Chapter 7
Just Jon

Jon Qwelane is both a prolific reporter for the Star —his byline sometimes appears eight or ten times in a week, and on half a dozen different stories in the Sunday Star —and one of the paper's best-known columnists. He produces a steady stream of op-ed pieces, and when I was in Johannesburg he was writing two regular columns: "Jon's Jive," which appeared on Saturdays, and "Just Jon," on Sundays. Qwelane was then, in fact, the only black columnist writing for a white newspaper in South Africa.

Qwelane's weekly columns were in some ways his shelter from the storm of day-to-day reporting, and that was especially true of "Jon's Jive." "I try to keep that piece light," he told me. "There's too much gory stuff in the paper already. Sunday is the heavy one." For "Jon's Jive," he had written about everything from phantom loose pigs causing car accidents in Soweto to a variety of township slang known as tsotsi taal . He likes to set stories in shebeens, and often lets his Catholic schooling show in extravagant religious metaphors—even whole disquisitions on Heaven and Hell. These two leitmotifs, religion and drink, sometimes come together in a single column—like the one in which a drunkard, locked in shebeen debate with a priest, claimed that "some

of the first drinks on record were mentioned in the Bible in the story of the wedding at Cana where guests were bored to tears because there was no hooch. The priest shot back that the biblical account nowhere stated that after the Lord converted water into wine, its drinkers got drunk."

The Saturday columns let Qwelane have fun with language. In another shebeen piece, a wife bursts in and starts belaboring her husband with a golf club. We listen to his pleading, her accusations, and in the midst of it are reminded, "All the time she was sinking putts with the club." The columns on township slang, of which there have been a number, celebrate the multilingual richness of their subject. A reader learns, for instance, that since money is "sugar," to be broke is to be "sugar-free"; that people of high standing are "situations," and their neighborhoods, should these also house poor residents, are "mink-and-manure townships"; that a "stop nonsense" is a concrete wall; that an irritating shebeen keeper may cause the customers to "impose economic sanctions." Some of these tsotsi taal columns read like an African Finnegans Wake , with the few conventional English words and phrases surfacing like small clear windows in a dense, jeweled cloud of language. In fact, they are much like urban African speech in South Africa, which one who does not understand the languages being used, but listens closely, finds studded with familiar bits: "unfortunately"s and "no matter what"s.

"Just Jon," Qwelane's Sunday column, may have been named that by the Star 's editors in the hope of reassuring white readers that the opinions expressed therein were the writer's own, not those of the newspaper—and not, heaven help us, those of blacks in general. As Rex Gibson says, "In some ways, Jon has come to be the symbol of all 'uppity kaffirs.' "Qwelane manages that trick simply by commenting on the issues of the day from a black perspective—not the black perspective, since there is no such thing, but a perspective that Gibson acknowledges "is very widespread," and that many whites seem to fear represents what their black workers or servants really think. In one of his first columns for the Star , Qwelane described how he and his friends were rooting against the white South Africans who were playing at

Wimbledon. The country's isolation in most international sports is a very sore point among white South Africans; the idea that "their" blacks might be enjoying their discomfiture is doubly enraging. After black spectators turned up at an international rugby match and cheered for the visiting squad, one Afrikaans newspaper angrily suggested that blacks wanting to attend future matches be screened to weed out subversives. Qwelane played straight to this weakness, and has continued ever since to insert the needle just where it hurts.

The angle of Qwelane's attacks on apartheid is different from that of the Star 's editorials: it emphasizes black experience rather than white guilt, and often projects a strange mock gaiety. Thus, when he slams P. W. Botha for betraying with the latest crackdown some vague promises of conciliation and "reform" that Botha made in a series of radio broadcasts and newspaper advertisements, he does so by way of an elaborate threat to sue the State President for false advertising.

At times, "Just Jon" is a straightforward editorial—one that may or may not follow the Star 's line. Qwelane, for instance, supports international economic sanctions against South Africa, and claims they have massive black support. Other columns are like megaphones: one side in the undeclared civil war speaking directly, angrily, to the other. When the white far right, spearheaded by the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), whose program includes a whites-only state, began to make their presence felt in white national politics, Qwelane wrote, "Perhaps the A.W.B. and its cronies are right about a white homeland, after all, and the sooner KwaWhitey is proclaimed, the better. All right-wingers must be told one thing: they are not as feared in the black community as they are in white circles."

The voluminous hate mail he receives, most of which he reads and keeps, lets Qwelane know his words are at least reaching the far side of the apartheid abyss. He once showed me a stack of letters—screeds full of death threats and psychopathic racism, most of them semiliterate, all of them unsigned—and said, with a short laugh, "Maybe I'll publish a selection someday. We could call it 'White Political Thinking.' "A few weeks before, Qwelane

said, he had received a phone call from a woman, obviously white, who simply said, "You should be shot."

Though Qwelane is given fairly free rein by his editors in "Just Jon," he still has to battle to protect his copy. For instance, the Star , following government usage, calls the bantustans "homelands," a term that Qwelane, like many blacks, rejects. So, to get "bantustan" past the copyeditors, he must put it inside a quote from a fictional conversation. (This may sound like a trivial problem, but terminology in South Africa is critical.) In any case, publishing Qwelane's columns is not a matter of altruism or political principle on the part of the Star . The newspaper not only heaps prestige upon itself by doing so, it also sells more papers. Qwelane's columns are hugely popular among blacks, and one white subeditor told me, "My mother absolutely hates Jon's writing, but she always reads his column first."

One of Qwelane's editors on the columns was Anita Hughes. A big, ebullient blonde young woman, she had worked with Qwelane for two years and was an outspoken admirer. "Jon's columns are so well thought out," she told me. "They always have a beginning, a middle, and an end. He writes to length, precisely. His copy is totally professional. His command of the English language, which isn't, after all, his native tongue, is superb. The only thing you might occasionally find is that he sometimes tends to be very adamant." As adamancy was also one of Anita Hughes's traits, she and Qwelane wrangled constantly. One of their standing differences was over his choice of work station. Hughes sat in the Sunday Star wing of the newsroom. One day while I was there, she strode into the ghetto and told Qwelane, obviously not for the first time, "We can't have you always sitting down here at this end. We want you up by us, where we can keep you nice and cool and calm." While Qwelane laughed and tried to change the subject, Montshiwa Moroke said to me, sotto voce, "She means where they can keep him in check ." That day, Qwelane managed to divert Anita into an argument about whether Christ sjambokked the moneylenders in the temple—the Gospel according to Qwelane—or merely overturned their tables, as Hughes claimed. They went round and round, each

wielding a considerable familiarity with the Bible, until Hughes finally exclaimed, "Every time I come down here, I stay two hours. Your mind is like a labyrinth. We have to sort you out!"

Rex Gibson was a Qwelane fan himself. "In his columns, you never get the feeling that he's writing to some hack formula, and he is consistently able to expose, with great effectiveness, the hypocrisy and shallowness of white arguments," Gibson told me. "Meanwhile, his straight reporting is of a very high caliber. He's a chameleon in that respect. He can leap from highly subjective comments to straight factual reporting." Of a recent story, broken by Qwelane after intensive investigation, on the violent activities of white vigilantes in West Rand townships, Gibson said, "We know he got it right, because if he'd got anything wrong we'd have heard all about it from the police." He paused, then added, "And somehow, through all this, Jon retains that great cheerfulness of his."

Several white Star reporters mentioned the same thing, in tones of grateful surprise, when I asked them about working with Qwelane: his warmth. Anita Hughes had been trying her hand at writing. She told me, "Every time I turned in a piece, Jon would write something encouraging about it and leave it in my 'desk'"—her personal computer file. Sheryl Raine, a labor reporter, described finding a computer-drawn house in her "desk" at Christmas, with a message from Qwelane, "Happy Christmas—Let's move into this house." "It was just such a lovely thing to do," she said.

Qwelane's connection to the Star 's computer system borders on the organic. Whenever we sat talking in the newsroom, he would chain-smoke cigarettes, drink can after can of Coca-Cola, answer the phone ("Newsroom," barked, might be followed by a quick conversation in South Sotho), and doodle on a computer terminal. Glowing patterns of dashes, commas, slashes, hyphens would slowly bloom across the screen, be abruptly cleared, then start growing up again. In the middle of a conversation, he would, to illustrate some point, turn to a monitor, call up a story, highlight a paragraph with a couple of key strokes, and say, "Read that." All activities in the vicinity of a terminal are marked

by a steady flow of small inspirations—by Qwelane's casually making electronic notes to himself, reviewing the latest stories to come in, suddenly revising his own stories or columns, or leaving messages, both serious and playful, for his colleagues in their "desks." One white Star reporter said to me, "Jon is so locked into events and developments that it's as if the news has become fused with his personality. In fact, he's such a workaholic that if he ever stepped out of it suddenly he'd probably disintegrate."

This close relationship to his writing extends to Qwelane's reporting rounds, on which he is constantly canvassing public opinion—asking people what they think about the latest boycotts or killings or taxes. He conducts these open-ended surveys in taxis and buses and elevators and shops, addressing people in the African familiar mode as buti (brother), mama (mother), sisi (sister), or baba (father). The flow from these conversations into his columns can be startlingly direct. The passing comments of a cleaning woman may be recorded, turned into a witty attack on the government, and sent to his editor's "desk" in the space of an hour.

Archbishop Tutu is a Qwelane enthusiast—"I love Jon very much," he told me—but, unlike the reporter who believed that Qwelane would disintegrate if he took a break, Tutu thought he could use some time away from South Africa. "With the kind of reporting he does, he may need to have some of the poison drawn out of his system," Tutu said. "Maybe a stint overseas on a good paper."

There is, in fact, a whole array of overseas programs and fellowships, including the Nieman fellowship at Harvard, available to South African journalists, and these days they are more likely to be awarded to a black journalist than to a white. Qwelane is an obvious candidate for a Nieman, and he has been urged to apply for one, but he seems dubious. When I said I thought he could get one, he shrugged, and said, "I suppose I could join the jet set. But I just hate to be patronized."

At the moment, Qwelane is in no danger of joining the jet set. He lives in a tin-roofed four-room matchbox in a working-class

district of Soweto called Chiawelo Extension Two, with his wife, Sana, and their two small children. The house has had electricity only since 1984; the toilet is an outhouse across the backyard. It is two taxi rides from the nearest supermarket, and almost twenty miles from Johannesburg. Sana, who is a quiet, powerful-looking woman with a lovely laugh, works as a nurse at a Johannesburg hospital. With their combined incomes, the Qwelanes have hopes of eventually building a bigger house—or building onto their present house. In the meantime, when Qwelane wants to write at home he must do so in longhand at the coffee table, which doubles as a dining-room table (and is, in fact, the only table in the house). It and two sofas, two chairs, a bookshelf, and a television set cram the tiny living room. "Desiderata" and an inexpensive print of Leonardo's "Last Supper" hang on the brick walls. On the bookshelf sit a Bible, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and several dozen Penguin paperbacks. Qwelane told me that the family doesn't keep any political literature in the house. (To do so is asking for trouble. Qwelane's good friend and colleague Montshiwa Moroke, who once collected books freely, lost his whole library in a police raid. Fortunately, he was not home when the police came, and when friends managed to reach him and warn him he simply abandoned the company car he was driving, and went into hiding. The other members of an activist theater group to which Moroke belonged were all arrested. He himself stayed underground for a year. It was when he finally, tentatively, resurfaced, half mad from running and hiding, that he first went to work as a journalist.)

Mudini Maivha and I went to the Qwelanes' for dinner one evening in June. It was a moonless night, but we hid my rented car behind the house anyway. There had been a lot of fighting in Chiawelo over the previous couple of weeks, with cars stolen, hijacked, and burned. It was not safe, moreover, to have a strange car parked in front of one's house—particularly not if anyone had seen a white man in that car. The Qwelanes' two-year-old son, Sobukwe—whom his father usually refers to as "this terrorist" or "this funnyman" or "this wild native" and, according to Sana, indulges hopelessly—was at his grandmoth-

er's house, in another district of Soweto, and their second child's birth was still some weeks away, so the house was quiet and peaceful.

Maivha, Qwelane, and I watched the news on television while Sana served dinner, which consisted of baked beans, a beef sausage called boerewors, and great helpings of mealie pap, the corn porridge that is the staple food of Africans throughout southern Africa. We washed the meal down with a sweet orange drink while P. W. Botha discoursed dourly on the screen about some rural water scheme. Then Deputy Minister of Information Louis Nel came on to warn us about ANC "terrorism."

"You know," Qwelane said, "no news story on South African television is complete without a Cabinet minister making some pronouncement on the subject. What kind of journalism is that?"

His point was immediately reinforced as Minister of Law and Order Louis Le Grange appeared, defending the latest extraordinary powers granted to the police, followed by the Home Affairs Minister, Stoffel Botha, announcing that he had just deported an American journalist (Richard Manning, of News-week ). The next story was about locusts in the Orange Free State, and Maivha said, "I wonder what the Minister of Locusts will have to say." A few clips of World Cup soccer were shown, which Maivha and Qwelane watched intently. Soccer is easily the most popular sport among black South Africans, but SABC was not broadcasting the World Cup finals, which were being played that week. Instead, it was broadcasting rugby, a white sport, and tennis at Wimbledon, where the handful of "South African-born" or "South African-raised" players were being relentlessly featured.

When the news was over, Maivha, getting up to leave, asked Qwelane about his plans for the next day.

Qwelane said, "I think I will go around to some of the public toilets in town. I want to make sure they're still not letting niggers like you use the facilities. There could be a column in it."

Maivha, standing over Qwelane, who was sprawled on a couch, nodded slowly, suppressing a smile. "Good idea," he said. Then

he thanked Sana, donned his lumberjacket, said "Ciao ," and left on foot.

That evening, while we chatted, sipped coffee, ate ice cream, and watched TV, Qwelane was voluble and seemed relaxed—except that each time he heard a vehicle outside he fell silent. Now and then he went to the window, drew aside the heavy curtain, and looked out. A wild-looking boy had showed up at the Star that afternoon, appearing suddenly in the door of a conference room where Qwelane and I sat talking. The boy was a student leader, he was on the run, and he and some friends needed a place to stay that night. Qwelane had told him they couldn't stay at the house, but told me afterward that he expected them to turn up anyway. He just hoped they would come early; he didn't like opening the door after midnight, particularly not lately, when a strange car had been parked around the corner for several nights running, with men sitting in it.

I asked Qwelane if any of his neighbors had been firebombed.

"Ye-e-e-es," he said. (Qwelane has a way of saying "yes" in a high, musical voice that makes it into at least a four-syllable word. The effect is to lighten the assertion, and to add some details without adding them. He also has a four-syllable "no" that is a whole conversation in itself.) "One of our neighbors just lost his home that way. Fortunately, no one was hurt or killed. But, you know, nothing is ever said. There is no warning. And after it happens you usually don't have to ask, 'Why did they hit me?' Because you already know. You paid your rent. You shopped in town. And the comrades have said they will enforce boycotts by petrol bombing."

Did he and Sana observe the boycotts?

"Of course. We have absolutely supported every consumer boycott, even when it meant going without the things that Sobukwe needed when he was very small. And we have stopped paying rent as well. Everyone in Soweto has."

Did his neighbors resent the comrades?

"People may fear the comrades, and they may dislike their methods—I don't agree with the tactics these kids use—but

virtually every black person wants to see this country changed, wants to see the system overturned, and they know that is what the comrades are fighting for. The comrades are their children. People are proud of them. Everyone understands that they are up against a hell of a lot. You can't help admiring their courage."

The Qwelanes' neighborhood, which is made up of long rows of little houses exactly like theirs, is, in Qwelane's words, "a real old-time apartheid neighborhood," meaning that it dates from the days when areas of Soweto were, in effect, strictly segregated by language group—their neighborhood is still almost totally Venda-speaking. Qwelane moved there in 1983, after that policy had begun to unravel, and managed to get a ninety-nine-year lease on the house in 1984, when those became available. (Before that, virtually all Africans in urban areas were forced to rent housing—if they could find it—from the government.) "Most of our neighbors are conservative, rural people," Qwelane told me. "The women wear traditional Venda headdresses, which can be quite elaborate, and all kinds of leg bracelets. In fact, their legs look like very well-fed pythons. On Sunday afternoons, the neighbors all get together in the field just here next to us and have a party. They beat drums, blow whistles, play guitars, dance. And the hooch flows! It all gets so loud you can't believe it. I call it the Venda National Symphony Orchestra. As soon as it starts, I flee. I go to see friends."

Qwelane's friends, who tend to be other journalists, mostly live in other sections of Soweto, some of them many miles away. When they get together, they speak English. "But I often wonder why," Qwelane once said to me. "What's wrong with our own languages? We are not Englishmen." The language spoken around the Qwelanes' house is Zulu, Sana's mother tongue. So Zulu will be Sobukwe's mother tongue, too. He is also picking up some Venda from the little girl next door. And some Sotho from the neighbor kid at his grandmother's house. And English from his parents and their friends. When he reaches school age, Jon and Sana plan to send him to St. Joseph's College, a Catholic boarding school in Botswana, which Jon himself attended.

Jon was born and raised in Mafeking, a small railway-junction

town in the northern Cape. Perhaps because his childhood coincided with the somber heyday of grand apartheid—that period when the government first moved to impose its gigantic, monstrous plan of racializing and revamping every aspect of South African society—the outlines of his early life as he recalls it seem etched largely by political developments. The apartheid program of "forced removals," which has displaced three and a half million people to date, included the destruction of the "native location" outside Mafeking where the Qwelanes lived. Jon remembers the destruction of his family's home, and the scattering of his extended family. The introduction of the system known as Bantu Education, under which the government took over responsibility for black education from the churches and openly proclaimed that its intention was to provide blacks with permanently inferior schooling, also affected Qwelane directly and lastingly. His father was a teacher, and a graduate of All Saints College, which had been one of the top black schools under the old mission system. Proud, strict, politically aware, the elder Qwelane was so appalled by Bantu Education that he quit his job, left South Africa to teach in neighboring Botswana (then still the British protectorate of Bechuanaland), and sent seven of his nine children to school there.

The education that Qwelane received at St. Joseph's, which he attended on a half-scholarship, was academically superior in every way to what was being offered to his peers at home in South Africa, but was probably most valuable simply for its retention of English as the medium of instruction. Under Bantu Education, a program of "mother-tongue instruction" had been imposed on African schools, requiring the use of African vernacular languages in all subjects for the first eight years of schooling. Mother-tongue instruction is one of the pillars of the apartheid program of "retribalization," and its effect on black education has been devastating. Not only are the African languages unsuitable for learning basic subjects such as science, mathematics, history, and geography, but the few children who reach high school are desperately unprepared to suddenly start learning in English or Afrikaans. The majority who never reach high school are, of

course, unprepared for life in modern society, except in the most menial capacities. Qwelane escaped the debilitation of Bantu Education. What is more, the colonial and parochial education he received, for all its shortcomings, allowed his aptitude for English to flower.

Qwelane spent his school holidays in Mafeking, however, and most of his childhood memories are distinctly South African. He and his friends would carry bundles of laundry for the washerwomen of the "location" into the white town, and Qwelane remembers being set upon there by gangs of white boys and beaten up, for reasons he could never fathom. His mother was an uneducated, devout Catholic who worked as a domestic servant and took no interest in politics; he remembers her simple pride in the fact that she worked for the family of the chief magistrate of Mafeking. ("If you have read P. G. Wodehouse," he has written, "you will know that such seemingly inconsequential social distinctions mean a lot in the servants' quarters.")

His father, meanwhile, conveyed his own political convictions to his children. He refused to call white men, even policemen who demanded his pass, baas —he once went to jail for objecting to the way the police addressed him—and when shop assistants treated him badly he took his business elsewhere. He also taught his children a version of South African history not found in the official texts: "My father always made it clear that this was the black man's land, that it was stolen from him." His political hero was Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, a brilliant African nationalist who had also once been a schoolteacher. Sobukwe, founder of the Pan-Africanist Congress, is one of the tragic figures in South African history. He was jailed for incitement for three years in 1960, and held for six more years without charges (the longest anyone has ever been imprisoned without charges in South Africa), then confined to his home in Kimberley under a banning order, until he died, from cancer, in 1978. Jon Qwelane's father died in 1967. Qwelane's naming his own firstborn Sobukwe honored both Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and his father.

"I got into journalism by accident, really," Qwelane told me. "After high school, I was working as a clerk at the Department of

Health and Social Welfare in Mafeking. There was a weekly paper, the Mafeking Mail , with a black edition that consisted of a four-page supplement that was mostly sports. A relative of the editor told me they needed a freelance sportswriter, so I started filling in for them. I did that for four or five months—this was 1972. Then I started sending in freelance articles about local politics to the Rand Daily Mail . They bought everything I sent them, so I took heart and, in 1974, moved to Jo'burg. I had no prospects when I arrived, but fortunately I had quite a number of aunts and uncles in the area. I stayed with an uncle in Soweto, and after a short while I got a job with the World "—a black paper—"covering news and courts. But I was too wild to stay with that uncle and his family. He was a very conventional man, and I kept no schedule—I slept at the office, I slept in shebeens—so we fell out after just three months. Really, I was an untamed rogue at that time."

Freelance sportswriting was the traditional portal into black journalism, and Qwelane's performance as a young reporter in Johannesburg was also in the high tradition of Drum and the Golden City Post . The untamed rogue from Mafeking moved, wrote, and drank at a ferocious pace, careering from paper to paper in what sounds today like one long hurricane of scoops and sprees. From the World (which was banned in 1977, resurrected as the Post , banned again in 1980, then resurrected again as the Sowetan ) he went to the Sunday Times , a paper with a huge circulation and an especially insulting extra edition, for which Qwelane covered news and sports. He found he liked the deadlines on a weekly (they gave him more time to carouse), and set the pattern for his next several jobs by celebrating a streak of exemplary reporting and page-one bylines with a binge that ended in a smashed company car and abrupt unemployment.

In 1976, the Afrikaans papers were desperate for coverage of the uprising taking place in the townships, and so Qwelane went to work for Beeld , the Johannesburg morning daily. He was the first—"and still, as far as I know, the only"—black reporter to work there. "That was a hair-raising experience," he told me. "But I discovered that some of those chaps, despite being Afri-

kaners, have a lot of integrity. I wrote in English, they translated my copy, and they never changed the meaning at all . They actually wanted to know what was happening. I had front-page stories so many days. The funny part was that the people in the townships didn't mind that I was working for Beeld . Things were much less polarized then. The people were not so critical of the press."

After several months of hard and dangerous reporting and then a week's unauthorized vacation in a Beeld car, Qwelane found himself back on the sidewalk. He next went to work for the Citizen —"This was before anything was known about that paper's funding"—where he was again the only black reporter. The stint was a short one, ending the same way as the others. The Rand Daily Mail hired Qwelane in 1977. There he escaped the sports beat once and for all when an editor assigned him to cover a boxing match after he had gone to a friend's wedding. Soweto weddings often involve some drinking. By the time Qwelane got to the fight, which was a title bout, he "couldn't tell a left hook from a push." His report reflected this confusion, and news became his only beat thereafter. The two years he spent on the country's leading English-language newspaper sharpened Qwelane's skills as a journalist, but they did not mend his ways. His tenure at the Mail ended after a misunderstanding with the security guards at the paper's offices. "They handcuffed me and beat me up quite well," he said. "Afterward, it was their word against mine about what happened, and there were six of them and no witnesses."

Then there came a one-day stint at Drum . The magazine was only a shadow of its former electrifying self, but Jim Bailey, its longtime owner, still prized racy writing, for which Qwelane had become known. On the afternoon of the day he was hired, the staff held "a welcoming piss-up." Qwelane's memory of the party is sparse, but the editors afterward helped him piece together a version of events that featured him accusing Jim Bailey of giving him drinks in order to kill him, the same way he had killed Casey Motsisi, Can Themba, and other bright lights of the Golden Era.

The suggestion hurt Bailey deeply, and he fired Qwelane on the spot. Qwelane apologized, but was not rehired.

Qwelane joined the Star in 1979. His drinking, superb reporting, and insubordination continued until one day in 1982. "I went to cover a story and came back the story itself—the story of the newsroom," he said. "Smashed to hell and beyond." He was fired, and then, after three months, rehired on condition that he reform. Qwelane stopped drinking, relapsed, and stopped again, off and on for a year or so. Finally, in 1983, he joined a Soweto chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. The group meets every Sunday. He never misses a meeting. Qwelane runs down the rap sheet of his decade as the bad boy of Johannesburg newsrooms with a sort of rueful relish. At the same time, there is something automatic about his confession: the slight dissociation of the consciously cured.

In his nine years at the Star , Qwelane has covered many beats and a great range of stories: township politics, bantustan politics, mine disasters, hospital scandals, hailstorms and car accidents, political trials, and the Soweto Scrabble craze. He has interviewed or profiled most of the leading figures in black politics: Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi. From the beginning, Qwelane showed a flair for feature writing. He could write features that were strictly "human interest": on the Jews of Soweto; on young black artists; a panoramic, Dickensian description of the black wing of the Johannesburg train station at Christmas, with vivid descriptions of pickpockets and of young migrant workers going home with their new clothes and radios. He could write features with political themes: visits to the families of political prisoners, an analysis of black student organizations, the meaning of funerals in black society.

Qwelane became known for his inventive, cinematic leads. In a story about a boxing champion sentenced to death for murder, Qwelane's opening focused on the guppies in the fish tank beside the TV set in the boxer's mother's flat—how even they seemed to swim dejectedly. In his straight political reporting, the tension

between his subjects and his own political views often gave his stories a special tautness; and the underpinnings of that tension were sometimes revealed in the separate editing his pieces received for the white and the black editions of the Star . Thus, Qwelane's account of a Buthelezi speech in Soweto (Buthelezi, the leader of KwaZulu, the large and heavily populated bantustan for Zulu speakers, is in favor among the Star 's editors) emphasized in the white editions the Zulu strongman's anti-government remarks, while in the Africa edition it emphasized Buthelezi's belligerence toward black journalists and his penchant for making silly remarks. (Figures less popular with the Star 's editors could be treated less delicately: a Qwelane profile of Ephraim Tshabalala, "mayor" of Soweto and a supporter of the government, took little trouble to mask its writer's scorn for its subject.) In 1983, Qwelane got his first column. It was called "My Word" and ran only in the Star 's Africa edition. The column gave him new freedom not only as a writer but as a political commentator. When he wrote about bantustan leaders in his column, Qwelane simply eviscerated them.

With a regular column in the Star , Qwelane's work became widely known—particularly after his column started to run in the paper's white editions—but he continued to work as a field reporter, and is perhaps still best-known for a remarkable series of stories he filed in March and April of 1985. On March 21, the police opened fire on a crowd marching near Uitenhage, in the eastern Cape; twenty-one people were killed and hundreds wounded. Qwelane flew to the eastern Cape that day, and the next day he filed a story that challenged police claims about the killing. Louis Le Grange, the Minister of Law and Order, had told Parliament that petrol bombs were being used against police before the shooting. Qwelane searched the length of the road where the shooting took place, and "found neither splinters of glass nor anything to indicate that petrol had burned on the surface." He gathered eyewitness accounts disputing official assertions that freedom songs were being sung, political slogans chanted, and a warning to disperse given before the police opened

fire. (A government investigation later found that the police had lied.) The next day, he reported allegations by the Uitenhage Black Civic Organization that police had shot and killed people who were lying wounded on the ground, and had then placed stones beside their bodies to suggest that they had been throwing them.

"It was supposed to be an in-and-out thing," Qwelane told me. "But I saw that there was a hell of a story still developing, so I stayed. I ended up staying four weeks." The residents of Langa, the township where the shooting had occurred, and of the nearby township of KwaNobuhle were in an insurrectionary mood after the massacre. Both townships were sealed off by police roadblocks, memorial services were banned, all black policemen and their families were evacuated, and residents staged mass stay-aways from work. Mobs controlled the streets, especially at night, and Qwelane was soon the only journalist left on the scene. He had to work incognito, moving around on foot, taking no notes, doing his utmost to avoid being noticed either by police or by angry crowds. He was filing his stories over the phone, straight out of his head, and, unbeknownst to him, they were being run by the entire Argus group and picked up by newspapers around the world. Each phone he used went dead shortly after he used it and brought police swarming, but Qwelane kept moving, using different phones. When Bernardus Fourie, the South African ambassador to the United States, said on American television that cannibalism was taking place in the Uitenhage townships, Qwelane was in position to file a story citing numerous sources and headlined "CANNIBALISM REPORTS DENIED."

Qwelane saw his share of horrors, however. At the end of his first week in Langa, he estimated that ten people had been "burned to death by angry crowds in the last four days." His eyewitness account of the death of one township councillor, T. B. Kinikini, probably made such events more real than many of his readers were prepared for. But the most extraordinary story that Qwelane filed from Langa was the one headlined, in the Star 's Africa edition, "RELUCTANT HEADHUNTER'S NIGHT

OF TERROR." It described his being press-ganged into a mob that was going from house to house demanding that all able-bodied males join the search for a businessman it had decided to burn. The tone of the story was half farce, half nightmare as it told of Qwelane's marching around with the mob, praying that it would find no one to kill. That night, his prayers were answered: "Just as I began thinking there was no way out, reason prevailed. Our unseen commander suddenly considered the possibility of an encounter with the law, and wondered what the outcome would be. A murmur of voices, including mine, forecast dire consequences and after more talking we were ordered to disband, each on honorable discharge."

The next evening, Qwelane had an even more frightening experience. The mob came again to the house where he was staying, again looking for the businessman, but this time someone suddenly decided that the stranger, Qwelane, was the man it sought. "There were about two hundred men out there, with knives, spades, axes, and a jerrycan full of petrol," Qwelane recalled. "Some of them were shouting, 'Your time is up!' and 'You bastard!' and 'You've sold us out long enough!' They were holding on to me, and they were shining a big torch in my eyes, so that I couldn't see. I tried to stay calm and collected. It was no time to start feeling sorry for myself. I showed them my air ticket back to Johannesburg, and my press card—which almost made matters worse, because it mentions the Commissioner of Police on it, and somebody noticed that. What saved me was the people I was staying with. One is an ex-detainee, the other is a former Robben Island prisoner. The crowd decided that such people would not have a sellout in their house. But a mob is almost impossible to reason with, you know. It only takes one irresponsible accusation these days to seal your doom."

Qwelane nevertheless stayed on in Langa, chronicling the disintegration of state authority in the Uitenhage townships, the spreading of violent resistance to nearby "coloured" areas, and the squabbling that broke out between local political organizations and trade unions in the heat of the confrontation. His descriptions of the horrible living conditions in the Uitenhage

townships gave added context to the uprising; his report on the mass funeral in KwaNobuhle, where more than seventy thousand mourners turned out to bury twenty-nine dead, conveyed the scale and the focus of events; and his ongoing investigation of the massacre on March 21 continued to undermine police statements.

But it was the close call with the mob in Langa that seemed to remain with most of his colleagues—who often told me to "ask Jon about Uitenhage" or to look up the stories he had filed from there—as the scene that summed up the assignment. For it also summed up their own dilemma: how to mediate between their duties as newsmen, their powerful identification with the struggle for black liberation, and their understandable alarm, both personal and political, over the forms that struggle can take.

After Qwelane's harrowing stint in Uitenhage, the Star's editors rewarded him with a trip to Europe. As he recalls it, the trip was less than a life's dream come true. "They managed to get me a passport, so I thought I should go. Very few of the chaps can get passports, and it was a chance to get the word out." He went to London, Amsterdam, and Paris, filing travel pieces and columns (including one claiming that he could not relax in places where there were white street sweepers and white hotel porters, and white policemen who called him "sir," and concluding, "No, something is seriously wrong with overseas people"), and doing some public speaking, but mostly visiting exiles, many of them journalists or ex-journalists who were old friends.

Exile has been the fate of a dizzying number of black South African journalists. They live all over Africa, Europe, and America, teaching, writing, working in the outlawed liberation movements. Many fail to cope: Nat Nakasa threw himself out a window in New York; Can Themba drank himself to death in Swaziland. "Even the ones who are doing well seemed so homesick, so out of place," Qwelane told me. "The chap I stayed with in Paris got out and played some old jazz records that he used to love as a kid in Alexandra, and you never saw such pain in a

man's face. He's working in radio now. His kids speak French; they go to a French school."

Later that year, Qwelane visited the United States. "In Newark, New Jersey, we had a party the night before I was supposed to fly back," he told me. "There must have been fifteen exiles there, including Joe Gumede, who's my journalistic grandfather. You see, he brought Joe Thloloe into journalism, who, years later, brought me in. Joe Gumede works at the United Nations now. That was a great party—it went all night and I ended up missing my flight—but it was also so sad. Some of the guys were literally crying at the thought of mothers whom they had not seen in twenty-five years. They were all giving me messages to take home. They missed the ghetto. No, man, exile looks too sad."

Occasionally, Qwelane talks about the possibility of being forced to leave South Africa himself. On that June evening in his living room in Chiawelo Extension Two, he sighed, and said, "I think I'll only skip if I'm facing five years or more. That long in jail is just such a waste of time."

The student leader and his comrades didn't show up at Qwelane's that night. We watched The Golden Girls , a program that Qwelane loves—the only one he watches regularly besides The Cosby Show . He chuckled at every laugh line as the aging southern belle played by Rue McClanahan tried to decide whether to marry the dashing millionaire who had flown her to Atlanta in his private jet for dinner. Later, in the middle of a serious conversation about socialism and the Book of Exodus, with Sana still watching TV, Qwelane noticed something on the screen and interrupted himself. "It's Hagar!" he cried. "I love Hagar." We turned and watched. It was a commercial, a cartoon, with a Viking curmudgeon selling flashlight batteries.

It was nearly midnight when I finally rose to head back to town. An old black-and-white Tarzan movie was just starting. There was tribal dancing—Africans imitating birds in a furious mating dance—intercut with some glittering repartee among the khaki-clad white folk looking on. Jon and Sana saw me to my car

before Tarzan appeared. They told me—almost pleaded with me—to stop for nothing and no one until I was out of Soweto. I managed to follow their advice as far as the Army roadblock at the edge of the township, where I had no choice but to stop. The young white soldiers peered at me for a long moment, cradling their automatic rifles. They seemed frightened as they waved me on.