about being treated as nonentities by the media (especially the government-controlled South African Broadcasting Corporation).

Reporters for the afternoon paper, dressed casually, jam into a conference room around a massive oval oak table. They're a thoroughly multiracial bunch, a sign of how much has changed since Mandela was elected president ten years ago.

A closer look tells a more nuanced story, however. At the news editor's end of the table mostly white staff members cluster. In the middle section are the mixed-race reporters ("coloured" in apartheid-era parlance, still widely used). At the far end of the table near the door, as if to signal their more recent arrival, are the black reporters.

The news editor, Vivien Horler, gets right to the big story. South Africa's first democratic election brought in Mandela as president in 1994, followed by transition to his successor, Thabo Mbeki, in 1999. Will tomorrow's vote lead to a third straight rout of opposition parties by the African National Congress? The strongest challengers -- Tony Leon's Democratic Alliance and Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party -- have been hammering on the government for failing to deliver a better life for the country's black majority. Unemployment is high, and the gap between rich and poor is growing. President Mbeki has been storming the country in shirtsleeves, promising to do better. The alleviation of poverty is at the center of the ANC's campaign.

A few reporters have been assigned to track down politicians at their voting stations for comment, but they protest that this is such a tired convention. Murray Williams, a white reporter, suggests finding especially interesting people who are not politicians to interview. A number of his colleagues chime in, mentioning neighborhoods in the city where well-known writers, architects, and theater people live.

A huff of disbelief blows down from the far end of the table. Zenzile Khoisan, a stick-thin investigative reporter in a black baseball cap, says: "That's all very nice for us to spend time in the wealthy districts, eh? Aren't they having an election in Khayelitsha, too?" He ticks off the names of other townships where blacks and mixed-race people had been forced to live under apartheid.

Williams stiffens in his chair. He's having none of his colleague's guff. "That's a very good question, Zenzile," he says with an air of condescension. "So maybe you can tell us what important nonpolitician lives out there in Khayelitsha."

An edgy silence descends. Reporters sitting at the predominantly white end of the table turn toward Horler, the news editor. At the other end, black journalists offer one another pinched glances. (Here's one more implication: The posh neighborhoods tend toward the opposition while the townships are heavily pro-ANC.) Nobody intervenes, or suggests the names of athletes, musicians, activists, or small business-women living in the townships who actually might be worth interviewing. An opportunity is missed.

The flare-up is short-lived. Some in the room are bound to think I've made too much of it. Most of the older editors in the room, and across the way at the Cape Times, boast anti-apartheid credentials, after all. And many of the younger white reporters, like Williams, are liberals who have spent most of their working lives in a supposedly new, nonracial South Africa. Williams argues that reporters in this newsroom have successfully moved beyond historical racial divisions. He and Zenzile just enjoy stirring things up, he says. "Things are generally cool."

Take others aside to chat one by one, though, and you'll find that tension is rife along racial lines. Nonwhite journalists point out that the complexion of the newsroom is still far paler than the population at large. Wouldn't real transformation -- the opening of professions long dominated by white men to nonwhites and women -- mean that only 10 percent of the reporters and editors should be white? Joseph Aranes, the gruff political editor of the Cape Argus, says pointedly: "Lots of white people in the newsroom don't know what the hell is going on in Cape Town!" Dozens more whites will have to move on, he adds, so that the papers can be "transformed to reflect our new reality."

Add another wrinkle: Mixed-race journalists report being lost between their white and black colleagues. They're 11.5 percent of the population in the country but make up 54 percent of the population in the Western Cape. Anti-apartheid activists made it a point to promote solidarity and subvert the government's categories by calling all nonwhites black, but shades of difference still matter. Older "coloured" reporters tell me, for example, that under apartheid they weren't considered "white enough" for equal treatment, but now they don't feel "black enough."

Some whites, on the other hand, complain privately of being sidelined, denied promotions on the basis of skin color, and inhibited from raising questions about falling editorial standards by the fear of being labeled racist. They worry about the inclination of most newspapers to hew so closely to the ANC line and wonder if black journalists have the appetite to be tough watchdogs over this government.

Newsrooms here are microcosms of the larger political atmosphere. President Mbeki has berated the newspapers for behaving like the opposition, and his ministers put particularly intense pressure on nonwhite editors. Opposition leaders, in turn, accuse reporters and editors of pro-government bias. Those criticisms carry a racial charge. Tony Leon, the white leader of the Democratic Alliance, the largest opposition party, argues that the transformation of newsrooms "has been used to basically cleanse the newsroom of the old order and bring in the new. That's why it's driven with such fervor in the government. The assumption is that if you're black and you're young you're likely to be an ANC supporter."

Bring up any number of charged subjects these reporters are likely to cover in any given week -- poverty, AIDS, economic development, corruption, crime, and even sports -- and you get an inkling of the challenge they face. Race still runs through everything. No issue seems more salient for the multiracial group sitting around the table in Cape Town, or more complicated, or potentially more volatile. Perhaps that's why race is so seldom discussed directly across racial lines.

The legacy of legal separation is partially to blame. Much of daily life for South Africans remains a deeply segregated experience. In spite of the emergence of a politically connected black elite, middle- and upper-income whites still may choose to live in a bubble, where nearly all the blacks they come across bag groceries, or serve food, or guard cars. That's the constraining backdrop for even the best-intentioned journalist.

While some elements of this situation may seem familiar, it's nothing like affirmative action in the U.S. Publishers here face stringent government fines if they fail to achieve "employment equity." Commercial pressures are probably even more influential. To grow, the country's largest newspapers, which traditionally served a white minority, must reflect the aspirations of a 79 percent black majority.

Before dawn on election day, reporters, including Zenzile Khoisan and Murray Williams, fan out across the Western Cape. In the city, they find respectable turnout. In the townships, where I'm shadowing reporters, lines of voters snake along dirt paths and meander up the street. The scene may not be quite as impressive as those iconic images of first-time voters that flashed around the world in 1994, but it's a robust demonstration of interest in the franchise all the same.

At the end of the day, the electorate, for the first time, delivers control of all nine provinces to the African National Congress. The party racks up nearly 70 percent of the nationwide balloting, its highest percentage of votes ever (though not the greatest number). The vote has, once again, fractured along racial lines: few whites voted for the ANC, and few blacks bolted to the DA -- a sign, some commentators worry, of a trend toward "re-racialization."

The morning after the election, the Cape Times devotes nearly all its space above the fold to a beautiful photograph of a long line of voters, in silhouette at sunset, in the midst of one of the townships. The headline reads: A NATION FINDS ITS FEET. This frankly celebratory treatment serves to underscore the fact that, although the paper has been around for generations, it now serves a changing readership in a multiracial democracy just ten years old.

In May I head northeast, some 900 miles, to Johannesburg, once the heart of gold mining country. Johannesburg is the buzzing ying to Cape Town's mellower yang. A crackdown on criminal syndicates in the past few years has made it safer than it was, though anyone you meet will rattle off a few hair-raising tales of carjackings and robberies.

The city and its outskirts make up a 220-square-mile colossus, much of it surprisingly wooded. It's the center of political and economic power in South Africa, and its racial makeup is a close proxy for the rest of the country. In Cape Town, where blacks were once forbidden to settle, less than a third of the population inside the city limits is black. Johannesburg is 73 percent black.

This city is a news junkie's dream. There are seven major dailies (one in Afrikaans) and nine weeklies, as well as zoned community papers with a combined circulation of over a million.

The city is the staging ground, in fact, for a fierce competition for new readers. Two years ago Naspers, a traditionally Afrikaans-language media conglomerate, launched a daily newspaper aimed at working-class blacks. In an environment where the circulation of most other papers held steady or declined, the Daily Sun proved an instant sensation with its menu of noir crime reporting, sex scandals, and witchcraft tales, leavened by plenty of how-to and self-help articles. The paper rocketed to more than 300,000 circulation by late June, making it the country's largest daily.

On an unseasonably hot morning in mid-May I've arrived with a few of my students in a community where circulation of the Daily Sun is booming. Soweto, the black township just a twenty-minute drive southwest of Johannesburg proper, is known around the world for a mass uprising that took place in 1976. Today the town is all fired up again, this time for a far more prosaic reason.

At Mofolo Cultural Bowl, with its large stage and lush lawn, we're about to learn, from a live broadcast projected on a huge screen, whether Morocco or South Africa will host the 2010 Soccer World Cup. It is impossible to overstate the significance of this decision. It seems as though every Walkman in the township is tuned to minute-by-minute reports about the progress of the lobbying effort by President Mbeki, Mandela, and Desmond Tutu. (Radio still has the greatest geographic reach in South Africa, far ahead of television and totally swamping print.) Crowds of children in shorts and faded shirts sit quietly on the grass as if waiting for the results of a big exam.

A hunky hip-hop star named Wendy pleads with two great powers -- the Lord and Mandela -- to exert their influence on the world soccer federation. "South Africa is calling on the Madiba magic," he sings, using Mandela's nickname, which means "grandfather."

The massive screen behind Wendy flickers with the image of a luxury sedan pulling up outside the soccer federation headquarters in Zurich. The crowd stirs. Mandela has arrived. His hair is a brilliant white and he's dressed in an ornate yellow silk shirt.

Children in the park leap to their feet, clapping as if he might hear them. Our emcee asks everyone to remain standing. He instructs us to hold hands. The announcer from SABC suggests that it's not too late to send instant messages of prayer from our cell phones. We join in one looping chain across the grass, my pale hands firmly grasped on each side by grown black men, both of whom are unashamedly trembling.

Finally, the federation president is handed an envelope: It's South Africa. I have been at scores of sports events and political rallies in my life, but have never experienced anything like this social explosion. People of all ages levitate, issuing hosannas. A cacophonous roar rolls on and on. Then the hugging begins, not pro forma handclasps but close, sustained embraces.

When the noise subsides, I fall into conversation with the young man on my left. As it turns out, he's a budding journalist. Bongani Mdagane, twenty-four, was raised in a rural province, and he quickly reveals himself to be the sort of bright, eager, and informed young person who ought to be drawn into the profession. He tells me that he's dying to become a full-fledged reporter. "I've got the will and the spirit to do it. It's the only thing I want to do," he says. He taps his chest. "It's the thing that moves me -- in here."

There are plenty of obstacles. A few years ago, Mdagane put himself through part of his first year of college-level journalism training at an expensive private academy. (These academies are notoriously inadequate at preparing students for a journalism career.) But he lost his job, couldn't pay the fees, and had to drop out.

Mdagane describes his conundrum without a stitch of self-pity. Looking around at the boisterous crowd, he adds: "I'm living in Soweto and I'd like to report the truth about what's happening here. But if I can't finish my studies because I can't get a job, how do I get started?"

He's placed his finger on the nub of the biggest problem -- the dearth of opportunities for bright and ambitious but undereducated blacks. How can editors here ever turn newsrooms into proxies for the population if neither the universities nor the newspaper companies have invested in the talents and aspirations of young people like him?

In downtown Johannesburg, a few blocks from the majestic Supreme Court building and not far from the world-famous Market Theater, two block-long buildings face off across Sauer Street -- the national headquarters of the African National Congress and of the Independent Group, the country's largest chain of dailies (of which the Cape Town papers are a part).

The Star, 117 years old, is the flagship of the Independent Group. The paper, which for much of its history represented the perspective of English-speaking whites, also played a significant role in the struggle against apartheid. The newspaper served, too, as a kind of training ground for many of the best journalists in the country, including influential black editors like Mathatha Tsedu at City Press, Mondli Makhanya of the Sunday Times (the largest Sunday paper), and Justice Malala at This Day.

The paper lost a chunk of its circulation, along with its luster, after its halcyon days in the early 1990s. The building now is a dreary, stained, run-down box. When Sir Anthony O'Reilly, an Irishman who runs Independent News & Media Ltd., bought The Star in 1995, many thought it would herald a new era of prosperity. The dilapidated facilities and overstretched editorial staff prove how illusory this prediction was.

"There's a doctoral dissertation still to be written about how this one man, Tony O'Reilly, destroyed South African journalism," says Ryland Fisher, who edited the Cape Times for several years and now runs a key journalism training program at Peninsula Technikon.

On a morning in early June, I catch up with Moegsien Williams, The Star's current top editor. He doesn't agree with Fisher, his friend and former colleague. At the moment he's running an editorial meeting. It's been a hell of a month for news: the seating of Parliament after the election; the president's appointment of ministers; the deepening split within the ANC over a crooked arms deal in which the deputy president, Jacob Zuma, has been implicated; the on-again, off-again rollout of AIDS medication in public health clinics; a series of horrific multiple murders; a raft of vicious sexual assaults; the death of the pop icon Brenda Fassie after a drug overdose; a vigorous debate within the ANC over affirmative action, with both the defense minister and the minister of sport raising doubts about the government's policy; and the announcement of the World Cup selection.

It's a bit disorienting to find Williams running a mainstream newspaper. He was once a union activist and cofounder of radical publications inspired by Steven Biko. His closest friends, including his current boss, Nazeem Howa, executive director of operations for the group, worked with him at South, a movement publication whose primary goal was to publicize the activities of banned organizations and to overthrow the apartheid state. After 1994 Williams rocketed to the top, serving in swift succession as the first nonwhite editor at Pretoria News, then Cape Argus, then Cape Times, and now The Star.

At the meeting, he finds himself enmeshed in a discussion of complaints about the paper's political coverage. "Tony Leon doesn't like us," one of the editors volunteers, speaking of the leader of the opposition. "He sees us as the lapdog of the ANC." Williams, fifty-two, is a poker-faced man with a deceptively laid-back style. But the allegation of bias clearly stings. "That criticism is just ridiculous," he says. He jabs his thumb in the direction of Sauer Street. "They think it's convenient that ANC headquarters is right there, as if we go over all the time taking orders."

Actually there have been steady complaints about bias from the other direction as well -- from Mandela to the current ANC leadership -- accusing editors of behaving too much like the opposition. The critics, both from the government and the opposition, don't understand the delicate balance that a "new cadre of reporters and editors" must now pull off, Williams says.

When you consider how poorly trained many in this new cadre are, you get a sense of the magnitude of the challenge editors like Williams face. In a country of eleven official languages, many of his reporters (including the whites raised speaking Afrikaans) struggle to write well in English. For some of his reporters, English is a third language.

University programs and craft schools simply aren't turning out graduates ready to enter the newsroom, Williams says. This isn't just the predictable complaint of someone from a pioneering generation. An industrywide survey several years ago by the South African National Editors' Forum revealed that many reporters who had been on the job from two to five years had a limited mastery of basic journalistic skills. A majority could not answer the following question correctly: "If 4,000,000 Zimbabwean citizens indicated that they were going to vote, and 2,000,000 indicated that they were not going to vote, what percentage of Zimbabwean citizens will vote?"

The survey spawned a terrible new word: juniorization. It covers a multitude of sins. When more experienced reporters left the profession because they were traumatized by covering the political violence that swept the country in the 1980s, or crime or AIDS in the 1990s; when talented reporters get snatched up at double their salaries by government or corporations as spinmeisters; when someone gets promoted beyond his abilities, and even when a reporter gets a story wrong, "juniorization" is the one-size-fits-all label used to shame newsroom denizens without mentioning explicitly that most of the "juniors" are black.

The reporters in The Star newsroom are a congenial, multiracial bunch. They treat their boss like a venerated eccentric uncle. Take a few of them aside for lunch or a beer, though, and you'll get a glimpse of how anguished they feel about conditions in the newsroom. They, like many of their editors, wish Williams would stand up to the bean counters in the company and fight for more resources. On some days, they point out, there are just a dozen reporters on call to cover a metropolis of more than 3.2 million people, and that's not counting Soweto and the other townships.

In the past decade, The Star's editorial staff has been slashed roughly in half, to about 120. The paper's lauded in-house Cadet School was shut down just as several executives were arguing that both entry-level and advanced training was needed to ease the historic transition about to occur in its newsroom.

Thin staffing means less of an opportunity for editors to mentor young talent, the reporters point out. It translates into a harsher environment for newcomers trying to find their footing. It also means less of a chance for reporters to specialize and deepen their expertise. It means fewer enterprise stories. It means more "what" and "when" stories, less analysis and explication of the "why."

Back in his office, Williams acknowledges that the Independent Group was far too slow in recruiting, training, promoting, and retaining nonwhite talent. "Many other institutions in South Africa saw the writing on the wall in the 1980s," he says. "We woke up in 1994."

But Williams objects to the suggestion that editorial values have been erased by business-side objectives. The way he sees it, he helped his boss face down formidable threats to the paper's survival. Circulation had fallen from a high of about 230,000 in 1994 to a low of 152,000 four years ago, he says. Under his direction, earnings trebled and The Star's circulation ticked back up to 172,000.

"The reality is that I've helped grow The Star and make the paper play the role that it has to play in the society," he says. "You won't have the opportunity if you let the business fall apart."

The paper "is in the marrow of Johannesburg," Williams argues, a city that, like South Africa, has been in a state of flux for the past decade. Perhaps it reflects its place and time. Even though the paper has a majority of black readers now, The Star is still widely seen as "white controlled." Williams wants to reinvent the paper for its multiracial future -- something his chief competitors, who aim at either white or black, don't have to do.

He takes a deep breath. The success or failure of his effort to produce a paper through which the city of Johannesburg "talks to itself" will turn, to a large degree, on transforming the newsroom into a reflection of the world outside this building. "If we don't succeed in transforming this country and affirming the majority -- and if the majority of the people don't have a stake in its survival -- everything will be lost," he says softly. He points over his shoulder at the newsroom. "The young black reporters out there," he adds, "are the future custodians of a free press in this country."

At the edge of Auckland Park -- one of Johannesburg's most vibrant neighborhoods, where lofts, handicraft shops, cafes, and clubs signify the next hip thing -- you'll find the brick-and-glass headquarters of the Mail & Guardian, circulation 39,000. This newspaper is South Africa's intellectual leader, with a venerable history of anti-apartheid exposes and a strong reputation, post-1994, for breaking stories about corruption within the new government.

On a cold, gray morning in late June, Ferial Haffajee, hired as the editor in January, greets me in her office with a frank challenge: "The state of our media is healthier than the state of your media," she says, launching into a critique of flag-waving American press coverage of the war in Iraq. It's been a bad few months for the U.S. reputation among South Africans, and the worst of it, such as photos of prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib prison, has gotten splashy page-one play.

Haffajee, a thirty-seven-year-old classified as Indian-Malay under the old apartheid distinctions, grew up in Bosmont, a mixed-race township outside Johannesburg. "I grew up thinking of myself as black because my brothers taught me about black consciousness," she says.

She started working at the paper as a business writer in the late 1990s, went off to the Financial Mail, and returned to the staff two years ago. She was named its first female black editor when Mondli Makhanya, a black man, moved on to edit the Sunday Times. (Makhanya heralds his successor's appointment as a historic moment in South African media. "After ten years of democracy, and fifteen years after Mandela was released," he told me, "it's astonishing that we have only one female editor of a mainstream newspaper in the whole country.")

Haffajee cocks her head toward the doorway, listening to the buzz of a newsroom coming to life. Her chief reporters and editors file into her office for their 10 a.m. editorial meeting. Ten years ago the Mail & Guardian had a mostly white staff. The reporters in the room today are a mix of black and white, men and women.

There's a looser, more congenial atmosphere in this newsroom than in others I've visited. Wisani Wa ka Ngobeni, an investigative reporter at the paper, addresses a colleague's story about a small-town mayor accused of steering contracts to his numerous wives. The mayor is an ANC stalwart. Throw in the fact that one of the mayor's wives is white, and you might expect some awkwardness.

"One of the wives divorced him," Ngobeni reports.

"They all divorced him?" a reporter asks.

"No, just the white one." Everyone laughs -- perhaps not for precisely the same reason, but more or less at the same time.

Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya reads his planned lead for a takeout on the country's proposed hate-speech law, which would criminalize public advocacy of hatred based on race, ethnicity, gender, or religion: "If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, then freedom of expression must be the bigot's favorite hideout." There's a hush in the room, and the audible sound of grinding teeth from an editor sitting near me.

Haffajee leans back in her chair. There's a colloquy, partly along racial lines, about the importance of protecting people from verbal assault on the one hand, and protecting freedom of speech on the other. It's a bracing exchange. "We have to go for absolute freedom of expression," Haffajee says, ending the debate.

The meeting moves on, but Moya's article morphs over the next few days into the lead essay for the "Comment and Analysis" section. The cover story is on the nepotistic mayor with the complicated home life.

A few days later, I have lunch at a cafe called the Color Bar, with Ngobeni. He's just twenty-seven and he came to the paper through its renowned training program. Ngobeni tells me that although there's been tremendous progress under Haffajee's leadership, the paper is not yet the Promised Land. A few weeks ago, for example, a picture of an unidentified black man was splashed on the cover under the headline: IS THIS THE FACE OF CORRUPTION? Since there was no caption identifying the man as a corrupt official accused of a particular crime, a black face was used in a generic way to symbolize a problem. "That was bad! That was bad, bad, bad!" Ngobeni says, getting worked up all over again.

He acknowledges that his reaction to the photo connects to a deeper discomfort. Many of his contemporaries consider ANC figures now in government to be heroic. He finds himself worrying about the effects of a steady diet of stories about corruption in the public sector -- as opposed, say, to a focus on white-collar fraud in business. The careless pursuit of such stories could even undercut confidence in black majority rule. "I don't think many white journalists see this dimension," he says.

After work, I head back to the Color Bar for a beer with Ngobeni's white colleague, Stefaans Brummer. (Brummer eschews apartheid-era race classifications, preferring to call himself "African.") He joined the staff right before the 1994 election, when it was "a lot whiter," he says, after getting his start in journalism as a reporter at the Cape Argus. He saw the struggle against apartheid up close; his biggest story from those days was an expose about a massacre of ANC supporters in one of the homelands.

Integration of the newsroom was overdue on the merits, in Brummer's view. But he says transformation was necessary for journalistic reasons, too. For a time after the 1994 election there was a fair amount of "sunshine journalism," in which the transition to ANC rule was mostly lauded, uncritically. In the mid-1990s, when the paper began breaking stories of government corruption, "We were increasingly attacked by officials accusing us and others of racism," Brummer says.

So he looks at the changing demography of his own newsroom from a slightly different angle: "The newsroom was under pressure to transform. But transformation did not mean a change in mindset about our journalistic responsibilities," he says. "Sure, the newsroom has become more representative. And that has given us more of an opportunity to be tough."

In many ways, Brummer and Ngobeni exemplify how transformation is supposed to work. They've recently been at loggerheads a few times about "a certain investigation," Brummer acknowledges. One of the chief antagonists in this investigation is white, the other black. Brummer has a more solid line into the whites while Ngobeni is tighter with the blacks. They've gone back and forth on how to interpret the information they've gleaned. But they haven't spoken much, at least not yet, about how race might be influencing their own relationship or their treatment of the story. Why not? Brummer turns up his palms. "Race is often the final barrier."

Back at the office, Haffajee is proofing final pages. Highlighted streaks at her crown set off jet-black hair pulled tightly back. She checks the stories that have been taped to the windows of her office -- one about a nanny fired by her employer when she tested HIV-positive, the other about threats from the government of Zimbabwe to stop the Mail & Guardian from circulating there.

There are other, more serious threats. A collection of lawsuits filed by ANC officials has cost both time and money. Competitive commercial pressures are intense. "Democracy came to South Africa just as globalization hit," she points out. Pressure to do more with less collides with the obligation to train the next generation of crusading journalists. "The changes we need to make will never come as a result of what politicians tell us to do. In the end, it will come only from us," she says.

At the end of our conversation, Haffajee says something that startles me, perhaps more than anything else I've heard in newsrooms around South Africa. She tosses off casually that she expects to clear out of the editor's office within a few years. She plans voluntarily to give up the influence she acquired only six months ago as the first young woman to edit the Mail & Guardian.

"Why in the world would you do that?" I ask. She considers me coolly, an eyebrow lifted as if I should have that figured out by now. There's a "stage we need to go through" before reaching the nonracial goal of the South African liberation struggle, she says. She ticks off, one by one, the names of even younger reporters on staff. "Because within a few years any one of them will be ready to take my place," Haffajee says softly. She pauses. "And because I'm not black."