The Johannesburg Star, 12 August, 1963 and 2008
AS THE 2009 NATIONAL ELECTIONS approached, the prospect of Jacob Zuma becoming the next president of the country became more and more certain. People began to queue up to ingratiate themselves, and where possible to provide favourable publicity.
An edition of the Johannesburg Star in August 2008 carried a mock-up claiming to be a replica of the newspaper’s edition forty-five years previously, in which it had supposedly reported on 12 August 1963 that the 21-year-old Jacob Zuma, ‘one of the ANC’s rising stars’, had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.1
In Jeremy Gordin’s biography of Zuma, he writes: ‘He was apparently better known than either he or recent history has acknowledged. The headlines on page 6 of the City Late edition of The Star [12 August 1963] read: “JACOB ZUMA JAILED”.
‘Jacob Zuma, a prominent member of the banned African National Congress and activist in the ANC’s military wing Umkhonto weSizwe, has been sentenced to an effective ten years’ imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the government. He was arrested with a group of 45 recruits near Zeerust in the Western Transvaal. The 21-year-old Zuma, son of a policeman from Nkandla in Natal, became involved in politics at a very early age and joined the ANC in 1959 when he was a mere 17. Zuma was one of the ANC’s rising stars when the political party was banned by the government.’2
The moment I saw The Star in 2008 I smelt a rat. As part of the MK Regional Command in Natal, I knew he was anonymous to the public and media when we sent him for training abroad in 1963. What was more, none of the many political trials at the time, other than when the big fish like Mandela or Billy Nair were in the dock, had warranted more than a couple of column centimetres to report that a group of Africans had been sentenced under security legislation. If Zuma was indeed regarded in Durban as ‘one of the ANC’s rising stars’, The Star would have been hard pressed to uncover such a view, for the ANC was deep underground and there was no reference in the Natal press. Another error is the reference to the ANC as a ‘political party’, which it was not. Neither the ANC nor anybody else regarded the organisation as a party until the 1994 elections.
Amina Frense and David Niddrie, journalists of long standing, accompanied me on a search for The Star report at the Johannesburg Library, which keeps an archive of South African and international newspapers. The 12 August 1963 City Late edition has a dramatic front-page story featuring the escape from Marshall Square police headquarters of Abdulhay Jassat, Arthur Goldreich, Harold Wolpe and Mosie Moola. Page 6 has no mention of the Jacob Zuma story at all. We searched for any mention of Zuma in all editions from 1 June through to the end of August 1963, but nothing came to light. We also checked copies of the Rand Daily Mail and the Natal Mercury, Zuma’s home town morning newspaper, which one would think would more likely than most carry news of the ‘rising star,’ but to no avail. We found nothing in our search for the entire month of August 2008.
The 14 June 1963 edition of The Star did have a story that simply mentioned forty-five Africans had been arrested near Zeerust on their way out of the country. They were being held under the 90-day detention law, allowing suspects to be detained in solitary confinement with no access to lawyers for up to ninety days at a time. No names were provided, and no other information was given about the people’s identities other than that two Indians and an African woman were among the group. Whoever unearthed that information from whatever the source must have thought that the story, given a good deal of spin, would make for good publicity for the forthcoming president. It was apparent that his image could well do with a facelift.
Both Lorna and I had without a shadow of a doubt seen the extract Jeremy Gordin featured in his book on Zuma, but that was in August 2008. A strange account indeed.