Sjamboks, knobkerries, metal pipes, sticks and shields were waved in the air by thousands of people as the IFP marched to the City Press office in Ferndale to deliver a memorandum of demands.
Members of Inkatha Freedom Party sang struggle songs and chanted slogans written on cardboard signs, all the way from Rose Garden Park, Bordeaux, up Jan Smuts and Selkirk avenues to Pretoria Avenue, about 1.4km away.
The march on September 16 drew people from as far as KwaZulu-Natal, Free State and Mpumalanga.
They presented a 38-page memorandum of demands to City Press regarding what they called defamation of character of their former president and founder, and Zulu tribal leader Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi by the editor-in-chief of the publication Mondli Makhanya.
In an August opinion piece, Makhanya said of Buthelezi, “It boggles the mind how a nation that claims to be appalled at South Africa’s high levels of violent crime can celebrate a mass murderer who contributed so much to the culture of violence that prevails today; how a people that is so fixated on the sins of the past can so casually overlook the sins of a man who was responsible for so much of the killing that happened in the name of apartheid.”
The national spokesperson of the IFP Mkhuleko Hlengwa said, “We came here today to march because we have a right to do so according to the Constitution.
“We are not here to suppress the freedom of the media. We support impartial reporting and the independence of the media.”
Party president Velenkosini Hlabisa alleged Makhanya had told lies about Buthelezi for years. He also claimed Makhanya was a confessed murderer, having admitted to the crime during apartheid-era violence between opposition parties, under a pseudonym in the Weekly Mail in 1990.
The four main points of the memorandum centred around City Press no longer publishing new or old pieces by Makhanya about Buthelezi or other committee members of the IFP, to hold him to account for alleged abuse of power, inform the IFP why they employed a ‘former political operator’ and publish an apology for breaching the Press Code.
The newspaper was given 14 days to respond to the memorandum, failing which a march of a ‘different manner’ would be organised ‘that would be difficult to manage’.
The crowd was monitored by Metro police as well as Linden and Randburg police officers, not to mention the group’s volunteers wearing bright yellow bibs who formed a perimeter around the huge crowd to keep them together and peaceful.
It was the IFP’s leaders who had to hold a violent segment of the crowd back when they surged forward to try to clash with City Press personnel when they came forward to sign the memorandum.
Otherwise, the march was peaceful and no injuries were reported.
“As a representative of Media24 and City Press in particular, firstly we need to say thank you for the manner that you have done this thing [march], in a non-violent manner,” said news editor Timothy Molobi before he signed the memorandum.
“We have received your memorandum… We are going to take this copy and give it to abasiphethe [management] to deal with the contents of your grievances.”
The next day, Makhanya wrote in a News24 article that the IFP’s allegations against him were ‘absolute balderdash’.
“In that [Weekly Mail] article, I wrote about the violence in KwaZulu-Natal, and what they [IFP] are trying to do now is to turn things around and say that I have murdered a person,” Makhanya said.
“I have said nothing about me murdering anyone. I merely spoke of how the violence happened then… The fact that I used a pseudonym is not in dispute.”
The South African National Editors’ Forum decried the march as an act of intimidation and an attempt to silence Makhanya.
ALSO READ: WATCH: IFP hand over memorandum of demands to City Press
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