As CEO of the SA Institute of Race Relations John Kane-Berman, who has died in Johannesburg at 76, exposed in relentless and damning detail the nuts and bolts of apartheid and its devastating impact on black lives.
The institute’s famous annual Survey, of which he was editor-in-chief for 30 years, provided a factual record of everything that happened under apartheid, including the implementation of security laws, deaths in detention, forced removals, the dumping of people in rural wastelands, child malnutrition, conditions in the homelands, influx control and the migrant labour system.
When whites subsequently claimed they never knew about the full horrors of apartheid, he retorted it was all there in the SAIRR’s annual Survey, the primary and most frequently cited source of information about apartheid for researchers, academics, commissions and journalists in SA and around the world.
No single publication did more to expose the insanity and immorality of apartheid than the Kane-Berman annual Survey.
Most of the material, all 22,000 pages of which over 30 years he scrutinised, was culled from newspapers, parliamentary debates, speeches questions recorded in Hansard and official documents.
Restrictions on what the press could report about strategically sensitive matters such as embargo-busting oil supplies, arms and troop movements never stopped him.
No amount of government propaganda, inside or outside, SA was able to hide the truth the Survey and other SAIRR’s publications systematically exposed.
Kane-Berman was pilloried by the white Left which the SAIRR accused of turning a blind-eye to violence stoked up in the townships by anti-apartheid organisations.
Obtaining all the statistical data was sometimes extraordinarily challenging. Such as when four homelands became “independent” states and the government attempted to “disappear” millions of SA citizens by excluding them from official population figures on the grounds that they were no longer SA citizens.
Kane-Berman was having none of this and hunted down the damning figures which duly appeared in the Survey, blowing the apartheid government’s attempted deception out of the water.
In 2006 he received an award from the International Society for Quality of Life Studies for having retained these would-be non-SA citizens in all of the institute’s population data “during this dark period”.
An academic from the University of Witwatersrand said the Survey had been “innately radical and subversive in tearing apartheid and its logic apart”.
Kane-Berman was born in Johannesburg on March 3 1946 to a politically aware family. His father, who loathed the National Party, whose elected representatives he said were “simply inhuman”, was the chair of the Torch Commando which was set up by WW2 veterans to stop the apartheid government from removing coloured people from the common voters’ roll in the Cape Province.
Kane-Berman went to St John’s College in Houghton. He challenged the college chaplains to reword a prayer which called for “the right solution to all the problems presented by the native and coloured peoples” to “the right solutions to all our racial problems”, after telling them those problems arose not from “native and coloured peoples” but from the attitudes of whites.
After matriculating he went to Wits, where he led a protest against the government’s attempt to segregate racially mixed English-speaking universities, which precipitated a showdown with PM John Vorster at the Union Buildings, an encounter he described as “less than gracious”. Vorster “exploded”, berating him and two fellow students as “little pink liberals” whose actions “would not be tolerated”.
After Wits he went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. When he returned to SA in 1971 he joined the Financial Mail.
He wrote a cover story about forced removals after Steve Biko showed him the dumping grounds in the Eastern Cape, where the victims of what he described as “ethnic cleansing” had been dumped.
Vorster exploded again, publicly denouncing his story as a pack of lies. When Kane-Berman and FM editor George Palmer offered to take a government delegation to the dumping grounds they backed down.
When he was CEO of the SAIRR, British PM Margaret Thatcher’s team asked him if there were any issues she should raise in her meeting with PW Botha at Chequers in June 1984. “Hammer him on forced removals,” said Kane-Berman.
Vorster objected to another cover piece he wrote after Pik Botha told the UN his government did “not condone racial discrimination”. Kane-Berman told a photographer to take pictures of apartheid signs he juxtaposed with Pik’s quote. “Discrimination is at the very heart of our society,” he wrote in his cover story.
Vorster attacked him in a public speech for being unpatriotic at a time when SA was fighting for its existence, and threatened to proceed with legislation to curb the press.
After being appointed CEO of the SAIRR in 1983, Kane-Berman found it was almost bankrupt and his immediate priority was its survival. Had he known what he was walking into he probably wouldn’t have applied for the job, he said.
Its financial situation became even worse when, after publishing the results of an opinion survey by professor Lawrence Schlemmer showing that three quarters of black people opposed economic sanctions against SA, Sweden terminated its funding of the institute.
He decided to focus on research and do away with projects that then Business Day and future Sunday Times editor Ken Owen called “do-gooding charity stuff”. The only project he retained was its bursary programme which had once benefited Nelson Mandela. After his release in 1990 Mandela called Kane-Berman requesting a bursary for the child of a domestic servant. Kane-Berman said the selection of beneficiaries was in the hands of an independent committee and he would send him an application form.
Kane-Berman was pilloried by the white left, which the SAIRR accused of turning a blind-eye to violence stoked up in the townships by anti-apartheid organisations.
He became even more unpopular when he claimed, in his book Political Violence in SA, that the ANC’s campaign to make the townships ungovernable was a major cause of the violence that tore black communities apart between the mid 80s and early 90s. He said there were few aspects of this violence that the institute had not carefully scrutinised and categorised.
With the arrival of democracy in 1994 many thought the SAIRR’s work was done and it no longer had a role.
Kane-Berman believed the new enemy to democracy after apartheid would be an officious bureaucracy and intrusive state, and that the role of an independent and outspoken SAIRR would be as important as ever.
He continued to lead the institute until 2014.
He is survived by his partner Pierre Roestorf.
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