Pogrund, Benjamin

Benjamin Pogrund was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on May 5, 1933. He obtained degrees of Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and Bachelor of Social Science at the University of Cape Town between 1950 and 1956 and Bachelor of Arts in African Studies at Witwatersrand University in 1971. From 1958 to 1985, Pogrund worked in a variety of capacities for the Rand Daily Mail. He achieved acclaim and notoriety for his reports on prison conditions and for his coverage of black South African individuals and groups who organized resistance to apartheid. Pogrund also wrote on South African affairs for many publications abroad, including the Boston Globe, Economist, Today, New Republic, and Sunday Times (London), and published several books, including a biography of Robert Sobukwe. Pogrund collected extensive materials documenting the struggle against apartheid and donated them to research libraries around the world. He moved to London in the mid-1980s, where he worked in the foreign departments of several newspapers and commented widely on South Africa. He lived for a short while in the United States during the 1990s before moving to Israel to establish the Center for Social Concern in 1997.