Picture: Danie van der Lith
THE DIAMOND FIELDS Advertiser wasn’t Griqualand West’s first newspaper, that honour belongs to the Diamond Field published in Barkly West (then Klipdrift), which was first published on October 13, 1870 and lasted for seven years.
Then there was The Diamond News, the Mining Gazette and the Independent.
The DFA began its life on Saturday, March 23, 1878, as a twice-weekly free sheet called the Diamond Fields Advertiser and Commercial Guide, appearing on Wednesdays and Fridays. It was created by John Radford, a compositor on the Diamond News.
He announced the intention of the paper in its first edition: “The first requisite of an advertising medium is an extended circulation. To enable them to guarantee to their patrons every advantage in this respect, the proprietors have decided at the outset that this will be a free paper.
“This will be liberally circulated at both the river and the Dry Diggings and also will be forwarded to public libraries, hotels, chambers of commerce and places of resort in the old Colony, Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal. By this means a circulation unsurpassed by any Griqualand West or Trans-Oranje advertising medium will be secured.
“To make the Diamond Fields Advertiser and Commercial Guide a constant medium of reference, several columns of carefully compiled news and general items, to include paragraphs of local interest, will be inserted in each number.
“In the columns, nothing will be admitted liable to give personal offence, while particular care will be taken to obtain the latest and most reliable market and trade returns, rates of carriage from various towns, notices of auction sale and the commercial news of the day.”
It was sold for the first time, six months later September 18. Wednesdays and Fridays were chosen as the distribution days because these coincided with market days. By November though the DFA was being printed three times a week and by Monday, February 10, 1879, the paper was officially the Diamond Fields Advertiser, its price increased to 6d and the ‘Commercial Guide’ dropped from the masthead.
In those days the paper was substantially bigger than the current broadsheet papers, at 56cm down by 46cm across.
In 1882, the owners of the Diamond News sold their paper and its plant to the Diamond Fields Advertiser and in May the paper became a daily paper.
The DFA eventually grew to a six-day operation; Monday to Saturday with the short-lived Saturday Evening News, published between January 1, 1937 to January 1939 circulating in Kimberley and Bloemfontein, making it effectively a six-and-a-half-day operation.
The advent of World War II also saw the paper moving news to the front pages for the first time, like the rest of the country, due to the shortage of newsprint.
By 1960 the paper had grown from the usual eight-pager to 36 pages, it had also become the only daily newspaper published in Kimberley and the Northern Cape.
In 1976, the newspaper changed to its current tabloid format.
The Covid-19 pandemic struck the world in 2020 and saw massive changes in the newspaper industry. The DFA stopped publishing a print edition for several weeks and turned its attention to its online platforms, keeping the people of the Northern Cape informed as the pandemic spread across the world.
As lockdowns were lifted, the DFA returned to the streets in print format as a weekly newspaper on Fridays. Several of the newspaper’s competitors did not survive Covid.
In May 2022, the DFA took another bold decision . . . printing 40 000 copies every Friday the newspaper went back to being a free publication, focussing on community news while its online platform (www.dfa.co.za) continues to provide breaking news and updates every day, as it happens.
Some of the other newspapers from Kimberley’s first 50 years included:
The Comet
The Ace of Diamonds
The Griqualand West Investors’ Guardian
Diamond News
The Diamond Field News
The DuToitspan Herald
The Diamond Fields Herald
The Diamond Fields Express
The Diamond Fields Mail
The Diamond Fields Times
The Diamond Fields Witness & Griqualand West Advertiser
Mining News
The Independent
The Critic (which changed its name immediately after the inaugural edition to The Wasp)
As well as Sol Plaatje’s
Tsala ea Becoana; and,
Tsala ea Batho