Editor’s Note: This article responds to Hopewell Radebe’s SANEF-published piece of  October 28, 2025, written as a rebuttal to the IOL column “Celebrating Elitism: The Gala of Gatekeepers and Its Impact on Media Freedom“.

Hopewell Radebe’s defence of SANEF’s gala functions as a rationalisation of elite capture. He repackages compromise as maturity and misuses the memory of struggle to validate corporate alignment. The arrangement he defends has abandoned the protection of press freedom in favour of donor loyalty and gatekeeping.

Radebe invokes apartheid-era media ownership to frame today’s donor partnerships as consistent with the past. This reworking of history substitutes institutional subservience for principled legacy. In doing so, he drains Black Wednesday of its historical and political significance.

Black Wednesday marked the state’s violent suppression of the Black radical press. On 19 October 1977, The World and Weekend World were shut down. Percy Qoboza, Aggrey Klaaste, and others were detained. Nineteen Black Consciousness organisations were banned. The crackdown deliberately targeted the Black public sphere. White publications remained undisturbed.

Anglo American and other corporate owners stood apart from the violence, while their press holdings remained untouched. Their editorial structures offered no resistance. These institutions played a stabilising role within the architecture of apartheid capitalism.

In the present, SANEF invokes Black Wednesday at a corporate-sponsored gala. The event’s funders include banks and mining houses. They are presented as defenders of journalism. Institutions enriched by inequality are welcomed as partners in the commemoration of resistance.

Radebe expresses no discomfort with this alignment. His language mirrors the discourse of donor frameworks. He does not probe the motivations of these funders. The ideological terrain that underpins their involvement remains unnamed.

He claims journalism has always been shaped by commercial imperatives. This is a misrepresentation. Advertising supported publications by paying for space, but advertisers had no formal influence over content. Donor funding introduces ideological expectations, institutional obligations, and project-linked deliverables. It nurtures specific ideological tendencies and constrains radical divergence.

Donors such as Open Society Foundation, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the European Union operate at the global level. In South Africa, institutions like the Raith Foundation, Claude Leon Foundation, and the Millennium Trust play similar roles. These actors promote liberal democratic frameworks, market values, and Western geopolitical interests. Their funding avoids radical African voices, Pan-Africanism, and anti-imperialist critique.

Radebe leaves this context unexamined. He avoids addressing how donor priorities dictate the contours of press discourse. He reframes dependence as realism and bypasses the ideological gatekeeping that results.

His framing of SANEF’s Media Defence Fund suggests institutional neutrality. The record reveals a different pattern. Support is extended to liberal editors and journalists aligned with donor norms. Transformation-aligned journalists face exclusion and isolation. The fund offers protection selectively.

Independent Media and IOL remain outside SANEF’s embrace. The exclusion of the country’s leading Black-owned and transformation-driven media house exposes the political boundaries of SANEF’s project. The decision to exclude signals a refusal to acknowledge oppositional voices.

Radebe turns this omission into silence. He does not refer to the exclusion, nor to the sustained attacks against Independent Media and IOL. The silence is consistent with the broader agenda: protect those who conform, erase those who challenge.

His celebration of the gala lacks critical reflection. He gives no account of the historical role of banks in media manipulation. He omits interrogation of the racialised economic structures that shape donor interests. His advocacy aligns with access rather than accountability.

He positions himself as a responsible commentator. His argument reinforces institutional consolidation. He outlines a version of journalism that submits to donor oversight and avoids conflict with capital.

Qoboza and Biko are quoted to evoke legitimacy, but the context of their work and words is left untouched. These figures did not operate within the bounds of elite approval. Their work threatened the system Radebe now defends.

The post-apartheid donor architecture functions through managed consent. Radical perspectives remain marginal. The narratives of Black Consciousness, Pan-African socialism, and working-class insurgency are excluded from protected speech.

No connection exists between those detained in 1977 and those seated at donor-funded galas. The conditions are not comparable. One group faced state violence. The other manages discourse within institutional consensus.

Qoboza’s final editorial before The World was banned declared: “If the banning is the price we must pay for telling the truth, then so be it.” The clarity of that statement rests on risk. Today’s media arrangements are built to avoid it.

Press freedom cannot depend on elite invitations. Journalistic independence does not grow in proximity to corporate favour. The principles that guided past resistance do not survive through donor commemoration.

Black Wednesday carries a history of struggle. That history cannot serve those who administer exclusion. The memory of that day belongs to those who continue to speak outside the sanctioned script.

Radebe has placed himself among those who endorse the arrangement. His defence affirms a model built on selective access, narrative control, and the erasure of radical critique.

The line has been drawn. One either joins the tradition of those who resisted erasure or remains with the architects of oppression.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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