We have lost many friends, colleagues, associates and comrades over the past year, in the media industry where I have worked for almost 40 years and in progressive political circles, where I have been active for even longer.
The most recent of these colleagues and friends is Shaun Johnson, who died suddenly and unexpectedly this week. He retired in December at the age of 60 as CEO of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, having created an opportunity to study abroad for so many students from the African continent.
Shaun was one of those people whose paths I would cross in my various guises, as an activist and as a journalist. We met at Rhodes University in 1979 where I first saw his face on a billboard proclaiming his candidacy for the Student Representative Council (SRC) – I think for president – before we became friends and worked together in several societies.
We played soccer outside the university, in Grahamstown’s townships, under the banner of the South African Council on Sport (SACOS), one of whose leaders famously declared that there could be “No normal sport in an abnormal society”. Later, we both followed careers in journalism until our paths crossed again when we both became senior editorial executives within the Independent Newspapers group in the 1990s.
We continued to interact after he left newspapers to join the Mandela Rhodes Foundation and, in August 2018, Professor Bryan Trabold, an associate professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts, asked the two of us to speak at the Cape Town launch of a book he wrote about the alternative media in the 1980s. He focused in his book – Rhetorics of Resistance: Opposition Journalism in Apartheid South Africa – on the Weekly Mail, where Shaun worked, and the New Nation, where I worked. I learned that night that Shaun had also written the feasibility study for the New Nation.
It was a good discussion, allowing us to reminisce about the good old bad old days when investigating the apartheid government’s indiscretions (for want of a better word) could get you imprisoned or killed. Afterwards some of us went for dinner, where we continued our reflections, before all going our separate ways. It was the last time I saw Shaun, even though we did engage in conversations via email and telephone over the past year.
Reflecting on my experiences of Shaun this week, I thought about some of the stories we shared that night. There were differences and similarities between the papers we reflected on: the Weekly Mail and the New Nation. Both were fiercely anti-apartheid and pro-struggle, but the Weekly Mail readers were mainly white, while the New Nation readers were mainly black. The Weekly Mail journalists received bylines, while we wrote anonymously at the New Nation. Part of the reason for this was to protect us from possible persecution from the security police. Our editor, the legendary Zwelakhe Sisulu, took most of the brunt of the security police on himself, leading to him serving long spells in detention without trial.
But while the papers were different, what they had in common is important. At a time when there are people who want to rewrite the history of our country, and especially the resistance to apartheid, it is important to acknowledge the role of anti-apartheid newspapers such as the New Nation, the Weekly Mail, Vrye Weekblad, Grassroots, South, Saamstaan, the Eye, Bricks, Speak and a host of others – targeting different audiences but speaking the same language: keeping up the hope of a free and democratic South Africa, at a time when things looked very dark. The people who were involved came from different backgrounds, but we had in common our love for democracy.
These form part of my memories of Shaun Johnson, along with the intense and interesting discussions, the long lunches, his beautiful turn of phrase – and the young man with the trendy hairstyle who implored me from a billboard on a lamp post to vote him onto the SRC at a time when I could not even vote in my country. Rest in peace, my friend.
(First published as a Thinking Allowed column in the Weekend Argus on Saturday 29 February 2020)
