BOOK REVIEW: Interesting history spoiled by hagiography of owners Naspers
Newspaper had a great influence on politics and served to promote the UDF
City Press: The Chapter We WroteBy Len KalaneJonathan Ball Publishers The history of the country’s black newspapers is saturated with all the vicissitudes of SA history — brave resistance to apartheid, well-meaning but also cynical white financiers, eccentric editors and writers — and all of these make for ambiguous, strange and sometimes contradictory phenomena. Len Kalane, editor of City Press from 1995 to 2000, has produced an interesting book on how the paper emerged and flourished. He outlines its history after its takeover by Naspers in 1984, just a few years after its launch by Jim Bailey, the owner of Drum magazine, in 1982. The paper was named after the Golden City Post, which Bailey launched in 1955 as Sophiatown was being bulldozed. More than an account of the paper’s history, Kalane has produced a fledgling political and social history, shedding light on how apartheid determined the lives of black people, and how they resisted. In part the book serves as an introduction ...
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