STOP THE PRESS
Steiff, William
STOP THE PRESS To African regimes, no news is good news BY WILLIAM STEIF Gwen Lister and Ken Best have never met. She is a white South African; he is a black Liberian. But their stories...
...We're opposed to the double standards of the South African government and the Afrikaner churches," Lister, thirty, told me...
...Best held on to the letter for a month before deciding to print it...
...She was on her way back from a United Nations-sponsored conference in Paris when customs officers and security police seized the papers, documents, and pamphlets in her possession...
...Instead, Lister and editor Hannes Smith founded their own weekly paper, The Windhoek Observer...
...The reason: "defamation of the government's character...
...The censors accused the weekly of being "indecent," "harmful to public morals," and "prejudicial to the security of the state...
...There was none...
...Both worked for newspapers called, co-incidentally, The Observer...
...which is false in any material particular or which brings or is calculated to bring the federal military government or the government of a state or a public officer to ridicule or disrepute...
...getting the paper out, go home for a couple of hours' sleep, and come back to work...
...Smith William Steif, a former correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, reports frequently from various parts of the world for The Progressive...
...Nothing happened to me...
...But both have been put out of business by government, a fate shared by many of their colleagues, whether in the white-controlled fiefdoms of South Africa or the black-controlled nations south of the Sahara...
...But their stories converge...
...In Malawi, a number of journalists have been forced into exile, and the managing editor of The Times of Malawi was fired for giving too much play to the claims of the accused in a treason trial...
...Ken Best is a graying black man, forty-six, who lives on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia...
...The legal defense "drained our financial resources," she said, even though she was acquitted...
...Six years ago, however, The Advertiser was bought out, and the new owners insisted that editorial employees adopt a stance favorable to the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance, a political group controlled from South Africa...
...After another job in Liberia and one in Kenya, Best returned to Monrovia in May 1980 to edit and publish his own daily newspaper...
...But his independence and hard work got him in trouble...
...He graduated from Liberia's Cuttington College, worked for his government for a few years, went to Columbia University in New York City to take a master's degree in journalism, and worked at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in New York...
...The order also gives Major General Mu-hammed Buhari, the top leader of Nigeria, the right to close any media outlet...
...Best was fined $1,500...
...My phone is tapped under an 'emergency zone' decree that lets the police go into any house from Windhoek to the Angolan border...
...The experiences of Gwen Lister and Ken Best are symptoms of an affliction that has swept the African continent—the effort of government, any government, to curb the free press: Nigeria's military government, which ousted civilian leaders in 1983, is clamping down on the media...
...Lister went on trial last May...
...According to Lister, "the police have worked on us in other ways...
...Even in Senegal, a relatively free country by African standards, the editor of a satirical biweekly, Le Politicien, which is modeled on France's Canard Enchaine, was recently fined some $500 for poking fun at a government official...
...For this, he was arrested and jailed for nine days...
...The letter was written by a Gui-nean teacher who, like thousands of other Guineans...
...The Liberian government accused him of "defaming a fellow head of state...
...After graduating from the university there, she began a reporting stint at The Advertiser, the main daily in Windhoek...
...Last year they deported a BBC team...
...Both tried to report the news as best they could...
...There comes a time when you have to stand up...
...I spoke with Lister in the coffee shop of the Kalahari Sands Hotel in downtown Windhoek, the pleasant capital of Namibia (formerly known as South West Africa...
...But to those whose power depends on keeping the world as it is, the truth is best left unpublished...
...A third Guardian employee was taken away the next day...
...In each of these instances, journalists were punished for doing nothing more than describing and interpreting the world about them...
...Her film was also taken, and Lister was released after two and a half hours...
...road...
...For eight months she heard nothing...
...Best, his wife, and the paper's staff of nine were carted off to Monrovia's Military Post Stockade...
...The government has also issued a decree threatening to try anyone "who publishes in any form, whether written or otherwise, any message, rumor, report, or statement...
...The material, the government said, was "prejudicial to state security...
...We were out of business for a month," recalled Best...
...Namibian readers never got to see her dispatches from that meeting...
...Lister was charged with importing and failing to declare "seditious documents"—apparently a reference to the constitution of the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), which advocates armed struggle against the South African rulers of Namibia...
...Then, one day early this year, two South African security police served her with a summons to appear in court...
...Last April, The Guardian, the most popular daily, reported that its assistant editor and senior diplomatic correspondent "have been taken away by men of the Nigeria Security Organization...
...Blue-eyed and blonde, Lister grew up in Cape Town, South Africa...
...They raided my house when I was working for the BBC...
...South African officials banned the two issues in which they were contained...
...We were shut for two weeks...
...But in August 1983, The Observer ran a photo of a rutty country road, and the caption read, BAD, BAD...
...The four women on the staff were jailed for four days, the men for ten...
...Liberians had been ready a long time for an independent paper," Best explained as we drove from downtown Monrovia to his home...
...His Observer caught on in the euphoric atmosphere following the soldiers' coup of April 12, 1980, led by Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe, which overthrew the old Americo-Liberian hierarchy that had run the country for almost 150 years...
...A footnote to the story: Willis D. Knuckles, the BBC correspondent in Monrovia, spent five Weeks in the Military Post Stockade for filing a report on the forced shutdown of Best's newspaper...
...My wife Mae-gene and I sometimes would work until 5 a.m...
...Despite the harassment, Lister and Smith somehow managed to put out their paper—until late last summer...
...Best is awaiting a court verdict, and if it is favorable, "we have a marvelous staff of committed young fellows who could publish tomorrow...
...The Observer has been silent ever since...
...and the three were held for days—without charges—because the newspaper had reported on the reshuffling of Nigeria's ambassadors...
...The government took exception," said Best, "and out of the clear blue sky the Justice Ministry sent a busload of policemen and ordered us to close...
...It offered the liveliest reading in Namibia and attracted the largest circulation—9,000 subscribers...
...Later that month, the Justice Ministry ordered The Observer closed and filed suit to revoke the paper's articles of incorporation...
...In Sierra Leone, the editor of The Progress was arrested and detained for writing an article that caused a diplomatic row with Liberia...
...In January 1984, the government sued Best, claiming his paper misquoted Doe...
...The editor-in-chief of The Times of Zambia was "suspended" for criticizing what he considered improper use of Japanese aid...
...On June 29, 1981, The Observer ran a story that offended Doe, now known as Head-of-State-Com-mander-in-Chief Dr...
...Free to travel and report again, she went to Lusaka, Zambia, to cover a meeting of SWAPO leaders and delegates of the South Africa-backed Multi-Party Conference...
...had taken refuge in neighboring Liberia...
...Many newspapers, and most of the radio and television stations, are owned by the government anyway, so the decree is aimed at the few independent outlets...
...The South African government in Pretoria has run the old German Colony since 1915, but Windhoek, a city of 100,000, still retains traces of its German past—the big Lutheran church, for example, and the prevalence of German surnames...
...and Lister did not cater to the Afrikaners who dominate the region...
...About a year ago, Lister was detained at Johannesburg's Jan Smuts Airport...
...Of 6,268 miles of road, only 366 are paved...
...In November 1981, The Observer published an open letter to the dictatorial president of Guinea, the late Sekou Toure, imploring him to permit free enterprise in his nation...
...1982 was a good year," he said, smiling...
...he said...
...The irony is that a week later the Public Works Ministry apologized for Liberia's bad public roads...
...Samuel K. Doe...
...On August 15, South Africa's Publications Control Board in Cape Town decreed that The Windhoek Observer would be banned permanently...
Vol. 48 • October 1984 • No. 12
