How to Lose Friends

Johannesburg's crusading editor, Laurence Gandar, 50, of the Rand Daily Mail, had been looking forward to a visit to Britain, on an invitation mailed him just the week before by an admiring British newspaper group. Then, suddenly, two of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's detectives changed his plans by calling at his home and relieving him of his passport -- indefinitely. Joked Gandar: "For a moment, it struck me that somebody here might have been reading my mail. But I dismissed so unworthy a thought."

The detectives did not say why they had revoked the passport. But it doubtlessly had to do with his campaign to expose the abuses in South Africa's prisons first reported to the Mail by ex-Prisoner Robert Harold Strachan (TIME, July 23). Last week Strachan, after two months of house arrest, was formally charged with violating the Prisons Act, which makes it a crime to provide false information about the jails. His trial is set for Sept. 3.

Matter of Perjury? After Strachan's story appeared, Gandar ran a second article on prison tortures, witnessed by two warders and two ex-prisoners. Since then both prisoners have been rearrested, and one of the warders put under house arrest. The other, Gysbert Van Schalkwyk, 22, was given a three-year jail sentence fortnight ago, after pleading guilty to perjury, and explaining, in a statement read to the court by the state prosecutor, that he had lied when he said he had seen electric torture applied 15 to 20 times.

Gandar himself was not permitted to take the stand. He may get the chance sometime, for the government may well be building a case against the Mail itself under the Prisons Act. In the past two months, the newspaper's office has been raided four times, and security police have seized all documents and photographs of prisons or prisoners. They have also visited sources whose names had only been discussed by Gandar on the telephone, leading him to suspect that his line is being tapped. Though the Mail has been campaigning for nothing more radical than a judicial enquiry into prison practices, Verwoerd's state radio and the Afrikaans newspapers that support him regularly describe the English-language Mail as "a source for the Communist and Afro-Asian propaganda machines." Some Thanks. But the protests against the Mail come not from official sources alone. A torrent of abuse was pouring into Gandar's office from an angry public that seemed to think Verwoerd should get far tougher with the Mail. "Hang down your head in shame! You have done irreparable harm to our wonderful country," wrote one irate reader. Staffers have also received threatening phone calls, and students from Witwatersrand University were picketing the Mail's offices last week with bitter placards: "News, Not Abuse," and "Is it Worth it, Gandar?" But now and then came the kind of reaction that Gandar was proud to print: "One day the whole of South Africa will thank you," said one correspondent, "for the courage you have shown by your unwavering efforts to make this a more civilized country to live in."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.