Inside South Africa no one takes R W Johnson seriously, yet he is the go-to man for a number of British publications when it comes to matters South Africa (and Zimbabwe). Whether right-wing publications (The Spectator, The Times) or those inhabiting that space between center and center-left (The London Review of Books, The Guardian and The New Statesman, for example).
This gives Johnson opportunities to write all kinds of useless things, including sometimes objectionable, racist sentiments or just plain nonsense. Johnson, if you don’t know him, was born in Durban, lived in Britain for a long spell and then came back to South Africa where he headed up the “liberal” Helen Suzman Foundation. He was eventually relieved from his post at the Foundation when he wrote a column for the Business Day, a Johannesburg financial newspaper, that was premised on the discredited idea that a cabal of Indian South Africans really pull the strings in the ruling ANC and manipulate Africans for their own corrupt ends.
Johnson wrote: “This being SA [South Africa] there is, of course, also an ethnic point. We know that the presidency is largely in the hands of the two Pahad brothers, with Aziz looking after external affairs and Essop effectively the country’s prime minister. We also know that Parliament is in the hands of Frene Ginwala. So is it really a surprise to discover that our enterprising Asian countrymen have captured the deputy presidency too?”
Johnson’s pieces are usually full of errors and revisions of history.
He takes the “reasonable” tone, presents himself as a central figure in the struggle against Apartheid, praises “liberals” (mostly white) as usually the only true and principled resisters of Apartheid (even Mandela gets dismissed as a chancer) and goes on about Communist influence on black resistance. And when it comes to the ‘new South Africa,’ all blacks seem to do is mess up. The good, working things are usually courtesy of “the infrastructure that white South Africa had bequeathed.”
Which brings me to his latest assertion–in a review of Andre Brink’s new autobiography–for Britain’s Sunday Times. Here he decides who is deserving of Nobel Prizes:
“… the desire to reward the anti-apartheid cause led to a certain inflation of careers and reputations. If you look at the Nobel prizes won by [Nadine] Gordimer, Chief Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk, you’re bound to say that all those prizes were won essentially because of apartheid: J M Coetzee is the only South African whose Nobel had nothing to do with that.”
J M Coetzee‘s books are set on the moon.
