n Trevor Grundy
A strange case of mistaken identity After being caught-up in a Machiavellian political exercise known as Detente between black-ruled Zambia and apartheid South Africa in the early 1970s, Trevor Grundy found work in 1976 as a journalist at the Star newspaper in Johannesburg. In this excerpt from his new book, Call Me Comrade, he tells what happened when a woman took him to a clandestine ANC gathering to celebrate Nelson Mandela Photo: Adarsh Nayar)
A
pril 20, 1976, Johannesburg’s Hotel Elizabeth, the drinking den for people who worked for the Star, the city’s biggest-selling newspaper. I was telling a group of cynical white journalists how I’d represented the London Financial Times and BBC’s Focus on Africa while I was working in Zambia just a few months earlier. “So what you doing on the Fruit and Veg desk at the Star?” quipped an enormous one-eyed bullyboy, who specialised in the coverage of the country’s true religions – rugby and cricket. (Fruit and Veg Desk was the nickname for the paper’s business and finance department.) How could I start to explain what had happened to me in Lusaka? I told him that Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda had approved my transfer from the Times of Zambia to the Lusaka office of the Johannesburg-controlled Argus Africa News Service (AANS) because I had a good
Trevor grundy in the newsroom of The Standard in Dar es Salaam in February 1970.
grasp of life in Zambia, and this was the age of détente between the Black North and the White South. Kaunda was a big supporter of Jonas Savimbi and his Angolan freedom movement UNITA, but when it was revealed that the South African Army was fighting
12 ColdType | Mid-March 2020 | www.coldtype.net
alongside UNITA to stop the Marxist MPLA taking over the country, students rioted and threatened Kaunda’s presidency because of his tacit support for apartheid. After that, I was no longer any use to either side, so I was given the chop and put on a plane to Johannesburg on February 25. Reuters correspondent Fred Bridgland had given me a copy of Let History Judge, a book about Stalin by the Russian writer Roy Medvedev as a parting gift as I left Lusaka. But the customs officer at Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport almost had a heart attack when he saw it and accused me of being a communist, so I was held in an airport prison in a room not much bigger than a cupboard for a week while my entry form was processed in Pretoria.
