August 20, 2001 Donald Woods, Editor and Apartheid Foe, Dies at 67 By RACHEL L. SWARNS
JOHANNESBURG, Aug. 19 — Donald Woods, the crusading white newspaper editor who championed the black anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, died in England today. He was 67.
The cause of death was cancer, his eldest daughter, Jane, told The Associated Press.
The friendship of the white editor and the black leader was chronicled in the 1987 movie "Cry Freedom," made by Richard Attenborough. It was a friendship that ultimately forced Mr. Woods into exile.
He was the editor of The Daily Dispatch newspaper in the South African town of East London in the 1970's. His fierce condemnations of the apartheid government quickly made him an enemy of the state.
"One day, I wrote an article reminding Prime Minister Verwoerd of his record of Nazi sympathies and accusing him of embodying Hitler's master-race theories in his apartheid policies," Mr. Woods recalled in an interview in New York in 1981.
The retaliation came quickly. His family was threatened. A police officer sent T-shirts to his children that had been treated with a Mace-like substance, Ninhydrin. The acid burned the skin of his 5-year-old daughter.
Mr. Woods's friendship with Mr. Biko, the young, charismatic leader of South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement, was the turning point in his life.
Mr. Biko, who argued that black self-reliance was the key to psychological emancipation, was arrested in 1977 on his way to a political meeting in Cape Town. During his interrogation, the police beat him with a hose and rammed his head into the wall of an interrogation room. He was 30 years old. Mr. Biko died in custody, stirring a furor at home and abroad.
Mr. Woods helped to raise the outcry, publishing details of Mr. Biko's death in his newspaper, and was subsequently banned — forbidden to write, or even sit in the same room with more than one person aside from his family. Soon after, he fled the country disguised as a priest, with his wife at the wheel of the getaway car.
The persecution made him more determined to fight the all-white regime. "The irony is that by trying to silence me, the government there has caused me to reach a greater number of people than I ever could have reached had they left me alone," Mr. Woods said.
He moved to England where he became a noted campaigner against apartheid. He lectured in Europe and the United States and wrote essays and books condemning the apartheid regime, including an autobiography and a biography of Mr. Biko.
Born in 1933 in the region known now as the Eastern Cape, Mr. Woods grew up around black children and spoke their language, Xhosa, as well as English.
But he admitted that friendship with blacks did not come easily. As a student, he believed that blacks should be kept "in their place" on tribal reservations. He told classmates "it's either them or us."
"It seemed to me to make sense that only a strong, white-supremacy government could keep the country stable and the white man safe," Mr. Woods recalled in 1981. But after studying law, he said, he realized the hypocrisy in a legal system that denied justice purely because of race.
Mr. Woods worked first as a country lawyer and then took a brief apprenticeship in British journalism on Fleet Street before heading back to South Africa to work at The Daily Dispatch. The newspaper was one of the first in the country to hire black reporters, to write about black politics and to print a wedding photograph of a mixed-race couple.
In 1990, after 13 years in exile, Mr. Woods made the first of several return visits to South Africa. The last was in May for the wedding of Mr. Biko's daughter, Nkosinathi.
Among the telephone callers to the hospital in Sutton, Surrey, just before his death was Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president.
Mr. Woods is survived by his wife, Wendy, three sons and two daughters. And tonight, he was praised by politicians across the political spectrum here.
A spokesman for President Thabo Mbeki said that Mr. Mbeki had recently described him as "a brave editor" who "sacrificed much to fight for decency and justice." The president made the comments in a letter to Mr. Woods to thank him for a copy of his latest book, "Rainbow Nation Revisited."
Tony Leon, the leader of the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, described Mr. Woods as "a true crusader for change." [end]