By Kevin Ritchie
It was December 1992, a head popped in at the door. “I’m Johan du Plessis,” the voice said.
“Charles Guild hired me, I’m here to start, I’ve just finished my national diploma in journalism at Pretoria Tech.”
There was only one problem, Charles Guild, the acting editor, was dead. He’d passed on literally between the aisles at Shorty’s Café (Madeira Café on Bean Street) a couple of months before.
It was an administrative nicety that was quickly overlooked, the Diamond Fields Advertiser, Kimberley’s daily newspaper since March 23, 1878, was understaffed, woefully so, and anyone with a pulse would have been welcome.
Johan du Plessis was more than a pulse; in fact, he would quickly become the pulse of the paper.
Thrown in at the deep end, sub-editing and then overseeing the final production of the edition before the week was out for no other reason than the acting editor was getting tired of pulling 16-hour days, Du Plessis took to newspapering like he had been born to it.
And, of course, in a way he had been. His late father Frik, well known in Kimberley insurance underwriting circles had run a small community newspaper in the Western Cape when Johan was a youngster. By the time Johan had finished school, done his mandatory two years national service in Bloemfontein and elsewhere before completing his studies in Pretoria, Frikkie had moved the family to Kimberley.
The Diamond Fields Advertiser, known to generations of Kimberley and Northern Cape people simply by its initials DFA, was a natural fit. No one at the time realised just how natural it would be for Du Plessis.
Night shift, producing pages 1, 2 and 3 and overseeing the rest of the paper on the stone with the photo-lithographic compositors down stairs wasn’t enough for the tyro. Armed with a trusty Minolta 35mm SLR camera, Du Plessis quickly established himself as the paper’s photographer during daylight hours, rushing in to develop and print his photographs before conference and the start of his production shift.
Often, he would shoot the front-page photograph, develop it, fix it and then lay it out – like the time he literally walked into the Trust Bank grenade blast attack in Kimberley’s Jones Street on May 25, 1993, took his pictures of the carnage, with the victims still lying crying on the street and then walked on to the DFA and completed his shift.
Du Plessis’s skills – and enthusiasm – weren’t limited to the editorial side of newspapering. Thanks to a childhood working on light tables for his father pasting his community newspaper together, Du Plessis was one of the few journalists ever allowed to help make up the pages on the DFA works floor by the ever-vigilant members of the SA Typographical Union. If any other journalist had deigned to touch the table, the union members would have downed tools, but Du Plessis was different.
His interest in the arcane, and now long lost, art of printing was matched by his fascination of the brand-new world of the internet and IT. He led the newspaper’s transition to desk top publishing in 1994 and acted as the company’s Kimberley IT guru in his spare time, helping with everything from networking to even a bit of coding.
He was indispensable behind the scenes for the production of the DFA, leading rapidly to his formal appointment as night editor in 1993 and deputy editor three years later, before becoming editor in his own right from December 2002, 10 years to the day he walked into the editor’s office to report for duty.
He would be editor for the next 22 years. It was an unprecedented record for the DFA, which in its 146-year history has only had 19 editors. The median term of office would be seven years, which very few of the editors achieved. Du Plessis's tenure by this yardstick would be three times that.
This would be a remarkable achievement by any measure, but it takes on even greater significance when the time frame of his editorship and his apprenticeship before as night editor and then deputy editor is considered.
Du Plessis witnessed the end of apartheid and the birth of the Rainbow Nation, the TRC and Griquas beating the All Blacks at Hoffe Park (today Suzuki Stadium). He covered Nelson Mandela’s visits to Galeshewe and FW de Klerk’s stoning in Roodepan, Madiba’s inauguration and then Mandela’s death and funeral in Qunu.
Du Plessis has had the ears of premiers and mayors from Manne Dipico to Zamani Saul, he’s seen MECs become cabinet ministers and others die mysteriously. He has faithfully chronicled the highs and the lows of the Diamond City and in the process won awards for his journalism while guiding countless young journalists onto greater things on bigger papers and greater platforms.
Throughout it all, Du Plessis has never changed. His passion for the paper and for the people who work on it and those who read it has remained undimmed over the decades. His humility, generosity and compassion are the envy of those privileged to know him.
On Thursday October 31, 2024, he put down his editor’s pen for the last time and closed the book on a record that is unlikely to ever be equalled again in South African journalism.
Johan du Plessis has made an incredible contribution to journalism, to Kimberley and to the Northern Cape. Critically, he has kept the flame of the DFA burning bright through unimaginable pressures, commercial and societal, including the monumental challenge of navigating the COVID-19 lockdown, which claimed the lives of so many other publications, old and new. We owe him a huge debt.
* Kevin Ritchie is a former journalist. He was editor of the DFA from 1992 to 2002.