Shaun Johnson: Talented journalist and friend of Mandela 1959-2020
Weekly Mail veteran quickly rose to the top in news and fiction
● Shaun Johnson, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 60, was one of the most talented, eloquent, suave, well-connected and bestdressed South African journalists of his generation.
He was also a Rhodes scholar.
He used all this to rise with seemingly effortless ease to the top of local journalism, rally international support for the Weekly Mail when it was threatened with closure and work fundraising miracles for the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, which his good friend Nelson Mandela hand-picked him to lead in 2003.
He always had an air of calm self-assurance. One of the few times he seemed at a loss was when studying for his journalism honours degree at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.
SA’s foremost media lawyer Kelsey Stuart mistook him for professional surfer Shaun Tomson and demanded to know where his board was.
From Rhodes Johnson, who matriculated at Hyde Park High in Johannesburg, went to Oxford and began a doctorate, never completed, on the politics of black youth. As part of his research he returned to SA in 1988 and offered his services to the Weekly Mail without pay in return for permission to use its name and “struggle credentials” to get access to the right political circles.
Influential friends
One of his first pieces was about the radical black consciousness group Azapo, following which a miniature black tyre was delivered to the paper’s offices with his name on it.
A far greater threat loomed, to the newspaper if not himself, in the form of an impending government banning order.
Being a Rhodes scholar at Oxford had given him access to influential business and political circles. He’d made friends of all the right people and now mobilised these contacts to save the Weekly Mail.
One of them was Philip Spender, who ran a monitoring group that documented cases of suppression of free speech around the world.
Spender quickly put together an ad signed by 500 editors and prominent public figures around the world calling on PW Botha not to close the weekly. Meanwhile Johnson solicited the support of ambassadors in Pretoria and Cape Town, notably British ambassador Robin Renwick, with whom he had a particularly close relationship.
Renwick, with the backing of prime minister Margaret Thatcher, organised a diplomatic démarche from the EU, a formal letter of warning to the South African government. It was believed all of this played a decisive role in saving the paper.
While doing all this Johnson was filing regular pieces for the Weekly Mail and UK publications such as the Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Times, the New Statesman and Society, recording in sublime prose the unravelling of the apartheid state and tumultuous birth pangs of the new SA.
He was one of the first to interview Mandela at his home in Soweto after his release in 1990, describing him as “a captivating, even aweinspiring man”. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
In 1993 these pieces were published in a volume titled Strange Days Indeed, which earned accolades from, among many other big names, Helen Suzman, who called him a “brilliant commentator and perceptive political analyst”.
Rising Star
In 1990 Johnson was recruited as political editor of The Star by editor Richard Steyn. In short order he became the paper’s deputy editor, editor of the Saturday Star, founding editor of the Sunday Independent in 1995, editor of the Cape Argus in 1996 and group editorial director.
In 2003 he became deputy CEO of the company, which was renamed Independent News & Media SA after being bought by Irish baked-beans-king-turned-would-be-mediamogul Tony O’Reilly in 1993.
O’Reilly quickly joined the Johnson fan club and gave him the job of running Independent’s international advisory board. He roped in his friend Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee as chair and a wide array of other international celebrities listed in his contact book, including former prime ministers, the first black mayor of New York, David Dinkins, and the first black US ambassador to the UN,
Andrew Young.
Johnson was born on November 30 1959 in Libode in the Transkei, where his father was the native commissioner. His father found his position increasingly degrading and morally untenable when the National Party began implementing “grand apartheid” with a vengeance, and a steady stream of souldestroying directives began arriving from Pretoria, including the redesignation of his job title to “senior Bantu affairs commissioner”.
He committed suicide when Johnson was eight. Johnson wrote a novel closely based on his father’s life, The Native Commissioner, which was published in 2006 to international acclaim. It won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book in Africa, the M-Net literary award and the Nielsen Booksellers’ Choice book of the year.
Nobel prizewinner JM Coetzee hailed it as “a welcome step toward the reconstruction of the South African past”, and it was prescribed as an English literature set work by the Independent Examinations Board of SA.
Some resentment
Not everyone belonged to the Johnson fan club. He was resented by some veteran journalists who thought his rise to the top was too easy, that he hadn’t paid his dues, was too ambitious by far and spent too much time in the company of very rich, powerful people.
Mixing with the rich and powerful was a key part of his job at the Mandela Rhodes Foundation. This was not only to identify and interview candidates for postgraduate scholarships — by the time he stepped down last year 532 had been granted to recipients from 26 African countries — but to ensure the programme would be fully funded into the future. This he did. Whether someone without his cachet could have done this is debatable.
Sunshine journalism
He was accused of sunshine journalism and allowing his close friendships with Mandela and most of his cabinet to erode his critical faculty.
Such criticisms didn’t seem on the surface to bother him but his apparent nonchalance was deceptive.
Beneath his brilliant public persona, with its assured confidence that sometimes came close to arrogance, was a more complex, insecure and vulnerable private person. He was driven by a deep need not just to succeed but to be seen as a success.
Johnson, who underwent surgery after suffering a bad heart attack several years ago, died of an oesophageal rupture.
He is survived by his wife Stefania and their daughter Luna.