In September 1989, four days before parliament held elections, a massive anti-apartheid demonstration flowed past Newspaper House. The police began to break it up and spray protesters with purple dye.
The strategy went badly wrong when a demonstrator got hold of a hose and turned it on the police. The boys in blue became the boys in purple. A Cape Times photographer caught the scene and his picture was splashed on the front page the following morning.
The security police were swiftly at Newspaper House waving the restrictive media regulations. Koos Viviers, the editor of the Cape Times, recalled in Gerald Shaw’s book The Cape Times: An Informal History that the cops were more than usually annoyed.
Dire consequences could flow from such a disregard of the emergency regulations.
Shaw quoted Viviers: “Yet how could we neglect, even at the risk of prosecution, to report this marvellous event right under our noses and leave bewildered readers to wonder how cars, pavements and buildings had undergone a startling change of colour. ‘The purple shall govern’, some wag graffitied on the buildings – and, of course, they did.”
Viviers, who ushered the Cape Times into democracy, died of cancer in 1999. The editor he had replaced, Tony Heard, said Viviers genuinely held out against tyranny in the darkest years of apartheid rule.
The 2014 editor of the Cape Times, Gasant Abarder, was in Grade 11 in 1994. He landed a job at the paper in 1999, the year Viviers died.
“I lived in Woodstock and was looking for a job as a journalist. One day I heard a loud boom. I knew it was a bomb. I ran towards the sound of the blast and saw a burning car outside a police station. It was the days of urban terror in the Western Cape.
“I started taking pictures. Cape Times photographer Benny Gool arrived a few minutes later, but by then the blaze had been extinguished. He asked if he could buy the picture from me. I told him I’d write the story and give the pics but I wanted a job in return.”
And that’s how Abarder got inside the Cape Times.
“The Cape Times has stayed true to its ideals of a paper that shines a spotlight on injustice, but it has to forge a different terrain in this age of new media, social media and digital journalism,” he says.
In 1994, Jane Mayne was a freelance music reporter, hooked on jazz, African jazz, rock and world music.
“All through the 1980s, up until 1994, much of South African creative arts was fuelled by the spirit of protest. Spurred on by symposiums like the 1982 Culture & Resistance Festival in Botswana, ‘cultural workers’ attempted to steer the trajectory of culture in a progressive direction. This fight for liberation was embraced by all mediums – fine arts, music, theatre, film, photography, dance, writing and poetry,” said Mayne, now the Cape Times arts editor.
“This heartfelt thrust to use art as a weapon of the Struggle lent extra depth and breadth to the originality of expression of the time – an aspect sorely lacking post 1994 – particularly in music and theatre.”
Aziz Hartley was a Cape Times messenger whose job was to run between Parliament and the newsroom. “I’d bring documents, minutes of meetings and briefings in Parliament so the news editors knew what was going on.”
On April 27, he got to the voting station at 5am. “There were already 300 people queuing. The vibe was fantastic. The newsroom was quiet because everyone was out. I was sad that I couldn’t be in the field. I was in the office, taking dictates.”
Hartley already had a keen interest in becoming a reporter and, he says, the election lit that fire. He nagged the news editor, Colin Howell, to let him cover a story. On August 9, Women’s Day, he finally got a break.
“There was a report of a fire and because it was a public holiday the newsroom was empty. Howell looked at me, ‘Okay, you’ve been nagging me for a long time – go do it.’ The angle was on a woman firefighter. That was the start of my reporting job.” Hartley is now the acting night news editor.
Cape Times cartoonist Tony Grogan was already a 20-year veteran. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he dedicated most of his ink and paper to biting satire of the National Party and PW Botha. The 1990s were just as politically charged – if not more – but Grogan said he found his work more difficult.
Part of his job was to capture the joy and excitement that surrounded the new vote. He remembers a cartoon featuring the then-head of the IEC in a maternity ward holding up a symbol of the vote. Instead of proclaiming, “It’s a boy!” the judge yells, “It’s a joy!”
“So many people came out here anticipating disaster and they saw hope.”
Grogan remained on the staff until 2005, and still draws the “Crack of Dawn” cartoons on the front page.