The Diamond Fields Advertiser, known to its readers as the DFA, is a once-a-week free newspaper. The DFA isn’t a normal newspaper: it’s been published with one or two notable exceptions ever since it was started on March 23, 1878. That’s nine years before The Star was started in Johannesburg.

It’s a local institution that’s given countless lucky young journalists an incalculable head start on their future careers as they learned at the feet of people like Tony Ball and the late Vusi Tukakhomo or Johan du Plessis – who is today the longest-serving editor in the DFA’s 144-year history and probably the longest-serving current newspaper editor in South Africa today.

Independent Voice of the Northern Cape.