His quiet and fearless opposition to the apartheid regime brought him many accolades, and cost him his job. He was a journalist’s journalist, a man for whom principles counted above all else.
It was his reporting that was recorded in history as the main account of the historic Langa anti-pass march led by the youthful PAC leader Philip Kgosana on 30 March 1960., and years later, he was instrumental in the campaign to get Cape Town’s De Waal Drive renamed for Philip Kgosana.The first time I met Tony Heard was when he welcomed me and the other “cadet” reporters assigned to the newspaper to his office on our first day.
“It had to do with journalism. No one in South Africa, up to that point, had been able to know what the ANC stood for.
“I was warned that, if I was thrown out, all I would receive was the smallish amount in the pension fund — and the keys would be taken out of my company car. The final straw was being asked to sign a letter confirming what I could never confirm: that the move was not political.” I arrived in Windhoek to find that very little of what was actually happening in the war zones was being reported on. The Special Operations K Unit of the SA Security Police, Koevoet, was running rampant, committing unspeakable atrocities against both captured guerrillas and the civilian population.
Tony wrote: “George Heard disappeared when I was seven and my brother Raymond nine. I recall my father only in faded snapshots… the men who hated George, the Afrikaner Nationalists whom he had attacked so severely in the war years, had their day. They came to power in 1948.”
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