The Mail & Guardian began life in 1985 as the Weekly Mail, a rebellious child of apartheid’s darkest years. Its founders — Anton Harber, Irwin Manoim and a group of fiercely independent journalists — launched the paper when South Africa’s press landscape was suffocated by censorship. The apartheid state had already banned publications, shuttered dissent, and jailed reporters. The Weekly Mail was not supposed to survive. Yet it did, because it was never meant to be comfortable.
The paper was regularly banned, sued, or threatened. Its offices were raided, its journalists harassed, but it remained unflinching. To open the Weekly Mail in those years was to feel the presence of resistance: a weekly roll call of injustice exposed, abuses uncovered, hypocrisies mocked. It was not a “business model”, it was a moral stance. Readers did not buy it merely for news — they bought it as an act of solidarity with truth itself.
In those early years, the Weekly Mail earned an aura that would shape South Africa’s journalism for decades: the paper was unafraid. It lived by a conviction that the journalist’s duty was to shine light into corners where politicians, generals, and businessmen would rather keep darkness.
The transformation into Mail & Guardian
With the end of apartheid and the dawn of democracy in the early 1990s, the paper shifted into new terrain. It could no longer exist merely as a voice of resistance. The question became: what role does fearless journalism play when liberation has come?
In 1995, the paper rebranded as the Mail & Guardian, after forming a partnership with the Guardian Media Group in the UK. This was no mere cosmetic change. The name Mail & Guardian announced itself as an institution — not only a watchdog of South African politics but a continental platform for investigative journalism.
Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, the Mail & Guardian thrived as Africa’s leading investigative weekly. Its scoops were legendary: stories on the arms deal, corruption in the new democratic government, abuses in corporate South Africa, and the creeping tentacles of state capture long before that phrase entered the national lexicon.
For a generation of young journalists, the M&G newsroom was the place to cut teeth. Here, careers were forged in fire. To publish in its pages was to be recognised as part of the country’s intellectual vanguard. It was not unusual for its investigative pieces to ripple through Parliament, force ministers onto the defensive, or change the terms of national debate.
The glory of character
What made the Mail & Guardian more than just a paper was its character. This is not a trivial word. “Character” meant that it stood for something higher than circulation or advertising. It was, in its DNA, a paper that believed journalism mattered as a public trust.
Readers recognised this. Buying the Mail & Guardian was an act of belonging to a particular South Africa — the South Africa that valued integrity, accountability, and truth-telling over spectacle and propaganda.
This moral character is what allowed the paper to become not just important, but indispensable.
Trevor Ncube and the change of ownership
The tide began to shift in 2002, when Zimbabwean publisher Trevor Ncube bought a controlling stake in the paper. At first, there was optimism. A black African media entrepreneur at the helm of a historically white liberal bastion — this looked like transformation fulfilled. It was hailed as progress: here was African ownership of Africa’s leading investigative weekly.
But ownership is not neutral. Ownership carries ethos, habits, and sometimes baggage. Ncube, shaped by Zimbabwe’s fraught press environment, brought with him instincts that would unsettle the paper’s character.
In Zimbabwe, publishers survived by knowing what not to print. They learned to tread carefully, to avoid stepping on the wrong political landmines. The whispered phrase “don’t investigate this” was familiar, even necessary. To stay in business, you played survival games.
At Mail & Guardian, this reflex proved poisonous. South African journalism thrived precisely because it had never accepted the idea of “off-limits.” The moment lines were drawn around certain stories, the spirit of the newsroom fractured. Reporters felt the chill of interference, the creeping sense that the watchdog’s leash was being shortened.
The grey years
The result was a slow greying. The Mail & Guardian did not collapse overnight. It still published stories, still carried features, still employed talented journalists. But its bite softened. Its investigations became fewer, its stings less sharp. The culture of fearless probing was replaced by a culture of caution.
Readers noticed. What had once been a must-buy paper became optional. Its headlines no longer led conversations; its exposés no longer shook the halls of power. The paper that once gave South Africa scandal after scandal now gave polite commentary and the occasional investigative flutter.
It was, in essence, a nuisance paper: still present, but no longer a force.
Digital disruption as accelerant
The global decline of print media hit the Mail & Guardian hard. Digital disruption gutted advertising revenues, circulation fell, and the business model looked fragile. But many papers worldwide survived the digital shift by leaning into their character. The New York Times doubled down on investigations; The Guardian in London reinvented itself with bold online reporting.
The Mail & Guardian, however, entered the digital era with its character already compromised. Without the fearless ethos that once defined it, the shift to online became less about mission and more about survival. Readers asked: why should I pay for cautious reporting I can get anywhere else?
The financial woes were therefore not just technological. They were moral. A paper can withstand poverty if it has fire. What it cannot withstand is greyness.
The collapse of an African beacon
By the 2010s and into the 2020s, the paper’s decline became obvious. Staff cuts, funding crises, and dwindling relevance plagued its existence. The once-revered institution was now fighting to stay alive, more museum piece than living force.
The irony is sharp. The Weekly Mail had survived apartheid’s bans and intimidation, yet the Mail & Guardian could not survive democracy’s complacency, Zimbabwean-style caution, and digital disruption combined.
The fall was therefore inevitable. It was scripted the moment ownership disrupted character.
Lessons in character and ownership
The tragedy of the Mail & Guardian teaches lessons beyond journalism. Institutions live or die by character. When character is compromised, no amount of credentials, branding, or financial engineering can save them.
South Africa, in general, has suffered from this disease: graduates with degrees but bankrupt in ethics; politicians with titles but empty of integrity; institutions with buildings but hollow of spirit. The Mail & Guardian is one more example in a national pattern.
Ownership matters too. A paper can change hands, but if the new owner does not grasp its ethos, it is as good as gone. Trevor Ncube thought he was taking over a Zimbabwean-style paper where one can say “don’t investigate this.” He did not realize he was dismantling Africa’s leading investigative tradition.
An obituary of spirit
The Mail & Guardian deserves to be remembered for what it once was: the fearless Weekly Mail that spoke when silence was demanded, the investigative powerhouse that made the powerful tremble. It deserves respect for the role it played in South Africa’s transition and in shaping the continent’s journalism.
But it also deserves honesty in obituary: its fall was not accidental, not merely the product of market forces. It fell because character was betrayed. And once character is lost, collapse is only a matter of time.
Chris Kanyane is a South African criminologist, ethicist and historian. He holds an MBA with a focus on ethics, a foundation undergraduate degree in criminology, and a Higher Certificate in Law Enforcement. His pioneering work on Macro-Whistleblowing reframes whistleblowing as systemic resistance, exposing entire architectures of corruption, violence, and ideology. Kanyane has written extensively on corruption, political assassinations, and governance failures, and his work has been featured in the New York Times and Reader’s Digest.
