WSM: Remembering Bill (RW) Johnson

This article was first published by PoliticsWeb.He predicted ANC decline when the rest of the world was still cheering the Rainbow Nation, and it cost him his place in South African journalism for years. William Saunderson-Meyer looks back on a 40-year friendship with RW Johnson, the Durban-born, Oxford-trained political scientist who died this week in Cape Town: bridge partner, best man, sparring partner on everything from de Klerk to Mbeki. Brilliant, self-centred, generous in secret, and famously impossible to out-argue, Johnson turned out right about the ANC far more often than his friend was willing to admit. BizNews gave his career its last great chapter..By William Saunderson-Meyer*.I loved Bill Johnson but he was the most disagreeable man.I mean disagreeable not, as his legions of detractors do, in the modern sense of being unlikeable, unpleasant or offensive. I mean it in the word’s original, 15th-century sense: not agreeing, not consenting, not acquiescing. For the remarkable political scientist and journalist who died this week in Cape Town, known everywhere professionally as RW, was the ultimate contrarian.I had some 40 years of experience of this, maintaining a firm friendship with him despite our rarely agreeing on politics, the subject so close to our hearts, as well as the very substance of our daily working lives.Our first encounter might well have been our last. In the late 1980s, newly arrived at Oxford from Durban on a mid-career journalism fellowship, I sought out Bill to supervise my thesis. He was the obvious choice. British-born but raised in Durban, he had fled the country after graduating from Natal University, only a step ahead of the Security Police. Initially at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he went on to forge a niche at Magdalen College as a politics don of formidable repute. He had extensive contacts within the anti-apartheid movement and the Labour opposition — he drove the Oxford campaign that denied Margaret Thatcher the customary accolade of an honorary doctorate — as well as having a consuming passion for all matters South African.But it immediately became clear that an opinionated journalist and an imperious academic, both of whom were sublimely certain of their own rightness, would do a great deal of head-butting. Bill wisely declined the honour, and I found a supervisor elsewhere. Instead he became a close family friend. We played bridge together, and he was best man — indeed, the only man besides the priest and me — at my tiny wedding in the cavernous Magdalen chapel. And many an Oxford night was spent in late, wine-fuelled discussion, dissecting the cascade of events triggered by FW de Klerk’s unexpected accession to the presidency in September 1989, culminating little more than four months later in the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela.Yet, whether as journalists or academics, we all wanted to be there, on the ground in South Africa, as the next chapters unfolded. By early 1993, I had left the Financial Times in London, returned to Durban, and begun writing the Jaundiced Eye column for the Independent newspaper group. But already the winds of political conformity were blowing hard.Bill could — and often did — boast of the movers and shakers who had survived the weekly one-on-one grilling of his Politics, Philosophy and Economics tutorials at Magdalen. Five had gone on to become Cabinet ministers or chancellors of the Exchequer, two had become editors of The Economist, and another became prime minister of Australia. Yet despite Bill’s academic credentials, and the fact that, at 52, he had readily surrendered tenure at one of the world’s elite universities, there was no place for a sharp-tongued, critically minded white man at any university in the new South Africa.Instead, he became the first director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, leading it for six years. It was the perfect base from which to advance what still seemed possible: a South Africa that transformed, as history required, without abandoning constitutional liberalism in the classical British tradition — individual rights, equality before the law, restraints on state power and accountable government — within the disciplines of a broadly market-based economy. He also was writing prolifically: a stream of opinion pieces for both local and foreign publications, and became the Sunday Times of London’s regional correspondent.As always, we differed on almost everything. No matter how critical I was about the ANC in my writing, at heart I was an indomitable Afro-optimist, confident that a constitutionally grounded South Africa drawing on the talents of all its people would be a world-beater. Bill, in the opposite corner, was an incorrigible ANC pessimist of Chicken Licken proportions. Rubbing shoulders with so many exiled ANC luminaries had convinced him that the party, on the whole, was a gang of Stalinist-inclined hardliners, many of them intellectually mediocre, entirely ill-prepared for the mechanics of governing, and that South Africa would descend into the thuggery, theft and decline that marked most of post-colonial Africa. Gallingly, Bill turned out to be right and I wrong.Bill, provocative by nature and accustomed to the rough-and-tumble of British public debate, did not hold back in his excoriating attacks on the ANC government. Even Helen Suzman, still involved in the Foundation that bore her name, at times became annoyed at what she perceived to be needlessly goading broadsides. ‘I do wish he’d watch his words a little more carefully,’ she once remarked to me, which was a little rich coming from a woman whose fame as a parliamentarian rested on the verbal flailings she inflicted on her political opponents.It was not only that Bill’s words rankled an increasingly defensive ANC, especially the thin-skinned Thabo Mbeki who knew him from the exile years, during which, at different times, they also dated the same woman. The party was also becoming anxious about the influence he might exert abroad, given his international reach and reputation. At a time when virtually all of the foreign media was ‘on message’ about a benign ANC building a contented Rainbow Nation under Mandela’s saintly oversight, Bill’s doom-laden forecasts cut sharply across the prevailing narrative. An increasingly compliant local media took their cue from the governing party, and he became the target of venomous attacks, accused of being unpatriotic, racist, and trapped in a colonial mindset.Nor did Bill do himself any favours. In 2010, with the world’s attention fixed on South Africa during the closing days of the football World Cup that it hosted, he ignited a firestorm with an exceedingly ill-judged blog for the prestigious London Review of Books, to which he was a regular contributor on a wonderfully esoteric range of topics.He began the LRB post by describing baboons descending on his Cape Town neighbourhood in search of food and how one had been killed by a dog. In the next paragraph, he turned to xenophobic violence against African migrants, who were ‘also essentially searching for food’. In a culture increasingly hyper-sensitive to the racial implications of language, the juxtaposition was a heaven-sent gift to his critics.Although Bill survived the campaign to silence him permanently as a journalist, the brouhaha undoubtedly inflicted considerable damage on his reputation. For the next half-dozen years – though he regularly contributed long form articles to Politicsweb – he was effectively frozen out of the opinion pages of South African newspapers. His journalistic career was further revived when Alec Hogg, the founder and editor of BizNews, gave him a regular slot on the platform, where Bill rapidly re-established his deserved prominence as political analyst and commentator.Bill was a fantastic, at times fantastical, raconteur, drawing on an inexhaustible fund of funny stories from his richly textured life. He was soft-hearted and undemonstratively generous, for years quietly funding a community outreach and feeding scheme in rural KwaZulu-Natal as well as supporting old friends who had fallen on hard times. He was courageous, remaining unflinching in the face of vitriolic, scurrilously personal attacks by his powerful political foes, and he confronted his health woes with fortitude and wry humour.But Bill was also cantankerous and could be ungracious to the point of rudeness. On occasion, too, he was surprisingly sensitive when he felt slighted.He cut ties with BizNews after Hogg interviewed an aggrieved John Steenhuisen at length, following a column in which Bill had savaged the then leader of the Democratic Alliance in the most personal terms. I tried to persuade Bill that this was simply a right of reply, standard journalistic practice. However, Bill felt that Hogg had gone much further and had failed to stand by his columnist. As always, once his mind was made up, he would not budge.Bill and his wife, the historian Irina Filatova, had built a holiday home across the road from ours in Trafalgar, a little village on KwaZulu-Natal’s lush south coast. There, the Oxford pattern of long and passionate discussions about South Africa resumed. Bill was magnificently self-centred, and it was often difficult for anyone to get a word in edgewise. I remember one stormy night with him in full declamatory stride, a lightning bolt seemed to explode in the middle of the room and the lights went out. In the pitch black of a rural African night, while the rest of us sat stunned, speechless, our hair on end, Bill continued in full flow, not missing an oratorical beat.In Irina, who during the Soviet era was a specialist on Africa and its liberation movements at Moscow State University, Bill had at last met his intellectual and rhetorical match. His debating style, in keeping with his physical bulk, was to steamroller any dissenting opinions into submission. In contrast, Irina played the part of the intellectual guerrilla against him — darting in, drawing blood and then nimbly skipping out of reach.But she was also unflagging in her devotion to Bill, supporting him stoically through a succession of life-threatening health challenges that began in 2009, when a deadly bacterial infection contracted while swimming in the Trafalgar lagoon necessitated the amputation of one leg. Through that ordeal and those that followed as his health declined, he continued to write prolifically, with books, articles and searing critiques streaming from his hyperactive mind..Read more:.Boardroom Talk: RIP RW Johnson - leaving a huge hole in your nation's heart.Perhaps Bill’s most controversial books were the two bestsellers that asked How Long Will South Africa Survive? The first, published in 1977, concluded that although the apartheid regime was more resilient than many thought, international isolation and mounting economic pressure would eventually force fundamental change. In 2015, he returned to the question in How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis, this time warning that under the ANC, the survival of effective government was threatened by corruption, state collapse and economic decline.Both books were deeply unpalatable to many and provoked furious reactions — the first from his critics on the right, the second from those on the left. Yet their central shared conclusion— that governments which subordinate economic realities and institutional competence to ideology and political survival ultimately exhaust themselves and crumble — appears to be standing the test of time.In an intellectual sense, at least, RW Johnson will outlive his critics..This article was first published by PoliticsWeb and is republished with permission..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

WSM: Remembering Bill (RW) Johnson

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