No Future Without Forgiveness

by Desmond Tutu

The newspapers were not averse to self-censorship so as not to rouse the wrath of the government and ostensibly to avoid statutory control. When the apartheid government closed the black newspaper the World, the white papers in the same newspaper company were lukewarm in their protest, suggesting that the World had been playing with fire and had got what had been coming its way. It was not unusual for a white reporter’s copy to be preferred to that of a black reporter even if the latter had firsthand experiences of what he or she was reporting on. When black reporters described the appalling conduct of the security forces against blacks, their copy was normally toned down as perhaps maligning these forces. Now we know, of course, that the black reporters were telling it as it was. The editors would have angrily denied that they were being racist. No, they wanted “objective” writing. They did not care to define from whose perspective “objective” was to be judged because the assumption was that their standards were universal. They