Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Recalling the ‘Colourful World’ of the 1970s
Some key events from this week in history are reflected in the following reports from the archives of the Argus’s 160-year-old titles
ILLUSTRATING the “effects” of apartheid on “non-whites” was a tricky affair back in 1971, especially in showbiz. This much emerges from a late February report published 46 years ago about the fate of a satirical revue named It’s a Colourful World.
It sounds jolly enough, and it played to full houses – “of all races” – at Durban’s Bolton Hall for all of four weeks, three longer than its intended run.
But then it hit a snag, as the report “‘ Colourful World’ may be mimed” of February 23, 1971 reveals the script was banned by the Publications Control Board.
Undaunted, the producers sought to keep the show open on technical grounds – as the cast knew their lines there was no need to have the banned material, the offending script, actually in their possession – or, if that failed, to mime the production.
It is a reflection of the absurdity that even the chairman of the Publications Control Board (a “Mr Kruger”) told producer Benjy Francis that “although the script was banned there was nothing to prevent the show from going on”.
Even so, Francis was taking no chances. “We are also thinking of converting the entire show into a mime. Yesterday we had a rehearsal at which we explored the possibilities of mime. If we decided to do this it would take about a month to polish up,” he said. With apparently unintended irony, he added: “This would change the complexion of the show and it wouldn’t be the same.”
In a way, the choicest reporting in the piece is the deadpan obscuration, rather than explanation, of the sin: “The items dealt with in the banned script included aspects of apartheid, inequality, the Department of Community Development and the Immorality Act. The show illustrated the effects these things had on non-whites.”
As the 1970s wore on, apartheid became not only more brutal, but more desperate and more bizarre.
The great corruption scandal of the late 1970s, the Information Scandal – or Muldergate, after Information Minister Connie Mulder – was, in its naming, a misnomer.
It was an elaborate multimillion-rand misinformation scheme by government agencies, chiefly the Department of Information, to covertly sway public opinion towards a more hospitable stance on apartheid South Africa.
Funding was clandestinely funnelled to SA-friendly organisations, and wholly new ones – such as The Citizen newspaper – were established.
It was rotten, it smelled, and it was found out. A 1979 commission of inquiry concluded, among other things, that Prime Minister John Vorster – hastily appointed president when the scandal first broke – had tolerated the corruption. He resigned in disgrace.
But the most colourful of all the dramatis personae was a man named Eschel Rhoodie, the spin doctor in chief, who fled, and turned up in what we now know was Ecuador, but which Argus readers – when political correspondent John D’Oliveira became the first journalist to track him down – cryptically were told was “Somewhere in South America”.
This was the dateline of the story – “We find Rhoodie” – of February 27, 1979.
“Yesterday I found Dr Rhoodie – the central figure in the Information affair and perhaps the most controversial South African anywhere in the world,” D’Oliveira began.
“Our meeting in an obscure South American state was the outcome of weeks of investigation, weeks of following false leads, incorrect trails and cul-de-sacs. It was a trail that has frustrated journalists representing almost every newspaper group in South Africa over the past few months.
“I finally traced Dr Rhoodie to the home of a business associate with whom he was staying while on a business visit to the state concerned. He was only slightly taken aback when I telephoned him and told him I was speaking from a hotel only a few kilometres from the home in which he was staying. He recovered quickly, greeted me warmly, but warned he was not prepared to talk.
“However, he agreed to meet me for lunch, provided I promised not to reveal the identity of his hosts or his precise whereabouts, and not take any photographs of him – either openly or clandestinely.
“Dr Rhoodie was his usual, to-the-minute, punctual self, apparently unchanged from the man I had come to know well while he was secretary for Information in South Africa.”
If he doesn’t come across as a scoundrel, it is perhaps also true that even liberals in 1979 sometimes had difficulty telling the wood from the trees.
Who can say where the rot really set in? As far as the Argus was concerned, an especially shameful date in the record was an earlier February 27, this one in 1956.
In the editorial of that day, headlined “A matter of honour”, the paper noted: “By the time these words appear in print, the joint sitting (of Assembly and Senate) will doubtless be nearing its end, and the Separate Representation of Voters Act will have been validated by the two-thirds majority artificially contrived for the purpose.
“Some people, perhaps, will be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief and to hope that, now this troublesome question has been got out of the way, it will be possible to make a fresh start and go forward towards peace and unity. For ourselves, we find it impossible to lay that flattering unction to our souls.”
This day marked “not a beginning but an end”. “It is the end of faith in the white man’s world, the end of the entrenched sections, the end of the aspirations towards unity based on the agreement of Union. Henceforth, South Africa will live, but with honour tarnished. Every promise made by the white man to the non-European or by one white section to the other will, in future, be read in the light of the pledges – to uphold the coloureds’ right to vote as a matter of honour – given in 1931 and 1936 and scattered to the winds today.”
It was, indeed, “a day of mourning”, for it meant that “South Africa moves out of the age in which her people trusted one another’s word”.
The paper concluded: “Whatever the verdict of the courts may be, it cannot either erase from the record of history the moral betrayal or lessen the tragedy of Nationalism’s failure to rise to its first great test of principle.”