The veteran newspaper editor and anti-apartheid activist Donald Woods died in Surrey yesterday at the age of 67. Mr Woods was the founder and editor of the Daily Dispatch, based in the southeastern city of East London. He had been ill for some time with cancer.
Mr Woods had settled in London, and paid his last visit to South Africa in May to attend the wedding of Nkosinathi Biko, the son of his friend Steve Biko, the black consciousness leader killed while under detention by apartheid era security police. Among the telephone callers to the hospital in Sutton, Surrey, shortly before his death was the former South African president, Mr Nelson Mandela.
Mr Woods was editor of the Daily Dispatch from 1965 to 1977, when he was banned for five years by the National Party government. He escaped from South Africa with his family in 1977, and became known throughout the world with the release of Richard Attenborough's film Cry Freedom, his constant campaigning for a democratic South Africa, and through his books, lectures and journalism. In 1978 he became the first private citizen invited to address the UN Security Council.
He returned to South Africa after 13 years in exile in August 1990.
