By Gillian Schutte

The Mail & Guardian’s decision to publish Ivor Ichikowitz, founder of Paramount Group, one of Africa’s most prominent private defence and aerospace companies, as a moral voice on Winnie Mandela during its Youth Day period was an insult delivered inside a sacred commemorative space. Youth Day belongs to 1976, to Black children and young people who faced police bullets, detention, torture, exile, prison and the long machinery of the apartheid state. Winnie Mandela’s memory belongs to the same history of banishment, surveillance, raids, state violence and political defiance.

To place an arms capitalist inside that memory without naming the arms economy from which his public power was built is already an editorial failure. To do so while the majority of Black South Africans remain oppressed, while Palestine is being destroyed, while South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice stands as one of the most important legal interventions of the post-apartheid era, and while Muslim readers, Palestinian solidarity organisations and anti-Zionist South Africans are watching which institutions still have the courage to name Israeli power, makes the failure much deeper.

The Mail & Guardian has published Palestinian and Iranian perspectives. It has carried work on Gaza, the ICJ case and the wider politics of anti-imperial solidarity. That is what makes this decision so revealing. A newspaper that hosts Palestinian grief and Iranian political analysis on one page, then hands Winnie Mandela’s memory to a pro-Israel defence capitalist on another page is confused. This is not pluralism. It shows a distinct lack of editorial and ideological direction.

The Mail & Guardian was not always just another liberal platform managing the boundaries of acceptable dissent. It once carried the aura of progressive possibility. The problem was that donor funding, including Open Society-backed projects such as the Guardian Project, helped pull the paper deeper into a disciplined liberalism. It did not expand the boundaries of radical thought. It narrowed them, enforcing a politics that could host dissent only when that dissent remained legible to donor-friendly respectability.

After that period, under new local ownership and Black editorial leadership, some of us still held out hope. We hoped the paper might return to a more courageous, pro-Black, anti-imperial and genuinely progressive position. We hoped it might break with the cautious liberalism that had contained its imagination.

That hope is difficult to sustain when the paper places Ivor Ichikowitz inside a Youth Day and Winnie Mandela commemorative space without properly naming his politics. This is not a neutral cultural figure reflecting on memory. This is a defence industrialist who publicly attacked South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, accused Hamas in the language of terrorism and genocide, and merged Russia, Iran and Hamas into a single narrative of South African moral failure. He accused South Africa of becoming one of Russia’s most strident allies and of aligning itself with Iran and Hamas. That is the politics the Mail & Guardian carried into the memory of 1976, into the memory of Winnie Mandela, and into a moment when Gaza is being destroyed before the eyes of the world.

What has also become apparent is that Black stories, Black pain and Black political critique may still be too troublesome for a liberal media class whose audience and writerly ecosystem remain deeply invested in managing the terms of Black speech outside of elitism. The problem is not the absence of Black editors. The problem is the politics within which those editors are expected to operate. Black editorial presence does not automatically produce a Black political line, especially where the institution still fears the displeasure of its liberal readership more than it fears betraying the wounded communities it claims to serve.

That is, it seems, the institutional frame in which the Mail & Guardian‘s decision to place arms capital beside Winnie Mandela, Youth Day/1976 and Gaza becomes so revealing.

Ichikowitz’s politics on Palestine were not hidden. In January 2024, after South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice over genocide allegations, he wrote in the SA Jewish Report that taking Israel to court could be South Africa’s worst decision. His own foundation republished a version headlined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel is rank hypocrisy. He accused South Africa of aligning itself with Iran and Hamas, among others.

That line belonged in the SA Jewish Report, where Ichikowitz had already made his pro-Israel politics clear. It should not have been laundered through Winnie Mandela, Netflix prestige and Youth Day commemoration without full disclosure to Mail & Guardian readers. The issue is not that he holds a pro-Israel position. The issue is that a newspaper with an anti-apartheid inheritance gave a clean progressive platform to Zionist war logic during a period of genocide, then placed that platform beside the memory of one of apartheid’s most surveilled, punished and demonised women.

The insult to Muslim readers is direct. South African Muslims have been central to the public defence of Palestine, to the moral pressure behind the ICJ case, and to the insistence that Gaza is a test of South Africa’s own liberation inheritance. Muslim writers, Muslim readers and Islamic organisations do not encounter this platform as an abstract media debate. They encounter it as a newspaper normalising a man who attacked South Africa’s genocide case against Israel while allowing him to speak through the memory of Winnie Mandela.

That is the frame in which Ichikowitz’s article, The dangers of comfortable history, must be read. The article presents him through the language of archive, testimony and moral complexity. It is linked to The Trials of Winnie Mandela, the seven-part Netflix documentary series for which he is executive producer. Netflix is already an imperial cultural platform, with global power to select, package and distribute African memory for international consumption. That alone should have required caution. The Mail & Guardian then showcased the same figure in a Youth Day atmosphere without placing his full political and economic record before readers.

The biographical note identifies Ichikowitz as chairperson of the Ichikowitz Family Foundation, founder of the African Oral History Archive and executive producer of the documentary. It does not identify him as the founder of Paramount Group. This omission is the political centre of the problem. The paper gave readers the foundation, the archive and the Netflix series. It withheld the arms economy.

Youth Day should never be reduced to content theme. It is the memory of the Black youth of the time confronting an armed state. Many of the people who carried 1976 into history spent their youth in detention, underground networks, exile, political imprisonment and surveillance. They faced police, soldiers, courts and prisons as teenagers and young adults. To place an arms capitalist inside that commemorative space without naming the arms industry is not a small biographical oversight. It is a failure of political context.

The Mail & Guardian‘s own archive shows that the newspaper knows who he is. In 2019, Simon Allison’s article, An arms dealer’s guide to philanthropy, described Ichikowitz as the founder of “the largest private arms manufacturer in Africa”. The article reported that Paramount manufactures armoured vehicles, naval ships, helicopters and fighter jets. It also named Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Gabon and the Republic of Congo among the states or regimes to which Paramount had sold weapons systems.

Arms manufacture is an industry built around state force, surveillance, border control, counterinsurgency, repression and war. A defence industrialist who enters public debate as a custodian of African memory cannot be separated from the material economy through which his public authority was built.

The Mail & Guardian knew this again in 2023. In The arms dealer behind the African peace mission to Ukraine, the newspaper reported on Ichikowitz’s presence around an African peace mission. The report stated that Paramount sells weaponised drones, infantry combat vehicles, naval patrol ships and fighter jets. It also referred to corruption allegations linked to Malawi’s $145-million defence contract to supply patrol boats, while recording Ichikowitz’s denial of wrongdoing and his statement that neither he nor his company had been formally charged with corruption.

The correction at the bottom of that article also belongs in the record. The M&G apologised for not putting the specifics of the story to Ichikowitz before publication. It corrected speculative language around secrecy and a presidential tweet. Ichikowitz and Paramount maintained that there was no secrecy surrounding his involvement, that they supplied no weapons to either side in that conflict, and that they had no links to or support for the government involved in one side of that war. The Deputy Press Ombud dismissed the other complaints.

Rather than remove the public-interest question, that question proves that the M&G understood the importance of disclosing his defence background when he appears in peace politics. In 2026, when he appeared as a moral interpreter of Winnie Mandela, the paper chose a softer frame.

DefenceWeb has also reported on Paramount’s delivery of Mirage F1AZ fighter aircraft to Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon. In that report, Ichikowitz confirmed two aircraft to Congo-Brazzaville and the balance of an order for six to Gabon. Fighter aircraft are not symbolic goods. They enter state arsenals. They increase the capacity of governments to patrol, threaten and strike. In African political systems shaped by debt, authoritarian habits, foreign pressure, resource conflict and internal repression, military hardware is never politically neutral.

This argument is ethical and political. Arms capital does not stand outside violence. It exists beside the institutions and technologies that make organised force possible. A newspaper with an anti-apartheid inheritance cannot detach the philanthropist from the defence industrialist when placing him beside Winnie Mandela and 1976.

Paramount has denied supplying arms to Israel, as reported by News24/City Press. That denial should be recorded. It does not resolve the editorial problem. The issue is that a man from the defence economy, with a public record attacking South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel, was given a clean M&G platform to speak through Winnie Mandela’s memory during a commemorative period linked to 1976.

Instead of full disclosure, readers were given the foundation, the archive, the Netflix documentary and the language of complexity. They were not given the arms economy, the African defence contracts, the peace mission controversy, the SA Jewish Report article, the attack on the ICJ case, the framing of Iran, or the insult to Muslim readers and Palestinian solidarity organisations.

An honest platform would have named Paramount. It would have named armoured vehicles, drones, naval patrol ships and fighter jets. It would have named Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Malawi. It would have named the Press Council correction and the complaints dismissed. It would have named Paramount’s denial regarding Israel. It would have named the contradiction between Winnie Mandela’s memory, Youth Day, Gaza and Zionist war logic.

The M&G did not challenge power. It offered power a progressive frame and placed it beside Winnie Mandela’s memory.

South Africans should read that decision with care. The danger here is not only comfortable history. It is the comfortable platform: the editorial space in which arms capital, Zionist war logic and liberal respectability are permitted to stand inside Black sacred memory without being made answerable to it.