News from faraway places takes on a riveting closeness when it happens to someone you know.
My world suddenly got very small when I heard two recent news items about two Africans I knew. One died, the other was arrested.
Donald Woods died in London after a long fight with cancer on Aug. 19. He was 67.
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Four days earlier, Geoffrey Nyarota, 50, editor of the Daily News, Zimbabwe’s only independent daily, was arrested along with three staff members for practicing what Americans would call good journalism.
One was a white South African who found out that his worst enemies were not black. The other is a black Zimbabwean whose worst enemies are not white.
I have been proud to know both men as role models. Despite our vastly different backgrounds, we belong to the same misunderstood minority group: We are journalists.
You may remember Woods from the 1987 film “Cry Freedom.” Directed by Richard Attenborough, the film starred Kevin Kline as Woods and Denzel Washington as “Black Consciousness” movement leader Steve Biko.
As editor of a 30,000-circulation newspaper in coastal East London, South Africa, Woods’ attacks against apartheid, his country’s now-defunct system of racial segregation, made him the nation’s most famous charismatic and controversial journalist. A fifth-generation South African, he grew up the way most whites of his generation did, as a believer in apartheid. As a law student, he changed his mind and later turned to journalism.
In the mid-1970s, he tried without success to persuade government officials to talk to Biko. Instead, Biko was arrested by security police in September, 1977. He was beaten unconscious and driven naked and in chains about 700 miles to the prison where he died. He was 30 years old.
Woods’ outraged crusade after that death led to his being “banned” for five years, which confined him to his home and prohibited him from writing or being in the company of more than one other person. Shots were fired at his house. He eventually fled with his family to London.
Woods lived long enough to return to his homeland as an honored man after apartheid fell. Now we have to turn next door to Zimbabwe, which shifted to black-majority rule a decade before South Africa, to see President Robert Mugabe shattering the hopes he once cultivated for his region’s post-colonial future.
The story that brought the hammer down on Nyarota and the Daily News was a report that police vehicles were spotted ferrying party militants in what the newspaper called “well-orchestrated acts of lawlessness” in the looting of some white-owned farms.
Mugabe has persistently denied that his government backs the raids against white farmers that have been led by veterans of the country’s revolutionary war. Of course, he has not condemned the raids, either. At 77 and losing popularity after 21 years as he faces next year’s elections, Mugabe finds white farmers make a convenient scapegoat for his government’s failures.
When I reached Nyarota by telephone, he told me he had been kept the whole time in a room by himself at the central police station.
“Any minute spent in that particular station is psychological torture,” he said.
A judge invalidated the charges and the journalists were released by 10 p.m. the following evening. But new charges of “publishing subversive statements” were lodged against them later.
He didn’t have time to say much more. He had another edition to put out. His newspaper’s printing presses were bombed in January after the government called it, inaccurately, an opposition mouthpiece. No arrests were made. Undaunted, the paper went to smaller editions and a reduced print run by using private printers.
I met Nyarota in July when I visited Zimbabwe as part of a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Despite the government’s charges, his paper is nobody’s mouthpiece. Like South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki and Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Daily News is only calling on Mugabe to play fair.
So is the U.S. Senate. It passed the Zimbabwe Democracy Act on Aug. 2. Headed to the House, it orders “travel and economic sanctions” against those responsible for the violence, intimidation and breakdown of the rule of law in Zimbabwe “and their associates and families.”
That’s a good measure for starters. Like Idi Amin, Slobodan Milosevic, Mugabe needs a nudge from the civilized world. The United States was slow to get on the right side of history in confronting South Africa’s apartheid regime. We must not make the same mistake with Zimbabwe.
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