Joe Latakgomo: Founding editor of Sowetan – critical role in black journalism

Joe Latakgomo, a giant of black journalism in South Africa and founding editor of Sowetan newspaper, who died recently, was one of those special big-picture journalists who not only saw journalism as uncovering the truth, holding power accountable but who were also active community-builders. The sort that were involved in strengthening community civic life, civic institutions and civic engagement, outside journalism.

Functioning and cohesive democracies, societies and communities require healthy civic life, non-state civic institutions in communities and active engagement in civil life and civic institutions by ordinary citizens. These institutions include local sport, cultural or community clubs, volunteer service organisations, or school governing boards and raising funds for local community causes. In liberation or anti-colonial struggles, civic institutions are often turned by political activists into fronts to take on autocratic apartheid or colonial regimes. These institutions then lose their traditional civic role, causing many non-political activists to withdraw, weakening these institutions.

Latakgomo was also a strong advocate for installing positive moral values among individuals and communities from previously oppressed communities, including respect for others, self-esteem, social justice and non-violence. Such values are critical for the healthy social fabric of previously disadvantaged individuals and communities and for fostering harmoniously functioning communities and societies. These values guide individuals to interact or behave healthily in schools, workplaces, in interpersonal relations across race, colour and gender, and in any given situation or circumstance.

Such core values are usually inculcated in families. Apartheid, whether through trauma or the migrant mine worker system, its violence broke down disadvantaged communities’ families. Schools and traditional and religious structures also foster moral values. During apartheid, schools in previously disadvantaged communities became battlefields in the fight against apartheid; some traditional and religious structures also became corrupted.

Broken families, collapsing schools and captured traditional and religious structures cannot infuse positive values into children. Liberation movements, in their fight against apartheid, colonial or other authoritarian regimes, often also have to use violence, promote the defiance of inherited social institutions of oppressed individuals and communities, challenge received moral values among oppressed communities, and in some instances also rupture existing core moral values.

Journalism could potentially educate, promote and socialise good moral values when other social institutions fail. Latakgomo believed in journalism’s responsibility to do this.

Societies cannot prosper, be cohesive or stabilise following long liberation or revolutionary struggles unless there are healthy, diverse, non-state civic institutions which are functioning, and positive moral values, including respect for others, self-esteem, social justice and non-violence, are fostered among individuals and communities from previously oppressed communities.

Journalism was not just about exposing the truth, bringing out the stories of the marginalised and holding the institutions of power, whether government, business or religious groups accountable but also about building and educating communities and changing the mindsets of readers from a black-and-white village or township-focused mindset to more expansive national and global outlooks.

Latakgomo was the founding editor of Sowetan newspaper in 1981 and died on 22 February 2026.

Before Sowetan, he was a senior journalist at The World and Weekend World, which were banned by the apartheid government, and also assistant editor at the Post and Sunday Post.

When the June 16 student uprisings exploded in Soweto, he was acting editor of The World newspaper when the editor Percy Qoboza was on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.

The World newspaper was among the first to bring the news of the Soweto uprising to the outside world. The World’s team included Willie Bokala, Duma Ndlovu, Sophie Tema and photographer Sam Nzima.

Latakgomo was deputy to editor Qoboza.

Jovial Rantao, the former editor of the Sunday Independent, wrote that: “It was at The World that he found himself standing alongside one of South Africa’s most towering figures in the press, Percy Qoboza. To serve as deputy to a legend requires a particular kind of strength — not the strength that competes but the strength that complements. Latakgomo had that strength in abundance”.

“While Qoboza thundered with prophetic courage, Latakgomo held the ground, kept the ship steady and ensured that the journalism they produced together was worthy of the dangerous times that demanded it.”

The apartheid government banned The World in 1977. Out of the ashes of the banned The World, Sowetan was launched.

He mentored three generations of black journalists — many who started in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

When I arrived at Sowetan as the new generation leadership, I often would almost viscerally feel the weight of the history of Sowetan newspaper greats like Latakgomo and Aggrey Klaaste. Their portraits, including that of Qoboza, hung on the walls of the old 61 Commando Road, Industria newsroom of Sowetan, looking out into the newsroom.

He was born in Atteridgeville, Pretoria, on 13 January 1948, the year the National Party came to power and introduced apartheid. He started as a freelance reporter before securing a job at The World newspaper in 1967. He started as a sports writer.

Latakgomo had many interests, read widely and travelled widely, among the basic requirements for good journalism. He was involved in building the community of his hometown, Atteridgeville and helped found the Pretoria Jets softball club with fellow softball aficionados Jerome Sachane, Elliot Makhaya, among others.

He also loved soccer. His book on the history of South African soccer, Mzansi Magic, Struggle, Betrayal & Glory: The Story of South African Soccer, was published in 2010.

The South African Football Association awarded him a lifetime achievement award for his long-standing contribution to building soccer in South Africa. He was inducted into the SAB Sports Journalists Hall of Fame in 2009.

He was reserved but warm, with a quiet, dignified personal presence. Although very influential, he was not as widely known as many of his contemporaries, such as Aggrey Klaaste.

Abbey Makoe, a former journalist at The Star, wrote: “Across newsrooms, he represented integrity. Young and old, he interacted with the editorial staff with dignified sincerity that was genuine.”

After his editorship at Sowetan and career at ‘black’ newspapers, he was recruited to the then white liberal Argus group (now Independent Newspapers) as assistant editor of the Johannesburg Star and assistant editor of the Argus Africa News Service.

In the post-1994 period, he was public editor of Times Media, ensuring that journalists in their stories were fair to those they reported on.

He served as public advocate at the Press Council of South Africa between 2018 and 2020. He wrote the text for Peter Magubane’s 1996 photographic commemoration June 16, Never, Never Again.

Makoe wrote that Latakgomo, when joining The Star, was a “bridge between journalism during apartheid and the transition into the new society we have today”.

William Gumede is former deputy editor of Sowetan newspaper and author of the bestselling Restless Nation: Making Sense of Troubled Times (Tafelberg).