Donald Woods Biography

Donald James Woods was born in Mbashe, Eastern Cape. His parents, Edna and Jack were of Irish and English descent respectively. In the early 1900s Jack walked 300 kilometres to set up a trading station at Hobeni on the banks of the Mbashe River.

At his birth on 15th December 1933, there was a complication which the local white doctor was unable to fix. Riding 40 kilometres cross-country on an impulse from Idutywa, Tiyo Soga’s grandson, Dr Lex Soga, arrived at Hobeni and immediately remedied the problem.

Born among the amaBomvana at Hobeni, he was given the Xhosa name Zweliyanyikima - "the world shakes", by the Bomvana people. He spoke Xhosa for three years before he spoke English. This helped him later on in life when arranging meetings with Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko who were both banned at the time.

Schooled at Christian Brothers College in Kimberley, his sense of values and beliefs came very much from his upbringing and surroundings. He had a strong sense of family and injustice with World War II taking place in his formative years. The former colonial homeland, Transkei, contained a range of contradictions between beliefs and values, at the same time being one of the poorest parts of rural South Africa.

Some of these values included "ubuntu" - a Xhosa word with no direct English translation. It means "warmth of the human spirit” and that we only realises our own humanity when taking an interest in other people’s well-being. Wider political beliefs in the cornerstones of democracy and free speech were rooted in the writings of Hobbes, Locke and in particular, John Stuart-Mill.

He developed an interest in politics while studying law in Cape Town, but with a huge passion for literature and writing, he found that his character, personality and sense of humour were more suited to the print media and in 1956 he joined the Daily Dispatch, East London in the Eastern Cape, as a cub reporter.

With this sense of core beliefs, the nature of South African journalism and the minefield of 317 apartheid laws, through which editors had to tread on a daily basis, he was less interested in in-depth policy analysis and preferred to ‘shoot from the hip’.

Being an active liberal in South Africa became more defined by the nature of government repression, and his beliefs forced him to reject a passive role within the parliamentary system and push the boundaries through extra-parliamentary means.

He admired the actions and sacrifices of people like Alan Paton, Randolph Vigne, Cosmas Desmond and David Russell. In South Africa today, this form of radical liberalism, of which he was very proud, is wrongly confused with the former passive form, which functioned primarily within the apartheid parliamentary system and is quite different.

In 1957 he stood, aged 24, for Parliament on a ticket of abolishing all racial laws, but was heavily defeated. He then worked on newspapers in England, Wales and Canada. He returned to the Daily Dispatch in 1960 and worked in turn as a senior reporter, sub-editor, political correspondent, columnist and leader writer, and was appointed the youngest editor in South Africa in 1965, aged just 31.

In 1962 he married Wendy Bruce and over the next ten years they had six children: Jane, Dillon, Duncan, Gavin, Lindsay and Mary. The youngest son, Lindsay, contracted meningitis and died aged 11 months in 1971.
As a father, he was very loving. As a person, he had a strong sense for what was unique about the character of each individual he was talking to and loved relating to other people, often using humour, mimicry and anecdotes.

After speaking to Steve Biko on the phone, the security police would invariably phone up with abuse or simply silence. On some occasions he would impersonate the South African Prime Minister at the time, BJ Vorster, and berate the local Special Branch for "harassing Donald Woods" and to "leave him alone".

He never presumed to represent any great body of opinion and knew that others were making much greater sacrifices in exile, jail and death. The increasingly brutal nature of apartheid forced him along a much more radical path in challenging government Ministers directly through leader articles, particularly after meeting Steve Biko, whom he described as the most impressive person he had ever met.

By 1977 the Daily Dispatch had become the biggest-selling newspaper in the Eastern Cape, and was increasingly attracting the anger of the apartheid government for speaking out for the rights of the black majority and for attacking racial legislation.

During the 12 years of his editorship Donald Woods was prosecuted seven times under apartheid’s publication laws and sentenced to jail – all unsuccessfully. During the same period he took on the apartheid state in court, successfully suing on eight occasions for defamation, for implying that he was an enemy of South Africa or otherwise disloyal to the country.

During this time the Daily Dispatch also became the first mainstream newspaper in the country to urge the release of Mandela, to have racially integrated social and sports pages without separate editions, and to print the views of black leaders such as Steve Biko, in defiance of banning regulations which forbade such publication. 

By 1977 Donald Woods had become the most widely syndicated columnist in South African journalism, whose weekly column appeared in eight South African newspapers. He also served as correspondent to The Observer of London and the New Statesman magazine.

In September 1977, his close friend, Steve Biko was killed at the hands of the Security Police. A month later, Woods was arrested at Johannesburg airport and served with banning orders for publicly accusing the apartheid government of being responsible for the death of Steve Biko in Security Police custody. His banning orders forbade him to write anything, to be quoted in the press, to be with more than one other person at a time, to travel, to communicate with more than one person at a time and a range of other restrictions.

Under constant Security Police surveillance, he wrote a biography of Steve Biko exposing what happened to him – realising that to publish it he and his family would have to leave South Africa since it ended with what then constituted a capital offence, being a call for international economic sanctions against the apartheid state.

This decision was hastened by Security Police actions against the family, including bullets being fired into the house, and a T-shirt being sent to five-year-old Mary Woods after being soaked in acid powder called ninhydrin. In December 1977, Donald Woods – disguised as a Catholic priest – escaped past his Security Police observers, crossed the border into Lesotho, was joined by his wife and five children and travelled via Botswana, Zambia and Tunisia to Britain, where they were given asylum as political refugees.

Based in London, he worked as a broadcaster, writer, lecturer and journalist on South African issues, while campaigning internationally for economic and diplomatic pressures against the apartheid state. He wrote seven books on South Africa, and became the first private citizen invited to address the United Nations Security Council in 1978, speaking on mandatory arms and economic sanctions against Pretoria.

He founded the Lincoln Trust which during the ‘80s and ‘90s assisted in or otherwise helped to secure university education for more than 100 exiled South Africans in Britain, America, Canada and Australia, several of whom are now serving in the new democratic South African government.

Richard Attenborough’s 1988 film Cry Freedom was the first major anti-apartheid feature film and was seen by hundreds of millions of people in 26 languages in 82 countries.
Following South Africa’s transition to democracy, he returned to South Africa for a couple of years to run the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in Johannesburg.
In 2000, he was honoured by the British with a CBE, awarded by the Queen at Buckingham Palace for his services to human rights. Soon afterwards, he died in hospital, near his Surrey home, from lung cancer on 19th August 2001.

A service was held in London a week later at St Martins-in-the-Field Church in Trafalgar Square, which was filled to its 800 capacity. Following his cremation, his ashes were flown to South Africa and were laid to rest in Cambridge Cemetery in East London, next to his son, Lindsay.