„Journalism is for people who are committed to something bigger than themselves and the chequebook they get at the end of the month.” says Joe Thloloe into the complete silence of the room, where 22 young journalists from 22 countries, hardly impressible for everything they had seen and been confided yet, are simply holding their breathe. “We have to adopt the perspective of the underdogs of our society and use our influence to give a voice to the voiceless. This is what makes a good journalist.”
Joe Thloloe is perhaps one of the least known lecturers of the Summer Academy, this decent modest gentleman of sixty-something who has been appearing amongst the young journalists one evening on the dinner table and had assisted silently at the seminars. But he will be the last to be forgotten. His agenda of “ethic and responsibility of the media” was expressed a dozens times before by lecturers and course participants due to the topic of the Summer Academy but it has never been so credible, heart-moving and empathetic.
Joe Thloloe was 15 years old when he became a journalist without deciding to do so. It was in the midst of the apartheid regime in South Africa deep in the 1950s and he still attended highschool. Young Joe was caught in the middle of a warfare of youngsters in his township Lesotho who fought each other as a result of the dividing policies of the apartheid regime. He wrote a reportage and sent it to Times Magazine as all South African magazines at that time were in the hand of whites and would never have printed it. A senior journalist immediately came around and when he stunningly found out that all facts given by the unknown schoolboy were true, he made sure its publication. Young Joe was awarded “the incredible salary of ten dollars” and so motivated that he went on intermingling in public affairs by writing letters to the editor under a synonym. He didn’t come out with his identity until the day when his father asked him, whether by chance or by suspicion, if he knew this x who was publishing all these comments. Thloloe smiles when he speaks of this: “It’s me, father.” he had said. Nothing more.
In 1959 Joe Thloloe was in his mid-twenties and among the “angry young men” filled with the desire for a better life, the passion for literature and the wrath of the voiceless and oppressed. “We were always running around with a book under the arm, we carried our idols of literature and journalism even to our meeting places: We also wanted to write of “Mice and Men” as John Steinbeck did, felt related to Hemingway equally as to Chinua Achebe. We had such an urge to educate ourselves, for never to fall into depression and drunkenness as many of the great spirits of this time did.” These “Stormers and Stressers” of the Fifties, among them Nelson Mandela and many others later known for their revolutionary achievements, didn’t feel sufficiently represented by the African National Congress any longer and split into a more consequent wing: The x. From one day to the other they simply refused carrying their passes as prescribed. The apartheid government of the Buren had introduced the passports to divide all Native South Africans into arbitrary ethnic classes and by that prevent them to leave their township. “We wanted to set a sign and make this pass system collapse, at any price.” Joe Thloloe remembers in his quiet manner. The price to be paid was high. Those of the 200 (?) young ‘rebels’ who were imprisoned were rather lucky, 67 (?) of them were shot during deportation.
It was during his 18 month in prison that between sessions of torture and solitary reclusion that young Thloloe was taught his later profession which already was his whole passion: “There was a senior journalist in the same jail as me, whom I admired a lot. We lacked writing material but he gave me oral lessons and I wrote my first features on the toilet paper they provided to us, collecting pieces of information of the other rebels which they had written on their papers.” The tension in the seminar room is tangible, many of the 22 junior journalists come from developing or transitional countries and have learned their art under difficult circumstances. But who has ever heard of a journalist school in jail? “Have you never ever wanted to give up?” Ade wants to know and he can’t prevent his voice from trembling. The young Nigerian journalist can just now harvest the “Grapes of Wrath” in his own country which his parents’ generation has planted: He feels privileged and thankful to be able to confront government officials with awkward findings – persons which were still inaccessible for his mother.
Thloloe looks at the participants with cloudy but ever so astute eyes, with an exhaustiveness which doesn’t come from his long flight but from a life full of suffering, but with ever so much commitment. And they know: Never, never had he ceded. Neither when he was accused of activist journalism as a member of the then founded “Union of Black Journalists”, neither when he was becoming a “living dead” as no one could quote him or refer to his ideas without both of them going to jail. “During the three decades of apartheid writing, my wife and me tried to joke around that we could write a study about South African prisons, me from the inside and she from the outside perspective.”
Their fight was vindicated, his black humour finally justified, when at the beginning of the 1990s apartheid was abolished, the rule of law and democracy were installed and when the responsibles had to confront a truth commission.
After his unique journalistic career which lasted for 46 years, Joe Thloloe has now put the pen apart. Instead he serves as an ombudsman at the newly founded Press Council of South Africa, a self-regulative institution comparable to the “Deutsche Presserat”, which shows how far South Africa has already advanced. Furthermore he transmits his large experience to a young generation of journalists as to the participants of the Summer Academy in Hamburg. Thloloe clearly believes that solidarity of the journalists as shareholders of the “fourth estate” is required not only in South Africa: “At all times and right around the world you find people who need your voice, in Germany as well as in Sudan and Afghanistan. Even after the abolishment of apartheid regime I could imagine a lot of stories I would go back onto the streets for.” We believe him at once.
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