{"id":4346,"date":"2016-05-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-03T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/amabhungane.org\/amabhungane\/stories\/obit-the-master-story-teller-who-unearthed-inkathagate\/"},"modified":"2016-05-03T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T00:00:00","slug":"obit-the-master-story-teller-who-unearthed-inkathagate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/obit-the-master-story-teller-who-unearthed-inkathagate\/","title":{"rendered":"Obit: The master story-teller who unearthed Inkathagate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picture: David Beresford, GuardianUK<\/em><\/p>\n

The skill of telling a good story, Oom Schalk Lourens said as he sat on the stoep<\/em> of his Groot Marico\u00a0farm, is to know when to tap your pipe against your veldskoen<\/em> and to know what parts to leave out.<\/p>\n

David Beresford, the Guardian<\/em> correspondent who died in Johannesburg last week, was a devotee of\u00a0Oom Schalk\u2019s creator Herman Charles Bosman and himself a masterful story-teller.<\/p>\n

But I would say that the parts that he left out were about himself and how he came to be one of the\u00a0most influential South African journalists of his generation.<\/p>\n

David was the long-term South African correspondent for what he affectionately called the \u201cGraun\u201d, so\u00a0named because the paper was once published with a typo in the masthead. He won awards and\u00a0accolades and was in the front-rank of foreign correspondents covering the violent and heady final days\u00a0of apartheid.<\/p>\n

But he also led an almost secret double life as a guiding force in the Weekly Mail<\/em> and its successor the\u00a0Mail & Guardian<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Anyone who searches the archives under \u201cDavid Beresford\u201d will find some of the most haunting classics\u00a0of journalism ever written on the African continent. It was writing that drove his colleagues to despair. \u201cI\u00a0should just have become a paint stripper,\u201d said one otherwise respected journalist on reading\u00a0something David had just turned out.<\/p>\n

When he was 14 David\u2019s elder brother Norman whom he idolised died, and he responded to the trauma\u00a0by escaping into the sanctuary of libraries, a pastime that prepared him for his future career. But he was\u00a0a poet at heart and a romantic who held a vagabond attraction for members of the opposite sex, a fact\u00a0that was both envied and admired by his male colleagues.<\/p>\n

David won his spurs as the Guardian<\/em> correspondent in Northern Ireland in the early eighties, a tour\u00a0noted not just for keen reporting but for his visceral sympathy for the underdog at a time when Fleet\u00a0Street viewed the Irish Republicans as anathema. His book about the 1981 Irish hunger strike, Ten Men\u00a0Dead, told the personal stories of the paramilitaries who starved themselves to death demanding that\u00a0Margaret Thatcher\u2019s government recognise them as political prisoners.<\/p>\n

Ten Men Dead was inspired by letters smuggled out of the Maze prison and had a symmetry with his\u00a0final book (The Truth is a Strange Fruit<\/em>, published in 2010) which also draws on letters from a prison cell:\u00a0those between the so-called station bomber, John Harris, and his wife Anne as he awaited his execution\u00a0in April 1965. Anne Wolfe died a few days before David.<\/p>\n

David was an unfashionable liberal. His passions informed the grand themes of his journalism: racial\u00a0injustice, incarceration and torture, the death penalty and the sanctity of life, and the Parkinson\u2019s\u00a0disease that afflicted him and which he stubbornly resisted for 25 years.<\/p>\n

Often, when people assess the influence or importance of a journalist, they ask who were his friends in\u00a0high-places, what were his high-minded opinions, or how often was he on television.<\/p>\n

David did none of that. But his self-deprecating laid back style and absence of a dress code masked the\u00a0seriousness with which he approached his craft. He had the sharpest of journalistic instincts that always\u00a0sent him in the opposite direction to the pack, a fiercely competitive streak and a love of the game.<\/p>\n

Moving back from Northern Ireland to South Africa was a strange transition. David told the story of how\u00a0he wandered in to Exclusives in Hillbrow to discover some copies of his book on shelves at the back of\u00a0the store, and offered to sign them to improve sales. The store manager, believing that the unkempt\u00a0bearded man who had wandered off the street was unhinged, threatened to call security.<\/p>\n

David grew up between Johannesburg and boarding school in then Rhodesia and his passion for\u00a0journalism was stoked by reading the Rand Daily Mail in his youth.<\/p>\n

By the time the Guardian<\/em> sent him back on assignment to Johannesburg in 1985 the RDM had been\u00a0closed by its owners, South African Associated Newspapers, and the rump of it was a thing called the\u00a0Transvaal News Bureau, which housed a few refugees from the RDM, including myself.<\/p>\n

The head of the bureau was one of his heroes, Mervyn Rees, the greatest investigative journalist of his\u00a0generation who had led the RDM\u2019s investigation into the Information Scandal, South Africa\u2019s equivalent\u00a0of Watergate that had brought down John Vorster and apartheid\u2019s propaganda apparatus.<\/p>\n

David sought out the inscrutable chain-smoking Mervyn and negotiated space in the newsroom, landing\u00a0up in the desk next to mine.<\/p>\n

That was how I came to know David Beresford and was privileged to be his fellow traveler and\u00a0confidante for many years. I recall whiskey-fuelled discussions in outposts like Ovamboland, Quelimane\u00a0or Naboomspruit, or the Portugalia in downtown Johannesburg, fantasising about the day when we\u00a0would have our own newspaper and resurrect the RDM for the coming new age.<\/p>\n

When the bureau was closed down David moved across to the Weekly Mail, the raggedy upstart that he\u00a0saw as the successor in spirit to the RDM. \u00a0While maintaining his day job at the Guardian<\/em>, David felt he\u00a0could not remain on the sidelines as the biggest story in the history of his country happened around\u00a0him.<\/p>\n

It was with the Mail<\/em> and its successor, the Mail & Guardian<\/em>, that he was to play a seminal behind the\u00a0scenes role in shaping the paper as a friend and advisor to the previous editor Anton Harber and to\u00a0myself when I took the helm in 1996.<\/p>\n

Without David there might be no Mail & Guardian<\/em>. It was he who brought the Guardian<\/em> in to rescue the\u00a0paper in 1993 after a financially disastrous attempt to transform itself into a daily.<\/p>\n

Some may protest that having influence in the making of one small newspaper is too parochial a legacy.<\/p>\n

But the big stories that David helped break had significance well beyond the M&G. They were the\u00a0defining stories of the new South Africa.<\/p>\n

His reputation was such that it was to David that a dissident security branch warrant officer\u00a0(subsequently identified as Brian Morrow) turned after he had stolen a bunch of top secret documents\u00a0from security police headquarters in Durban.<\/p>\n

The documents were explosive, revealing, in typed black and white, that the Security Police had\u00a0clandestinely funded Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi and his Inkatha Freedom Party and were behind the\u00a0creation of an Inkatha-affiliated trade union set up to oppose Cosatu that was responsible for horrific\u00a0shop-floor violence.<\/p>\n

David passed the papers to the Mail and worked with the team to turn it into an investigative expose\u00a0that came to be known as Inkathagate, a feat rightly honoured as the newspaper\u2019s finest hour.<\/p>\n

It was July 1991 and talks between the ANC and the ruling National Party that had been going on for\u00a0more than a year were stuck. Hundreds of people were being slaughtered in the townships by a\u00a0mysterious \u201cthird force\u201d. President F W De Klerk and his team appeared to be getting the better of the\u00a0ANC.<\/p>\n

Inkathagate changed the story. It confirmed suspicions that the government was clandestinely funding\u00a0opposition to the ANC and manipulating the violence to its advantage. Within weeks, the Cabinet\u00a0hardliners Magnus Malan and Adriaan Vlok had been axed or demoted and the already unraveling\u00a0national security state was further delegitimised. De Klerk\u2019s team were knocked off balance and never\u00a0recovered.<\/p>\n

The great investigative journalist Philip Knightley said that all good journalists are blessed with the luck\u00a0of being in the right place at the right time. David was present at the birth of the alternative media\u2019s\u00a0other great scoop: the apartheid-era security police death squads.<\/p>\n

In October 1989 he set out to profile a young Lawyers for Human Rights attorney known as \u201cShucks\u201d –\u00a0real name Huggins Sefanyetso – whose awful job it was every week to wait for the notices of execution\u00a0for the condemned prisoners on death row and to use \u201cevery trick and talent\u201d to save as many as he\u00a0could. When David interviewed him Shucks had helped rescue from the gallows dozens prisoners who\u00a0had been sentenced to death without adequate legal representation.<\/p>\n

The week of David\u2019s interview was the very one that a former security policeman Almon Nofomela was\u00a0to be executed for killing a white farmer. \u00a0Rather than \u201ctaking the pain\u201d, as his erstwhile colleagues had\u00a0suggested, Nofomela spilled the beans, confessing to being a hit man who had participated in nine\u00a0murders including the mutilation of civil rights lawyer Griffiths Mxenge.<\/p>\n

The bizarre claims miraculously earned him a stay and David handed the story to the Weekly Mail<\/em>. Ivor\u00a0Powell\u2019s scoop led the paper that Friday, and the government set up an enquiry under the Free State attorney general Tim McNally, in what was feared would be the usual whitewash.<\/p>\n

Sensing that that they would make him the scapegoat, Nofomela\u2019s former commander, Dirk Coetzee\u00a0fled into exile and unburdened the entire filthy story to the brave Afrikaans weekly Vrye Weekblad. That\u00a0was how the world got to know the names of Vlakplaas, the notorious death squad farm near Pretoria\u00a0and Eugene de Kock, apartheid\u2019s leading assassin better known as Prime Evil.<\/p>\n

David was also instrumental in the Mail<\/em>\u2019s publication of the story of Stompie Seipei, the 14-year-old\u00a0activist who was kidnapped by the Mandela Football team under the instructions of Winnie Mandela\u00a0and beaten to death. This was a particularly painful story for the newspaper to write because the\u00a0subject was not only an icon of the liberation struggle but the wife of Nelson Mandela.<\/p>\n

The Winnie story forced journalists at the Mail<\/em> to see that to do an honest job in the post-apartheid\u00a0South Africa that was fast approaching, would mean applying the same rigorous principles as before,\u00a0now to people we knew and admired. There could be no holy cows.<\/p>\n

In April 1996 I was appointed editor of the Mail & Guardian<\/em> and David and I rubbed our hands,\u00a0celebrating the fact that achieving our dreams was within our grasp.<\/p>\n

But, really, by the time I stepped into the breach the Mail\u2019s transition was already under\u00a0way, partly due\u00a0to the fact that David had assumed an increasingly executive role at the paper. After the first democratic\u00a0elections in 1994, the feisty rag, its mission seemingly accomplished, was tired and its founding editor\u00a0Anton Harber, who deserves credit for the change, looked to David for support and advice.<\/p>\n

David well understood that the task was to move the Mail from its struggle origins to a newspaper that\u00a0would hold the new democratic rulers to account while retaining its combative edge. My job was merely\u00a0to wrap the rest of the newspaper around that foundational principle.<\/p>\n

It was a path-finding moment that helped define the mission of the media in the new era and the Mail &\u00a0<\/em>Guardian<\/em>\u2019s investigative reporting became a template for others to follow.<\/p>\n

But it was not without pain. Exposing government corruption and criticism of the liberation movement\u00a0and the new elite provoked a severe reaction, even from loyal readers and friends, and we found\u00a0ourselves facing multiple libel writs and lawsuits and were hauled before the Human Rights Commission\u00a0on charges of racism.<\/p>\n

David was the paper\u2019s rock even as the Parkinson\u2019s devastated his health.<\/p>\n

He would amble around the newsroom on deadline late on Wednesday nights, increasingly reliant on a\u00a0cane, an almost mystical presence as he rewrote editorials and headlines, and provided advice that\u00a0often, rather than tempering our indiscretions, forced us to into an even more confrontational stance.<\/p>\n

He also understood the importance of training and preparation so that the media could be peopled by\u00a0the qualified journalists who were necessary to make the new democracy meaningful. The mainstream\u00a0media had failed South Africa in this regard and the Mail, despite its small size, made an outsize\u00a0contribution to the country\u2019s journalistic leadership.<\/p>\n

Some of the most touching tributes that have flowed in since David\u2019s death are from journalists that he\u00a0mentored, with warmth and generosity. \u201cI am most grateful for this quirk of fate that the great\u00a0Beresford sat with us young reporters and helped us with our copy,\u201d wrote Toby Shapshack. \u201cHe taught\u00a0me the remarkable alchemy he brought to writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The magic of that alchemy can be seen in the final article to appear under David\u2019s byline in the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, in December 2013, an obituary of Nelson Mandela that traced the extraordinary narrative of\u00a0that great life with heart-breaking empathy and honesty about his weaknesses and frailties.<\/p>\n

It was the resounding culmination of the career of a reporter, himself facing the end of life, who found\u00a0all his larger themes wrapped up in the figure of Mandela, a man that he had covered, loved, and\u00a0grappled with for almost three decades. It ends with a meditation on the roots of Mandela\u2019s greatness\u00a0in which David produced this startling insight:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother way of understanding South Africa is to recognise it as something of an Old Testament story, a\u00a0tale of people struggling to do right by their gods and failing time and time again. In the second half of\u00a0the 20th century, these people, exhausted by the struggle with themselves and against one another, had\u00a0need of a unifying figure to give them a vision of nationhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

David concluded that Mandela\u2019s greatness came from his willingness to don the mask. It was an\u00a0audacious twist that would have been a stretch in the hands of a lesser wordsmith, but in recognising\u00a0the truth of that old saying: \u201cCometh the hour, cometh the man\u201d, David pointed to his own greatness as\u00a0well.<\/p>\n

Phillip Van Niekerk is the President of Calabar Africa, a consulting company that operates through sub-Saharan Africa. In a previous life he spent 20 years as a journalist in South Africa, working as an Africa\u00a0correspondent for the <\/em>London Observer and Editor of the <\/em>Mail & Guardian from 1996 to 2000.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Beresford, the Guardian correspondent who died in Johannesburg last week, leaves a remarkable legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22549,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}