"An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted," wrote Arthur Miller. Have we exhausted the basic illusion of press freedom in South Africa? Firing troublesome journalists from the state broadcaster by e-mail could certainly imply an ending of sorts. It's a blunt act that transports us neatly to the very beginning of this particular era.Back in 1820, when Lord Charles Somerset ran the erstwhile colony, the Cape government published its own gazette, the only sanctioned publication (think SABC). For obvious reasons the governor was adamantly opposed to a free, independent press - political dissent tends to complicate things. But the arrival of settlers as part of the colonial project straight from the British mothership created some pesky free-thinking complications.These guys had been printing with relative freedom and testing the limits of that freedom in court for a couple of hundred years by the time they arrived in the Cape. By 1820, they had gone through several rounds of this boxing match - dismantling the Licensing of the Press Act in 1695 was round one, which ensured that you no longer needed a licence from government for any publication. In 1770, the Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights began a successful campaign to publish parliamentary debates - round two - and three effective court cases gave the government pause when charging people with seditious libel for publishing criticisms of the king.So when the printer Robert Godlonton and his partners Thomas Stringfellow and Edward Roberts arrived at Table Bay and had their printing press confiscated, it came as something of a surprise. The colony was not quite with it in the press freedom stakes. It took years to finally get the press back and only after the acknowledged father of press freedom in South Africa, Thomas Pringle (who had arrived in the same boatload of settlers with the aim of setting up his own press and school in the Cape), waged an all-out battle with Lord Somerset and finally managed to get the right to print a newspaper and a magazine in 1824.But Pringle shut down both publications that very year. His reasoning was that he would rather withdraw from the playing field than tolerate the high-handed interventions of Somerset, who had promptly reneged on his agreement not to impose censorship. Seems the good governor and some of his advisers "happened to be peculiarly sensitive" (Pringle's words) and had waged a concerted battle of attrition against the beleaguered Pringle, his publications and his school. Defeated by the governor's approach to the media, he returned to London and was appointed to the post of secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society.Since then the basic illusion of a free press in South Africa has often been severely tested, thanks to the efforts of subsequent peculiarly sensitive administrations, not least the apartheid government's own blunt instrument for smacking down the press. The SABC may be Lord Somerset incarnate, and there is no doubt that the COO of said institution is hellbent on imposing a limited version of reality on his "gazette" that is for much of the country the only source of news. But as American journalist AJ Liebling said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" and in South Africa we are in the fortunate position that whatever you may make of the various owners of the "free" press, we still have one. The constitution protects the "free press", but how to impose freedom on the government gazette? Taking them to court is a tried and tested solution and the ANC is even showing a bit of mettle. The fight for press freedom is not over and we cannot give up, like Pringle, and go fight a different battle, because the illusion has some life in it yet...