A Day Like Today: Memoirs. John Humphrys

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