South African Journalist, 90, Delivers News in the Desert

Frans Hugo, owner and editor of the Noordwester, the Messenger and the Oewernuus, delivers copies of his newspaper to a computer shop in Prieska, South Africa, Nov. 24, 2022. | Photo Credits: VOA

Armed with a flask of coffee, some boiled eggs and a towel to shield his bare legs from the scorching sun, 90-year-old Frans Hugo sets off every Thursday to deliver newspapers in the South African desert.

Week in, week out, the elderly editor has made the 1,200-kilometer round trip across the semi-arid Karoo region in the country's south.

He has been doing it for some four decades.

Born Charl Francois Hugo in Cape Town in 1932 — but known to everyone simply as Frans — he is arguably the last bastion of a dying business.

The energetic nonagenarian edits and hand-delivers three local papers — The Messenger, Die Noordwester and Die Oewernuus.

Driving an orange Fiat Multipla stacked with copies of the eight-page weeklies and with an old portable radio to keep him company, Hugo brings news to the towns and villages dotting this vast, parched back-country.

Hugo leaves at 1:30 a.m. from Calvinia, a small town of less than 3,000 souls about 500 kilometers north of Africa's southernmost tip, and he comes back in the early evening.

"I am like a pompdonkie," he told AFP on a recent tour, using the local moniker for the nodding donkey pumps used to extract groundwater from boreholes.

"I keep doing this every Thursday without fail. I will probably stop when I am physically not capable of doing it anymore."

The rise of the internet has hit readership but is seemingly yet to reach his newsroom, which looks like a museum.

The office is adorned by an old Heidelberg printing press and paper cutting machines. Staff use computers and software from the early 1990s.

Still, Hugo's team prints about 1,300 copies a week, something he says shows an undying appetite for community news.

The papers sell for eight rand (about 50 U.S. cents) and are dropped off at shops, convenience stores and the correspondents' homes.

The readers are mainly farmers, living in a remote, semi-arid landscape.

Writing in Afrikaans, which actor Charlize Theron recently controversially said was still spoken only by "about 44 people," keeps the language alive and ties together small communities separated by hundreds of kilometers of desert, according to Hugo.

As long as he's around and has the required strength, they will receive their paper every Thursday.

What will happen later does not concern him, he said.

"I don't have a clue what will happen ... in five years or 10 years," he said. "I am not worried."

Source: VOA