“No newspaper or broadcasting station in South Africa had been closer to the momentous political events of the 1980s and 90s than 702. More than playing a reporting role, the station had itself become part of the process that opened up democracy.”
In the final decade of apartheid rule, a feisty new independent station called Radio 702 exploded on the scene in South Africa. Innovative, in-your-face and exciting, it revolutionised the local broadcasting scene, breaking boundaries and challenging conventions as never before.
Radio 702 became the station that everyone was talking about. From the outset, it imbedded itself in the community it served, continually finding new ways to connect and engage with its audience so that listeners could feel that the station truly belonged to them. In the process it became a beacon for much of the country’s most promising broadcasting talent, from the legendary John Berks to John Robbie, Jenny Crwys-Williams, Dan Moyane and many others.
Even beyond the extraordinary social and cultural impact it made, Radio 702 became a vehicle for independent news reporting and debate on South Africa’s future at a critical time in the country’s history. After making the successful transition from an all-music to an all-talk radio format, it provided a forum for South Africans from across the racial and political spectrum to begin really talking to each other for the first time. In the process, it contributed significantly to the birth of multiracial democracy in South Africa and the no less challenging years of healing and nation building that followed.
EXTRACT: Road to Democracy
Also finding her way through the political maelstrom was former political activist and journalist Debora Patta. She’d come up from Cape Town to Johannesburg after the ANC was unbanned and Mandela released: ‘I heard 702 for the first time and it was like I’ve got to go and work there! So I tried for a very long time without much success to get in’. But then, towards the end of 1990, she was contacted by Mike Wills asking her to work over Christmas and into January covering for Debbie Meyer who was producing Chris Gibbons’ show. Patta’s first job at 702 was thus producing for Gibbons. A few months later she’d joined the team as a full-time reporter.
‘I first wanted to be an anchor, but as I got more involved I realised I wanted to be a reporter’ she says, ‘702 felt as if it was part of something bigger, that history was unfolding in our country and that we were going to be part of that history. As much as we were reporting on the news, we were also sort of part of it. I had been politically active but had never heard black people and white people talk to each other the way they did on 702. It felt as though it was part of the process of building a democracy in South Africa’.
A major personal hurdle for Patta was that Gibbons was not convinced she was right for the medium, feeling that she didn’t have a voice for broadcasting and that perhaps she should consider print. Patta was determined to prove him wrong. Her first big break, when it came, wasn’t a political story but a criminal one: ‘It was a good old-fashioned scam - two insurance guys who’d put a busload of black people into a van, taken out insurance on them, pushed the van into a sinkhole and set it alight so that they could claim the insurance on them as their employers. We investigated and broke that story’. The defining moment of her career, however, was covering Nelson Mandela. She became, as she put it, Mandela’s ‘little shadow. Everywhere he went, I followed him. Later, I became friendly with his wife, Graça Machel, because I did a big investigation into the Samora Machel plane crash. In those days we still did big investigations, where packages could run for four or five minutes on-air. That’s unheard of these days, what with the short attention spans and everyone following social media’.
Another big story for Patta was the hunt for baby Micaela Hunter, snatched as a new-born from a Johannesburg nursing home. 702 broke the story, and, with Patta covering it, the investigation went on for about two years until Micaela was found.
Like Gary Bailey Patta believes that radio prepared her for television: ‘The great thing about 702 was that because we were such a small team you covered everything: the Budget, politics, investigations, crime, violence, you weren’t a specialist. Television was much easier than radio, with one story a day. At 702, you had five stories in your diary that had to chase at any given time. It was incredibly good preparation for other forms of journalism’.
702 was often accused of bias. For every caller he had in later years who accused him of bashing the ANC (‘you’re anti-black and you’re anti-ANC’) Gibbons used to get three or four phone calls a day saying ‘you’re anti-white, anti-National Party, anti-Afrikaner’. He reckons that as long as he gets a few of those on each side he is doing his job properly.
Gibbons himself was once the target of a bomb threat while on air. At first he refused to leave the building as he was then doing the Evening Drive, but then got a message that his wife, Rhoda, had just called saying she’d had a bomb threat at their home. Religion rather than politics was the reason for the outrage on this occasion. An issue of prayers had arisen at the Codesa talks, with one group insisting that only Christian prayers be said since South Africa was a Christian country. Gibbons passed some remark about this being ridiculous superstitious nonsense. Jeremy Maggs decided that the matter had to be taken seriously, hence Gibbons was escorted home by the Flying Squad.
The achievement of democracy may have seemed attainable after the logjam was broken in 1990, but it was not inevitable and never smooth. There were crises and at times it seemed that the entire process might collapse. At the beginning of this book it is related how the ANC pulled out of negotiations following the Boipatong massacre and then being persuaded to to return after the Bisho shootings.
David O’Sullivan had famously reported on that incident, for which he won Radio Reporter of the Year and Radio Story of the Year in the Qantas International Journalism Competition; these are just two of many awards won by 702’s news staff over the years.
The sudden lifting of restrictions led to some explosive situations but 702 insisted on being open to views across the spectrum. In one week, for example, Robbie conducted interviews with Robert McBride, the man who planted a bomb that killed three people in Magoo’s, a busy night club in Durban, and Barend Strydom, dubbed the ‘Wit Wolf’ who was convicted of killing at random seven black people in Pretoria. Robbie commented: ‘When Barend Strydom was on, our black listeners were going bananas. And when Robert McBride was on, the white listeners went mad’. After these interviews both the station and Robbie received death and bomb threats.
There were other downright shocking events: over the Easter weekend in 1993, the country came close to the abyss when SACP leader Chris Hani was assassinated in the driveway of his house in Boksburg. David O’ Sullivan was involved in bringing the news to 702 listeners:
It was Saturday April 10. I was sitting with my feet up in the newsroom at 10:12am when a call came in from a Boksburg woman. As I listened, I just went cold: ‘I live next door to Chris Hani. He’s just been shot and I think he is dead. My husband jumped over the fence and is trying to revive him.’ She was obviously looking out of her window watching her husband. She then screamed down the phone, ‘He is dead, he is dead!’
At the time, not even the ANC knew that Hani had been assassinated. The newsroom had to wait until 11:10am, when the police phoned and a voice said: ‘A body identified as that of Chris Hani…’ At that point David slammed the phone down and went on air with the news.
Reporter Judith Dubin was on the scene within half an hour and found Hani’s body still lying in the driveway. The phones in the newsroom rang nonstop as local and foreign journalists called to find out more from 702 because of its reputation for reliability and being first with the news. Another reporter, Brett Hilton-Barber, recalls that there was an important conference on in the area but no one was in the conference: all were outside listening to 702 on their car radios.
When the first democratic elections were held in April 1994, 702 was in the position to deploy a seasoned team of reporters and analysts who provided unrivalled coverage of the campaign, voting and later the protracted wait until the results were announced. Many of the original core group of 702 news reporters returned from the far-flung places to which their careers had taken them to report on this historic occasion. Marita Eagar reported on events in the Cape, Adrian Horsman filed stories from Durban, Mike Rautenbach kept an eye on the right wing, and Judith Dubin followed FW de Klerk on the campaign trail.
Deborah Patta had been detailed to shadow Mandela during this historic time, and was one of the few reporters who followed him around permanently. Understandably, she remembers this as being the highlight of her career. Not many reporters could claim to have followed a man of such global stature. When Mandela himself voted, it was fitting that Patta should be the first reporter to talk to him.
If the Concert in the Park had been the culmination of the first phase of 702, the 1994 elections saw the maturing of a station that had been the flag-bearer for independent radio in South Africa for 15 years. Everything 702 did was innovative, and from the beginning it had followed the principle of being directly involved with its listeners.
Talk Radio 702 became increasingly relevant as the changes in the country were about to take place. It was able to position itself as the station of relevance insofar as news was concerned, and this made it the station on which politicians from all the sides of the spectrum wanted to be.
“When you start negotiating, that’s when you want your point of view to be heard” Issie Kirsh says, ‘We had everyone: the Wit Wolwe, Eugene Terreblanche, the Conservative Party, the ruling National Party, the Democratic Party, and of course the newly free ANC. 702 played an enormous part in preparing people for the coming changes. Importantly, we provided a forum for the voiceless, and listeners themselves were given a chance to engage with leading political personalities and with new ideas’.
In reporting on the advent of democracy, 702 became a contributor to and an integral part of the democratic process. It was to play no less important a role in the consolidation of that democracy.
In the process of providing a voice to its listeners 702 brought to them an amazing range of voices and opinions. John Robbie, the Irish rugby star who came out to play and returned to stay, found the succession of personalities endlessly interesting and sometimes inspiring:
‘I’ve interviewed some amazing people. The one with Desmond Tutu was extraordinary, because we hit it off right from the beginning. He knew about the show and just picked up what we were trying to do. There was Thabo Mbeki in the early days, who I interviewed when he came back from exile.
And then there was the white right, and AWB leader Eugene Terreblanche, who wouldn’t speak to me, except in Afrikaans. I said, “Come on, I’m an Irishman, we sent regiments out to support you in the Boer War”. So he says, ‘What was the name of the Irish general? If you can give me that, I’ll give you the interview in English’. Of course, I didn’t know, it was General McBride – who was an ancestor of Robert McBride, another very controversial figure in South Africa.
Robbie’s sporting profile meant that people often felt comfortable telling him things they would not otherwise have confided to a journalist. A Transvaal rugby player, for example, related to him a conversation they had just had with the killer of the anti-apartheid academic David Webster, and gave him details about the assassination. Afterwards Robbie contacted Vrye Weekblad reporter Jacques Pauw who was investigating the matter, but when Pauw met with the player concerned he was suffering from a bit of amnesia on the subject. On another occasion, a policeman told him about how a corruption case against his colleague was thrown out after the latter threatened to go public about the murder of National Party politician Robert Smit in the 1970s. It wasn’t often possible for Robbie to use the information he received in this way but it did keep him in the know and gave him a feel of what was going on within the ruling order.
Robbie was inspired by the momentous changes underway in his adopted country and when a chance came to be part of it seized it with both hands. As a close witness to the democratic transition and an active part of it, he is well placed to comment on how remarkable the country’s journey has been since the turbulent 1980s:
It’s only when you look back and see the things that happened that it actually strikes you, the times in which we lived. You’re so involved with the country changing, the incredible highs and incredible lows, that you almost got used to it. If you’re ever feeling down, visit the Apartheid Museum, and when you come out, you’ll think anything is possible. Sorting out crime, the economy, all our problems.
It was this can-do positive attitude that looked like driving 702 into the post-democratic era. With Mandela in Tuynhuys and a Government of National Unity in place (which had F.W. de Klerk as Deputy President alongside Thabo Mbeki) South Africa was the global poster-child for racial reconciliation, democracy, and harmony, brimming with potential, circled by eager investors. Talk Radio 702 was in a similar position: dominant in its marketplace, staffed by almost every major radio star in the country, and seemingly impregnable.
The Story of 702 is published by Batya Bricker Book Projects.
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