Armed with a bottle of coffee, a few boiled eggs and a towel to protect his bare feet from the hot sun, 90-year-old Frans Hugo delivers newspapers in the desert every Thursday.
Week in, week out, the old editor has made a 1 200km round trip through the semi-arid Karoo region.
He has been doing it for about forty years.
Born Charl Francois Hugo in Cape Town in 1932 – but known to everyone simply as Frans – it is arguably the last bastion of the dying business.
The energetic nonagenarian edits and delivers three local papers – The Messenger, Die Noordwester and Die Oewernuus.
Driving an orange Fiat Multipla piled high with copies of the eight-page weekly and an old portable radio to keep him going, Hugo brought the news to the towns and villages dotted across this arid country.
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He left at 1.30am from Calvinia, a small town of less than 3,000 people about 500km north of the southernmost tip of Africa, and returned in the evening.
“I’m like a pompdonkie,” he told AFP at a recent tour, using the local moniker for the nodding donkey pump used to extract groundwater from boreholes.
Every Thursday
“I continue to do this every Thursday without fail. I will definitely stop when I can’t do it anymore.
Hugo worked as a journalist in Cape Town and then in Namibia for almost 30 years before retiring to this remote area.
“I couldn’t handle the pressure anymore, so I moved to the Karoo,” he said.
“When I was able to catch my breath and relax, the man who owned the printer and newspaper in Calvinia came to ask me if I was interested in the business.”
Her daughter and husband joined but got tired and stopped after a few months. “I’ve been sitting with this thing since,” he quipped.
Aided by his wife and three assistants, he keeps some historic small-town titles alive while many print newspapers around the world struggle to survive in the digital age.
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The Messenger – formerly known as the Victoria West Messenger – was founded in 1875, while Die Noordwester and Die Oewernuus began printing in the early 1900s.
All three are written in Afrikaans, but sometimes have stories in English.
Hugo makes fun of people who want to “read the news on their cell phones”.
The rise of the internet has gained readers but it doesn’t seem to have reached the newsroom, which looks like a museum.
The office is decorated with old Heidelberg printing presses and paper cutting machines.
Staff use computers and software from the early 1990s.
Still, Hugo’s team prints about 1,300 copies a week, which they say shows the burgeoning appetite for community news in the region.
Only R8 a copy
Newspapers sell for R8 and are sold in stores, shops and correspondent homes.
The readers are mainly farmers, living in remote and semi-arid places.
Writing in Afrikaans, which the actor Charlize Theron recently controversially said is still spoken only by “about 44 people”, remains the language of life and the relationship with small communities separated by hundreds of kilometers of desert, said Hugo indefatigable.
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As long as he was there and had the strength he needed, he would receive the paper every Thursday.
What happens later is none of his business, he said.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen … in five years or 10 years,” he said. “I’m not worried.”
– AFP