Courage in South Africa

Upon hearing that a South African paper had published a sensational expose of conditions in the country's prisons, the London Sunday Times sent a cable to its Johannesburg stringer asking for details. "I dare not risk prosecution and gaoling by cabling this story," answered Stringer Benjamin Pogrund. He had reason for his fears. He had written the story in the first place for the nation's most outspoken newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail. And Prime Minister Verwoerd's police were already making trouble.

Pogrund's expose was based on the experience of South African Art Teacher Robert Harold Strachan, 39, who had served a three-year sentence for political conspiracy, and was so sickened by what he saw that he went to the Rand Daily Mail to tell all. Editor Laurence Gandar (TIME, Jan. 8), checked carefully, put Pogrund to work, then published Strachan's appalling story of filth and disease, of beatings and other tortures suffered mainly by blacks in South Africa's prisons.

As soon as the first two installments of the three-part series appeared, the police put Strachan under house arrest, then dropped in on the Rand Daily Mail and confiscated the typescripts of the series. The final installment had already been set, and the paper courageously went ahead and printed it. When no other newspaper would touch the story, the Rand Daily Mail blandly noted: "There is no onus on any person who has copies of the three issues to dispose of them."

It was the London Daily Mail that took the hint. Its editors simply tracked down a Londoner with a subscription to the South African paper and lifted the story, then splashed it across the front page. Editorialized the London paper: "Now Gandar awaits the knock on the door in the darkness at noon which is moving across South Africa. For this is the testing time for those journalists and editors in that country who have risked jail and intimidation to keep their press free."

Editor Gandar, who has been threatened many times before by the government, is not especially perturbed. Under the Prisons Act, he is safe from prosecution so long as he can verify his facts. He is sure he can. He is now collecting some affidavits on prison conditions from other ex-convicts and preparing further exposes. "We have opened up a chink in the curtain of secrecy surrounding our prisons," he wrote in an editorial last week. "We are now going ahead to bust it wide open."

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