History of the FCA

The Early Days

The Foreign Correspondents’ Association of Southern Africa was formed in 1976 to represent foreign journalists working in the region. In its early days it fought to give foreign reporters free access to events in South Africa and ran a pool system to allow wider coverage of events restricted by the apartheid government. It also made representations to the authorities when journalists were expelled or threatened with expulsion. Despite this, the apartheid authorities did expell many foreign journalists including Associated Press correspondent Cynthia Stevens in 1981 and Dutch Radio correspondent Gerhard Jacobs in 1982. The archive covering FCA activities in the group’s first decade is kept at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London.

Violence and Change

The period between the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and South Africa’s first free election in April, 1994, was filled with wonderful news stories and great danger for foreign reporters. Some were killed; many more injured. More than 70 were attacked in 1993 alone. Jennifer Griffin writing in the Columbia Journalism Review provides a fascinating snapshot of the violent transition to democratic rule. “Journalists covering South Africa in the 1980s occasionally had rocks thrown at their cars by black youths,” she notes. “Now those rocks have been replaced by pangas (machetes) and bullets.”

The danger came from government security forces as well as supporters of the ANC, IFP and right wing Afrikaaner groups. Some days reporters seemed threatened from all sides.

During this period, the FCA regularly complained to all these groups about threats, attacks, bannings, unfair tactics and obstructions that made difficult reporting tougher - and in some cases impossible.

In June 1990, for instance, the FCA complained to the Conservative Party on behalf of a group of correspondents, including two black journalists, who were stopped by Afikaner Weerstandsbeweging soldiers from attending a Conservative Party rally at the Voortrekker Monument. The leader of the Conservative Party apologised to the FCA but added: “Perhaps you can imagine what conservative Afrikaners think when they see white men accompanied by black women attending such a rally. It could be seen as provocation or insensitivity.”

Chairman John Battersby in a letter to Inkatha Freedom Party leader Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi a few months later, wrote of the FCA’s concerns about death threats to journalists from IFP supporters in the East Rand . “One doesn’t want to over-react to death threats but one also doesn’t want to ignore them. We have already seen our colleagues (George D’Aath at Crossrads in 1986 to name one) hacked to death,” wrote Battersby.

“We know that you will share our earnest desire to prevent a tragedy and allow the media to pursue its vital task of informing the public – here and abroad – about what is actually happening in the violence-torn townships on the East Rand .”

Chief Buthelezi agreed and said he would appeal to IFP supporters to leave reporters alone. He added, though, that some members of the IFP believed reporters were biased against the party and may have genuine grievances against the media.

As well as working to keep its members safe, the FCA fought against constantly changing government regulations on access to news events. In 1990, for instance, new unrest regulations were used to order reporters out of townships riven by conflict.

Sometimes the problem was not regulations but tactics. In September 1990, Battersby wrote to the Minister of Law and Order complaining that plain-clothes police video cameramen were displaying firearms at news events such as funerals for the victims of township violence. “This is an intolerable situation which seriously undermines the neutrality of journalists and could endanger the lives of all correspondents – but particularly television camera crews,” he wrote.

The FCA also sometimes had cause to sanction its own. In 1990 it suspended a member indefinitely after he had carried and used a gun in Kathlehong township.

But the early 1990s was not just a time of violence but oneof great change. In 1990 and again in 1991 delegations from the FCA met with the African National Congress’ Department of Information and Publicity. At the first meeting the FCA expressed its members’ frustration with access to ANC officials. The ANC had only recently been unbanned in South Africa and its Department of Information and Publicity was still based in Lusaka, Zambia.

By 1991 much had improved. The ANC had begun issuing press cards, was making spokespeople available around the clock, had begun training “press marshalls” to help rather than hinder reporters at large news events, and had made available a diary of engagements for Nelson Mandela. The party had become a government in waiting.

The New South Africa

In the post-apartheid era, the focus of the Foreign Correspondents’ Association has switched from trying to prevent its members being kicked out or killed to improving relations with South Africa ’s new government, setting up briefings with ministers and other newsmakers, and providing social contact between foreign reporters based here.

After the ANC first came to power in 1994, its relationship with the foreign media was good. Its leaders were regular speakers at the FCA annual dinner and at less formal Media Briefings. From the late 1990s on, though, the governing ANC has met less frequently with the FCA and the foreign press generally.

In the past decade the FCA has also intervened on behalf of journalists who have experienced difficulties obtaining visas, notably during the Abacha regime in Nigeria , in post-genocide Rwanda, where reporters had to submit fingerprints with visa applications, and, with less success, in Zimbabwe. It has also frequently spoken out against the lack of press freedoms in places like Zimbabwe.