Peter Malherbe: Beloved journalist with a huge heart
1959-2015
PETER Malherbe, who has died in Joburg at the age of 56, was a former managing editor of the Sunday Times, and an enormous and hugely loved presence in South African journalism for 30 years.
He joined the Sunday Times as a reporter under the editorship of Tertius Myburgh in the ’80s and over time took on different jobs — including news editor and managing editor. As managing editor he was the de facto deputy to the editor.
He worked on many of the country’s biggest stories, exposing apartheid sanctions-buster Marino Chiavelli and government and arms deal corruption.
These stories invariably brought the paper into confrontation with the authorities.
To avoid the predictable storm of outrage and denunciation following publication on Sunday, he would climb into his car and leave town, often driving as far as the Kruger Park or anywhere where there was no cellphone reception.
Not that the denials caused him any loss of sleep. His research was always meticulous and he knew that his reporting team not only had the story right, they had a lot more.
Malherbe was a big man in every way. He was a warm, generous, comforting force of nature. People gravitated towards him. His rumbling belly laugh, cheerful unflappability and disdain for convention, office intrigue, job titles and pretentiousness inspired an extraordinary degree of love and loyalty from almost everyone he had anything to do with.
He insisted on the highest professional standards. No amount of cajoling or foot-stamping would move him. Threats were made, pot plants and other projectiles reached for, glares exchanged. Then the deep, infec- tious chuckle. The tension would dissipate, agreement would be reached, Armageddon avoided. As a people manager he was unsurpassed.
Malherbe was born in Cathcart in the Eastern Cape on January 27 1959. He won an audition to the Drakensberg Boys Choir where he spent two years before going to Dale College, the alma mater of his future editor Myburgh and managing editor Joe Sutton. This did his prospects at the Sunday Times no harm at all.
He studied journalism at Rhodes University, did a year’s national service in Pretoria, then returned to Rhodes for an honours degree.
One of his first newspaper jobs was at the Hillbrow Herald. It had no budget and he did everything himself; wrote the stories, sold the ads, distributed the finished product. There was no car, so when he went to cover a story he caught a bus. He caught the bus again with piles of newspapers which he dropped off at supermarkets and street corner cafes.
Later as a news editor, if a reporter came and said there was no car to take him to a job, he would lean back in his chair and say: “And . . .?”
He was sent to run the London office of the Sunday Times in 1992. He arrived at King’s Cross station in mid-winter in size 16 slip-slops, carrying an old card- board suitcase held together with a belt.
In 2000 he began a love affair with the island of Phuket in Thailand. He would fly there on Saturday night after putting the first edition of the paper to bed and be back in time for news conference on Tuesday morning.
In 2002, he quit the Sunday Times and went to live there. Colleagues joked that his days of breaking big stories were over. He said he hoped “a big one” would fall into his lap — he might “catch a major celeb dallying with a go-go girl”, he said, knowing that the chances of anything disturbing the peace of this idyllic island were close to zero.
Then came the devastating Christmas 2004 tsunami. As luck would have it he wasn’t there at the time. He had just left for Christmas in South Africa. He was barely out of the airport when he heard the news. He caught the next plane back and quickly realised that he probably would have been swept away like many of his friends and neighbours if he had been there earlier.
“Imagine an earthquake suddenly swallowing half your hometown.”
He wrote in the Sunday Times about “the horror and hopelessness” and “the odour of death. It is a smell like no other.”
Malherbe loved travelling and hotels. He flew from London to Las Vegas to stay in a hotel he had been fantasising about. When he got there he lay on his bed all night watching game shows and ordering room service before catching a plane back.
It was no surprise that his first job in Phuket was at hoteltravel.com.
He loved swimming, or, more accurately, wallowing. He would book into hotels — nobody was better at negotiating special deals — just for the joy of using the pool and being treated like royalty.
Heaving his great bulk out of them became an ordeal after a while, but the arrival of infinity pools solved that. The one he loved most was called Centre of the Universe, in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. He was known to undertake the drive — a trip of more than 20 hours — in his Toyota bakkie, to float on his back in the Centre of the Universe.
He had a long-standing love interest who lived a few hours from Phuket, a young man with a wife and children who all adored him and would haul a large, battered La-Z-Boy down the steps of their house on stilts in honour of his arrival.
He liked to travel light, often carrying no more than a plastic Checkers shopping bag on his trips to Thailand. This aroused huge suspicion and it took all his considerable powers of persuasion to convince airport security that he was a bona fide traveller and not some nefarious mafia type making a drop.
For a gay man Malherbe had a keen interest in beautiful women. He was a sucker for beauty pageants. Whether Miss South Africa, Miss World, Miss Fatty Boom Boom in Thailand, Miss Southern China or Miss South Korea, he would be glued.
He was fascinated by Eurovision song contests, boxing matches and British elections.
Malherbe said that when he boarded a plane he could see all eyes fixed on him in horror. He knew that they were thinking desperately: “Please don’t sit next to me.” As he lumbered down the aisle he was comforted by the knowledge that he had bought two tickets to spare them the ordeal.
He liked Thailand because nobody there stared at him or willed him to keep his distance. Nobody judged him. Thais would come up to him and say, “Ah! Pom Poi,” meaning, “the fat one”. It was a term of endearment. He was the Buddha of
He liked to travel light, often carrying no more than a plastic Checkers shopping bag on his trips to Thailand His rumbling belly laugh and disdain for convention . . . inspired an extraordinary degree of love and loyalty from almost everyone
Phuket and the more daring would gently rub his belly, a sign of good luck.
The people loved him, and he loved them back. He was accepted. He found peace.
He returned to South Africa last year because of a life-threatening lung condition. He was on oxygen for the last few months of his life.
The doctors had told him it was a miracle he was still alive, he said nonchalantly, determined to keep living life as he always had, to the full, until his final boarding call.
He died of a suspected heart attack and is survived by two brothers. — Chris Barron