When journalist Ron Nixon was growing up as a young black child in the US, his grandmother gave him a magazine about South Africa. Page after page featured images of wonderful wild animals, sunsets and happy black people on the beach.

Decades later, Nixon would realise that the magazine was a piece of propaganda produced by the apartheid government’s Department of Intelligence, one of countless publications distributed internationally under the guise of being “regular” magazines.

To understand the scope of the propaganda war, picture this scene: the setting is a boardroom in 1970s South Africa under the presidency of John Vorster. A group of bureaucrats gather to hear the results of a survey undertaken by an expensive New York PR firm, tasked with finding out what people think of apartheid South Africa internationally.

Journalist Ron Nixon. Photograph: The Daily Maverick

What the bureaucrats hear isn’t pretty. They’re told South Africa is the second most most unpopular country in the world, just after Idi Amin’s Uganda. The country is “less favourably regarded” than both the Soviet Union and China.

This, Nixon writes in his new book Selling Apartheid: South Africa’s Global Propaganda War, was one of the moments that saw the country’s information war step up a gear.

‘Buy, bribe, or bluff your way’

From the earliest days of apartheid in the late 1940s, DF Malan’s government sought to win US support, by convincing Americans that a white minority government in South Africa was a critical bulwark against continent-wide communism.

Amid growing international criticism under Malan’s successor JG Strijdom, the apartheid propaganda machine was refined and professionalised. Public revulsion towards the 1960 Sharpeville massacre – when 69 black protesters were killed by police – saw the need for pro-apartheid material to be produced, and at speed. The Hamilton Wright Organisation, a public relations firm with experience representing unpopular governments, was called in. It produced articles and films featuring beaming black South Africans and scenic wildlife, and distributed them worldwide.

It was under then information minister Connie Mulder in the 1970s that South Africa’s propaganda efforts picked up serious steam. Mulder told the government that what South Africa needed was a campaign that would “buy, bribe, or bluff its way into the hearts and minds of the world”, Nixon quotes. Mulder hired a former journalist called Eschel Rhoodie to counter the negative perception of South Africa spreading worldwide, and Rhoodie was given access to a secret fund of millions, Nixon claims.

South Africa needed to buy, bribe, or bluff its way into the hearts and minds of the world

It was Rhoodie who hired the expensive New York public relations firm to undertake the survey which delivered such devastating results as to South Africa’s global popularity. From this realisation came the action plan that would see the infamous founding of The Citizen, a newspaper intended to counter left-leaning media such as the Rand Daily Mail.

Mulder, Rhoodie and Vorster would eventually be brought down in the scandal known as Muldergate, in which the trio were implicated in moving millions of rand from the defence budget to undertake a series of propaganda projects. “More than anything,” writes Nixon “the scandal would destroy the widely held popular opinion that while apartheid-era leaders supported a harsh and repressive policy which denied blacks their rights, they personally weren’t corrupt or out to enrich themselves.”

Vorster’s toppling did not see the end of the propaganda war. Although his successor PW Botha would disband the Department of Information and create a replacement, Botha retained as many as 60 of the secret projects spearheaded by Rhoodie, Nixon suggests.

The reach of the government’s information tentacles was impressive. In the UK, two MPs in the ruling Labour party were on the apartheid payroll, writes Nixon. They were tasked with lobbying for apartheid in the House of Commons, and spying on anti-apartheid groups. German journalists were taken on annual trips to South Africa. A group was formed in Japan to establish links with Japanese unions. An Argentinian advertising expert was hired to place pro-South African articles in South American papers. There were abandoned plans to create and bankroll a pro-apartheid Norwegian political party.

In the 80s lobbying in the UK was handled by a firm called Strategy Network International, which campaigned to prevent sanctions against South Africa and treated UK politicians (including David Cameron) to trips to the country to persuade them that things weren’t all that bad.

South African women demonstrate outside the Cato Manor Beer Hall against the clean-up of their township, 1959. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

The characters

The bulk of the apartheid government’s efforts, however, were directed at the US. Nixon’s book is populated with extraordinary characters, particularly those black Americans who became such diligent mouthpieces for the apartheid government.

Nixon’s previous short e-book Operation Blackwash vividly chronicled the apartheid regime’s attempts to win the favour of African Americans, and here again Nixon returns to this surreal aspect of the propaganda war.

Schuyler was a vocal advocate of black South African rights until he became vehemently anti-communist

We’re introduced to characters like Max Yergan, a black American who lived in South Africa for many years, who became a confidante to African National Congress (ANC) pioneers such as Govan Mbeki and AB Xuma. Yergan returned to the US to lobby for the rights of black South Africans alongside the likes of WEB du Bois, but abruptly went on to inform on his political comrades to the FBI, and tour South Africa warning about the evils of communism, Nixon records. In 1953, Yergan gave an interview to an American magazine suggesting that “the South African government deserved the world’s understanding, rather than scorn, for its policy of apartheid”.

Then there was George Schuyler. A black American, Schuyler was a vocal advocate of black South African rights until he became, like Yergan, vehemently anti-communist. Nixon writes: “In the late 1940s, Schuyler began to shift his political views, perhaps because of an awareness that he had come under suspicion by American intelligence agencies like the FBI.” By the 1960s, Schuyler was giving radio interviews voicing his views: “I don’t think it’s the business of other people to change [apartheid] society”.

Andrew T Hatcher, Richard Nixon’s deputy press secretary and “one of the most high-profile African Americans in the world”, to quote Nixon, set up lobbying trips to South Africa for black American journalists and legislators where their movements were strictly controlled. Nixon suggests that Hatcher was also paid by the apartheid regime to make press appearances on American television to tell the US of the “encouraging” situation in South Africa. He also is alleged to have distributed lapel pins with interlocking American and Transkei flags, to suggest the degree to which the US backed the “homeland”.

William Keyes, another black American, was paid $400,000 a year by the apartheid government to write editorials in conservative newspapers attacking the “communist” ANC, Nixon writes. In a CNN interview in 1985, he spoke of the need to recognise “the reality of the ANC as a terrorist outlaw organisation which has perpetrated violence primarily against innocent black people”.

Sanctions

South Africa’s PW Botha (left) with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984. Photograph: STF/EPA

Nixon’s book also contains fascinating nuggets about behind-the-scenes wrangling over sanctions. Nixon records that Margaret Thatcher’s steadfastness to avoid sanctions against apartheid was unmoved even by a plea from the Queen herself. “Royal advisers took the unusual step of leaking to the [Sunday Times] newspaper the monarch’s political views and the growing distance between her and the prime minister over South Africa,” Nixon writes.

“Unstinting support” was also given to the apartheid government by US televangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, with Falwell even encouraging “millions of Christians to buy Krugerrands [gold coin]” to support the South African economy. Much of the US opposition to sanctions was premised on two pillars: that sanctions would hurt black South Africans more than whites; and the need to keep South Africa strong to prevent communism from sweeping the continent.

“I hate communism more than I hate apartheid,” Nixon quotes one conservative black American minister as saying.

Nixon concludes that if the propaganda war actually achieved anything, it was to delay the inevitable. During a phone interview, he elaborates: “I think they got taken [in]”.

For Nixon, though, what it comes down to is something murky, not clear-cut. “For the most part what I hope it shows is the complexity of all these movements,” he says. “That they are not as black and white as it seems.”





Ron Nixon’s Selling Apartheid: South Africa’s Global Propaganda War is published by Jacana

Ron Nixon is a Washington correspondent for the New York Times. He is a visiting associate in the Department of Media and Journalism Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he teaches investigative reporting and data journalism