AN EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE

Tony Heard Loot.co.za (R229) MISSING INK

IN 1987, TONY

Heard was fired as the editor of the Cape

Times for having broken the law and printed an interview he had written and published in 1985 after a meeting with OR Tambo, the leader of the ANC, exiled in London.

That interview is not what this book is about, but it does give a hint of the steely resolve of the author of 8000 Days.

What is a fired editor to do? Especially when he has a family to maintain and is young enough to start a new career?

Heard was offered a job that would take him to the heart of the new ANC government when the late Kader Asmal offered him a job in May 1994 in the first democratic government in South Africa.

As the author says, he was 56, he liked Asmal and he needed a second career. The job came as the new government was establishing itself – walking the previously apartheidcontrolled corridors of power, literally, and setting up ministry offices and settling into a new reality.

Asmal had returned to South Africa from Dublin after the unbanning of the ANC, with his activist wife Louise by his side, and was, according to Heard, one of the finest and most principled men to serve South Africa in a Cabinet post.

He took on the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry and turned it into a department much admired.

Heard was to end up in the Office of the Presidency as a special adviser. This meant working with Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe as caretaker president when Mbeki was ousted from power. The book chronicles the inner workings of government and is fascinating on that level alone.

Heard makes it a bigger book than just the story of what it was like to work in the powerhouse of one of the world’s most watched new democracies, by weaving through it a narrative of what was happening in his life.

He is never self-pitying, but delivers the honest and cogent story of what it was all like, as one would expect from a man of his stature and reputation.

He is clear on what he thinks should happen in the future, without being pompous or patronising, and speaks from a point of knowledge. In fact, a lot of the value of the book lies in him setting several issues straight.

There is a gift in the rare insight he gives us into Mbeki as a president and as a man, and of his wife Zanele, who remained very much her own person while supporting her husband.

Through the magic years of Mandela, to the sober and restrained years of Mbeki, to the destruction by Jacob Zuma of much that had been won, this book looks at a unique time from a unique perspective. |