David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
One day, no doubt, my grandson will ask me: “Where were you when Nelson Mandela was released?” I will reply: “I was there, my boy! I was there.” And he will say: “Don’t cry, grandpa. He did live an awfully long time!”
“It’s not that,” I will say, irritably brushing away the tears. “It’s just that .” And I will look down at his anxious face, turn away and morosely mutter: “You’ll understand when you’re bigger.”
I was there, you see, but .Well, I had to be there. I was a journalist and it was going to be the biggest bloody story journalism had ever known. (Excuse me if I use a few expletives, but I’ll tell this one better if I pretend I’m propped up at the bar.)
Consider it. When did the Beatles discover they were more popular than Christ? Hell, that was almost before they had colour TV. Geo-stationary telecommunications satellites? Sputnik had barely flown overhead! And there were four of them and only one of him.
Maybe, just maybe, more people have tuned into a World Cup final, but that’s 22. He was just one man. For concentrated interest, if stories are to be measured by numbers, by ratings, by circulation . to heck with Moses. The birth of Jesus doesn’t rank. Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, Muhammad Ali, the other Madonna? Forget it! No, he must have been the most popular man ever.
And, after 27 years, he was going to walk out of that living tomb. It had to be the biggest human interest story the world had ever seen. This was reality, big time! It was going to be, to put it frankly, an orgasmic moment. And I was going to report it!
So I had made preparations. Nothing serious. But I knew the city like the back of my hand. He was going to speak from the City Hall, to the crowd on the Grand Parade – the old parade ground built by the Dutch, back in the 18th century. I had booked a room, on the fifth floor of a hotel tucked discreetly around the corner. My computer was open on the table, switched on, all systems go for the writing and transmission of my doubtlessly golden prose.
And now here I was, Zeiss binoculars to hand, Olympus micro-cassette recorder in my pocket (in case the man offered any whispered confidences), slap bang opposite the gates of Victor Verster prison, waiting for the man.
Well, everyone knows what happened. Everyone saw what happened. Nearly everyone, that is. My problem was that I was “our man on the spot”. All that I know for certain is that a voice cried out, “There he is!” There was something like a collective sigh, a woman’s voice let out a piercing scream behind me and pandemonium broke out as the camera people stampeded.
By the time I got to the spot where I thought I had had a glimpse of him, all that was left for me was the receding roar of his motor escort. The rest of the world had it all, through the lenses on board the helicopters clattering overhead and the mobile lift behind me. But on the ground! Forget it.
“The speech!” I thought to myself, as I galloped for my car. The decisive moment? The photographers could have it! I was a wordsmith. This was the man who had made the statement from the dock at Rivonia, one of the great speeches of our, or anybody else’s, era. He’d had more than quarter of a century to prepare a few more words. The Gettysburg Address? Forget it!
By the time I had made it through the traffic jams, back into the city, it was about heart-attack time. I hardly glanced at the crowd in front of City Hall, sprinting up to my hotel room for a hurried check-in call to London.
“How much time?” I panted.
“You’ve got 20 minutes,” (or something like that) they said.
Down I sprinted, around the corner and burrowed into the heaving crowd. It was so tight I had to struggle to get my wrist up to read my watch.
Fifteen minutes to deadline. The sound system seemed to have packed up. No, he was still inside, nobody had seen him. What was I going to write? Colour! I needed colour!
Squirming my way free of the crowd I rushed around the side of it.
Paramedics working on bodies. I looked around in bewilderment. The boom of police shotguns. Instinctively I reached for my wallet and my ID. I’d been pick- pocketed!
Ten minutes to deadline. Back I pounded, around the corner, up to the room.
I stared blankly at the blank screen. The telephone rang.
“Where are you?” asked the foreign editor, 9E600km away.
“In my hotel around the corner.”
“You’d better get down there. He’s walking out on to the balcony. We’re watching him now!”
Down, around the corner, diving into the sea of flesh again, struggling to release my pen and pad above my head, I stared open-mouthed as he began his speech … I couldn’t hear a word! The mother of all speeches was lost in the roar of a human sea.
I cobbled something together, of course. But a pro would spot the panic in the introduction: “If you don’t have an intro, give them the time.” And there it is, in the cuttings: “It was 4.16pm South African time on Sunday, February 11 1990, when he finally came out of prison after 27 years .”
When I got back to London I bought a Sony mini-TV with a built-in video recorder and, after that, carried it around with me in the bottom of my shoulder bag.
Next time history came knocking, I knew where reality was to be found.