Journalist and campaigner

Born: March 10, 1933;

Died: September 19, 2016

ALLISTER Sparks, who has died aged 83, was one of South Africa’s truly great, brave and brilliant journalists.

In an era long before the flowering of social media, and before even there was television in his own country, Sparks skilfully used newsprint to lay bare the injustices of apartheid. “Whites didn’t know what was going on in the black world because they didn’t want to know,” he once wrote. “The system of enforced racial segregation made it easy for them to avoid that uncomfortable knowledge.”

Sparks was as big as they come. As editor of the liberal Rand DailyMail between 1987 and 1991, he and a young reporter, Helen Zille, exposed the murder by white policemen of the charismatic Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. The government said Biko had died as a result of a hunger strike while in custody of the security police. Sparks and Zille received a tip-off from the government pathologist who told them: “I can tell you that (Justice Minister Jimmy) Kruger is lying. Biko didn’t die of a hunger strike, he died of brain damage. He was beaten to death.”

The pathologist, Dr Jonathan Gluckman, revealed after his retirement the killings in detention of many black South African activists, but Sparks waited many years, only after the country’s first all-race general election in 1994, to reveal his source.

Biko, as a result of Sparks’ exposé, became – and remains – a cause célèbre that shone a glaring light on the wrongs of apartheid South Africa. On Twitter, one black South African wrote: “History is weird. The world wouldn’t have known what really happened to Steve Biko had Allister Sparks not sent Helen Zille to find out.” Or as a current leading broadcaster observed: “Sparks did what most journalists can only dream of. He changed history, he changed the story, he told the truth. To do this required guts, strength and a real devotion to his craft. Without such an important exposé in our history, so much else would have been kept hidden.”

The Biko murder was only one of Sparks’ many scoops in a career that spanned more than six decades. Although Kruger demanded a clamp down on the press and made it illegal to quote members of the outlawed African National Congress, including the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and his “banned” wife Winnie, Sparks and his team went on to expose corruption at the heart of the white National Party government that forced the resignation of the hardline Prime Minister John Vorster.

In the so-called “Muldergate Scandal,” Sparks and his talented investigative reporter Mervyn Rees described, after a two-year investigation, a covert propaganda campaign, using millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, to create a slush fund to launch a pro-government newspaper, The Citizen, to counter the “lies” of the Rand Daily Mail.

Muldergate also entailed bribes of international news agencies and the purchase of the Washington Star newspaper. Money was laundered by bypassing foreign exchange regulation and using South Africa's vast gold resources to deposit cash in secretive Swiss Bank accounts. Sparks literally took the identity of his Muldergate source, codenamed Myrtle, to the grave with him, saying: “Her identity shall remain a secret for ever.”

Muldergate was a step too far by Sparks for the Rand Daily Mail’s spineless owners, the Anglo American Corporation. Although he had grown the paper’s black readership, he was sacked instead of being rewarded. In a shameless move he was told by management that what was most wanted were moneyed white readers, especially women, who made key household purchases and attracted advertisers.

Sparks then began another distinguished chapter of his working life, becoming the South Africa correspondent of The Observer, The Washington Post and Holland’s NRC Handelsblad, informing international audiences of the growing violence between the government and the black majority as his country teetered on the verge of a racial apocalypse.

Allister Haddon Sparks was born in 1933 in the small Eastern Cape settlement of Cathcart, near where the Great Kei River flows into the Indian Ocean and formed the border between Britain’s old Cape Colony and the large “native reserve” of Transkei. The first language he spoke was the Xhosa of his black playmates on his parents’ farm.

He began his career as a teenage reporter on a rural newspaper, planning to go on to university. But the editor, a Scot, successfully warned him: “Don’t do that, son, they’ll ruin ye. I’ll teach ye all ye need to know.”

Besides his vast journalism output, Sparks wrote a number of books, including an outstanding and exclusive account of how negotiations between the white government and Mandela had begun while the ANC leader was still in prison almost a decade before the 1994 election which established the modern democratic state.

Sparks, who throughout his working life had campaigned for black liberation and the unbanning of the African National Congress, became disillusioned with its latest leader, State President Jacob Zuma, writing scathingly until weeks before his death about the descent of Zuma’s administration into the mire of gross corruption.

“The man is a constant disaster waiting to happen in the presidency. He must go before more damage is done; it’s going to take years to fix,” Sparks wrote in one of his last columns for Business Day, South Africa’s equivalent of the Financial Times.

All the same, Sparks never lost his love for his country and his hope for its future. On the final page of his memoirs, he wrote: “All of us in this shrinking world have to learn to live in harmony with ‘the other’. Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, both Nobel Peace Prize winners, have given South Africans the vision of a ‘rainbow nation’ at peace with itself and the world. Now we have to conjure up the vision of a ‘rainbow world’. Not easy.”

Sparks was married three times. His first wife, Mary Rowe, whom he married in 1957, died in 1972. Sue Matthey, whom he married in 1973, died in 1999. His third marriage, to Jenny Gandar, ended in divorce. He is survived by three sons from his first marriage, a son from his second marriage and six grandchildren.

FRED BRIDGLAND