From cautious optimist to cautious pessimist: the life of Dennis Pather

Are you hopeful about South Africa? For more than half a century, that question followed veteran journalist and editor Dennis Pather – from his days as a young “copy boy” in Durban’s Casbah to his final, bruised reflections on a “smudged rainbow” democracy.

ARE you hopeful about South Africa? This is the question that has followed Dennis Pather for decades. A question that emerged time and again in his tongue-in-cheek columns in Durban’s curry dens where journalists from the “Golden Age of Newspapers” hung out, in family gatherings, in opinion pieces, and in reams and reams of newsprint sheets that he steered through ink-stained web presses since the 1960s.

Then he was a young reporter on the beat, newly-emerged from the brutality of segregated education and police harassment, trying to make sense of “what’s happening to me” under apartheid.

His answer, he recalls, was stubbornly defiant: “It’s inhumane, it’s unjust, it’s dehumanising but I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Optimistic that “this hell on earth had to come to an end”, that every clenched fist of resistance and every act of brutal repression would, in the end, push the country closer to liberation.

Half a century later, in retirement, the question found him in a very different place. Dennis reflected that he had slowly become “cautiously pessimistic”.

Something went wrong “on the way to the Promised Land,” he mused.

“When you have seen comrades jailed and killed for an ideal, it is hard not to flinch when that ideal is traded for crooked tenders, silenced whistle-blowers, rotting hospitals, pit latrines, load-shedding and some of the highest rape and murder rates on the planet. We are asked, politely, not to look too closely as former freedom fighters feed at the trough of power.”

Between those two phrases – cautiously optimistic, cautiously pessimistic – lies the story of Pather’s life and of the country he chronicled.

It is a journey that runs from a “bush college” on Salisbury Island and the heady backrooms of Durban’s Casbah newspapers to the editor’s chair at some of South Africa’s most influential titles; from copy boy sprinting between typewriters and sub-editors’ desks to being awarded a coveted Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard University in the US.

Pather rose through the ranks in the Argus Company to eventually become editor of four of their major newspaper titles – the Daily News (for some years in conjunction with the old Saturday Paper), The Mercury, and the POST, before retiring as deputy editor of the Sunday Tribune.

With his death this week, that voice falls silent. But the tension between those two answers – the young man’s hard-won optimism and the elder’s wary pessimism – still frames the question he kept posing to his readers: what kind of country are we becoming? And who will keep asking the uncomfortable questions now that he is gone?

Early life and roots

Pather’s beginnings were modest and mobile. He grew up in Durban in a family with six other siblings and doting parents. However, they seemed always to be packing up and starting again as apartheid’s racial laws shifted who could live where.

When his father, Samuel, accepted a hotel job some 80 kilometres away, the move to the small north coast town of Stanger (now KwaDukuza) felt, at first, like exile to “the bundus”.

It turned out to be a “breath of fresh air” and the making of him.

Stanger offered something Durban did not: a close-knit community and a school that took thinking seriously. At Stanger High, under a principal and teachers who treated education like a calling, pupils were pushed beyond textbooks into debates, speeches and sport. The school motto, Semper Sursum – “Always Aim High” – became an ethic, not just Latin on a badge. It was here that Pather and his classmates began asking hard questions about the absurdities around them.

He didn’t encounter apartheid as an abstraction. He saw Indian moviegoers herded into a separate section at the local cinema while whites claimed the best seats. The irony was that the movie theatre was Indian-owned. He watched his family being ushered to the back pew during Sunday mass at their predominantly white Anglican church.

Those experiences – and knowing that Chief Albert Luthuli, confined to nearby Groutville, was being punished for preaching non-violent resistance – etched a lasting memory in him. He woke one night to security police raiding their home in Temple Grove.

“My mum was too traumatised to understand what was happening but managed to maintain her calm as police searched our home, emptying bookcases and cupboards onto the floor while they boorishly interrogated my father.”

His father, though not a firebrand by nature, participated in the Defiance Campaign of 1956 and served as branch secretary of a trade union. This brought him into direct contact with union leaders like Dr RD Naidu, who often visited their home.

“After several hours, I watched in stunned silence as my father was frogmarched out of the house by two policemen, bundled into a waiting car and driven away.”

He was detained for three months before being released without any explanation.

“With my father the sole breadwinner gone, it was hard to imagine how our family would survive those traumatic months. However, the generosity and public spiritedness of the local Stanger community came to their rescue. They rallied behind us and took care of our basic needs until my father’s release. That episode was pivotal in defining and shaping my political thinking for future years.”

Political awakening and Salisbury Island years

Salisbury Island, the “bush college” for Indian students built on an old military barracks in Durban harbour, was where Pather’s politics caught fire.

Officially, it was the University College for Indians, created to keep black, Indian and coloured students apart. The campus was under strict surveillance at all times.

“In the early years on Salisbury Island it was difficult to avoid the feeling of being second-class citizens,” Dennis wrote.

His friend and fellow student on the Island, Dr Betty Govinden, summed it up: “Salisbury Island was a discarded military barracks, and we were its discarded people.”

In practice, it became a pressure cooker of ideas. In the cramped cafeteria, he fell in with a circle of sharp-tongued young activists, steeped in the rising language of Black Consciousness and arguing late into the night about Frantz Fanon, freedom and the future of the country.

It was the birth of what came to be called the Café Clan.

“It’s hard to put a number to The Clan’s membership,” Dennis recalled, “but the hard core was fairly consistent – Strini Moodley, Kogs Reddy, Sam Moodley (née Pillay), Ben David, Asha Moodley (née Rambally), Roy Thathiah, Nash Nainaar, Archie Augustine and yours truly.”

The Clan led small groups of students on noisy protests through the campus. 

“Close communications between The Clan members and leaders in the Black Consciousness movement on other campuses, like Steve Biko, Aubrey Mokoape and Barney Pityana, were a pivotal thrust to our protests – there was now no turning back.”

Pather recalled that he and Steve Bantu Biko met under the strangest of circumstances.

“A friend and I had missed the last bus taking revellers from a party at the black medical school in Wentworth back to the city centre. It was dark and we were stranded. While trying to figure out what to do, a figure emerged from under a streetlight. ‘Hi, I’m Steve. You guys look lost. You obviously missed the last bus?’”

It turned out he was head of the SRC at the institution.

“No problem. You can bunk in my res for the night. I have other accommodation. I’ll arrange breakfast for you in the morning.”

This friendship endured and grew stronger until Biko’s brutal murder by the apartheid state in1977.

“While campus protests were critical to mobilising students, we craved greater exposure, beyond the confines of the Island, to get our message across,” Pather reflected.

“And what better medium than theatre to reach this wider audience.”

And so, a satirical theatre revue called Black on White was born.

“The skits focused on the indignities suffered by people under apartheid – like the naked racism behind champion golfer Papwa Sewgolum being handed his trophy in the pelting rain after winning a major tournament at Royal Durban because the clubhouse was reserved for whites only; we mocked the SABC for being the unashamed propaganda arm of the apartheid government; we lampooned the Special Branch policemen as they scrambled to find commies behind every bush and stuck a middle finger in the face of local city officials for disrupting settled communities and dumping us into matchbox houses in Chatsworth.

Black on White was an instant success, playing to packed houses at the old Bolton Hall in the city centre, community halls, private homes, parks, theatres as well as on campuses at Natal and Wits. The revue went on to run for over three years. Its script refreshed each year to keep pace with the changing dynamics in the country.

However, not everyone enjoyed it. The Broeders on Salisbury Island were furious and refused The Clan permission to stage their revue on campus – but they went ahead anyway. That act of defiance was the last straw: in May 1967 security swooped on a dorm room where The Clan was celebrating a birthday. Pather was dragged off to Fynnland police station, assaulted by two burly white cops and then threatened by Special Branch men who reminded him he still had “179 days left” under the 180-day detention law.

"After hours of grilling at SB headquarters in town, they eventually let him go with a warning that they’d be watching. Within a week, three Clan members – including Dennis – were expelled and two suspended. But if the campus authorities thought their troubles were over, they were badly mistaken. The early shoots of Black Consciousness had sprung and began to flourish. ‘Black man, you are on your own’, a slogan coined by Steve Biko, echoed across the Island, the city and later, the country,” Dennis wrote.

Copy Boy and scandal sheets

After expulsion what Pather desperately needed was a real job, a permanent job.

“Call it serendipity if you wish,” Dennis said, “but I happened to drop in for a cup of tea and a sandwich at Kapitans in the Casbah one morning when I caught sight of GR Naidoo, the editor of the old Golden City Post. ‘Hey, Pather... What are you doing with yourself now that you’re no longer at that bush college?’”

They had known each other through mutual friends for a few years, often talked about books and authors and, as Pather recalled, GR was a big fan of the revue Black on White.

GR asked him to pop by at the newsroom the next day.

So on July 2,1967, a nervous twenty-something Pather walked into the Durban offices of the Golden City Post in the Casbah and was handed the lowest rung on the ladder: copyboy.

His job description was simple and brutal. At the shout of “copy!” he had to sprint to a senior reporter’s desk, snatch the still-warm carbon copies from the typewriter and fan out across the floor, dropping copies of the stories at the sub-editors, the news editor, the branch correspondent and, finally, the editor’s office – all before the presses rolled.

It was adrenalin on tap, powered by newsroom panic and strict deadlines. The rest of the time he was, as he later wrote, a convenient dogsbody. He ran for cigarettes and sandwiches, learnt the fastest route to the tote, the bottle store and the tobacconist, and on a good day might quietly pocket the loose change a distracted senior left in his hand. It was menial, but it was also an education. GR led a lively team of journalists, including some household names in local tabloid journalism at the time.

“Not all were natural wordsmiths, but they could damn well smell a good story from a mile away,” Dennis recalled.

“To excel on a racy tabloid like the Golden City Post, it counted in your favour to know who had murdered whom; who was screwing whom adulterously; who was swindling whom and who got nabbed under apartheid’s infamously diabolical Immorality Act which criminalised the simple act of loving across the colour line. Scandal and sensation were the currency of success.”

Political and "community hothead"

From the tabloid frenzy of the Golden City Post, Pather moved into what he later called “the university of real reporting” – the community papers. In 1968, he joined The Leader, a family-owned business under the editorship of Sunil “Sunny” Bramdaw, son of founder Dhanee Bramdaw.

At The Leader he covered whatever landed on his desk: magistrates’ courts, school prize-givings, shack fires, factory strikes, rent protests. One day he would be taking notes in a cramped courtroom as a bewildered teenager faced a harsh sentence; the next he would be in a dusty hall listening to activists rail against the Group Areas Act.

In those pages, the impact of apartheid was felt in stark headlines. Families evicted from long-standing homes, workers detained after police raids, civic leaders banned or “removed” from office – these became the stories Pather gravitated towards.

“However a man cannot survive by job satisfaction alone,” Pather noted.

By then he was married to Kay and had two beautiful children in Brendan and Nisha.

“So, after five eventful and productive years, the offer of more money from competing local weekly, The Graphic, was too tempting to turn down. It helped pay the rent.”

The Graphic was a small, closely knit team operating from a single room in Victoria Street. It was originally founded by K Pillay, the son of a printing press owner, and his wife Dr K Thirupurasundari, an obstetrician and prolific author.

By the time Pather worked there it was owned by a group of local businessmen with attorney Pat Poovalingam at the helm. Pather described his three years at The Graphic as professionally fulfilling. He developed a reputation for being “too interested” in the sensitive stuff: labour disputes, police brutality, the quieter ways in which the state squeezed the life out of ordinary people.

However, he became restless to advance into mainstream journalism. When he began knocking on the door of the mainstream English press – the Daily News and its sister titles – his reputation as a “political hothead” followed him.

Although the news editor interviewing him said he was an ideal candidate, he also admitted to being “concerned about reports that you associate with people like Steve Biko, Strini Moodley, Barney Pityana and Saths Cooper, all of whom are prominent leaders of the Black Consciousness movement.”

He was dismissed as a student radical who might bring trouble into a carefully policed newsroom. CVs vanished into drawers. Promises to “keep in touch” came to nothing. Undeterred, Pather’s friendship with Steve grew even closer when Biko used an unused room in their Overport apartment to study.

Fellow Black Consciousness stalwarts – Strini and Sam Moodley, and Saths and Vino Cooper – lived a few floors higher in the same block of flats.

“My children, Brendan and Nisha, were five and four respectively at the time and couldn’t have hoped for a better ‘uncle’ at home. Whenever I arrived home from work, the family would greet me with a loud, ‘Amandla’ to which I would respond, ‘Awethu’.”

“About a year later, the local grapevine sent out a message that the Daily News was still keen to hire a black journalist. I re-applied and in the interview conducted by the same news editor, was again asked about my ‘questionable’ political associations. Refusing to apologise for the company I kept, I responded rather forthrightly. ‘Are you seriously telling me you’re worried about my surreptitiously slipping in subversive content into your newspaper columns without you knowing, given all the checks and balances that go into producing a newspaper like yours?’”

The news editor appeared taken aback by the somewhat blunt riposte, but it worked. He eventually relented and gave Dennis the job.

Cautiously optimistic

Breaking into the Daily News felt less like getting a job and more like crossing a border where Pather's clearly didn’t belong. In that big, white newsroom he was first assumed to be the messenger, not the reporter.

Black journalists were certainly not “a natural in this white herd.”

Pather had to work twice as hard just to be noticed, and harder still to be trusted. 

“So, when Michael Green, then editor of the Daily News at the time, announced my appointment as the newspaper’s political reporter, it came as a surprise. I suppose he reckoned he could kill two birds with one stone – appointing someone who was able to straddle coverage of white establishment politics as well as the politics of the growing masses of the dispossessed and disenfranchised,” Pather said.

“When I took my seat for the first time in the provincial council’s press gallery in Pietermaritzburg, I must have appeared such an oddity that all the members stood up to gawk at me. What was this darkie doing in our precinct? Who invited him here? And if any of them felt even vaguely uncomfortable about having to deal with a journalist who happened not to be white, that was just tough luck. I was now officially the political reporter of the largest newspaper in the province, whether they liked it or not.”

It was a fraught beat in a country on the brink, but it suited his temperament: watchful, sceptical, relentless about checking facts. Outside the building, Special Branch men followed him from opposition meetings, pulled him off the road, and calmly helped themselves to his notebooks.

Once he was issued with a search warrant, and they walked through his office as if they owned the place, rifling desks and cupboards while he pretended to concentrate on his typewriter. Perhaps the darkest day for media freedom came on October 19, 1977, when a number of journalists, including senior executives and editors like Aggrey Klaaste and Percy Qoboza, were detained and held without trial for over seven months. Black Wednesday, as it came to be known, was a clear warning that any paper which told too much truth could simply be snuffed out.

For black reporters the risks were sharper; they were far more likely to lose passports, be restricted or detained, and sometimes defending a source meant breaking the law.

“I remember sitting in a police station, accused of harbouring a banned person. I decided on the spot to lie in my statement because, frankly, the law was an ass and my first duty was to the truth and to that man’s safety,” Pather once told me.

“So you walked a thin line every day – between your community and your company, between your conscience and their regulations– trying to stay in a ‘white’ paper long enough to smuggle as much reality as you could past the people who wanted it buried.”

Pather recalled how as time passed in the newsroom, white and black journalists started finding each other.

“We began opening up about our respective past experiences in the search for answers and making earnest attempts to reach out to each other. I recall one evening when a group came up to my desk and asked whether I’d like to join them for drinks at a hotel on the beachfront. When we got there, they allowed the whole group in except me. I was the wrong colour. ‘Well, if he’s not allowed in, then we’re out too,’ said a colleague as the entire group walked out in disgust, pledging not to patronise that establishment in future.”

Another time he was invited to join a visiting politician to lunch at the exclusive Durban Club off Smith Street, which was previously strictly off-limits to people of colour.

“Unaccustomed to such posh establishments, I couldn’t tell the front entrance from the back and looked hopelessly lost when a waiter popped his head out of a window and asked, ‘Looking for a job here, bru?’

"When I told him I was an invited guest for lunch, he went almost white with shock. The lunch itself was refreshingly cordial although I could have done without the constant stares from guests at neighbouring tables. Hadn’t they seen a black person eating from fine crockery before?”

Nieman Fellow and newsroom leader

In 1980, Dennis joined a group of African and Asian journalists for four months at the International Institute for Journalism in what was then West Berlin. It was an opportunity to sharpen his skills and see how other societies handled power and the press.

Then followed a string of invitations to exchange programmes and study tours in the USA, a short working stint at the Argus company’s bureau in London, private family trips to Europe and Britain and several foreign government-sponsored trips to Germany, Portugal, India,Canada, Holland, China, Taiwan, Thailand as well as Mauritius, Réunion and Zambia.

However, the crowning experience was his selection as South Africa’s Nieman Fellow in1987, joining 19 international mid-career journalists from all corners of the globe for a year’s sabbatical at Harvard.

This put him in conversation with legendary editors and reporters from around the world.

“What made it all the more exciting was that my wife Kay and our two teenage children, Brendan and Nisha, were allowed to accompany me. It was without doubt the best year of our lives.”

The curator of the Nieman Foundation was Dennis’s mentor and friend, Howard Simons. Simons led the now famous Washington Post team of journalists that included Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who after a probing and painstaking investigation of a botched burglary at the Watergate Hotel, unearthed a White House cover-up and exposed many of the Nixon Administration’s shenanigans in that era. This reporting led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

The Watergate scandal was later immortalised in the blockbuster movie All the President’s Men, which starred Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the roles of Woodward and Bernstein and won four Oscars. Soon after, Dennis rose through the ranks – Deputy Editor of POST in the early 1980s, a stint in the Argus company’s London bureau in Fleet Street, and then, in 1985, Editor of the POST itself.

Those years were followed by the kind of trajectory few black journalists of his generation were allowed. Back home he became senior assistant editor at the Sunday Tribune, then Editor of the Daily News through most of the 1990s, also overseeing The Saturday Paper.

Later he edited The Mercury before returning to the Daily News and finally serving as deputy editor of the Sunday Tribune before retirement. In each newsroom he was asked to do more than fill pages; he was asked to help steer papers, and their readers, through the treacherous turn from apartheid to democracy.

His editorial philosophy was simple and demanding. Journalism, he believed, was not there to flatter power or comfort one’s own side. He liked to quote Thomas Griffith’s remark about a good newsman having “a dedication to facts and a scent for humbug”, and he expected the same of his staff.

Reporters learned that he would back them fiercely when they were right, but would not hesitate to spike a story that hadn’t been checked to the last comma. Colleagues remember an editor who was exacting but fair, able to hold together multiracial newsrooms at a time when South Africa itself was threatening to come apart.

He pushed for tough coverage of corruption and abuse, regardless of who sat in office, and insisted that unpopular voices be heard alongside fashionable ones. In doing so, he helped shape not only front pages but a generation of journalists who took their cue from his quiet, uncompromising standards.

'Fervent passions'

In his later years, Pather found a second life as a columnist – part chronicler, part conscience, part amused onlooker shaking his head at a country he loved but no longer fully trusted.

“One of my fervent passions, especially in the later years of my career, was writing newspaper columns which accorded me the freedom to break away from the formal protocols and rules of journalism and express my personal opinions on matters of the day. And it was a lot of fun too.” Dennis admitted that he loved the licence to be informal in language and style, writing as if he were in conversation with his readers.

“Probably even more rewarding was the feedback I got back from readers. Not all of it was positive. It doesn’t really matter whether readers agree with you or not – just as long as they’re reading you. It’s when they stop reading you and are indifferent that you’ve got to start worrying.”

The columnist side of Pather started in the early 1990s when he began writing a column for the Daily News called “Black Press” in which he highlighted and commented on critical issues raised in newspapers read mainly in the black communities.

He turned his journalist’s eye onto the post-1994 republic and asked whether the promises of freedom had survived contact with power. Early on, he wrote as someone still “cautiously optimistic”, convinced that the brutality he’d lived through under apartheid could not be the final word.

But as the years wore on, that optimism gave way. His “Animal Farm – South African Edition” column used George Orwell’s barnyard allegory to describe a liberation movement that had begun to look disturbingly like the regime it replaced.

The farm animals who once chased out the tyrant, he warned, were now ruled by leaders who walked upright, cracked whips and behaved just like the humans they had overthrown – a metaphor he applied to a ruling elite mired in corruption, patronage and“crooked tenders”, while millions remained trapped in poverty and protest.

Yet even at his most acerbic, there was no glee in his disillusionment. The columns carry atone of bruised affection: a veteran newsman who had seen too much to be naïve, but whostill believed that naming the rot – state capture, “tenderpreneuring”, the lost moral compassof leaders – was an act of loyalty to the country, not betrayal. In holding up that mirror, heturned his own journey from optimism to wary pessimism into a way for readers to thinkhonestly about the state of the nation.

The man behind the byline

At home, away from headlines and deadlines, Pather was less “editor-in-chief” than husband, father and thatha with a lap permanently reserved for small grandchildren and a pile of newspapers.

His first thanks in his memoir goes to his wife, Kay – partner of more than fifty years – who quietly absorbed the odd hours and emotional turbulence of a “hardened, career-driven journalist”, clipping his columns, filing cuttings and later helping him sift photographs for the book.

It was Kay, with her astonishing memory, who shook him awake one lazy Sunday in 2017 to remind him it was exactly fifty years since his first day as a copy boy – the nudge that finally pushed him to write his memoir.

He wrote with clear pride of his son, Brendan, his daughter, Nisha, her husband, Fredrik Olofsson, and the grandchildren – Noah, Micah and Leah – whose “unconditional love and constant support” carried him through the long labour of the book.

They were the audience he most wanted to impress, and the ones likeliest to tease him about his “cheeky tongue” – the name he gave to one of his columns.

Even after retirement he was still editing, mentoring and prodding from the sidelines, working as a consultant to the Independent group and guiding younger reporters through the craft.

Friends like his “brother in the Casbah”, Dr Adam Mahomed, and his nephew Ruben Reddy remember long, laughter-filled evenings “fuelled by the nectar of the gods”, where stories, politics and newsroom gossip flowed in equal measure.

His lifelong friend, Ben David – brother of Pather’s inspiration Phyllis Naidoo – remembers his zest for life, his sharp wit and his sly sense of humour.

“I am laughing and I am crying because his last chat with me was when tests were done at the hospital. He said ‘Ben, it’s All Souls Day today! Don’t pray for the repose of my soul – rather ask the Good Lord to remove these unpleasant haemorrhoids that’s bugging me.’ I’m putting it mildly, he said ‘Ben, please pray for my ass…’ Even on the hospital bed, his sense of humour remained.”

His nephew, Yuven Naidoo, was deeply impacted.

“When I was a kid, Dennis was the first adult to speak with me like an adult. He was genuinely interested in what I had to say. It may have been the moronic ramblings of a teenager but he was able to relate it to the person and situation, and carry on a conversation.“It’s the reason that we all gravitated to his house. We felt heard and taken seriously.

"His home was always filled with a mishmash of people, from journalists, musicians, politicians, religious leaders, corporate heads… and most importantly family!“He really enjoyed mentoring the young journalists and editors around him. They were always at his house and on the phone, using him as a soundboard.“

Pather was never self-important. He was always up for a drink, a hearty meal and a good laugh with everyone. It’s probably why he was a good journalist. He was an everyman who enjoyed a good trotters and beans and didn’t care for the top-shelf stuff.

“He was a true gentleman, who never demanded recognition but was so deserving because of who he was to those around him.”

In the end, Pather leaves more than a list of newspaper titles behind. He leaves a book that began as a family project and became a public record – Copy Boy, his attempt to make sense of six decades in the news.

He leaves a body of columns that still read like warning flares over a fragile democracy: sharp, funny, impatient with excuses. And he leaves a generation of journalists who learned, under his watch, that getting the story right mattered more than getting their names big.

What he never gave up on was the belief that independent journalism – and citizens willing toread critically – are the only real safeguards against the abuse of power.

Viroshen Chetty is a writer, creative director and entrepreneur. He has published Dennis Pather’s memoir Copy Boy: A Journey from Newsroom Gofer to Award-winning Editor

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