A Day Like Today: Memoirs. John Humphrys
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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