2000. Hard cover with dust cover. 381 pages. Very good condition. Under 1kg.
When Benjamin Pogrund, one of South Africa's most distinguished journalists, first began his career as a young reporter in the 1950s, "There had been little reason at that stage to believe that anything revolutionary was about to start."
As the "African affairs reporter," and then deputy editor, it was Pogrund who first brought the words of black leaders like Robert Sobukwe and Nelson Mandela to the pages of South Africa's leading newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail. This was the period of apartheid in South Africa and for most of the next thirty years, the Rand Daily Mail was the country's liberal white voice against the tyranny of the Afrikaner Nationalist government.
A riveting memoir and a complex commentary on apartheid and freedom of the press, War of Words offers an insider's perspective on one of the most turbulent, and arguably one of the most significant, periods in modern history.
Pogrund recalls South Africa's slide into the last terrible years of the Afrikaner nationalist government, beginning with the police shooting of 69 unarmed blacks at Sharpeville in March 1960, which resulted in the State of Emergency. He unfolds three stories: South Africa's; that of Johannesburg's Rand Daily Mail, for which he wrote from 1958 until its demise in 1985; and his own. Pogrund recounts his boyhood as the son of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants and his adult commitment to dispassionate reporting that could not be used as propaganda by anyone. The book is a view of apartheid's bloodiest years from inside South Africa's leading newspaper by a man who knew the country's leaders personally and who appears candid about his own mistakes and those he saw on all sides. Fascinating in both its perspective and detail, this book effectively complements Pogrund's two earlier works, Nelson Mandela: Strength and Spirit of a Free South Africa and How Can Man Die Better: Sobukwe and Apartheid. Recommended for collections on South Africa, apartheid, race relations, and journalism.
