A Day Like Today: Memoirs

As for me, I’d had enough of living in foreign countries. I wanted to keep the promise I had made to my family and return to the country where we were born. So when Alan Protheroe said he was coming to South Africa to get briefed on what was happening in that troubled country and have a proper chat with me, I seized my chance.

Oddly enough, ‘getting briefed’ for Alan did not involve, say, visiting black leaders in Soweto to take the temperature of that volatile township or meeting stern-faced Afrikaans political leaders in the unlovely capital of Pretoria. It meant spending a couple of hours with a government official or two and the rest of the week exploring in some depth the state of South African cuisine and, naturally, its most famous vineyards while staying in some of the finest hotels the continent of Africa had to offer.

I was never quite sure why he was so interested in fine dining. He always had exactly the same meal: steak. And he always briefed the waiter in exactly the same way.

Waiter: How would you like your steak sir?

Alan: Well done.

Waiter: Yes sir.

Alan: Very well done.

Waiter: Yes sir.

Alan: Tell the chef that he must grill the steak until there is not a drop of blood left in it.

Waiter: Yes sir, I understand.

Alan: And when the chef is in tears because he will feel he has destroyed a perfectly good piece of meat, tell him to put it back under the grill and cook it again. And then – and only then – you can bring it to me.

But Alan knew his wine, which is why I left the big conversation about my career until the night before he was due to fly back to London from Cape Town. He had insisted on our final meal being taken in the finest grape-growing area on the planet: Stellenbosch.

The meal was magnificent (well … mine was) and the wine so good that even my palate, which can just about recognise the difference between a 1950 claret and a bottle of malt vinegar, was aroused. And then, with the sun setting over the rolling, vine-covered hills of Stellenbosch and the boss as mellow as big bosses ever get, I took the plunge. I wanted to come home, I told him. I wanted to reintroduce myself to my family, rescue my marriage, do a job which meant I wasn’t always waiting for the phone to ring and having to rush off to the airport. I wanted a normal life. Alan listened carefully and then …

‘Fancy being a newsreader do you?’

Wouldn’t I find it just a little boring? I ventured.

‘Absolutely not! I’ve had enough of “announcers” reading the news that other people write for them. You would not be just a newsreader, you’d be the journalist who reads the Nine O’Clock News and you’d be the BBC’s first reporter to do it. You’d write your own stuff and get involved in all the big decisions over what stories are in the bulletin and how they’re handled. You’d do live interviews with the people making the news and you’d even present the big stories on location – not stuck behind a desk in a studio. You’d be Walter Cronkite rather than Robert Dougall. You’d love it. What do you think?’

What did I think? I thought I’d won the lottery. My life would be my own again. No more being torn away from the bosom of my family at a moment’s notice. No more living out of a suitcase. We’d be able to do amazingly exciting things together like arranging to see friends for dinner in a week’s time and not having to apologise at the last minute because someone had decided to stage a revolution somewhere a long way away. We’d be able to keep promises to the kids about a weekend at the seaside. We’d be able to lead normal lives – as a family. And I’d be on telly every night, recognised everywhere I went. Getting paid a fortune to open supermarkets and making brilliantly witty after-dinner speeches. And making BBC history into the bargain. Alan ordered another bottle of wine to toast my new future.

The toast turned out to be a little premature. I should have known better. Never trust a boss when he makes a promise after a couple of bottles of Stellenbosch’s finest. At first everything went according to plan. It was agreed that we would be leaving for home – but not until I had covered the last act in the Rhodesian independence drama.

In 1965 the Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith had rocked the British government 6,000 miles away by issuing a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI). His country had run its own affairs for half a century, but remained a British territory. No longer, said Smith. It was now an independent sovereign state. The British colonial governor in Rhodesia called it treason and fired Smith and his entire government. Smith ignored him, threw him out of the country and told Britain to go to hell. Britain was outraged, declared UDI illegal and persuaded the Commonwealth and the United Nations to bring in economic sanctions, the first time the UN had ever done so. The Royal Navy even mounted a sea blockade off the coast of neighbouring Mozambique. The last British territory to declare independence unilaterally had been the United States two centuries earlier.

Rhodesia was left with only two friends in the world: Portugal (the colonial power in neighbouring Mozambique), and the one that really mattered, South Africa, its neighbour to the south. Without the help of South Africa UDI would have collapsed within months if not weeks. And the Rhodesian government faced a much bigger threat within its own borders: the vast majority of the population who had inhabited the land for centuries before Cecil Rhodes and his white adventurers had even set foot on its soil. They’d had enough of being treated with contempt by the white bosses and the white farmers who had, they believed, stolen their land while their colonial masters had stolen their country. They wanted it back. They wanted black majority rule. And Smith had no intention of allowing it to happen.

Out in the bush, beyond the calm, well-kept streets of Salisbury, two guerrilla organisations – one led by Robert Mugabe, the other by Joshua Nkomo – had already begun to arm themselves with the help of their black neighbours. Rhodesia, for so long one of the most peaceful and prosperous countries on the continent of Africa, was about to go to war with itself and there could be only one outcome.

The Rhodesian military was small but highly professional and had the support of South Africa. But that support waned as the years went by and the war became increasingly vicious. It began with a few landmines planted in the dirt roads but escalated until the guerrillas (or ‘terrs’ as the white Rhodesians called them) were shooting down unarmed civilian aircraft with heat-seeking missiles and the Rhodesian forces were resorting to chemical warfare – poisoning the water supplies used by the enemy.

Every white man up to the age of sixty-five was likely to be called up in a massive programme of subscription. Travel outside Salisbury and the other main towns was highly dangerous. Apart from helicopters, which were in precious short supply, the only safe way to travel any distance was in convoys escorted by the military. You could identify by sight the regular military drivers on the Salisbury-to-Johannesburg convoy. Their left arm would be pale, the right burned dark brown – because they would drive south in the morning and back north in the afternoon with their arm resting on the sill of the open window.

My cameraman Francois and I decided foolishly to take a break from the war when our families came to visit us from Joburg. We wanted to see one of the greatest sights Africa has to offer: the Victoria Falls. When we’d phoned the magnificent Victoria Falls Hotel to book rooms, the receptionist had seemed a little surprised. We understood why when we got there. Apart from one other individual we were the only guests. We had the breathtaking spectacle of the falls to ourselves – and what a spectacle it was. No wonder Livingstone called it ‘the most wonderful sight I have witnessed in Africa’ when he first set eyes on it in 1855. The native Lozi people call it ‘Mosi-oa-Tunya’ – the Smoke that Thunders. You can see from miles away the spray that rises high into the sky like a great cloud from the billion gallons of water crashing over the edge every minute. And no wonder that in pre-war days this had been one of the most popular tourist destinations on the continent. The fact that we were just about the only guests in the hotel bore powerful testimony to the effect the war was having on this extraordinary country. Surely Ian Smith would have to acknowledge the inevitable. It came sooner than many had expected.

Two years later at the end of 1979 I was back in London to report on the Lancaster House conference, which had been called by the British government and was to be attended by all the warring parties in an attempt to bring peace to Rhodesia – or ‘Zimbabwe Rhodesia’ as it was known by then. I agreed with my old friend John Simpson, who was reporting for radio news, that the conference was doomed to fail and we’d be back home in Joburg before the week was out. It seemed inevitable. Ian Smith had conceded defeat in the guerrilla war, but how could the three warring parties – Smith, Mugabe and Nkomo – ever agree to a peaceful settlement? To John and me and many other observers, it was inconceivable. We could not have been more wrong. The conference lasted for the best part of three months and ended in a peace agreement.

I was to make one more journey into the Rhodesian bush some months later, this time with a squad of British commandos whose job it was to help keep the peace while Rhodesians prepared to vote. All Rhodesians. Black and white. The commandos dug a deep pit, lit a fire in it and kept throwing in wood until there was a great pile of red-hot ashes in the bottom. Then they heaved the carcase of a sheep into the pit, filled it with soil and forgot about it for twenty-four hours. It was easily the best meat I have ever eaten. The next day the voting began and two days later Robert Mugabe and his ZANU party emerged victorious. It was my last election in Africa.

Here is one small footnote which demonstrates wonderfully how the BBC has changed in the decades since I reported on that bloody guerrilla war. In a rather pathetic and totally unsuccessful attempt to win some sympathy for myself I had mentioned to my editor how dangerous it was out in the Rhodesian bush. Today reporters are usually ‘embedded’ with soldiers if they are to report a war. The commissars of Health and Safety will settle for nothing less. But there were no sympathetic soldiers to guard us in Rhodesia, and although our Land Rover had a piece of tin welded to the bottom to protect us against land mines (fat chance) there was no protection from the guerrillas who would come hunting when they heard the bang. And those desperate men did not discriminate. If we were white, we were the enemy.

‘No problem,’ said my entirely unimpressed boss, who just happened to be a colonel in Britain’s Territorial Army in his spare time. ‘You need a couple of sub-machine guns. Loose off a few rounds and that’ll scare the buggers off.’