A Day Like Today: Memoirs. John Humphrys

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A Day Like Today: Memoirs - John  Humphrys


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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.’

      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.

      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.

      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?’

      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


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