In 1977 Pretoria silenced the black press with a stroke of the pen. Today the threat is quieter, and it comes down to who is willing to pay for journalism that questions power.
On the night of Tuesday, 18 October 1977, the staff of The World put the next morning's paper to bed as they always did. Soweto was still raw from the uprising of the year before. Steve Biko had been dead for five weeks. In that climate, every edition was an act of nerve.
They would not be allowed to produce another.
Before the next day was out, their newspaper had been banned, their editor was in detention and their union no longer legally existed. In a single day, the apartheid state tried to switch off the loudest black voices in the country.
South Africans remember that day as Black Wednesday. Today marks 49 years since it happened. It deserves more than a moment of remembrance, because the danger it represented has not disappeared. It has simply changed shape.
On Wednesday, 19 October 1977, security police walked into the Johannesburg offices of The World and arrested its editor, Percy Qoboza. By the end of the day, Justice Minister Jimmy Kruger had banned The World and its sister paper, Weekend World. The Christian Institute's journal Pro Veritate went too. So did 19 Black Consciousness organisations, among them SASO, the Black People's Convention and the Union of Black Journalists.
Qoboza was held without charge in Modderbee Prison for five months. His deputy, Aggrey Klaaste, and other World journalists were detained with him. It came barely five weeks after Steve Biko died in police custody, a death The World had refused to let the country forget. The anniversary is now also marked as National Press Freedom Day.
The apartheid state believed that if it closed the newspapers, it would close the conversation. It was wrong. The Argus company, which had owned The World, launched Post in 1978, and Qoboza returned to edit it. When the state forced Post off the streets in 1980, the same journalists produced the Sowetan, which appeared in February 1981 in open defiance. When the Rand Daily Mail was shut by its owners in 1985, its retrenched reporters pooled their severance pay and started the Weekly Mail, today's Mail & Guardian.
There is a lesson in that history that we tend to skip. Every time the state closed a door, journalists opened another. But someone had to pay for the new door. When a Cape Town businessman was asked to back the Weekly Mail, the veteran editor Benjamin Pogrund advised him to do it, but to understand that he was making a donation, not an investment. South African journalism that challenges power has always depended on people willing to fund it without expecting a return.
The irony of 2026
Forty-nine years later, the landscape carries an irony the men who signed the 1977 banning orders could not have imagined.
The best-resourced newsroom in the country today is News24. It is the digital flagship of Media24 and Naspers, the company that served as the media wing of apartheid. Nasionale Pers was founded to advance Afrikaner nationalism, and for decades its newspapers were the National Party government's loyal partners. A former Naspers chairman has described how its shares were once allocated only to "good Nationalists". When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called the media to account in 1997, Naspers refused to appear. It was left to 127 of its own journalists to defy management and confess what the company would not. Naspers waited until its centenary in 2015 to apologise.
So here is the irony of 2026. In 1977 the apartheid state shut down the black newspapers that told the truth about the struggle. Today the media heir of that same apartheid establishment dominates the landscape. Bankrolled by Naspers, one of the richest companies on the continent, News24 has spread through South Africa's news market with resources no independent competitor can match. The papers apartheid tried to crush have had to fight for every rand. The press that served apartheid never had to.
News24's only real competitor at that scale is IOL. That is precisely why IOL has come under relentless attack from the establishment. It gives South Africans an alternative to the narrative of a media house whose roots lie in the apartheid state. To those who would prefer the country hear only one version of its story, that makes it dangerous.
The first black owner, and the price of that
In 2013 a consortium led by the Survé family's Sekunjalo Group bought Independent News & Media South Africa from its Irish owners for about R2 billion. Those mastheads trace back to the same Argus stable that once owned The World. For the first time, a black-led group had acquired outright control of one of South Africa's largest newspaper companies. Earlier attempts at black ownership of a major group had not achieved that.
You might expect that milestone to be celebrated in a country that writes transformation into its laws. Instead, the reaction from much of the white business and media establishment was hostile from the start. The ownership was framed as political, the owner as a problem to be managed. The hostility reached the banks. The Competition Commission found that nine banks had colluded, in contravention of the Competition Act, against the companies of the Sekunjalo Group, the owners of the media group, by closing or refusing to open their accounts. The Commission has referred the matter to the Competition Tribunal for prosecution.
Why media, and why the fight never ends
Look at the family's history and the investment makes more sense. Long before Sekunjalo, Iqbal Survé was an activist in the student movement, healthcare and a confidant of Nelson Mandela and Ahmed Kathrada. Sekunjalo, founded in 1997, grew out of Mandela's call for black professionals to enter the mainstream economy. The group describes its model as a gentler capitalism, one that puts people before profit.
Survé has spoken openly about why he wanted a newspaper group. Under apartheid, he has said, black South Africans were portrayed one way by the very newspapers that still dominated the market after 1994. Visitors to his family's home kept asking why they did not see themselves in those pages. He has argued that the group had been sold to foreign owners rather than allowed to pass into black hands.
Media is not like any other business. It is the most powerful institution a society has outside government. Whoever owns a newspaper helps decide whose suffering is reported, whose corruption is exposed and whose version of the country is believed. For more than a century that power sat with the same few owners, and nobody called it a problem. It became a problem only when the presses passed to people determined to use them for the powerless.
That is why the fights never stop. Survé has described the battle over the group as a fight for the soul of the country, and has spoken of a campaign to steer advertisers away from its titles. By his own estimate, media makes up about 3% of the family's assets yet accounts for almost all of its reputational battles. Few investors chasing returns would accept that trade-off. Whatever one thinks of the owner, the family has kept paying, and its titles no longer let News24 and its allies set the national narrative unchallenged.
The journalists pay too. When IOL published a leaked video involving DA MP Renaldo Gouws in 2024, its journalists, editors, Dr Survé and his family received threats, some of them violent. The titles refused to back down.
This is what it means to be the voice of the voiceless. When IOL marked Black Wednesday in 2020, its writers observed that the struggle had shifted: once the government chose which newspapers to target; now commercial interests do. The pages the family funds exist to carry the stories of people the mainstream rarely puts on its front pages. Through Survé Philanthropies, the family also funds work on children's and women's rights, education and healthcare.
Who is paying for the conversation?
By Sekunjalo's own account, it has put more than R5.2 billion into Independent Media and related businesses over 13 years. Today the National Media Group publishes 17 of the country's best-known titles, including the Cape Times, Cape Argus, The Star, Pretoria News, The Mercury, Daily News, Sunday Tribune and Isolezwe.
Compare that with the rest of the industry. In 2024 Media24 ended the print editions of Beeld, Rapport, City Press, Daily Sun and Soccer Laduma, putting about 400 jobs at risk. Communities that had read those papers for decades were told to go online. The family's titles, meanwhile, are still on the streets. And this year, when the rest of the industry is in retreat, the family has backed the launch of The National, a new national title for the thinking reader.
This investment has also paid for journalism that powerful people would rather not see. These titles pursued the Phala Phala scandal, PPE looting during Covid-19 and, more recently, the cartel and political-interference allegations before the Madlanga Commission.
The new Black Wednesday will not be announced
We are a country in transition. Poverty is deep, unemployment is high, and the geopolitical ground is shifting under us. In moments like this, ordinary people need newspapers that tell their stories, not only the stories of markets and boardrooms.
Nelson Mandela understood this. Addressing the International Press Institute in Cape Town in February 1994, he said: "A critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy." He argued that only a free press could check a government's appetite for power and expose corruption wherever it hid.
Survé returned to those words publicly this month, closing his keynote at the PR Worx 25th anniversary with them. He reminded the audience that Mandela had asked for more than freedom: the press, Mandela said, needs the economic strength to stand up to government officials, and enough independence from vested interests to be bold without fear or favour. Perhaps that is why the family continues to invest. It is a way of keeping alive the spirit of Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, against everything the apartheid establishment that Nasionale Pers served did to shut down a free press.
Black Wednesday was a dark day for journalism in this country. No government today will ban a newspaper by decree. It does not need to. Media houses seen as friendly to the current government and the establishment, such as Media24 and Daily Maverick, find advertisers, funders and allies. Those that question power find bank accounts closed, advertising withdrawn and their owners vilified. Starve a newspaper long enough and it closes on its own.
That is the quiet Black Wednesday we face. Without philanthropists willing to fund journalism for the sake of media freedom, diverse narratives and jobs in the industry, many of the voices that apartheid failed to silence could fall silent anyway. Qoboza and his colleagues paid with their freedom so that South Africans could read the truth. The least we owe them is to make sure someone is still paying for the presses.
Viasen Soobramoney is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of IOL