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Michelle McGrane interviews Shaun Johnson, author of The Native Commissioner
Tell me about your main social, political and cultural influences and the environment of your youth. My earliest years were spent in the Transkei, the place that shaped my view of life. I am moved to this day when I am able to visit those beautiful places, now of course part of the Eastern Cape, but then a remote “homeland” in that monstrous place on earth our country once was. My deep personal feelings of South Africanness stem, no doubt, from those days. Later, most of my schooling took place in Johannesburg, at Rosebank Primary and then Hyde Park High. I loved those schools. I began to become politically aware at school (I was in matric in ’76, the year of the Soweto schools uprising); this accelerated during the compulsory white-boy’s stint in the army under apartheid; and once I arrived at Rhodes University I was probably a prototype callow white leftie of the times and became very involved with Nusas etc. I was already a voracious reader, but got a cultural leg-up by taking Don Maclennan’s great course “English in Africa”. Before that I had never heard of the likes of Achebe, Ngugi, Soyinka, Tutuola, or of South African writers like Alex La Guma. It was also an amazing time in music – the arrival of punk and new wave played out in weird and wonderful ways in Grahamstown, South Africa in the late ‘70s, I can tell you. When did your passion for words develop? Which South African writers and journalists inspired you when you started writing? I had written my first two short stories, “The Horrible Greasy Fat Man” and “Slim Jim” by the age of eight (my mother kept them). Dreadful, of course, but I guess they signalled an intent. I also used to produce home-made newspapers, which I tried to sell to members of my family for 2c a copy. By the time I reached high school I considered a perfectly poised sentence to be the most beautiful thing in the world. I was lucky to have very good English teachers. I very much admired the black journalists who covered the Soweto uprising and read all the collections of the Drum writers. At Rhodes I was also introduced to Tom Wolfe’s collection, The New Journalism, which many of us kortbroeks at the Journalism Department thought had been written especially just for us. What made you decide to become a journalist? It seemed to me to be the only way I could write, be politically involved, and earn some kind of living. I also recognised very early on that I was not brave or disciplined enough to join the underground, although I would have liked to. Tell me one of your most vivid memories of the years you spent at Rhodes. Difficult to pick one, as I feel that was where I really grew up: many of the “first experiences” that matter in all of our lives happened there. I feel a deep gratitude and loyalty to Rhodes University, and to Grahamstown. But one random adolescent memory: standing on a Nusas ticket for the SRC in my first year, my poster campaign being “Don’t Be A Monkey, Vote Johnson”. I lost, and so did Nusas. You were a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. What were your impressions of the tradition and pageantry of one of the world’s most eminent universities? Quite simply, it changed my life. I had never set foot outside South Africa before and my worldview suddenly went into cinemascope (for those old enough to remember what that means). For me it was like living in Brideshead Revisited, though of course Oxford had changed a lot since Waugh’s famous portrait. I spent the first six months terrified that I would be “found out”, that I was actually just a provincial South African nonentity who had got there somehow by accident (like Chauncey Gardener in Being There). I think this was quite a common experience for many of the foreign students at Oxford, and also for English youngsters from poor backgrounds, especially from the north of England. But at a certain point it changed. I realised that while there were indeed thousands of young intellectuals there whose brilliance I could never imitate, there were a lot of very interesting people too who were prepared to become my friends. I had been a very fearful boy from the age of eight – a theme explored a bit in The Native Commissioner – but Oxford taught me that you can learn confidence, and that once learned, it can grow. But alas, I had far too much fun in my Oxford years to ever finish my doctorate. I made an extreme effort to live the life of the sybaritic “Bright Young Thing” for those years (including co-directing Athol Fugard’s A Lesson From Aloes at the Oxford Union, being a tennis coach to Italian tourists (for the money), designing theatre posters, playing soccer, backpacking across Europe, going to concerts all over the UK, and much more). I keep saying to myself I must go back and finish the last three chapters of my DPhil, but it is more than 20 years ago now … Did growing up in apartheid South Africa influence your writing and its content? Completely. From my teen years I knew I was living in a place that had something deeply wrong with it – and therefore that there must be something wrong with me – but I didn’t know exactly what it was. So I started watching and listening and writing things down so I could try to work it out one day. As a journalist, were there times when you feared for your safety prior to 1994? Were you intimidated or harassed? As I’ve said above, I recognised when still quite young that I am not a naturally courageous person, and that I feared fear – another strand in The Native Commissioner. I was so terrified by the security police in the Eastern Cape, for example, that I was in awe of the bravery of my other activist friends who went to jail for long periods, and I used to literally pray that I would never be tortured under interrogation, because I feared I would break easily. As it happened, I think I got off very lightly among student activists and then later in the alternative press. I was always there or thereabouts when the really risky and scary stuff was happening, but my own experiences of intimidation, death threats, surveillance, phone-tapping and the like are really very, very tame when compared with those of my much braver contemporaries. The scariest times, without doubt, were the successive States of Emergency in the ‘80s. I often say now that if I had had any real idea of how deep in we were, I would have run away to hide. The ignorance of youth has its uses. You were the founding editor of The Sunday Independent at a crucial time in South Africa’s democratic transition. How important and how effective was the role of the media in the country’s transitional process? I’d like to answer that by giving four examples from my own experience. First, I was the person asked to write the feasibility study for what became the New Nation newspaper – New Nation was battered and bruised throughout its short life, but it broke the “Goniwe Signal” story. Stories like that, exposed by the various titles within the alternative press at different times, shook up South African journalism forever. Second, I was taken in and able to play some role in the amazing early days of the Weekly Mail – the best schooling I could have had as to how brave editors could really make a difference in what was happening in our country. Third, I was political editor of The Star, a newspaper of such stature and influence, at exactly the right time: 1990 to 1994. I was given free rein by another brave editor and, with a team of talented and committed colleagues, I think we participated in the actual “crossing over” into the new South Africa of the coverage of the old mainstream press. Four, I was given the incredible privilege of launching the very first new newspaper of the new South Africa, The Sunday Independent, in 1995. It was extraordinary to be able to invent something pure and from scratch, with no baggage, for the new country. So yes, I thought then and think now that the media are extremely important in our democracy. You’re currently the Chief Executive of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation. What is its primary mission? To build exceptional leadership capacity in Africa. The main mechanism for this is the Mandela Rhodes Scholarship programme. Briefly put, we identify young Africans (meaning anyone who is a citizen of an African country) whom we believe to have leadership potential. They can be in any discipline. They must, apart from academic competence, demonstrate an affinity for the kind of principled leadership embodied in the life of Mr Mandela. You could call the programme the Rhodes Scholarships of Africa, in and of Africa; they represent the finest educational opportunity on the continent, and you would understand why at this stage of my life I feel so passionately about helping give others the kind of life-changing opportunity that I had. The Mandela Rhodes Scholarship is much more than a bursary (though it is generous on that score): it provides customised leadership training and mentoring, and I think we are building a network of amazing young Africans who will go on to do great things for our continent. And another of our purposes is to give them reasons to stay here – to say that aspiring to be world-class does not mean you have to go to other parts of the world that are not Africa. It is truly inspiring work. At the moment I am also Interim Chief Executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, so I am not able to give my full attention to the Scholars, but fortunately I have superb colleagues who are doing that. When do you find the time to write? When you’re working on a book, do you try to sit down and write at a certain time every day? Do you set yourself deadlines? I’d love to try the 9 to 5 approach one day, but for the moment my life doesn’t work like that at all. In the two or so years it took to write The Native Commissioner most of the manuscript was written on long-haul flights. My job at that stage involved a ridiculous number of trips to the USA and Europe. I calculated that altogether I was going to spend about a month of my life in the sky and said, Why not use the time to write the novel you’ve always talked about? It was perfect: comfortable seat, no one knows you, no cellphone calls, no emails, kind people bringing you food and drink. I highly recommend this new form of “airport novel”. But of course it also meant – especially for early-morning and late-night revising – stealing time from my wife and young daughter. They were very supportive (though 5-year-old Luna didn’t quite understand how I could spend so much time on a book that had no pictures), but certainly it involved some obsessive behaviour, and that comes at a price. I remember one day on holiday when I didn’t leave the hotel room for ten hours. I tend to write unbrokenly, in binges, and then leave it for a while, depending on what’s happening with my job. Regarding deadlines, I had the luxury of not having one with this first novel – but now Penguin are reminding me that I signed up for a second. I’m looking forward to writing it – I know what I want to write – but I honestly don’t know when I’ll be able to get started. I think about it, especially the structure, a lot, however. What was the motivation and inspiration for your non-fiction best-seller, Strange Days Indeed? In all my years in journalism I thought of myself as more of a writer than as a breaking-news reporter, though of course one had to be both. A really good atmospheric piece always pleased me more than a news scoop. So in those incredible years from the Emergencies through to Mr Mandela being inaugurated at the Union Buildings I wrote pieces in eyewitness/diary style. It wasn’t planned – that was just my preferred style of journalism – but when 1994 came it was suggested to me that a chronological collection of the best of these could form quite a compelling portrait of the most important period in our country’s history. I said in the introduction then: “[These stories] will be overtaken, and soon, by the yet more important journey on which we are about to embark. But I think these strange days we have shared are worth remembering.” I still think that. As regards it having been a best-seller: that, I have to say, had everything to do with a timing of publication that could not have been more exquisite – the election had succeeded, there was a sigh of relief across the country like a Mexican Wave, and everyone wanted some record so they could remember what they’d lived through. Strange Days Indeed was that book, happily for me. I find it is still being read more than ten years later, and I’m told there’s a modestly healthy second-hand market for it on the booksellers’ websites. The Native Commissioner, your first novel, has just been published by Penguin South Africa. Can you describe it briefly? Difficult (to do it briefly) because it is intended, in my mind at least, to be a book of many, many thematic layers which will be read differently by different readers. Let me settle for the publisher’s blurb: Sam Jameson was eight years old when his father George died in shocking circumstances. He decides, some forty years later, to finally open the box of his father’s papers which his mother had passed on to him, and he left sealed for more than two decades. In trying to piece together a picture of his unknown father, Sam discovers a troubled, doomed, but extraordinary man – and an extraordinary story. George was a Native Commissioner in the old South Africa, deeply unsure of the morality of his work, but unable to escape it. The backdrop is the lush and harsh landscape of South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, in the early years of apartheid … In what ways were the processes of writing Strange Days Indeed and The Native Commissioner different? As different as they could be. I have more than 20 years of journalism programmed in my brain. Fiction is a completely different form of writing. I had to force myself to unlearn the journalistic style and set myself free into the sea of fiction. A lovely, liberating, thrilling feeling, actually – I think I like it! As my friend Denis Beckett says: you can make those pesky characters do whatever you want! How much of yourself and your life did you inject into The Native Commissioner? The impulse to write this particular story came, I suppose, from a lifetime of wondering about the father I hardly knew, what kind of man he had been, and why the cataclysm that happened in my own family had happened. As I started to think about it seriously, to go through some documents of the times, to begin to think myself into the head of a man like I imagined my father might have been in his times, it took on a life of its own. I also thought that South Africa in the ‘60s and ‘70s would be a very interesting period to write about now: I get the feeling most people know a lot about when apartheid ended, less about when it began. So I decided to use some basic facts from my own life story – my father was a Native Commissioner in rural South Africa, the family was nomadic to an extraordinary degree, and he died very tragically in 1968 – as what I think of as the tent poles around which I have built the tent of my fiction. It is not autobiography, or biography, and specifically does not claim to be truth. It is a story that the writer hopes will make readers feel something – what, is up to them. It certainly is not a primarily political book, though the backdrop, of course, is. Was writing the novel cathartic? Very much so for me, on at least two levels. One, the exploration, finally, of how it is and feels to write fiction (I hope to do much more, as I am still an apprentice), and two, the exploration in my imagination of my lost father and his times. What would you like readers to get out of reading The Native Commissioner? Many things, among them perhaps a sympathetic sense of the complexity, including the hardness, of life for every single one of us individual human beings – themselves included. What are you reading at present? I’ve just finished Patrick McGrath’s Port Mungo. I’ll have to wait for holiday time before diving into Gerald L’Ange’s The White Africans, which is long but I’m eager to read. I’m struggling to find a copy of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book after Everything Is Illuminated, which I loved. I am trying to decide whether to wait for the English translation, or to read Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat in Afrikaans. I thought Triomf was just astounding. Would you name five books which have influenced your life? Years ago I was asked by a magazine to list my 100 most important books. It took me two weeks to get a shortlist down to 300. So this is a rough question to ask me – I love reading too much. But, with very little consideration and no consistency, these jump into my mind: Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, all the stories of Herman Charles Bosman, JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Athol Fugard’s plays and diaries. And now I have looked up at my shelves and seen at least a hundred others … like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, etc. What is the best thing about living in South Africa today? That all the prophets of doom were so very, very, very wrong. And that I lived long enough to see it proven so.
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Shaun Johnson is Chief Executive of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, which is dedicated to building leadership capacity among young Africans. He is also Interim Chief Executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, which manages Mr Mandela’s post-presidential office, Chairman of the Cape Town Partnership, and a member of Independent News & Media’s International Advisory Board. A leading figure in the alternative press of the 1980s, he was President of the South African Students’ Press Union before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. On his return he became a reporter, newspaper editor and award-winning writer of non-fiction before being appointed Deputy Chief Executive of Independent News & Media in South Africa. The Native Commissioner is his first novel.
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