Shaun de Waal
Raeford Daniel, who died last week, aged 66, of a heart attack, had a long and distinguished career in the South African press. As a critic he accomplished the greatest of the critic’s tasks: helping to shape our communal artistic consciousness.
He started his journalistic career at The Friend in Bloemfontein in the 1950s, and later worked for The Star, The Rand Daily Mail (for nearly two decades), The Citizen, and The Weekly Mail. It was in 1990, on this paper, then mutating from The Weekly Mail into The Daily Mail and back again, that I met him. We became good friends and remained so after he returned somewhat reluctantly to The Citizen, where he had worked since the closure of The Rand Daily Mail.
The 30-year gap between us did not matter at all; when the proprietors of a favourite coffee shop mistook us for father and son, I think we were both flattered.
He could be exasperating, both as a colleague and as a friend. He could hold up conferences (or a casual conversation) for half an hour with anecdotes about people whose names one barely recognised, and the administrative duties of an arts editor were not something he handled with relish.
Yet as a theatre (or ballet or film or book) critic he was the consummate professional, bringing more care and knowledge to a review than most critics can command. But he was never precious about his copy: he could write witty, erudite stories with great speed – hammering them out with two fingers – and was willing to add or subtract as the need arose.
He had an exceptional sense of what a play could mean, of whether its potential as a work of art had been fully realised or not. He championed Athol Fugard in the Sixties and protest theatre in the Eighties – though when it became dully didactic he said so, as kindly as possible.
He was no detached observer but, by virtue of his almost priestly commitment to the theatre, a deeply involved participant. His reviews were always generous, sometimes over-generous; he identified with the people on stage and behind it, and he was incapable of aggression or scorn.
In person, he was gentle and playful, a delightful conversationalist, overflowing with ideas and opinions formed by a lifetime of eclectic reading and a theological love of argumentation. But he was also paradoxical: on the one hand, there were the luxuries he refused to eschew; on the other, there was his blithe self-neglect.
Yet his dishevelled exterior cloaked a mind of supple elegance. The breadth of his understanding and the depth of his sympathies are qualities I, for one, will always aspire to emulate.