Some months before the FIFA World Cup in 2010, I visited a Cape wine farm with a few American tourists. The winemaker, a nice fellow whose vineyards ascended the lower slopes of the Constantiaberg, didn’t take to the subject of baboons well. He would tell us that they had cost him a fortune in therapist fees and worse, that a neurotic woman was stalking the cellar, ready to put her body on the line for the bastards should he try to shoot them.
He explained he’d recently witnessed a large male baboon casually rip over twenty metres of vine from its trellis.
I sympathized. Working at a game reserve in my late teens and early 20s, I had regrettable encounters with that species. One annihilated a fruit display I had painstakingly arranged for a special attention guest (SAG, or VIP). I shot it. Another time, one charged into the curio shop and started going berserk. I shot from close range but only winged it, taking a chunk of cement from the wall. Mortally injured, the thing then climbed onto the wooden rafters of the ceiling and started doing unspeakable things to itself while screaming.
Days before the final of that 2010 World Cup, the ex Oxford Don and a man who was to change the way so many South Africans thought of their history, R.W. Johnson wrote about life after the tournament for the London Review of Books (LRB). Bill started with stories about baboons in Constantia, in particular, how a Rottweiler had been shredded by an invading troop. He then pivoted to the subject of African immigration, noting the commercial nous of enterprising Somalians who’d disrupted the local spaza model with competitive pricing.
A week later, an irate email was sent to LRB’s editor. Signed by ‘73 prominent academics and writers’, this group had blanketed themselves under something called ‘The New Left Project’. In waves of spastic paranoia, they seized how Bill had spoken about baboons, then about African migrants.
Looking at those signatories all these years later and imagining the furrowed brows leading to panicked calls, I struggle to think how the white boomer men who signed it survived an era where male sanitary pads were not exactly ubiquitous. Bill was an anti-apartheid academic with pronounced hostility toward the daft and the sneaky, but ‘The New Left Project’ was evidently an early adopter of conniving behaviours that would one day popularize the phrase ‘the left eats its own’. The post was taken off the LRB’s page.
It’s not surprising that someone like the most DEI’d, upwardly-failing writer in the history of Great Britain, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown signed this letter – irrespective that she prefers her racism explicit. You see, just four years earlier in 2006 on the BBC, the Ugandan-Indian Alibhai-Brown spoke about white men, stating: ‘I don’t like them. I want them to be the lost species in a hundred years.’
The extent of Bill’s wisdom was a wonder, switching with ease between profound and prescient. Only he could describe Julius Malema as a contemporary equivalent of the young Zulu impi performatively fronting up to British forces in view of his elders. Only he could describe the ANC’s patronage schemes involving the Shaiks and Guptas as South Africa’s ‘Tammany Hall’ – a reference to the US Democrat’s political base, rife with corruption. Only he could casually remark that Robert Mugabe was made aware of the 9/11 attacks before they happened.
The allure was intense but necessary. During the champagne years of the country, many perversions of history were laid and no deviation was tolerated. But when things started getting rocky in the mid 2000s, Bill – ever patient despite appearances – started bleeding uncomfortable truths into the political fabric, spoiling already exhausted celebrations with awkward truths.
We have occupied a dream world. A country cannot run on vibes. You could have the ANC, or a growing economy. Not both. You weren’t obliged to believe everything and perhaps this is what made him so popular. Essays, frequently crossing 8000 words, were devoured, as were his speeches at conferences, and every one of his books. The based survivor’s national treasure.
It is fitting that his last article for The Common Sense lamented the state of the The Sunday Times newspaper, once the jewel of South African media, today like sewage in a can. For a long time I hoped that local mainstream media was where Bill would turn his gaze next – an environment littered with scheming dwarves, dissemblers and deadbeat punks in the service of shadowy forces too clumsy and stupid to cover their tracks. Sadly that is not to be.
When Bill was confronted about the LRB column, he shrugged it off. He’d just been on safari, and was in no mood to engage neurotic social justice reporters. To the fury of his critics, the LRB continued to post Bill’s diary.
Unwilling to let these events go, some years ago I concluded that the article had been strategic, akin to the military tactic of feigned retreat – forcing enemies to reveal themselves. If I’m right, he knew that just association, paragraphic as it was in this case, would be enough to scramble hostiles in the media and academia – a field in which he still enjoyed prominence – into the open. He knew who these people were. He wanted to see what they were becoming.
I was lucky to call him a colleague, and may his brilliant wife Irina find comfort in the great numbers of people he fascinated, depressed, amused, informed and occasionally insulted, who thought him supremely gifted, resilient and unique, the very best of our great country’s intelligence. We will miss him.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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