An unreal first night on the unrest beat and other exploits

I LOVE reminiscing, especially about my days as a journalist at the Cape Herald newspaper, when typewriters were the norm and pages were made up with hot metal.

In my early days as a reporter, I was fortunate enough to attend the Argus Company’s cadet school, and being the top cadet in my class of that year.

It won me a seven-month secondment to the Argus’s Fleet Street Bureau in London in 1982 – and what a great learning experience that was.

Eldrid Retief, the news editor at the bureau, had a habit of never stopping to talk to anyone who wanted to discuss anything with him.

He was always doing something else – and I always got the impression that he was only half-listening to what others had to say.

But one Friday, I got him to stop dead in his tracks…

“Can I go to Oliver Tambo’s daughter’s wedding tomorrow?” I asked.

His eyes went big and his response was a tentative, “have you been invited?”

“No,” I smirked, “but Thembi Tambo is also getting married at St Paul’s.”

He started moving around again, and said: “All right, then – but just do a colour piece. We can’t quote Tambo.”

Just two days earlier, I was one of a team of reporters at the bureau who had covered ourselves in a fair amount of glory for the way we had covered the wedding of Charles, the Prince of Wales, and Diana Spencer.

A wonderful writer named Garner Thompson sat behind a TV and typed, without hesitation, while the rest of us looked out of windows, walked into the packed crowds to interview, usually pretty women, and generally looked for anything to write about to add to the mood of the occasion.

We even counted the horse s*** before the horse-s*** picker-uppers did their job.

Only I would be covering the Tambo wedding – but I was convinced it was going to be far more interesting than watching the royal family clip-clopping down Fleet Street in open, horse-drawn carriages.

The Tambo ceremony was not held in the main St Paul’s, where Charles and Diana tied the knot, but in a side chapel. The officiating priest was Canon John Collins, one of the great anti-apartheid fighters, who was eventually expelled from South Africa by the Nats.

Back in the UK, he helped found the Defence and Aid Fund, an organisation which collected money and then smuggled it into South Africa to help pay the legal fees of anti-apartheid fighters charged with political “offences”.

That sunny Saturday, many of South Africa’s most “notorious terrorists”, dressed to the nines in top hats and tailcoats, joked and laughed and shared in the happiness of newly-weds Thembi and her British banker husband, Martin Kingston. And OR, dapper and upright, was every bit the proud father.

I found black protest politics pretty laid-back – okay, tame – in the UK. And yet, I got the distinct feeling that black people breaking shop windows and stoning the police got the Argus Company reporters, with Jean-Jacques Cornish being a notable exception, quite nervous.

I guess this was why when unrest broke out in the inner-city suburb of Brixton in London, I was quickly put on night shift to cover it.

My first night on the unrest beat was unreal.

This happened before the wedding of Charles and Di – and the thing I found quite funny when I walked to Railton Road, Brixton’s main street, was the sight of a shop window smashed, with all its Charles and Di wedding souvenirs stolen

The other thing that made me mumble “piece of p*ss” was the nature of the protest…

A couple of overturned cars in the middle of the street, with a line of policemen in helmets and carrying Perspex shields behind them, was the sight that greeted me as I entered the street.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” a policemen said to me. “I’ll be okay,” I replied.

Reggae music blared, and the smell of dagga was everywhere.

“Who the f*** are you?” asked one of the protesters. My accent – or my looks – proved to be a hit, because others quickly gathered around. Our conversation was robust. “Black South Africans are worse than useless,” said one.

“How many black South Africans are there?” asked another. “About 26 million,” I replied. “And how many whites?” “About 3 million, I guess.” They couldn’t stop laughing. And they couldn’t stop repeating that maybe they should train South African blacks how to fight.

As I started walking home, I couldn’t help asking myself: “What the heck am I doing here?”