The Pulitzer at 100: Michael Parks and the unraveling of apartheid

South Africa was boiling. It was 1986, and security forces were cracking down on anti-apartheid activists daily and with brutal force. Black activists were disappearing from the streets. Bombs were exploding in shopping malls and sports arenas frequented by whites.

The end of apartheid was four years away, but that was far from obvious at the time.

In the midst of the turmoil was Michael Parks, the Johannesburg correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Over the course of that year, he painted an unflinching portrait of a nation on the brink of historic change. In 1987, the Pulitzer board cited his “balanced and comprehensive coverage” in awarding him its prize for international reporting.

[sidebar style="left" head="Celebrating 100 Years of Excellence in Journalism and the Arts"]Join us at Harvard's Sanders Theatre on Sept. 10-11 as we celebrate 100 years of the Pulitzer Prize and explore the theme "Power: Accountability and Abuse" with two-dozen Pulitzer winners. Visit the Nieman Foundation's Pulitzer Centennial event page to learn more.

In the weeks before the event, Storyboard has been showcasing great storytelling from some of the winners, like this one.[/sidebar]

Looking back recently at that award-winning work, I was struck anew by its scope, power and complexity.

He wrote news and analysis with an authority that came from being a reporter with deep sources, both in the liberation movement and the white-minority government. His enterprise pieces about life under apartheid were prime examples of the best of our craft, and frequently earned display as front-page “Column One” features.

In this story, for example, his theme was the loyalty that black South Africans felt for the banned African National Congress. But he told it by boarding a train in Soweto with a courageous young activist. The introduction, in particular, is simple, elegant and perfectly on point.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Sipho calls himself a "human radio." Each morning, he gets on the train near his home deep in Soweto, the sprawling black satellite city outside Johannesburg, and begins to repeat the news from the Radio Freedom broadcasts of the African National Congress.

As the crowded train rattles on toward downtown Johannesburg, Sipho, a brokerage clerk in his mid-30s, gives a detailed rundown on the growing unrest around the country; recounts the latest exploits of "our fighters" in the Spear of the Nation, the congress's military wing, and reports on the activities of the group's exiled leadership. Then he starts a discussion based on Radio Freedom's latest commentaries.

"Man, do I have an audience today!" he said. "Two years ago, people weren't interested, not at all, and I might have been talking to myself most mornings. Today, they want me to shout out the news, and they leave the train not just talking about the ANC but ready to work for it, to fight for it. . . . They know the ANC is going to lead us to freedom."

The fortunes of the African National Congress, outlawed here in 1960, have indeed soared in the last two years. Today, the group can probably claim the allegiance of more of South Africa's 25 million blacks than any other organization, and this makes it a major political force here.

Among the foreign reporters based in South Africa, Michael was a distinctive figure, usually roaming the townships in his trademark navy blazer and khaki pants – to make it clear to all sides, he told me, that he was a reporter: nothing more, nothing less.

As the correspondent who succeeded him and covered the end of apartheid, I saw first-hand the respect Michael had earned for his unstinting but balanced coverage.

As he handed off coverage, he began by introducing me to leading figures in the white-minority government. Then we secretly met anti-apartheid leaders. I was struck by how both sets of combatants so clearly enjoyed talking to this American reporter who, with previous postings in Saigon, Peking and Moscow, knew a lot about the geopolitical forces at work in South Africa.

At one point in the reporting hand-over, Michael and I went to Zambia to meet the ANC leaders in exile, all of whom knew him by name. Fearing attacks by South African agents on Lusaka’s streets, they would arrive at his hotel room well after midnight, and still be talking at dawn. (He always came to Lusaka bearing gifts: pipe tobacco for Thabo Mbeki and a bottle of good Scotch for the ANC’s military chief.)

Some of his best work in 1986 had focused on the absurdities of life in a black-majority country under white rule.

The scene at the top of this Column One is a great example:

For 33 years, Rowley Arenstein lived in a world that Kafka might have created. Declared a threat to the state, he became practically a non-person.

A lawyer who specialized in labor law and political cases, Arenstein was barred by government decree from all political and union activities and then prohibited from practicing law.

Under South Africa's system of "banning," a unique form of political ostracism that has been codified into law, he could meet with only one person at a time. He was under house arrest for years, allowed out only at specified times of the day and permitted no visitors.

When he did go out, he was barred from schools, printing shops, publishing houses and factories. He could not enter segregated black, Asian or mixed-race areas and could not go beyond the city limits of Durban, his home area. He was required to report daily to the police.

Arenstein could legally speak to his wife only by ministerial dispensation from regulations barring communication with any other person under restrictions similar to his. He needed a magistrate's permission to talk to his sister and to his law partner. He could teach his two daughters, but not his six grandchildren.

And nothing he said could be repeated.

[pq full]As the correspondent who succeeded him and covered the end of apartheid, I saw first-hand the respect Michael had earned for his unstinting but balanced coverage.[/pq]

Under the apartheid government's state of emergency decree, authorities gave themselves broad powers to detain their opponents. Even a journalist who wrote about detained people could be subject to detention and, in the case of foreign journalists, expulsion.

In this story, Michael wrote about the “disappeared,” showing, in simple yet powerful prose, the human cost of the policy.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Simon M., Mary D., Nazareth M., Fatimah S., Fikile M.--where are they?

Simon, a 15-year-old schoolboy, was sent to the store near his home in Soweto, outside Johannesburg, last Wednesday evening for bread, milk and jam. He has not returned. His parents are frantic with worry.

Mary, 20, a student leader in Soweto, told her mother on June 15 that she would be spending two nights at a girlfriend's house and would be back last Tuesday morning. She has not come home yet.

Nazareth, 17, an altar boy at a Roman Catholic church outside Port Elizabeth, went to serve Mass on June 15 and was last seen being taken away from the church by three men.

Fatimah, an insurance clerk in her early 20s, went to a meeting on that weekend of an Indian cultural organization to which she belongs near Durban and did not return.

Fikile, a truck driver in his 40s, left for work on the morning of June 17 but, according to his Cape Town employers, never arrived, although he has a "superior attendance record." Neither his foreman nor the company lawyer has been able to locate him despite checks with the police, local hospitals, the mortuary and all his known friends.


These five are among the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of South Africans who …have "disappeared" since President Pieter W. Botha imposed a national state of emergency June 12 and gave the police and army the authority to detain anyone without charge and hold him or her indefinitely.

In late 1986, the government announced that it was expelling Michael; he was the fifth foreign correspondent to receive an expulsion order that year.

Michael and his editors decided to fight it. He called his sources in the government, who lobbied on his behalf. Then the L.A. Times editor and foreign editor flew to Cape Town in early 1987 to meet government officials and make a formal appeal.

In that meeting, three of the most powerful government ministers brought in boxes containing all 242 stories he had written the previous year, each carefully annotated. Although they said the stories had put the country in a negative light, they admitted they had been unable to find a single error. In a rare move, they reversed their decision and allowed him to stay.