There are many stories and events that show that South Africans are resilient, compassionate, hopeful and a people that want to make things work. It is therefore no wonder that Trinidadian Sir Trevor McDonald, the first journalist to interview Nelson Mandela after his release from prison after 27 years, had a change of heart from doomsayer to optimist when he travelled our land – and was “surprised by the absence of hate – the bitter hate of the kind I saw in the eyes of opposing sides across the barricades in Belfast and Londonderry”. Denis Worrall, former South African politician, diplomat and fellow author who has had several encounters with McDonald describes his recently published autobiography An Improbable Life as “rich and delightfully unassuming”. – Editor
By Dr Denis Worrall*
Trevor McDonald, or Sir Trevor as he is now, would be known to most senior South African journalists and commentators who I am sure will very much enjoy, as I have, reading his recently published autobiography An Improbable Life. As an internationally-renowned interviewer and commentator McDonald has a rich and interesting story to share with his readers which he does in this book in a delightfully unassuming way.
After offering the opinion at the beginning of the book that the greatest challenge to journalists is that journalism is riddled with complexity – the simplest stories may not be that simple after all! – he goes on to describe what he possibly felt was the most important emotional experience in his career, which was his coverage of President Barack Obama’s Inauguration in Washington DC on 20 January 2009.
Many people I am sure found that event exciting. But what McDonald captures as a black man is the amazement and something almost awesome of what it meant to black Americans. The impossible had happened. McDonald manages to capture that because he shared it. “Sitting at my mother’s feet I grew up to believe that race discrimination was an abomination… and countless stains on human decency that marked so much of American life were about to be brushed aside on Inauguration Day in 2009 at least for one bright, shining moment.”
It is important to make that specific point because as McDonald ends this excellent chapter – a superb introduction to recent American political history – with a reference to Donald Trump he concludes: “Perhaps in the end Obama’s election to his country’s highest office was much less of the dramatic change we considered and may merely be another step in the still gradual pace of real change. Such is the sorrow and the pity.”
McDonald was born in Trinidad in 1939 and of which he writes: “I will always be a part of the land that gave me breath, the island that nurtured and cared for me and watched me grow. Tiny Trinidad allowed me to dream of things that never were.” But apparently like most Trinidadians he had an ambition to settle abroad and specifically in the UK.
This was nurtured in his case by a love of the English language and of English poetry in particular and, of course, cricket which he describes as a West Indian addiction. One is happy to be reminded by McDonald, who played cricket into his sixties, of that great period in West Indian cricket dominated by the likes of Gary Sobers, Frank Worrell, Viv Richards, Clyde Walcott and others, and of those brilliant British cricket commentators of that time like Neville Cardus and John Arlott. McDonald quotes Arlott’s description of one match when Weekes and Walcott and Worrell were taking the English bowling apart: “This is not cricket. It is civilised murder” and comments: “How could we resist the charm of a game that inspired such flair for the language?! We never tried. We succumbed as meekly as lambs.”
McDonald’s first job was as a reporter with Trinidad Radio where he developed his talents and which led to his first visit to London to report on Trinidad’s independence conference in 1962. He joined the BBC World Service in 1969, ITN in 1973 and became the first sole presenter of ITN’s News at Ten in 1992 and the ITV Evening News presenter until 2005. Aside from interviewing successive British and Commonwealth prime ministers and American presidents, he reported extensively on “the troubles” in Northern Ireland and kept a watchful eye over South Africa. In fact, South Africa became very important to him with his involvement in the country being spread over two chapters in his memoir.
McDonald visited South Africa for the first time in 1984 and the first chapter (a new birth of freedom) is actually devoted to his experiences and impressions at that time which quite frankly make horrific reading. Remember he writes as a black man. “It’s not easy to absorb the shock of finding yourself in a country where the hospitals, planes, buses and public conveniences you are not allowed to use, the park benches in which you are not allowed to sit, and the beaches you are not allowed to go to, are determined solely by the colour of your skin. For many days on my first visit to the country, I felt I was drifting around, eyes wide open, but in the grip of a frightening and recurring nightmare.”
He writes that the most persistent prediction, voiced openly when he first went to South Africa, was that the country’s race divisions would propel it into a mighty confrontation between black and white, engulfing cities and townships in a bloody war. Most White South Africans, whom he correctly points out were cosseted by apartheid, didn’t recognise this. But that was the view I personally was confronted with in August 1984 when I arrived in London as South African ambassador. Incidentally, it was also around this time that I met McDonald. His decision to describe his experience of South Africa in two chapters is a logical one.
The first deals with his introduction to the country under apartheid, ending frequently with doom-laden and brimful images of blood-soaked streets. In the second (looking beyond the past ) he opens with this sentiment: “Untutored as I was in the many complexities of South African political life, I saw enough to make me doubtful of the view that it would all end in mayhem, with bodies piled high in the streets… Black and White South Africans needed each other. They were interdependent. They’ve been thrown together, and somewhere down the line they were destined to live together however their fates decided.” And then he comes with this: “In my travels around the country, through the most depressing black townships and in the face of the most terrible hardship, I was surprised by the absence of hate – the bitter hate of the kind I saw in the eyes of opposing sides across the barricades in Belfast and Londonderry.”
What is quite clear from this chapter and from my experience of him in London – because he interviewed me several times – is that he understood South Africa was changing. It was obviously not at a pace that pleased everybody. It was incremental. But it was happening in the Afrikaans universities and the churches, in industrial labour relations and in the economy generally and I believe McDonald understood this. In what became a debate on McDonald’s programme with one of the anti-apartheid clerics on the day the South African parliament in 1985 abolished the prohibition on interracial sex and marriage, the significance of which against the South African racial background I focused, while the cleric said the decision was irrelevant because it didn’t amount to one-person one-vote, McDonald gave me the last word and, with a warm “Thank you, Ambassador!” that said it all, awarded the debate to me.
McDonald understood that even under the presidency of PW Botha pressure for negotiations was growing and informal contacts were made with the ANC and even imprisoned Nelson Mandela. McDonald understood this to the point where, when Nelson Mandela was released, he was the first top international journalist to interview him. His account of the Mandela interview and how he conducted it right down to the significance of the pauses in Madiba’s responses and McDonald’s interpretation of them, is a story in itself. An Improbable Life is an excellent read, superbly presented and with lots of character. And for me personally it brings back some poignant memories.
Aside from several interviews McDonald did with me, some of them on difficult issues but always conducted in a friendly way, I recall an intervention at a lunch the American ambassador gave in his office for several members of the diplomatic corps and senior journalists, among them Trevor McDonald. There must have been about a dozen of us, including the Zimbabwe High Commissioner who as we filed into the little dining room told our host that he could not join the lunch because of my presence. The American expressed regret and surprise as he said the guest list had been cleared with the Zimbabwe Embassy. There obviously was nothing to be done about it. The Zimbabwean left and the rest of us enjoyed a very pleasant lunch toward the end of which McDonald quite loudly and across the table asked me: “Ambassador, will you please drop me off at my office?” clearly wishing to save me any embarrassment I might earlier have felt.
Much later, when asked to join Alec Hogg in the London launch of my memoir, he immediately accepted. Aside from the excellent book he has written, that is how I will remember Sir Trevor McDonald.
- Denis Worrall is a former South African ambassador to the Court of St James who resigned to stand as an independent against a senior National Party government minister in the general election of 1987. He lost by 39 votes out of more than 18,000 cast but was a founder and one of the leaders of the Democratic Party. His memoir is titled The Independent Factor: My Journey Through Politics and Diplomacy.
