Boardroom Talk: RIP RW Johnson - leaving a huge hole in your nation's heart

Listen here.In today's Boardroom Talk, Alec Hogg confirms the death of RW Johnson, one of South African political writing's sharpest and most combustible voices, and reflects on a decade of working with him: the audiobook that started it, the necrotising fasciitis he refused to let slow him down, the Steenhuisen column that ended their working relationship, and the warmth he never stopped showing even after he stopped writing for BizNews..Edited transcript.Good day, and welcome to a Boardroom Talk that I wish I didn't have to record.I've learned, in the last few hours, that RW Johnson has died. He passed away last night. I have this confirmed by his wife, Irina Filatova — and out of respect for her, and for him, I'm not going to speculate on anything beyond that one fact. No cause, no detail I can't stand behind. Just the fact of it, which is hard enough to sit with on its own.If you've listened to this show, or read BizNews, at any point over the last decade, you'll know the name. RW Johnson — Bill, to those who knew him — was one of the sharpest, most stubborn, most infuriating and most necessary voices in South African political writing. And for a good number of years, he was a colleague of mine. Today, I want to tell you who he was, and why his absence is going to be felt.Let's start with the unlikely shape of his life, because it's not the life you'd guess from the byline.Richard William Johnson was born in England in 1943, not South Africa — a fact that used to surprise people, given how completely he made this country his subject. His father was a chief engineer on oil tankers, and it was the Suez Crisis, of all things, that brought the family out to Durban when Bill was a boy — Mobil Oil needed a base for its Indian and Pacific Ocean shipping once the Canal closed, and that's how a Durban North schoolboy ended up becoming South Africa's most argued-about political historian.He did his first degree at what was then Natal University, and by his own account he was already involved in anti-apartheid student politics before he ever set foot in England again — this time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. And Oxford is where he stayed, in the professional sense, for a very long time. He was a fellow in politics at Magdalen - pronounced Maudlin - College for twenty-six years, and remained an emeritus fellow there for the rest of his life. Twenty-six years at one of the most storied colleges in the English-speaking world — that's not a footnote, that's a career in itself, before you even get to what most of us knew him for.He came home in 1995 — one of the very few South African Rhodes Scholars of his generation to actually return after apartheid ended, rather than build a life abroad. He ran the Helen Suzman Foundation in Johannesburg for a period. He wrote for the London Sunday Times as its South Africa correspondent, and for years contributed to the London Review of Books. And by the time most BizNews readers came to know him, he'd already published a dozen books — the most consequential of which, for our purposes, was *How Long Will South Africa Survive?* — a title that became something close to a national talking point.I don't think South Africans ever fully appreciated just how world-class a professional they had in Bill Johnson. Over those twenty-six years at Magdalen, he taught politics to students who went on to become British prime ministers and cabinet ministers. A career as a top-tier commentator in the UK, on the back of that kind of teaching record, would have been guaranteed — practically handed to him. He chose South Africa instead, deliberately, because he believed he could have a bigger impact here than he ever would competing for space in the crowded world of British political commentary. We once talked about emigration, in passing, and he told me he was genuinely surprised that any South African journalist would even consider leaving — because in his view, South Africa was the most exciting country on earth to practise our craft in. Nothing else, he said, came even close.Now — I worked with this man, going back much further than most people realise. I first came to know Bill properly through his book How Long Will South Africa Survive? — he and the late Jonathan Ball gave me permission to turn it into an audiobook, which was, believe it or not, my first ever adventure into voicing a book, almost a decade ago now. Tech was a lot more rudimentary back then, and it took me three months of work to get the recording fluff-free. I'll be honest with you — it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a financial success. But it was the start of something. That's how Bill and I first really got to know one another, long before he became a fixture on this platform.From there, I worked with him properly, argued with him, shared a stage with him. So let me tell you what that was actually like, because an obituary that only lists achievements isn't honest.Bill was physically tougher than almost anyone I've known. In 2009 he injured his foot swimming; it turned into necrotising fasciitis, and he lost the leg above the knee. He never once, in all the years I knew him afterwards, let that slow the output, dull the wit, or soften an opinion. He kept writing, kept flying out to our conferences, kept standing at a podium. At BNC#7 in Hermanus, not that long ago, he delivered a keynote on the GNU that had the room leaning forward — dissecting the gap between ANC activists and ANC voters with a kind of clarity that came from someone who'd actually met the founding generation. He was, by his own description, one of the very few people still alive who'd heard both Verwoerd and Mandela speak in public, before Mandela went to prison. That's not analysis from a textbook. That's living memory, and we are poorer for losing it.I'd be doing him — and you — a disservice if I pretended the man was uncontroversial, or that he and I parted on easy terms. He wasn't, and we didn't.There was a smaller irritation, too, that I think laid some of the groundwork for what eventually happened. Bill got genuinely, disproportionately furious whenever we published anything of his — a transcript, a piece of context around a column — that wasn't a hundred percent word-perfect. At the time I found it maddening, one of those very human failings that made him difficult to work with. But I understood it, and I understand it even more clearly now. He was that irritable about precision because his own copy never needed a single word touched. In this whole business, I have never come across another writer whose craftsmanship came close to his. If every journalist wrote like Bill Johnson, there would be no need for the armies of sub-editors who spend their days knocking rough copy into shape — and, for that matter, no need for the AI grammar and word checkers half of us lean on now. He held everyone else, including us, to the standard he held himself to. It wasn't always comfortable. But it was earned.Bill had a long, combative history with DA leadership going back years — long enough that some in that party privately nicknamed him "the Curmudgeon of Constantia," and he rather enjoyed the title. Earlier this year, he wrote a column tearing into John Steenhuisen, calling him a chancer and arguing he was bad for the DA. I made the call to give Steenhuisen right of reply on our platform. Bill saw that as a betrayal — he felt I should have simply backed my columnist rather than let the target of his column answer back. He was furious about it, and he didn't hide that fury. He stopped writing for BizNews. He effectively fired us. And when we asked whether we could at least republish some of what he was writing for The Common Sense afterward, he refused that too.That falling-out was never resolved. But I want to say, honestly, that even after all of that, Bill still answered my emails. We stayed in some kind of contact, even at a distance, even through gritted teeth on both sides. I kept hoping, quietly, that enough time would pass and he'd relent — that the Bill Johnson byline would find its way back onto BizNews one day. That's not going to happen now, and that particular regret is one I'll be sitting with for a while. Bill Johnson picked fights, right to the end. Sometimes he picked them with me. He was never, ever dull.So what does South Africa lose today?It loses one of the last living bridges to a version of this country's history that is rapidly passing out of living memory — someone who could tell you, first-hand, what Verwoerd sounded like, and what the mood in the room was. It loses a columnist who forced readers — including plenty who despised his conclusions — to actually engage with an argument, rather than simply nod along. And speaking personally, whatever our differences this year, I lose a colleague who never once, in all the years he wrote for us, phoned in a column.There's a broader point here too, for anyone in our audience who thinks of Bill purely as a South African commentator. He wasn't only that. He wrote seriously on French politics, on British politics, on the Cold War — his range was genuinely international, which is part of why the London Review of Books and the Sunday Times kept him on for so long. He had the rare ability to place South Africa's troubles within a global context, rather than treating them as a unique national tragedy disconnected from elsewhere. That habit of comparison — asking how a policy failure here rhymed with one in France, or Britain, or the old Soviet bloc — is something our discourse doesn't have enough of, and I don't have an obvious name to put forward as a replacement.I'll also say this, because it matters to how we think about voices like his: Bill Johnson never wrote to be liked. In a media environment that increasingly rewards caution, hedging, and the safe middle path, he did the opposite, every single week precisely. You could disagree violently with a Bill Johnson column — and plenty of you did, in our comments and in your emails to me — but you could never accuse him of not having a position, or of dressing up a lack of conviction as balance. That's a rarer quality in this business than people appreciate, and its value tends to become obvious only once it's gone.His last book was A Roving Eye — a collection drawing together the best of his BizNews columns, alongside his writing on politics and culture well beyond our shores. It's a book that ranges from South Africa to Europe to the United States, from the new space race to the great personalities of the age, and — because Bill was Bill — occasionally to soccer. Reviewers who know his work well have placed it in the tradition of Orwell: essays that hold together as a body of work but that you can also just as happily dip into at random, each one landing with the same sharp, clear, deeply informed originality. It's a fitting final volume for a man who spent a lifetime insisting on being read carefully, whether or not you agreed with him.And I'll admit something personal here. Bill wrote the foreword to that book himself, and in it he said some genuinely generous things about me and about this platform — this, despite everything that came afterwards with the Steenhuisen column and the falling-out that followed. That contradiction was very much Bill Johnson: capable of real warmth in one breath and real fury in the next, sometimes over the very same relationship. I'm grateful that a record of that warmth exists in his own words, in his own last book, even if we never quite got the chance to repair things before now.I want to say something too about his wife, Professor Irina Filatova. Irina is Russian-born, a formidable academic in her own right, and anyone who knew Bill socially will tell you she was the one who took the harder edges off him. He could be blunt to the point of bruising with people he'd just met; she had a gentleness about her that balanced that out, and a devotion to him that never wavered, including through the leg amputation and everything that followed it. She was also, rather wonderfully, far more comfortable with technology than Bill ever was — more than once, when a radio or podcast interview was going sideways because of some device or connection Bill was wrestling with, it was Irina who quietly rescued it, moving him through to her own office and her own computer so the conversation could carry on without the audience ever knowing there'd been a hiccup. That's the kind of partnership it was. My thoughts are very much with her today.I don't have funeral details for you yet. When the family is ready to share them, we'll pass them on, here and on BizNews.com. For now, my thanks go out to everyone who knew him — including a great many of you listening, who wrote to him, argued with him in our comments section, and in doing so kept this kind of writing alive.Rest well, Bill.This has been a Boardroom Talk special. I'm Alec Hogg. Thank you for listening, and for remembering him with us today.

Boardroom Talk: RIP RW Johnson - leaving a huge hole in your nation's heart

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