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South Africa's Propaganda War: A Bibliographic Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Galen Hull
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Extract

In the wake of revelations concerning the activities of foreign lobbyists in the United States, and especially the Koreagate scandal, increasing attention has been given in the press and on Capitol Hill to the effect on American policy-making. The most explosive instance of foreign influence peddling is the massive campaign of South African officials to improve that country's image in the western world. The most recent phase of South Africa's propaganda war, unleashed in 1972, has not only raised questions about official U.S. relations with South Africa but has provoked the worst political scandal in South African history. For several years there had been assertions by investigative journalists that the South African government was behind a variety of schemes designed to win friends and influence policy among its western allies. By 1979 it had become clear that many of the allegations were true. The South African Department of Information had spent $100 million on unconventional methods for this purpose in a seven year period.

The man at the center of the scandal was Dr. Eschel Rhoodie, former secretary of the Department of Information, who revealed in some detail the secret projects his government had undertaken to buy influence. In an interview with BBC television in March 1979, Rhoodie made no pretense about the ruthlessness of the methods employed by his department to assure South Africa's survival in a world hostile to its apartheid policies. The intellectual underpinnings of the propaganda campaign are found in the book written by Rhoodie in 1969 entitled The Paper Curtain, a kind of Afrikaner version of Mein Kampf. The book has subsequently been withdrawn from circulation. The Paper Curtain told how a curtain of lies and communist propaganda had isolated South Africa from the west and argued the necessity of mounting a counterattack through unorthodox methods. The book attracted the attention of the Minister of Information, Connie Mulder, who appointed Rhoodie to his post and gave him responsibility for telling the country's story abroad. In that capacity Rhoodie was the architect of an ambitious program which ranged from engaging the services of legal and public relations firms to wooing black African heads of state and subsidizing various publications. In all, Rhoodie claimed that his department financed over one hundred secret projects.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , December 1979 , pp. 79 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1979

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