Bill Johnson was a most disagreeable man. I mean disagreeable not, as his legions of detractors do, in the modern sense of being unlikeable, unpleasant or offensive. I mean it in the word’s original, 15th-century sense: not agreeing, not consenting, not acquiescing.
For the remarkable political scientist and journalist who died this week in Cape Town, known everywhere professionally as RW, was the ultimate contrarian. I had some 40 years of experience of this, maintaining a firm friendship with him despite our rarely agreeing on politics, the subject so close to our hearts, as well as the very substance of our daily working lives. Our first encounter might well have been our last.
In the late 1980s, newly arrived at Oxford from Durban on a mid-career journalism fellowship, I sought out Bill to supervise my thesis. British-born but raised in Durban, he had fled the country after graduating from Natal University, only a step ahead of the security police. Initially at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he went on to forge a niche at Magdalen College as a politics don of formidable reputation.
He had extensive contacts within the anti-apartheid movement and the Labour opposition – he drove the Oxford campaign that denied Margaret Thatcher the customary accolade of an honorary doctorate – as well as having a consuming passion for all matters South African. But it immediately became clear that an opinionated journalist and an imperious academic, both of whom were sublimely certain of their own rightness, would do a great deal of head-butting. Bill wisely declined the honour, and I found a supervisor elsewhere.
Instead he became a close family friend. We played bridge together, and he was best man – indeed, the only man besides the priest and me – at my tiny wedding in the cavernous Magdalen chapel. And many an Oxford night was spent in late, wine-fuelled discussion, dissecting the cascade of events triggered by FW de Klerk’s unexpected accession to the presidency in September 1989, culminating little more than four months later in the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela.
Yet, whether as journalists or academics, we all wanted to be there, on the ground in South Africa, as the next chapters unfolded. By early 1993, I had left the Financial Times in London, returned to Durban, and begun writing the Jaundiced Eye column for the…
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