Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

That issue was ignored by the government, which had hammered much
of the black media in the days after the riots. So we – and our lawyers –
were extra careful how we handled the following issue. Our vigilance was
in vain. The state reaction stunned us all: the August 1976, issue of Drum
was considered so inflammatory that the government didn’t just follow
its usual practice of simply banning the issue from sale, but they decreed
that possession of it was a criminal offence – an action usually reserved
for the most extreme political journals (that ban remained in place for
almost 25 years, until Mandela’s release in February, 1990).
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Yes, Drum’s rhetoric was angry, but it was reasoned, carefully-articulated,
anger, not a wild scream for revenge or bloody insurrection. Motjuwadi
had written, “Every adult South African, black and white should hang
their heads in shame. The whole blood-curdling affair of Hector Peterson,
only 13, riddled with bullets, stinks to high heaven. Every white South
African finger drips with the blood of Hector for ramming Afrikaans down
his throat.”
That paragraph was cited by the censors as one of a plethora of nitpicking
reasons for the banning, as was a photograph of a dead body,
shattered rib-caged exposed, which was declared “offensive to public
morals.” So it was confirmed: under apartheid, mowing down schoolkids
was okay, but publishing photographs of their corpses was a sin!
Ironically, the banning order made no mention of another quote in
the magazine, from a speech by the Afrikaner Chief Justice Rump at a
graduation of white students 56 days before the first shot had been fired
in Soweto on June 16, “… social equality will have to be accepted and
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TWELVE