Prelude to "In Search of the White South African"

 

In 1985, I was having a mid-life crisis.  I was about to turn 40, I'd been laid off from a very interesting writing and editing job (more on that someday), and I was getting divorced.  A summer class in Journalism Writing Enrichment at Metropolitan State University of Denver taught by Greg Pearson, a former Rocky Mountain News reporter and inspiring lecturer, got me thinking about a career as a "gonzo journalist" in the mold of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, who wrote first-person, subjective documentaries.    

With ideas and encouragement from my close friend, Jim Bachman, with whom I was living at the time, I came up with a plan to do freelance journalism and photography in South Africa during the waning years of Apartheid.  There were some impediments to this idea.  It was dangerous for foreign journalists to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in South Africa, but mainly the paranoid white South African government wasn't too keen on granting visas to unknown journalists who might write negative stories about their strange system of racial separation. I could have applied for a regular tourist visa but getting caught by the authorities with a portable typewriter, my controversial first-person accounts, and two 35mm cameras could have gotten me booted out of the country. 

Therefore, through one of my former grad school geography professors at the University of Montana, I contacted a prominent American geographer, Harm de Blij (1935–2014), a Professor at Michigan State University, etc. who was a geography editor for ABC's "Good Morning America" and an editor of National Geographic magazine.  De Blij also happened to be an expert on South African wines and, most importantly, he was friends with the director of the South African tourist bureau (SATOUR).  Through these contacts, I was able to get a visa as a "Guest of SATOUR" with the idea that I would write travel stories extolling the beauty of South Africa which was being hammered by boycotts and the unwillingness of foreigners to spend vacation dollars in a country which had become an international pariah.

My 1986-87 South African visa was obtained through a bit of chicanery.

I even received a free business class ticket from New York to Johannesburg from SATOUR and a couple more free flights once I got there.  Frankly, it was all a scam on my part. I had no interest in writing the standard, gushy travel stories that SATOUR was hoping for.  Instead, I wanted to experience the natural beauty of South African while writing about its people and what they thought about their government and society.    

In my opinion, the project was a success except, of course, financially.  I had intended to continue my writing, next time in Northern Ireland, where my Irish Catholic last name but Scots-Irish Protestant mother gave me a natural entree into that troubled society.  I spent a week in Northern Ireland on the way back from South Africa and felt I was on to a good idea as both Protestants and Catholics were very open to sharing their thoughts and experiences with me.  

When I got back to the US in the summer of 1987, I accepted a part-time, one-year teaching position in the Geography Department at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania.  The part-time position provided survival income and time to write up my South African stories.  However, I ran into brick walls trying to crash into a crowded field of professional journalists.  My unorthodox approach to story-telling (I included the unedited, racist rants of some white South Africans - I wanted to provide them a forum to show their true "colors") and the subterfuge I'd used to get into South Africa, didn't help.  For example, The Dallas Morning News initially had an interest in my stories but when they found out about my connection to SATOUR, they dropped me like a hot potato.

In the end, two "alternative papers" in Georgia and New York bought the first story I wrote.  As I recall, I received $200 from Southline in Atlanta and $150 from the Ithaca Times, not exactly the kind of money (even in 1987) that a journalist needed to survive and pay his travel expenses. So, I moth-balled my journalistic ambitions and switched my objectives to international development work.  The first step was a summer in Quebec in 1988 where I took 12 weeks of French immersion courses which I figured would help me get work in the French-speaking countries of Africa.  This effort led to a stint with the US Peace Corps in French-speaking Niger, but that's a story for another time. 

I have uploaded a scan of the South Africa story from Southline but the small print is unreadable in the format of this blog.  Fortunately, I've previously scanned most of my writings from that time and have uploaded the original manuscript which I sent out to newspapers in hopes of getting published.  Please excuse the 1980s-vintage dot matrix printer.  I also included scans of the photos Southline published.  They aren't the best as they were originally 35mm slides which Southline converted to black and white halftones.  I still have hundreds of slides I shot in southern Africa and hope to eventually convert some into digital files so I can share them on this blog.