A Day Like Today: Memoirs

But by then my family was getting restive. Or, at least, my wife was. My children were, to all intents and purposes, native Americans. They spoke with an American accent, knew every word of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and thought it perfectly normal that our delightful, friendly neighbours kept his ’n’ hers pistols in their bedside tables. All they knew about the United Kingdom was that every time they went there for a holiday it rained. But I had promised their mother that we would return home before they went to secondary school and she was keeping me to that promise. A date was set. And then the big story (for the BBC at any rate) switched from the United States to another country on another continent. Two countries in fact: Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then known) and its powerful neighbour, South Africa.

BBC Television News had a problem reporting from South Africa. We were not allowed to open a news bureau there. The apartheid regime tolerated radio, but drew the line at letting in a television correspondent. Then, in 1976, they changed their mind. Nobody knew why. Maybe they calculated that if only the rest of the world could see what problems the country was facing they would change their hostile attitude to apartheid and remove the iniquitous sanctions. Whatever their reasoning the BBC leaped at the offer and I got a call from my boss Alan Protheroe.

‘Hi John … looking forward to leaving Washington?’

‘You bet! My wife is counting the days … packing the suitcases already.’

There was a slight pause and then …

‘Umm … that’s good. Just one slight snag …’

‘Stop right there Alan! I’ve told her we’re leaving the States and that’s that.’

‘Of course … of course … no question about leaving the States … it’s just that I’d like you to make a bit of a diversion en route to London.’

The diversion was 8,000 miles.

5

A sub-machine gun on expenses

There were two huge and simultaneous stories on the African continent closely connected to Britain. One was the growing threat to the apartheid regime in South Africa and the fear that the country would collapse into lawlessness. The other was the bush war in Rhodesia, which would end with the sun finally setting on Britain’s last colonial outpost on the African continent. I had first been to South Africa in the 1960s when the world was beginning to take apartheid seriously and opposition to it was gathering pace. The police and military kept an iron grip on the growing discontent of the black population – and a beady eye on foreign reporters like me who were trying to tell the world about the inhumanity of the system. When I returned in the 1970s the country was under siege.

My wife hated living there – partly out of fear of the knock on the door from the South African police. We were allowing a husband and wife to live together in our house in Johannesburg. That meant we were breaking the law and so were they. Their crime was that they were black and the shameful apartheid laws did not allow black couples to live together in ‘white’ neighbourhoods, let alone allow them to have their children living with them. If they wanted to live together legally as a family, they would have had to find a home in one of the so-called townships. The nearest to us was a squalid slum called Alexandria, or ‘Alex’ as everyone called it.

It was a hell on earth – an affront to the richest nation in sub-Saharan Africa. Raw sewage ran in the gutters and most of the shacks had no electricity or running water. The children looked as if they were permanently hungry or sick, or both. Most of the men had no work and their wives fought a hopeless battle to give their children a decent meal every day and, even more difficult, some chance of an education.

On the other side of the main road out of Johannesburg was a different universe: the white suburb of Sandton, known to everyone as the ‘mink and manure’ belt (the mink to cover the elegant shoulders of the women in the cold high-veld winters, the manure deposited by their children’s ponies). I suspect they spent more in a month on their ponies than a family in Alex spent in a year – on everything.

Our own house closer to the city centre was typical of the homes in the smart northern suburbs of the vast city. It cost about as much as a modest semi in my home city of Cardiff but in Cardiff a modest semi did not come with verandas on all sides, nor a swimming pool in a beautifully tended garden shaded by a magnificent jacaranda tree and shielded from the obligatory servants’ quarters by shrubs that seemed to flower all year round. It was, in short, a small paradise – but available only to those with white skin.

In our absurdly naive idealism my wife and I had agreed that when we moved to Johannesburg we would have no black servants. We were not going to turn into those ghastly whites whose lawns were immaculate thanks to the gardeners (black, obviously) who were paid a pittance to crawl over them all day plucking out every weed by hand or whose house servants called their employers ‘master’ or ‘madam’. I recall with a shudder the first time we had dinner with a white couple, and on the table was a little silver bell. Our hostess would ring it imperiously to summon the next course or when she spotted something of which she disapproved. Not that they were all like her.

There were many, many decent white liberals who fought tenaciously to end apartheid and treated their servants with dignity and generosity but yes, of course, they had servants. And, of course, we too ended up with them. I say ‘ended up’. It took roughly twenty-four hours. On our first day in our new home I decided to give the overgrown grass in front of the house a trim. I’d barely pulled the starter cord on the lawnmower before I was surrounded by a small crowd of young black men, jostling with each other to take over.

‘Let me do that boss … you must not do that!’ And so I did. They desperately needed work and to deny it to them just to parade my liberal credentials and indulge in a bit of virtue-signalling would have been both selfish and stupid.

The couple who ended up working for us and living with us were delightful and intelligent (they spoke three languages fluently) but I never did persuade them to call me John. It was always ‘master’. It became almost a joke:

Me: ‘Victor, my name is John so please stop calling me master.’

Victor: ‘OK master.’

They were the children of apartheid and were permanently scarred by it in ways people like me struggled to understand.

For the whites of the northern suburbs, though, life was good – if you were able to accept that you, as a white person, were the superior race and black people existed to do your bidding. My wife could not. She hated having to send our children to posh private schools. We tried the local state school and pulled them out after one term. Like everything else in that disfigured country, the education system was racist to the core. At least the private schools did not teach history from a purely white supremacist standpoint.

She hated having to stand in the very short ‘Whites/Blankes’ queue at the post office while the ‘Blacks/Swartes’ queue stretched into the distance. She hated the way black people automatically stepped off the pavement to make way for whites. She hated the high walls, topped with spikes, of our neighbours’ houses and the armed guards whom some of the more fearful residents kept in little huts outside their fortified gates.

There’s no doubt that security was a worry, though, and we were endlessly nagged by friends to at least get a fierce dog – just in case. John Simpson, who was the BBC’s radio correspondent when I arrived in South Africa and had become a close friend, offered me his dog when he returned to London. He was a very fierce-looking Rhodesian ridgeback called Titus – as strong as an ox but very good with small children, as John was anxious to point out. And so he was. But he had one slight flaw as a guard dog which John conveniently forgot to mention when he handed him over to me: he was terrified of black men – presumably because of something that had happened when he was a puppy.

I discovered it when I heard a gang banging on our gate one night demanding to see Victor about some unpaid debt and threatening to do him serious damage if he didn’t pay up. I dragged Titus to the gate and he barked ferociously, straining on the leash. The men cleared off pretty sharply. They need not have. What they didn’t realise was that he was not threatening them: he was straining to run away.

A few months later, when Titus and I were returning from our regular morning run around Zoo Lake I saw some black men standing at our gate. So did Titus. I tried to grab his collar but too late. He was running hell for leather in the opposite direction. Not for nothing are ridgebacks known as lion dogs. When their ancestors were used for hunting lions they were capable of running all day and all night – which is exactly what Titus did. We searched everywhere, put up ‘missing dog’ posters, even contacted the police (fat chance there) but after two days we’d begun to give up. Then the phone rang. It was a very elderly lady.

‘Have you got a dog called Titus?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we used to have but he’s run away.’

‘He’s with me and his feet are all torn and bloody. You must come and get him.’ Titus had run clear across the city and Joburg is a very big city. Thank heaven we’d put a disc on his collar with his name and our phone number.

My wife and I also found it difficult to live with the constant low-level hostility we met because I worked for the hated BBC – hated, at least, by Afrikaner officialdom. We represented the enemy. The British ambassador expressed it well when I asked him just after we’d arrived how we could expect to be treated.

‘Well put it this way,’ he told me, ‘as the representative of Her Majesty’s Government I tend to find myself going everywhere with my fists half raised.’ For the most part, though, they left me alone to get on with my job. There was the occasional visit from policemen calling at my home with spurious claims that I had been seen driving dangerously or committing some other low-level offence, but it was pretty half-hearted stuff – presumably just to remind me that they knew who I was and where I lived. Potentially more serious was when the South African government demanded that the BBC recall me to London. They ordered their ambassador to make representations to the head of news at the BBC, Alan Protheroe, and a meeting was duly arranged.

Alan listened politely. The case was, on one level, unanswerable. Mr Humphrys, said His Excellency, was opposed to the South African government and its policy of apartheid. Difficult to argue with that, but was I getting it wrong? As Alan pointed out, the BBC would need hard evidence that I was failing to report accurately what was actually happening in South Africa before it would consider replacing me.

‘Ha!’ said the ambassador (as reported to me later by Alan). ‘I shall give you one very concrete example of his inaccuracies. When he reported on the rugby match between the Lions and the Springboks in Durban just the other day he said the first try was scored by Grobelaar and it wasn’t: it was scored by Geldenhuys. The man cannot be trusted!’

That was fair enough as far as it went – sport has never been my strong point – but my boss took the view that it did not necessarily prove I was unfit for the job of South Africa correspondent, all other things considered. And that was the end of that. A faintly ridiculous encounter, but with an important principle underlying it.

The ambassador was dead right when he said I had not been reporting from his country with the impartiality that the BBC demands from its journalists. Normally that might indeed be a sackable offence. Frederick Forsyth was sacked by the BBC in the late 1960s (or, if you prefer, allowed to resign) because he was sympathetic to the Biafrans when he was reporting on the civil war there. He had the last laugh. He tried his hand at writing a novel and the rest, as they say, is history. Day of the Jackal became a massive international bestseller and a blockbuster film, and there were many more where that came from.

But the principle stands. BBC correspondents are reporters, not commentators. We report the views of others, not our own. The BBC is, above all else, impartial. And yet … there is one exception that overrides even that iron law. It was pronounced by the man whose shadow has hung over the BBC since he became its first director general in 1927: John Reith. The BBC, he said, is not required to be impartial as between good and evil.

In my view and – rather more importantly – in the view of the BBC, apartheid was an evil doctrine. It’s true that I did not use my access to the BBC airwaves to denounce the National Party government of South Africa and demand its overthrow, but neither did I try to pretend that the way it treated the vast majority of South Africans was anything other than repugnant. Not that it was easy to have a sensible argument about it with those Afrikaners – and there were many of them – who believed as a matter of faith that they were superior to the ‘kaffirs’. After all, they had God on their side. Their defence rested on the Bible. They liked to quote from the New Testament: ‘God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and He allotted the time of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live.’

See? Apartheid means ‘apartness’ and all they were doing was enforcing laws that meant blacks lived apart from white. And, please note, God also allotted the boundaries of the places where they should live. How very fortunate in the case of the white people in Johannesburg that they should be allotted the rich, luxurious suburbs while those with a black or coloured skin were allotted the stinking slums. But, as God would no doubt point out, it wasn’t HIS fault that white people would turn out to be so much better at accumulating wealth than black people. Which would also, presumably, explain why the whites should have the richest land in South Africa including (naturally) the gold mines, while the blacks should be banished to their ‘homelands’ – even if they’d never set foot in the godforsaken places.

To my enormous surprise I got the chance to challenge the country’s president about all that in a television interview which I asked for but never, for a second, believed I would get. It was clearly a sign that, for all its arrogance, the government knew it had to start persuading the rest of the world that apartheid was just and essential for the country to survive let alone thrive. The president was P. W. Botha, popularly known as ‘Die Groot Krokodil’ (The Big Crocodile). He had earned the nickname: he had a thick skin, the sharpest of teeth and was totally ruthless. I tried suggesting to him that simple justice and humanity demanded all people should be treated the same, whatever the colour of their skin. Here’s his reply: ‘Simple justice suggests that you must allow a black man with his family to live a healthy, decent life. And you must provide work, where possible, for him, and not allow him to squat on your doorstep … and then, in the name of Christianity, say you’ve done your duty towards him.’

In one twenty-second answer Botha had used the three phrases that summed up the apartheid philosophy: ‘allow a black man’; ‘in the name of Christianity’; ‘you’ve done your duty’.

There was not a scintilla of doubt in the minds of men like Botha that they were the master race and black people were a subspecies. Wasn’t he worried that they might have had enough of being subjugated by their white masters? Wasn’t some form of revolution inevitable?

‘People have said so over a period of 300 years,’ he told me. ‘And, today, South Africa is one of the most peaceful countries in the world to live in.’

That, of course, was rubbish. Nelson Mandela might have been safely locked away on Robben Island, but the liberation movement he led was growing in strength. There could be only one possible outcome but it was to be several more years before Botha’s successor, F. W. de Klerk, released Mandela from jail and brought an end to one of the great criminal political systems of the twentieth century.

The first rays of sunlight were breaking through the smoke haze of 100,000 coal fires rising into the cloudless sky above the biggest black township on the African continent. This was Soweto on a chilly April dawn in 1994. The following morning 20 million black South Africans would be free to vote in democratic elections for the first time in their lives. But the government had opened some polling stations a day early for the very old and disabled who might want to avoid the crowds the next day. I had driven out to Soweto hoping enough people would have taken the opportunity of that early vote to give Today a decent lead story. They had.

From every polling station great queues snaked into the distance: old grannies leaning on their sticks; old men in wheelchairs; young, heavily pregnant women. For an election that had not even formally begun this was already a turnout to gladden the heart.

I wanted to do a live broadcast into Today at 8.10 British time from a polling station. I chose an old woman to interview who looked as though she might deliver a lively couple of minutes and asked her: ‘What will this vote mean for you?’ Her answer was disappointingly low-key: ‘I am very old. My life is coming to its end. For me, it means little,’ she said. This was not what I expected or wanted. I waited and hoped there was more to come. There was. She patted the stomach of the young woman next to her. ‘But for the young man in this woman’s belly it will mean everything. He will have the dignity that has been denied to me all my life.’ In that one sentence she encapsulated the achievement of perhaps the greatest African of the last century. I asked the pregnant women what name she would give her new baby. I think I knew what the answer would be.

Nelson. What else?

A couple of days later I stood in the dangerously overcrowded ballroom of the largest hotel in Johannesburg, deafened by the roar that greeted the arrival of her hero at his victory party. Nelson Mandela. The first black president of South Africa.

Over the years that followed Mandela would become the most respected and revered statesman of his time, his name a byword for courage and honour, humanity and humility. In towns and cities around the world public buildings and streets would bear his name and the Nobel Peace Prize was merely one of a thousand honours to be bestowed on him. Mandela’s moral authority was unquestioned, his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom required reading for any who wanted to understand something of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.

In these sceptical times when our leaders struggle to gain our respect it is tempting to suggest that no single figure can really be worthy of such adulation. Nelson Mandela, after all, was not unique. There have been other great liberation leaders. He was not a great naval hero like his namesake, or a brilliant scientist who changed the way we understand the world, or a Churchillian figure who led his nation to victory with the power of his oratory. He himself acknowledged that during his five years as president he failed to achieve one of the two great aims that he spoke of at his inauguration: to bring prosperity to black South Africans. The fact is that millions of them still live in the most appalling poverty.

But he did succeed in his other great aim: to reconcile a country divided by race for so long. To create a rainbow nation of people who would be, in his words, ‘assured of their inalienable right to human dignity’.

To understand Mandela’s achievement you have to go back to the old South Africa. When I first went to Johannesburg to set up a television news bureau for the BBC he had already been in jail on the notorious Robben Island for twelve years. The apartheid regime he had sworn to bring down was tightening its grip with increasingly draconian laws. The more isolated it became on the world stage, the more savagely its leaders reacted to protests at home. In 1976, high-school students in Soweto had staged a peaceful demonstration against apartheid and were met with murderous force. Hundreds were shot dead. I went back for the anniversary a year later and once again the police turned on the protesters with gas and guns.

Black people were not only treated as a subspecies of humanity, unfit to share the same schools or hospitals or post-office queues as white people, denied the vote and their basic rights as citizens. They were even denied the very citizenship of their own country. They were deemed to be citizens of bogus tribal ‘homelands’ created by the regime. Those who were allowed to live in the ‘white’ towns and cities could do so only in shacks in the gardens of the whites. Their sole purpose was to serve the needs of white people.

Mandela could have done what some other educated black people did: collaborate with the system or struggle to modify it. I remember a conversation I had soon after I arrived in South Africa with another very brave man, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I asked him whether, given the apparent invulnerability of the regime, that might not be the wisest approach. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘we do not want to modify apartheid. We want to destroy it.’

Which was exactly what Mandela had set out to do when he took control years earlier of the youth wing of the ANC. He instantly became a wanted man and proved so elusive he earned the nickname ‘The Black Pimpernel’. But he cut an unlikely figure as an underground leader: he didn’t even own a pistol. Eventually he was arrested and in 1964 was convicted of sabotage, treason and violent conspiracy in the infamous Rivonia trial. His speech from the dock reverberated around the world. And in South Africa it removed any doubts as to who was the leader of the struggle. His words send a tingle down the spine to this day: ‘I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an idea which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, my Lord, if it needs be, it is an idea for which I am prepared to die.’

When he walked free from prison twenty-six years later Mandela’s moral authority was unquestioned. In prison he had behaved with brave and stubborn dignity – he showed defiant respect even for the men holding him captive – and that dignity and quiet modesty never left him, however many honours an admiring world bestowed on him. Everyone wanted a piece of him, to share in the Mandela magic, and he seemed almost to be surprised by it all. I remember when he came to Television Centre many years later. He was approached by a South African musician who was performing in the studio. Mandela went to shake his hand, but the man bent down on one knee and bowed his head. Mandela shook his own head in disapproval. When I interviewed him he made me feel as though I were the person who mattered. Even for a cynical old hack it was hard not to be overawed by the man.

And never once did he seem to glory in his victory over the old regime. The contrast with neighbouring leaders could not have been more complete. President Hastings Banda in Malawi went nowhere without a great gaggle of adoring, ululating women wearing T-shirts emblazoned with his picture. He had me locked up once for asking what he deemed an impertinent question. And unlike Robert Mugabe, Mandela’s former comrade-in-arms in the neighbouring Zimbabwe, Mandela did not use his new power to butcher those who had sought to destroy him. Instead he worked with them.

Back in the 1970s I’d had little enough idea what to expect from my posting to South Africa. In those dark days it had seemed inevitable that, sooner or later, the 20 million oppressed black people would rise up and demand equality – and that they would be met by overwhelming force, South Africa would descend into chaos and, ultimately, bloody civil war, taking the rest of southern Africa down with it. But it did not happen. And that, surely, was Nelson Mandela’s greatest gift to his country and to his continent.