A towel on his knees against sunburn, a thermos of coffee and boiled eggs: Frans Hugo, 90-year-old editor, begins his weekly 1,200 km journey through South Africa’s Karoo desert to deliver his newspapers.
The energetic old gentleman is used to that. It has been forty years since Charl Francois Hugo, known as Frans, boarded his trusty limousine every Thursday for that long journey from Calvinia, fewer than 3000 souls amidst this immense far western south of the country.
If he stopped, his Afrikaans-language newspapers – The Messenger, Die Noordwester and Die Oewernuus – would probably die with him.
His little transistor stuck in the steering wheel, the car radio has long since capitulated, he begins his loop to the northeast, then south… “I stop in all the small towns,” he recently confessed to AFP Tour.
Departure 1h30 for a return 18 hours later. The time to put his batteries in a variety of places with his stick. Some have seen the recent influx of new residents, artists, loners or originals fleeing the hustle and bustle of the big cities.
Like Frans, many here express themselves openly and simply. Living in such a lost corner requires autonomy and ingenuity. A little eccentricity never hurts.
“In the Karoo they call it a ‘pompdonkie’, a regularly moving water pump that drains the reservoirs. “I’ve become a pompdonkie myself. I walk with the regularity of a metronome every week. I’ll stop when I’m physically no longer able to,” he predicts.
Born in Cape Town in 1932, he worked there for twenty years as a journalist, then for ten years in neighboring Namibia. “We worked day and night. I was less able to take the pressure, so I settled in the Karoo,” he says.
Survive the decline
“I was just gasping for air when the owner of the Calvinia print shop came by and asked if I was interested. My daughter was such that I thought they could run the business with my son-in-law and I would help them. After a few months they got bored and I found myself with it on my hands,” he summarizes with an amused wink.
The Messenger was founded in 1975, the other two local newspapers in the early 20th century. Frans, his wife and three employees continue this legacy at a time when so many print newspapers around the world are struggling to survive in the digital age.
These eight-page weeklies in Afrikaans, one of South Africa’s eleven official languages, inherited from the Dutch colonists, sometimes publish an English newspaper or advertisement here and there.
Frans, white-haired and looking like an old seal, is annoyed with those who consume her information online. “We print fewer newspapers.” But at 1,300 copies a week, the need for local information remains relevant, he believes.
The newsroom looks like a museum with its old Heidelberg printing press and its guillotines (paper cutting machines, here called guillotines), which were abandoned thirty years ago in favor of computers.
A daredevil, he says, he’s not worried about the future of his small press group. “I have no idea what will become of him in five or ten years. But no, I’m not worried.”
Actress Charlize Theron caused a scandal in South Africa in November when she said her native language, Afrikaans, is spoken by “about 44 people”.
On the contrary, for Frans, the survival of his dear diaries shows that the isolated denizens of this semi-desert Karoo must maintain a connection. And as long as the journalist has the strength, they will receive news every Thursday, without exception.