Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Warm tribute to Johnson, anti-apartheid trailblazer, colleague, friend for decades
WE HAVE lost many friends, colleagues and comrades over the past year, in the media industry where I have worked for almost 40 years and in progressive political circles, where I have been active for even longer.
The most recent of these colleagues and friends is Shaun Johnson, who died suddenly this week. He retired in December at the age of 60 as chief executive of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, having created an opportunity to study abroad for so many students from the African continent.
Shaun was one of those people whose paths I would cross in my various guises as an activist and as a journalist. We met at Rhodes University in 1979 where I first saw his face on a billboard proclaiming his candidacy for the Student Representative Council (SRC) before we became friends and worked together in several societies.
We played soccer outside the university, in Grahamstown’s townships, under the banner of the SA Council on Sport (Sacos), one of whose leaders, Hassan Howa, famously declared that there could be “No normal sport in an abnormal society”.
Later, we both followed careers in journalism, until our paths crossed again when we both became senior editorial executives at the Independent Newspapers Group in the 1990s.
Professor Bryan Trabold, an associate professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts, asked the two of us to speak at the Cape Town launch of a book he wrote about the alternative media in the 1980s – on the Weekly Mail, where Shaun worked, and the New Nation, where I worked. I learnt that Shaun had also written the feasibility study for the New Nation.
It was a good discussion, allowing us to reminisce about the good old bad old days when investigating the apartheid government’s indiscretions (for want of a better word) could get you imprisoned or killed. Afterwards some of us went out for dinner, where we continued our reflections, before all going our separate ways. It was the last time I saw Shaun.
Reflecting on my experiences of Shaun this week, I thought about some of the stories we shared that night.
There were differences and similarities between the papers we reflected on: the Weekly Mail and the New Nation. Both were fiercely anti-apartheid and pro-struggle, but the Weekly Mail readers were mainly white, while the New Nation readers were mainly black.
The Weekly Mail journalists got bylines, while we wrote anonymously at the New Nation. Part of the reason for this was to protect us from possible persecution from the security police.
At a time when there are people who want to rewrite the history of our country, and especially the resistance to apartheid, it is important to acknowledge the role of all the anti-apartheid newspapers at the time.
These form part of my memories of Shaun Johnson, his beautiful turn of phrase – and the young man with the trendy hairstyle who implored me from a billboard on a lamp post to vote him on to the SRC, at a time when I could not even vote in my country. Rest in peace, my friend.