He also was involved in an organization called Stratcom, which was Strategic Communications, which involved planting smear letters of anti-apartheid activists, or smear stories. Again, there were gullible journalists, or some of them were plants and colleagues of his. And he and his organization succeeded in getting stories published, which discredited, you know, really good brave activists and anybody who was perceived to be anti-government or was in their way or who needed to be discredited. You know, that's his career. That's his record. And you're telling me that Mr. Abramoff was a colleague, was involved with him.

AMY GOODMAN: You were at the Truth and Reconciliation hearing, where he testified?

ALLISTER SPARKS: Yes, where he sought -- he sought amnesty in both of those cases. And I attended both those hearings with the families, the surviving elements of the families. He seemed to me to be unrepentant. You know, many, many, many people doing that kind of work uttered the words of regret, but it was often doubtful. It often didn't ring very true. But, in my book, he's one of the less savory people my country has produced.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned perhaps the least of the crimes, which is smearing people, as opposed to killing them. But right now, with the U.S. in Iraq and the stories of the planting of stories and the paying of journalists, do you see something similar with Stratcom?

ALLISTER SPARKS: It resonates. This is why I’m just so distressed and angry at the United States. I mean, this is a country that has held itself out as a paragon of democracy and decency, standing for all the good things. And it's been the model that we've all supposed to watch and admire. I first went to the United States when John F. Kennedy was President. And I spent a Nieman year at Harvard. And there was an idealistic spirit in the air. And look where it is now. I mean, how much idealism is there about what is being done in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay?

I mean, this is disgusting stuff. This is the kind of stuff that disgusted me about my own country and rendered me -- in my first book, I said that, you know, in my long career of reporting this, I had never known or experienced the emotion of patriotism. That's how I felt about my country. And when it was -- when we transformed, I felt personally cleansed. And now I see a country that I’ve admired all my life descending to these depths, and I’m appalled. That's all I can say. I find it personally – I just find it hugely distressing. I’m always encouraged -- I have a lot of friends in the United States -- and I’m encouraged that many of them are distressed, too. But, you know, what has happened to the moral quality of your country? It's a profoundly distressing thing. And it doesn't seem to be getting better.

AMY GOODMAN: Allister Sparks, you exposed how Steve Biko, the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, died in South Africa. Can you talk about that?

ALLISTER SPARKS: Yes, I can. That was a source whose identity I concealed for as long as he lived. But I can reveal it now, because he has died. The Minister of Justice, which I always thought was a non-sequitur, gave in Parliament as the official reason for Steve Biko's death that he had died of a hunger strike. I was editing the newspaper, and this was the story. These were the big headlines, that he'd gone on a hunger strike and died. The Minister said so in Parliament.

And I got a call from this good friend of mine, who was a pathologist, to ask if I would go see him. And again, one had these meetings, and, you know, you would talk under trees in the garden to avoid all these listening devices. It became a way of life. You know, wiretapping intrudes on your life in a terrible way. Anyway, he took me outside and whispered to me. He said, “He didn't die of a hunger strike. I’ve just conducted the post-mortem examination. He was beaten to death. Brain damage killed him.” But he said, “Look, you can't mention my name.” And he showed me his report, his coroner's report on the death certificate. He said, “You can't mention my name, because I’ve got to testify at the subsequent inquest into the death, and I will not be able to do that, if it's disclosed. I shouldn't be telling you this, but I’m so outraged at what the minister said. You know, do what you can.”

So I pondered this one, and I went and consulted, again, very privately. You had to be careful of your own staff. I consulted with a very smart young woman, who I regarded as my most able reporter, and drew her aside, again went out of the building, and said, “You know, these are the facts. How do we do this?” And we decided to go and talk with the government doctors that we knew had examined him while he was in prison after he had suffered this blow to his head. And we knew who they were, because some statements had been made from them sort of supporting the minister.

So we flew her off to Port Elizabeth, and she went and beat on their doors. And they wouldn't speak to her at all. So I said, “Well, never mind. We've got to be creative here.” And we just ran a story, saying, “We have consulted the doctors who examined him. We can reveal that he did not die of a hunger strike.” We didn't directly connect the two, but we had to find a way of reporting what we knew absolutely to be the truth. I mean, I had seen the document. I had seen the death certificate. So it wasn't as though I had doubts. You know, you've got to do something, but how on earth to get around the fact that I couldn't reveal the source?

Well, immediately, there was an outcry from the minister. And we had one of the iniquitous things, we had a press code that had been foisted on the media and a threat of government action to intensify censorship. You know, the government had said, “The media must either control itself or we'll control them.” And our proprietors had always been weak-kneed, had gone along with this, and they had created this press code, which meant you could be publicly reprimanded if you told -- if you reported something that was factually incorrect.

Anyway, a retired judge was appointed head of the tribunal that was going to hear this case. I was supposed to have seven days, in terms of the regulations of this press code, in which to respond, but the proprietors all came rushing to me and said, “We think this is an absolutely seminal case, and the minister’s threatened that, you know, if you don't have the hearing right away, tonight, they will bring this law.” And this included my own managing director. “So, faced with that, are you going to be responsible for this?” For my seven days, I just thought in seven days I could, you know -- the facts might start to come out elsewhere, too, and I would stand a better chance. But, you know, I was in a corner.

All my career, I had made it a rule while editing that paper that when you got a story, when you were engaged in an investigative story like this, you were not only checking your facts for the sake of journalistic accuracy, you were also preparing your court defense at the same time. So, we would run it past the lawyers: How many witnesses can you call? Can you rely on those witnesses? How many on this issue? How many on that issue? You've got to have corroborative evidence. Here, I couldn't even bring the primary sources. So I was up a gum tree. And I appeared before the tribunal. It sat through 1:00 in the morning, and I was severely reprimanded and ordered to publish an apology, which I had to do. It still stands against me as a sort of conviction. And it took about three weeks to a month before the truth emerged.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you write in your apology?

ALLISTER SPARKS: Oh, it was dictated by the court. You know, they wrote it. I had to publish it on the front page.

AMY GOODMAN: And it said you were wrong?

ALLISTER SPARKS: It said I was wrong and apologized for the inaccuracy.

AMY GOODMAN: And then how did it come out weeks later?

ALLISTER SPARKS: Well, the public saw that we weren't wrong. But the minister -- you know, nothing happened to the minister. So you just soldier on to the next one.

AMY GOODMAN: This was --

ALLISTER SPARKS: It just becomes, you know, one more flesh wound that you suffer in the process.

AMY GOODMAN: This was another September 11th, wasn't it? September 11th, 1977? He died on September 12.

ALLISTER SPARKS: When he died, yes. Well, I mean, you know, the resonance of that rings on, because the details of it, exactly how he was tortured and who tortured him has all been revealed in our Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. It's all come pouring out there. And, you know, obviously we were vindicated long ago. But, you know, it was a tough night, all the same.

AMY GOODMAN: Allister Sparks, you lived in South Africa. You fought against apartheid in South Africa, and you also came to the United States at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and you met and covered Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King?

ALLISTER SPARKS: Yes, yes. That was during my Nieman year at Harvard, during the break between semesters. I bundled my little family into the car, and we drove south. And I went through the South. It was at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement. I went to the Ebenezer Baptist Church and heard the Reverend Martin Luther King preach. I had also heard him up at Harvard, and his father. I met Medgar Evers, oh, Julian Bond, a whole string of people. I still thought that Birmingham, Alabama, was, in spite of my experiences in South Africa, one of the scariest cities I had ever been in. The white hostility towards black people was palpable everywhere.

But, you know, basically the analogy between the two countries was different. South Africa has always been compared with the Southern states of the U.S., and to a degree, it -- the similarities are just enough to deceive. Yes, we had segregation. Both had segregation. Both had racial oppression, race prejudice, race brutality. But the South African crisis was much more profound than that.

At bottom, what apartheid really was was the consequence of a conflict between two ethno-nationalisms competing with rival claims to the same piece of territory, the same country. Whose country was it? Did it belong to the Afrikaner nationalists who had been there for three-and-a-half centuries, as long as white folk had been in the U.S.? Was it theirs? They claimed it was. And the theologians of the Dutch Reformed Church used a particular brand of Calvinist theology to give you that notion, to give that notion theological underpinning, that it was their God-given right to have a country of their own, in order to be a people, and it was divine, it was part of the ordinances of creation that a people had a right to be a volk in a Herder sense, you know, of the volksgeist, and to have their own land to give expression to that. That, on the one hand, and, of course, Afrikaan nationalism, denying that and saying this was a country that belonged to all who lived in it, and the majority had the right to rule.

Now, where else do you get -- you didn't have that kind of competition of rival claims to whose country the U.S. was, for even the Southern states. And this is a much bigger thing than park benches or schools or lunch counters. This is a contest over ownership of a country. And that is what you find between the Israelis and the Palestinians and between the Catholics and the Protestants of Northern Ireland. Those are the true analogies of the South African struggle. And I look at them and say, “How are they doing?” You know, we've resolved our own. We've resolved our crisis.

And the solution, if were you to apply it to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, would be one secular country shared by all and ruled over by the majority. And if people find that unthinkable, then perhaps they have some appreciation of what we've done, because that is what we did, without any foreign negotiator, no handshakes on the White House lawn, no conferences at Lancaster House in London. It was done in a shed-like building near the Johannesburg Airport by South Africans themselves, by themselves. And it was a remarkable thing. And documenting that and getting to the root of the story of how it came about, which is now the subject of three books that I’ve written, that was the high point of my career.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was South African crusading anti-apartheid editor, Allister Sparks, formerly editor of the national newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, author of a number of books including Tomorrow is Another Country and Beyond the Miracle: Inside the New South Africa.

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