http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/world/africa/allister-sparks-south-africa.html 2016-09-21 02:15:31 Allister Sparks, South African Journalist Who Challenged Apartheid, Dies at 83 As the editor of The Rand Daily Mail, Mr. Sparks exposed a covert government propaganda campaign that led South Africa’s president to resign. === Allister Sparks, a prominent South African journalist who challenged apartheid and exposed a covert propaganda campaign by his government, leading to the president’s downfall, died on Monday in Johannesburg. He was 83. The cause was heart failure after an infection, his son Michael said. Mr. Sparks was the crusading editor of The Rand Daily Mail, the major voice of liberal opposition to the white Pretoria government and a champion of majority rule, when he revealed that the apartheid opponent Steve Biko had been beaten to death by the police in 1977. His paper later exposed a secret offensive by the authorities against the mainstream news media in which a slush fund was used to establish a government-friendly newspaper, The Citizen, to counter The Rand Daily Mail and to buy stakes in other publications. That revelation led to the resignation of President John Vorster in 1979. In 1981, with The Rand Daily Mail ailing financially, the owners fired Mr. Sparks as part of an effort, he said, to “lower the paper’s voice and to shift the emphasis more toward white readers and less toward black readers.” The newspaper went out of business in 1985. Mr. Sparks went on to become what he described as a war correspondent in Officially a foreign correspondent then, Mr. Sparks was nearly prosecuted for quoting Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whose husband, Nelson Mandela, was the imprisoned leader of the African National Congress. He befriended Mr. Mandela and, on the basis of an extensive interview, wrote He also wrote six books, among them “The Mind of South Africa,” published in 1990; “ With the end of apartheid, Mr. Sparks was by no means forgiving of the corruption and ineptitude of the current, predominantly black administration of President Jacob Zuma. (Mr. Zuma said this week that Mr. Sparks had “made his mark in the fight for a free South Africa and proved that the pen is mightier than the sword.”) Mr. Sparks caused a storm late in life by describing former Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, an architect of apartheid, as a “clever” leader. He later recanted. But after Mr. Sparks’s death, his colleagues said that his overall record had, as Ray Hartley, a South African journalist, put it, “invested journalism under apartheid with more than a little moral dignity.” Allister Haddon Sparks was born on March 10, 1933, in Cathcart, in Eastern Cape Province, to Harold Sparks, a farmer, and the former Bernice Stephen. Raised among blacks in a rural area bordering a tribal reserve, his first language was Xhosa. A fifth-generation South African, Mr. Sparks was descended from the country’s original British settlers, who arrived in 1820. He thus belonged to a minority within a minority: English-speaking whites were outnumbered both by South Africa’s black majority and by the Afrikaner progeny of Dutch homesteaders. After graduating from Queen’s College in Queenstown, he was hired by the newspaper The Queenstown Daily Representative. After stints elsewhere in Africa and in Britain, he joined The Rand Daily Mail as a political correspondent and columnist. He became an assistant editor there in 1967 and editor of its sister paper, The Sunday Express (which also later closed), in 1974 before attaining the editorship of The Daily Mail in 1977. In addition to his son Michael, he is survived by three other sons, Simon, Andrew and Julian; five grandsons; and one granddaughter. “Journalism became my education and my intellectual salvation,” Mr. Sparks wrote in his memoir, “even as my country transformed from a racist police state to a nonracial democracy.” He recalled covering Parliament in Cape Town as particularly eye-opening, writing, “Here was a house full of white people talking most of the time about black people, assuming they know all about them, their wants and wishes and traditions and what should be done for them, never with them.” But he was foremost a shoe-leather reporter. In the mid-1960s, when two leaders of the armed struggle against apartheid, “My name is Allister Sparks,” he recalled saying. “I’m from The Rand Daily Mail, and I want to talk to Arthur and Harold.” They agreed, and Mr. Sparks got another scoop.