YESTERDAY was a crazy day. SMS and Twitter messages were flying: “Announcement on Madiba expected at 12”. “Security forces on full alert.” “Live SABC interviews being lined up.” “Jacob Zuma ready to talk live on TV.”
The rumours flew thick and fast. We made plans and then contingency plans, and then we made contingency plans around the contingency plans. Television sets around the newsroom were tuned to different news bulletins, we watched e-mails and the agency wire services with nervous dread.
A Guardian journalist stated definitively that Nelson Mandela was dead. Jacob Zuma said his condition had “improved”. His daughter, Makaziwe said “Tata’s situation is critical. I’m not going to lie. He does not look good, but I think that for us, as his children and grandchildren, we still have this hope because when we talk to him, he’d flutter trying to open his eyes.”
I know that yesterday, and the days to come, will be days no South African will ever forget. There have been other days like that. I looked back yesterday at two columns I wrote, one on October 20, 2000, the other on April 24, 2009, on similar subjects. This is a synthesis of the two:
One of those days that I remember with absolute clarity was Monday, April 18, 1994. The evening before, we had been travelling in our Land Rover along a dreadful track through the Maramagambo Forest in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park. As the sun was setting, we slid into a huge mud hole, and that’s where we slept the wet, uneasy night away. We woke to the sound of an emerald cuckoo calling outside the tent and colobus monkeys chattering in the forest canopy above.
As the sun emerged, we drove through clouds of newly-hatched yellow, emerald, brown and white butterflies, past enchanted meadows filled with water hyacinth where pods of hippo lolled in the swamps, into rolling parkland where shy herds of antelope skittered in the green, and over it all hung the Ruwenzoris, the Mountains of the Moon, a name to dream by. We camped that night on the banks of the Ishasha River, looking into Zaire, and as we sat by the campfire, were serenaded by grunting hippo, howling hyenas, a deafening chorus of frogs and night birds, and the distant roaring of a lion.
The day was very different in South Africa. If I had been back home, I would have been out at dawn in the East Rand township of Thokoza, covering the hostel war raging between ANC self-defence units and Inkatha impis. This was a war that was actively fuelled by shadowy Third Force operatives, and secret police units. Two years earlier, we had made a conscious decision to withdraw from the adrenaline-filled, high tension world of foreign news coverage of South Africa’s unfolding drama. I was becoming increasingly reckless in search of the story, and knew that if I stayed in the field, it would only be a matter of time before I was either totally burnt out mentally, or dead. So we packed up and drove into Africa.
In our paradise bubble in Uganda, we listened daily to the BBC’s Foreign Service, detached from, but still part of, the horror that was happening in South Africa. The first democratic elections ever were just weeks away, but the prospects for peace seemed as remote as our campsite on the banks of the Ishasha River. The news on April 18 was particularly bad. Heavy gunfire was being exchanged, and the National Peacekeeping Force was panicky and unable to act effectively. Then came the news from Thokoza: My friend and colleague, Ken Oosterbroek, was dead, caught in the crossfire. Greg Marinovich, another friend, had been seriously wounded.
Across the border in Rwanda and Burundi the genocide had just begun, and it sounded as though South Africa was heading down the same road. Bombs were going off in the cities.
If we had still been in South Africa, there is no doubt I would have been in Thokoza that day, covering events for my former employer, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s National TV news. But we had made a conscious decision to leave – I was burnt out from too many days taking dreadful risks just to get the story, and to get it out the country and broadcast in Canada.
And so we spent the dying days of apartheid meandering across the African continent in a slow, old Land Rover, camping wherever we found ourselves, in places that can only be described as paradise.
Just days before the April 27 elections, we moved our camp from Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to an idyllic glade on the banks of Lake Bunyoni, south of Kampala. There, in the shade of a massive acacia where hornbills cackled, with the lake lapping at our feet, we sat riveted, listening to every BBC bulletin we could get.
We wept with Desmond Tutu as he despaired and agonised live on air. We swore at the fascists who were setting off the bombs. We berated the Mangosuthu Buthelezis of the world. And then Inkatha and Buthelezi agreed to take part in the election and it was like someone had switched off a tap. The violence stopped immediately, and South Africans came out in their millions to vote.
A week later, we were back in Nairobi at a huge party organised by the South African High Commission to celebrate the results. As the speakers blared out Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, Liz and I stood with our left hands on our hearts, our clenched right fists aloft, weeping. Bang went a camera flash, and the next day our picture was splashed across the front page of The Nation. We were proud of that moment, we were proud to be South African.
Across all the mayhem and chaos in South Africa, that we watched from afar, strode Nelson Mandela like the colossus he is, and was. The peacemaker, the statesman, the conciliator, the compromiser and the tough negotiator.
He brought us back from the depths of despair, from the dark days of Thokoza, from the killing fields of KwaZulu-Natal, to the heights of greatness. We as South Africans have been touched by greatness, and we have touched greatness.
Let’s never forget that.
tonyweaver@iafrica.com