David Ross St John Beresford (1 July 1947 – 22 April 2016) was a South African journalist who was a long-time correspondent for The Guardian newspaper.

[1] Beresford was among the most prominent figures in South African journalism, and played a significant role in rescuing The Mail & Guardian in the early '90s.

[1][4] He started up a "long process of pestering The Guardian editor for a job" and moved to London to work for the South African Morning Group bureau.

[1] There he covered the bombings and assassinations carried out by paramilitary organisations, as well as the Thatcher government's response, including the ongoing internment at Maze prison.

Peter Preston, his editor at The Guardian, wrote of Beresford, "He was swiftly the finest chronicler of apartheid's disintegration, a correspondent who caught the excitement of a momentous story but always paused to analyse how and why the plates of repression were shrinking.

[1] Beresford was among a trio of journalists who brought about the "Inkathagate" scandal in 1991 at the height of the war between the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and African National Congress (ANC).

[1] Their reports led to the resignation of two key apartheid figures, Louis le Grange, the Speaker of the National Assembly of South Africa, and Adriaan Vlok, the Minister of Law and Order, and "forever tainted" Buthelezi.

[5] In 1994, Beresford wrote in The Guardian that Justice Richard Goldstone ran a "much vaunted" judicial commission of inquiry that "failed dismally", and that was a "rubbish bin" used by the South African government.