In the 1950s Jan de Klerk, the father of FW de Klerk and his predecessor by a generation in the apartheid government, railed against Trevor Huddleston, who was showing a pronounced contempt for the divisive racial policies of the day. "In the Middle Ages his type would have been burned at the stake," the elder De Klerk thundered. To him, Huddleston was a racetraitor, unpatriotically muddling apartheid's mission to segregate white and black.
A generation later, Donald Woods continued Huddleston's tradition: he broke racial ranks in favour of non-racialism. Although he was no Joe Slovo (the implacable strategist); although he was no Braam Fischer (who dissented against the Afrikaner establishment despite being born with its finest spoon in his mouth), Woods made worthy battle, primarily as the courageous editor of the Daily Dispatch in East London, in South Africa's Eastern Province, where some of the worst apartheid abuses occurred.
He is best known for his friendship with Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader who was killed in police custody in the Eastern Cape. Which raises another paradox: friendship between Biko, who was made out by the apartheid propagandists to be a rabid white-hater (which he never was) and Woods who, in De Klerk's book, ought to have toed a white party line. They were an odd couple.
Unlike many white liberals whose control freak instincts betrayed just how shaped they were by the apartheid racial hierarchies to which they were in theory opposed, Woods was as good a listener as a lecturer. This was how he learned from Biko, because he could see, which was no small feat in the white supremacist ethos of the time, that Steve Bantu Biko had much to teach.
All told, the life that Woods lived - especially his friendship with Biko - ought to be an extraordinary parable of inter-racial co-existence in the New South Africa. So one turns avidly to his memoir, Rainbow Nation Revisited: South Africa's Decade of Democracy. And, alas, having read it, one turns away with an enormous sense of anticlimax and disappointment.
Woods says in the book that Richard Attenborough, the irrepressible director of Cry Freedom, a powerful film based on the Woods-Biko friendship, was advised by voices in the liberation movement to tell the story from the white point of view, because blacks did not need to be told about the evils of apartheid. The important thing was to mobilise opinion in the white Western world, to bring pressure on Pretoria not merely to mend its ways, but to end them. This the film did admirably. But now that the dragon has been slayed, one might have hoped for the real dope, as it were, from Woods. What was it really like to inhabit a taboo-breaching friendship with the high priest of Black Consciousness at the height of that movement's influence in the second half of the 1970s?
Woods never really manages to move beyond averring admiration for Biko and meeting Biko's family members. He spends a lot of time telling his readers outright how moved he was to have been close to Biko and how much Biko influenced him; yet again Biko - as in the film - remains a ghostly figure. The most tangible impact that Biko seems to have had on Woods, according to the dry ink on these pages, is to secure from Woods an undertaking (duly fulfilled) to hire two Black Consciousness journalists on his newspaper. There must have been more to it than that.
The book conveys no significant sense of intellectual exchange and growth between the two men. I do not doubt that this exchange and growth occurred; it is just that Woods never lets the reader in on it. If the film de-centred Biko for at least arguably worthy reasons of international mobilisation, why does Woods now de-centre Biko all over again?
Instead of a profoundly valuable account of black-white comity in a high time of black-white polarisation, Woods gives us an amiable but meandering and ultimately trivial string of anecdote and random incident. Too many chapters begin with talk of his lecture tours; few references to these lectures even mention their substance. There is a boyish delight in the sheer bliss of travel. He tells at length of his request to his "New York lecture agent" (I had previously no idea that such an occupation existed) for a swansong in the fiftieth state of Alaska. "I had lectured in all the other forty-nine."
WHEN the book is not detailing his itinerary on the lecture circuit, it reads like a cordial travelogue of his return to old haunts after liberation came. That Woods and his family drive around South Africa freely where once he was banned is indeed a sign of the changes there, but even the most eager readers will tire of too much of this: "I spent the following week on a national flyabout, travelling back to Johannesburg, then to Cape Town, then to Durban, then back to East London, and my abiding impression of that whiparound of some 3,000 miles was of the staggering beauty of Cape Town." Biko and Woods and all the issues that intrigue us about them get lost in the idiom of a (mildly upmarket) Rough Guide to South Africa.
This is a memoir, so perhaps some digression is forgivable. But when Woods manages to shift from a discussion of the Boer War, through his favourite Boer War sculpture, to an extended discussion of the American icons at Mount Rushmore (it turns out his favourite sculptor also sculpted that), to a general discussion of heroism ("South Africa has long been a setting for heroic deeds"), and on to much talk of Gandhi and Churchill (now there's an odd couple), one fears that Woods has entirely lost the plot, if indeed he ever had one.
The further pity is that these meanderings apparently exhaust him, so that by the time he ventures to comment on the new South Africa, he merely regurgitates the going cliches. He speaks well of me and it is all the more embarrassing to say that the superficiality of his judgments reflects the fact that he remains an outsider. To say that he found that "standards were dropping in hospitals and clinics all over the country," paints a false picture of previously alleged high standards, while in fact, in entirely separate paragraphs which never coherently come together with these others, Woods himself acknowledges the weight of the apartheid legacy in creating the current difficulties. Similarly, to say that "official corruption was also on the increase in the 1990s" is to ignore that fact - of which Woods in particular ought to be keenly aware - that what has increased is government transparency in exposing corruption, (something that is not very much in evidence in Europe) as well as the media's new freedom to report fearlessly on it.
Woods is a good man whose admirable life lends itself to a far better book.
Kader Asmal is Education Minister in the South African Government and co-author with Louise Asmal and Ronald Suresh Roberts of Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid's Criminal Governance