biography

RAYMOND LOUW

Raymond Louw is Editor and Publisher of SOUTHERN AFRICA REPORT, a private circulation weekly current affairs newsletter started in 1983 after he left South African Associated Newspapers where he had been general manager after editing its noted anti-apartheid newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail (1966-1977).

He started journalism on the "Mail" -- where he was shot at while riot reporting -- and later worked on newspapers in Sussex, Cumbria and London, England, for six years and on the Sunday Times in Johannesburg.

In the run up to South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, while chairman of the Freedom of Expression Institute, he was appointed to the Independent Media Commission to ensure state broadcasting and state-financed publications were impartial. He was later appointed to a special Task Group on Government Communications to restructure the apartheid government's propagandist division.

During the apartheid era he headed the Media Defence Trust set up to defend journalists, publications, film and video  producers, broadcasters and authors against court actions or other censorship practices. He also took part in media industry deputations to government ministers to protest restrictive press legislation and practices. He participated in special media freedom missions internationally, headed campaigns for independent broadcasting and continues to be involved in journalism training.

He edited "Four Days in Lusaka -- Whites from 'Home' in talks with the ANC" (1989) and the narrative of "Nelson Mandela Pictorial Biography" by Peter Magubane (1994), was awarded the Pringle Medal for services to journalism by the SA Society of Journalists in 1976 and 1992 and made a Fellow of the International Press Institute.

Participated in a World Press Freedom Committee-IPI plea to the United Nations Human Rights Commission on the need to entrench Press Freedom as a human right (Geneva, Switzerland, 1987).