It was one of those dry, flat, bright Highveld days when a scrim of cirrocumulus at forty-thousand feet scatters the hot light of the African sun in so many directions it seems to be coming from everywhere and nowhere, when there’s no distinction between light and shade because everything is lit up from every angle, when you begin to think you’ll never get to see your own shadow again — as if it had been painlessly amputated from your body when you weren’t paying attention, an appendage you didn’t need any more, like your tonsils, your appendix or your gallbladder, just another vestige of evolution’s many failed experiments, and even its ornamental value had to be sacrificed in the interests of corporeal economy.
It has that effect on you, the Highveld, of reducing you down to the prehistoric essence of your specie — as if for all your language and learning and culture and clothes and shoes and opposable thumbs you haven’t, in fact, in the great scheme of things, advanced much further from Australopithecus than the thirty-five miles that separates you from the cradle of mankind over there by Sterkfontein. Maybe it’s just the altitude. Or maybe it’s just the way it felt when I thought about it later — just that particular incident, on that particular day, in the particular year, when apartheid got close up and personal, and I came face to face with my irredeemable superfluity in the face of it.
1975 was the first of the three years I was obliged to work at the South African Broadcasting Corporation, a.k.a. die Suid-Afrikaanse Uitsaaikorporasie, to pay back the student loan they had graciously given me without questioning my sexual, social or political preferences, tendencies and affiliations. All they needed to be reassured of was that I had done my military service, that I understood Afrikaans, that I could write proper English, and that I was definitely white.
In those days its headquarters were in Broadcast House on the south side of Commissioner Street, the main thoroughfare of Johannesburg’s business district. A six-storey building with a gracious Art Deco façade, it was bought by the SABC from the entertainment mogul I.W. Schlesinger in 1936, and named after its colonial mothership in London.
Schlesinger was an American who arrived on the Witwatersrand in 1894 to make the fortune that funded his vast southern African entertainment empire by selling insurance to optimistic gold diggers and pessimistic Swazi chiefs.
The façade of Broadcast House still glowed with a gracious pre-war splendour when I saw it for the first time on that summer morning in early January, 1975. I stood on the pavement with my back to warm morning sun, straightened Rodney’s wide tie of alternating blue, white and beige diagonal stripes, tightened its Windsor knot to snuggle neatly under the stiff white collars of my father’s freshly laundered shirt, fastened the leather-knot button at the waist of my father’s tweed jacket, checked the jib of Bruce’s navy-blue trousers, dusted the ox-blood toe-caps of Uncle Eric’s brown leather shoes for one final time on the back of Bruce’s trouser calves, each in turn, and told myself I had arrived.
Two weeks ago I was standing guard on the southern bank of the Limpopo about sixty miles west of Messina, the same sun trickling through the dense green foliage of a fever tree, my shaki browns faded to a light chocolate, my R1 slung over my shoulder with the safety off, mostly for crocodiles. Hence the wardrobe.
A diminutive, silver-haired Englishman in a grey suit let me into a first floor office, looked me up and down, sniffed into the white handkerchief, handed me a copy of How To Write The News, and briefed me on the SABC’s journalistic policies, protocols and punctuation while skilfully avoiding any mention of its politics.
I was going to be writing the radio bulletins that every person in the country could hear live, in English and Afrikaans, updated five times a day every day of the week except on Sundays, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Van Riebeeck’s Day, Republic Day, Settlers’ Day, Kruger Day, Dingaan’s Day, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, when they would be updated only once. Yes, me.
We would still be calling it Dingaan’s Day long after it had been changed to The Day of the Covenant. The Day of the Covenant sounded like the third episode of a series that started with the Day of the Locusts and the Day of the Jackal. Or maybe it was just the alliteration that made Dingaan’s Day stick.
The bulletins would be broadcast on the English A-programme, the Afrikaans B-programme, and on Springbok Radio alternately in English and Afrikaans. The Springbok Radio version differed only in requiring the addition of an amusing little topical anecdote at the end. Something to make people smile, you know. If we couldn’t find anything suitable in the local papers, we made it up.
Magriet van Rensburg got the surprise of her life yesterday when the pet tortoise she lost when she was eleven years old turned up in her Brakpan garden as she was celebrating her 89th birthday with her friends and family. She recognised Paulie from the distinctive shape of Paul Kruger’s beard in the markings of the tortoise’s shell. Whether Oom Paul recognised Tannie Magriet is another matter, but we like to think he did.
Versions of them would be translated, with amendments appropriate to the cultural tastes and linguistic nuances (if not to the political aspirations) of the audiences of the several Nguni and Sotho language SABC/SAUK radio stations, all of them offshoots of the original state-owned Radio Bantu. In the absence of any privately owned radio stations in South Africa at that time, the news that we manufactured at Broadcast House was all the radio news there was — unless you could decode the babble and squeaks of foreign voices surfing the white noise of medium wave or shortwave transistors. It barely needs saying that the strongest and clearest of these was the BBC World Service. It was our lifeline to the real world of measured analysis, cultural sophistication and fair play for all.
As a junior sub-editor I wouldn’t, of course, be selecting which stories to write. I wouldn’t be seeking out the stories or originating the stories or deciding on the importance of any given story or making any actual editorial decisions as such. That would come later. Or might come later. But I’d be writing them, nevertheless, putting my very own choice of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions in the order in which I freely chose to put them. Unless I was translating a story that had been written in Afrikaans by an Afrikaans editor or senior sub-editor, in which case it would be impolite not to follow his sentence structure as faithfully as possible, the position of the verbs aside.
I say “his” because I don’t remember any women working on the fourth floor of Broadcast House in 1975. Or anyone who wasn’t white apart from Solomon who wheeled in the coffee and the tea at the minutes of the hours that punctiliously followed the English tradition.
Just go easy on the adverbs, the Englishman said (gravely). And we don’t use the Oxford comma here. This seemed to sadden him.
For the first six months I did the night shift, starting at 11pm and ending at 11am. From from the flat I shared with friends in Parktown Mansions, Empire Road, it was a short commute over the crest of Hillbrow and down Twist Street to Commissioner Street where I could park my pale blue Datsun 1200 bakkie right outside Broadcast House until sunrise when a 10 cent coin in the meter would suffice until noon.
The news editors, one Afrikaans and one English, slept on military-issue canvas stretchers until five in the morning, an hour before the six o’clock bulletin was due. The rest of us, consisting of two senior subs, one Afrikaans and one English, and an Afrikaans junior sub who was my counterpart, waited for the telex machines to chatter into life with the news of the day, or the night. The telex machines carried newswires from Reuters, Agence France-Presse, United Press International and SAPA, the South African Press Association. A telex machine carrying TASS, the Russian newswire, was locked in an office that only the news editors had access to. There may have been others.
We had no journalists in the field, and no stringers apart from someone called Fritz in Windhoek. The news bulletins consisted of the newswire reports deemed suitable for broadcast. Sensitive wire stories were rewritten by the news editors themselves; the rest got passed down the line for rewriting in line with the SABC/BBC style guide, which insisted on the use of the present perfect, and which and strongly disapproved of subordinate clauses, which is probably why I like them so much.
The Afrikaans news and the English news had to be identical, so half of my work involved translating into English the stories written by my Afrikaans counterpart, and vice versa.
We typed our stories onto blank rectangular sheets of stiffish white paper not much bigger than a standard envelope, perfectly proportioned for paper aeroplanes. Except in some extraordinary cases, no story could be longer than the amount of double-spaced type that could fit onto one sheet.
We called them stories as if we’d made them up. It gave an air of romance to a job that never asked more of us than rearranging the contents of selected newswire reports. The only stressful aspect of it was learning to type without a single error, a task that became the more difficult the closer the clock ticked towards the deadlines, because the newsreader would read directly from our scripts once they had been arranged by the editor in his preferred order. I had a fantasy about inventing a white substance you could use to paint over an error and it would dry quickly enough for you to be able to type your correction over it and nobody would notice.
Each story was given a single word title called a “slug”, always in lower-case so it couldn’t be read out by mistake. The slug was your opportunity for creative expression. If your story was about a giant turnip that had broken all previous records at an agricultural show at Potgietersrus, you could spend twenty or thirty minutes playing around with options ranging from whataturnup to potluck. The most creative slugs got a nod from the news editor.
We rolled our bulletins for the English Service into plastic capsules and sent them in a vacuum tube with a suck and a whoosh to wherever the English and Afrikaans studios were. Nothing ever came back up the tube. Maybe they didn’t work that way. But at six o’clock in the morning we heard our words read back to us in reassuring voices on the transistor radios we kept for the purpose of monitoring the accuracy of the newsreaders’ enunciation of them, and we knew all was well in our world, if not in the actual one.
The gracious exterior of Broadcast House belied the brutalist deconstructivism of the interior, which appeared to have been burrowed out and patched up by several generations of aardvarks with very different ideas about what it should look like in the end, but without the flexibility of modern dry-walling. The remains of their experiments were everywhere. Concrete stairwells led to mezzanines without doors or windows. To reach the Springbok Radio studio from the newsroom on the fifth floor you had to traverse a corridor on the vacant fifth floor and find the emergency exit that opened onto a rusty fire escape in a dank atrium that led you down to a warren of underground passages where a new brick wall obliged you to ring a bell and wait for someone to show you the rest of the way. Sometimes you could catch of glimpse of David Gresham.
Over at Auckland Park, which is pretty much at the dead centre of present-day Gauteng, they were building the Corporation’s new headquarters in anticipation of the launch of television. I would be transferred there in June of 1976, just in time to take a CP-16 film camera into the Soweto Riots.
The suburb of Auckland Park, Johannesburg, was named and laid out in 1888 by John Landau, a New Zealander a long way from home. Only a desperate case of homesickness can explain why this desultory patch of Transvaal thorn trees, veld and dassie-ridden koppies reminded him of the lush rainforests that spill south from Auckland’s Volcanic Field to Manukau Harbour on the Tasman Sea, and to Waitematā Harbour on the blue Pacific in the north. Adding irony to idiocy, or perhaps the other way round, he then proceeded to name Auckland Park’s roads of dry, cracked earth after the pretty little Thames-side villages of Southwest London: Richmond, Twickenham, Ditton, Molesey, Surbiton, Putney, Barnes and Fulham, none of them more than ten miles away from where I am trying to digest my South African Englishness.
Before the rest of the subs and the managers and administrators and other government functionaries bustled in at eight or nine in the morning, it was a cold tomb of a place, that newsroom, more like an indoor tennis court than an office, far too big for the six of us on the night shift, and far too dark for comfort outside of the pale fluorescence that hung over the desks at the furthest end of the echoing linoleum floor.
It was easy enough, nevertheless, to console myself with the thought that I had not only survived the horrors of 1971, but that I had also escaped from the arid cultural wastelands of Estcourt and Mooi River, and I had found my way to the metropolitan oasis of Johannesburg, by luck or by judgement, it didn’t matter — because here I was, not just at the heart of this great city, but at the very nerve centre of the national news, in the throbbing hippocampus of the Republic’s brain, and surely on the threshold of revelations unimaginable to the parochial shadow of my former self.
If it felt unnaturally quiet up here for hours at a time it was only because the brain was resting; and the streets below were silent and empty in the sodium flare of their yellow streetlights only because the city’s white denizens had long since gone home to the white northern suburbs, and the city’s black workers had long since been banished by curfew to Soweto in the south.
Reading was forbidden, not for political reasons, but because it looked bad. So in my downtime I made a lot of paper aeroplanes and threw them out of the fifth-floor windows. One moonlit night an experimental design got caught in a very slight breeze and kept on flying in an upwards trajectory over the CBD until I lost sight of it somewhere high over the yellow mine-dumps near Boksburg or Benoni. By now it will have circumnavigated the world forty-seven times. I was never able to replicate it.
Another night I arrived at Broadcast House at 10.30 pm and found myself pinned down for three hours behind my blue bakkie by rifle fire coming out the Israeli Embassy in Fox Street. My eye-witness account didn’t make it into the morning bulletin, but I got a pat on the back and the weekend off in case my account differed from the joint Israeli and South African governments’ official press release which confirmed that nothing of any consequence had actually happened. You can read it here:
https://www.jta.org/archive/lone-gunman-surrenders-to-authorities-in-johannesburg
They wouldn’t pay for the shot that shattered the left-hand side-mirror because I hadn’t entered the building at the time of the shooting so I wasn’t actually a participating employee in the event as such.
On another occasion I heard the rat-tat-tat of the AFP telex and found a story claiming that South African troops had invaded Angola. It seemed on the face of it to be important enough to warrant waking up at least one of the news editors, and I said as much to the senior subs. This was, after all, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and it felt only right and proper for the voice of the nation to inform South African citizens, even just the white ones, that their country was at war with a neighbouring sovereign state. But their reaction suggested that they’d got to hear about it long before I did, because one of them crumpled up the telex and threw it in the bin, and the other one slapped me on the back and said, “Mooi-skoot!”
I understood after that there are only four kinds of news. The first is the hard news that has to be told because everyone around the world will get to hear about it soon enough. The example that springs to mind in the recent assassination of Shinzo Abe, live on television. You can’t not see it. Earthquakes and wars fall into this category — but not all of them.
There is a second kind of hard news, such as South Africa’s invasion of Angola, that is deemed not to be news because it wasn’t in the news; and it never made it into the news and never would make it into the news, not even after the boys came back from the Caprivi Strip and Luanda with missing limbs and stories of the most horrific massacres, cruelties and betrayals, or in body bags to be mourned neither in pride nor in anger, but simply in the dumb despair of puzzlement.
News — of what we choose to call The News — is the handmaiden of history. And the news-makers know if it isn’t in the news it won’t make it into history. Most of history doesn’t become news until it’s far too late for anyone to care or to do anything about it.
There is no such thing as “fake news”. Fake news is just information that some people, notably populists like Donald Trump and other proto-fascists, would rather not hear on the news.
The third is the soft news of social and celebrity scandals that excite a degree of prurience so highly charged that no garden fence is too high, no wall is too thick and no phone battery cannot be charged fast enough, to prevent the indignation of it passing from tongue to ear and ear to tongue until every human on the planet who gives a fuck is giving a fuck.
The fourth is propaganda, or advertising as it’s called outside of Brazil.
Nothing is news until it’s called news. Everything is news until you, personally, decide it isn’t.
At about two in the morning of the 20th of November all of the telex machines started chattering at once. Someone called General Franco had died. The senior subs woke up the news editors. Twenty minutes later we were visited by a deputation of men in grey suits with sleep in their eyes who handed us a script pre-written in Afrikaans that was to replace all the other news for the next twenty-four hours. From the long list of his achievements that I set about translating into English, I gathered that the South African nation would be united in mourning his loss.
One night I picked up the telephone and found myself talking to Pik Botha, our ambassador to the United Nations at the time. He was either drunk or upset or both because he said in slurred Afrikaans he just wanted to talk to someone in Afrikaans. “In my eie taal,” he said, “Asseblief, jong!”
The only time I had met Pik in the flesh was when he was braaing half a kudu with Magnus Malan and some of apartheid’s other luminaries in a cave at Greefswald that became known as Pik se Gat. It wasn’t exactly a meeting. I saw his eyes looking at me the way I looked at him, i.e. with a mixture of guilt and deference, when I dumped half the trunk of a leadwood into the dying coals.
I wasn’t inclined to remind him of our brief encounter, so I woke up the Afrikaans news editor who spent the rest of the night talking Pik down from his New York ledge. They had known each other for jonks, the editor said.
These incidents, and others like them, had the effect of inuring me to Kafka, but they were ordinary enough in the context of that time and place. I had by that time adopted a persona of ironic indifference to the intractability of South African politics: the view then prevalent among English-speaking liberal whites which was that as much as we abhorred the injustice of apartheid, disdained the Afrikaner’s narrow nationalism and sympathised with moderate black aspirations, there was very little we could do about it apart from returning Helen Suzman to parliament every four or five years. The Afrikaners weren’t going anywhere, Mandela was on Robben Island, the townships hadn’t erupted, the rand was strong, we had good friends in the US, the UK, Israel, Taiwan, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay, and the sun shone brightly on lots of very white beaches. We had been taught to keep calm and carry on, and we did it with typically English apathy.
Through this English prism we could see the Afrikaner as a figure of fun, the Van der Merwe of a thousand and one bad jokes pivoting on his vulgarity, his stupidity, his misogyny, his crassness, his racism and his rugby. He was the puppet through which we could voice aloud our own unspoken fears, prejudices and crude masculinity; an absurd caricature created by our need to distance his whiteness from our own; objectified especially by his lack of culture, his specific un-Englishness; despised even by the cultureless Dutch; no longer fit to call himself European; who clung onto the absurd belief that apartheid might yet deliver to him his Shangri-La of white sovereignty, that Trans-Transvaal of the mind where his Old Testament god provided the whole of the animal kingdom to make biltong out of, and his Old Testament Satan bowed and said “Ja, baas” and kept the braai coals glowing red. But he stood between us and unnameable perils, and we cherished him with our mockery.
There’s a website devoted to old Van der Merwe jokes, and I see that a film titled Van der Merwe has earned a stellar 8.0 score on IMDB. Forty-seven years have gone by but somehow it still feels too soon.
It’s a myth convenient to English-speaking white South Africans that apartheid was a crime perpetrated by Afrikaners for the exclusive benefit of Afrikaners, as though the rest of us happened by chance to find ourselves at the scene of a daylight robbery. It’s a narrative repeated with minor variations over and over again throughout the far-flung diaspora of Saffas, like a nursery rhyme warding off the Black Death, or something worse.
It was also convenient to British interests in South Africa during the apartheid years. They could feign disgust at the Afrikaner’s hateful policies while dealing in the dividends of apartheid’s disenfranchised black labour. And Afrikaner nationalism drew a kindly veil over the grim consequences of the British imperial legacy.
The exceptions were especially notable because they were so exceptional: the very brave white English-speaking South Africans who risked and sometimes gave their lives to the struggle for justice and democracy — just as there were many Afrikaner authors, journalists, political activists and ordinary citizens with the courage to fight not for only for the abstract principle of a new democratic dispensation, but also, traitorously, against their own race, nation and heritage. Their names are legion, but it’s not for me to enumerate them here.
I can speak only for my time and my generation, the majority, that is, of the English-speaking children born into the perfect white paradise of the 1950s and 1960s, who grew up thinking of themselves as outsiders in their own country, as spectators to a drama not of their making, who could assume, just as I had by 1975, the role of the supposedly objective observer, entitled to laugh and jeer from the stalls. It was a position of immense privilege, of being present without being involved, or seeing without being responsible for the sight, of having a first-hand view of a second-hand crime.
And it seemed to me in that newsroom at five o’clock in the morning where the paper from the telex machines felt hot to the touch that no-one was closer to the pulsing action of the drama than I was. So I turned the morally indefensible into the psychologically comfortable by thinking of myself as Nick Carraway watching Gatsby’s descent into hell, or more appropriately still, as Ishmael on board the Pequod making poetry out of madness, never thinking of how it might end or who would be drowned in the ocean’s revenge.
But in June or July of 1975 all that would change. I would be clearer about the date if the incident had been significant enough to earn a place in the historical record, but I can find no trace of it.
All I can tell you is what happened and how it affected me, or, rather, how it left me, because I didn’t understand the full effect it had on me until much later when it came to symbolise the superfluity of the person I thought I was; when I realised just how little there was of me that was of my own making.
If it had happened a year later I couldn’t have done it; or they wouldn’t have sent me to do it. By then we would have seen the riots and the rage of Soweto after the June killings, and those images would have been racing through our minds, and I would never have been stupid enough or reckless enough to follow it through the way I did. And immediately afterwards I was able to tell the story as though it was an amusing trifle, an after-dinner anecdote contextualised by the pre-June innocence of the day, a Boy’s Own adventure featuring Harry Flashman, Horatio Hornblower, Biggles and Lochinvar all rolled into one.
It was the day they gave me a Nagra tape recorder, the best in the business, and told me to find out wat die fok was happening at Johannesburg Station.
At the time I had graduated to working alternate shifts: two nights on, one day off, two days on. By night I was a lowly sub imagining myself as Dashiell Hammett, and every story I tapped out in that echoing tomb of the newsroom was another chapter in the life of Sam Spade, my Zulu-noir detective. By day I caught the bus down to Broadcast House and became a cub reporter with a Nagra, imagining myself as the audio equivalent of Peter Parker, ears peeled for a soundbite from Rockspiderman.
The reporters got to hang out in an office next to the carpool in the basement. It felt wildly exotic and supremely cool. A flood of tropes came back to me as we sat in that room waiting for the phone to ring. We were hard-bitten, tough-as-teak, cynical, sunburned, chain-smoking, luckless, alcoholic, thick-skinned, soft-hearted hacks who’d been there and done that and seen it all for what it was, chewing the fat in a hotel bar waiting for a war to break out while the wind howled and the palm trees swayed like the hips under the silk wraps of the slant-eyed waitresses who knew exactly how we liked our screwdrivers and pink gins, one part Somerset Maugham, two parts Evelyn Waugh and three parts Graham Greene. By the time the tea-trolley arrived at four o’clock I had finished the crossword puzzles in the Rand Daily Mail and The Star and was thinking about having a go at Die Beeld
But that afternoon they’d all been sent out on their various missions: to John Vorster Square to wait for the afternoon’s crime report, or to interview government functionaries for the official version of the truth of the hour. So I picked up the ringing phone and one of the news editors, Blake, I think, the big ginger oke, told me to get a driver and go up to the station where something was going on, he didn’t know what, but one of the reporters at John Vorster Square had tipped him off, and to take my Nagra and get some ambient sounds, if there were any of course, but not, definitely, most strictly not, to try interview anyone, unless it was a fire or a robbery, because everything else, including murder, politics and rugby, was above my paygrade.
I told him all the cars were out. He told me to start walking. So I trudged up Delvers Street with the weight of the Nagra digging into my left shoulder, zig-zagged across to De Villiers and turned right into Rissik.
It was a beautiful Joburg day.
So many highlights I highlighted every paragraph from the throbbing hippocampus of your sun-baked Saffa brain. It’s not just the writing Gordon, it’s the thinking. Next chapter please!
I love your writing! I hang on every word. I go to google and find present perfect and subordinate clauses, which I use all the time but don't know what they really are, now I do. I have partaken of your treats, even though I have used an irregular past participle.
But your last blog was too cruel, ending too abruptly, leaving me wanting more as it left me hanging on "It was a beautiful Joburg day."
I will have to wait for more.