Why the disagreeable RW Johnson will outlive his critics

I mean disagreeable not, as his legions of detractors do, in the modern sense of being unlikeable, unpleasant or offensive. I mean it in the word’s original, 15th-century sense: not agreeing, not consenting, not acquiescing. For the remarkable political scientist and journalist who died this week in Cape Town, known everywhere professionally as RW, was the ultimate contrarian.

I had some 40 years of experience of this, maintaining a firm friendship with him despite our rarely agreeing on politics, the subject so close to our hearts, as well as the very substance of our daily working lives. Our first encounter might well have been our last. In the late 1980s, newly arrived at Oxford from Durban on a mid-career journalism fellowship, I sought out Bill to supervise my thesis.

He was the obvious choice. British-born but raised in Durban, he had fled the country after graduating from Natal University, only a step ahead of the security police. Initially at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he went on to forge a niche at Magdalen College as a politics don of formidable reputation.

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He had extensive contacts within the anti-apartheid movement and the Labour opposition – he drove the Oxford campaign that denied Margaret Thatcher the customary accolade of an honorary doctorate – as well as having a consuming passion for all matters South African. But it immediately became clear that an opinionated journalist and an imperious academic, both of whom were sublimely certain of their own rightness, would do a great deal of head-butting. Bill wisely declined the honour, and I found a supervisor elsewhere.

Instead he became a close family friend. We played bridge together, and he was best man – indeed, the only man besides the priest and me – at my tiny wedding in the cavernous Magdalen chapel. And many an Oxford night was spent in late, wine-fuelled discussion, dissecting the cascade of events triggered by FW de Klerk’s unexpected accession to the presidency in September 1989, culminating little more than four months later in the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela.

Yet, whether as journalists or academics, we all wanted to be there, on the ground in South Africa, as the next chapters unfolded. But already the winds of political conformity were blowing hard. Bill could – and often did – boast of the movers and shakers who had survived the weekly one-on-one grilling of his politics, philosophy and economics tutorials at Magdalen.

Five had gone on to become Cabinet ministers or chancellors of the Exchequer, two had become editors ofThe Economist, and another became prime minister of Australia. Yet despite his academic credentials, and the fact that, at 52, he had readily surrendered tenure at one of the world’s elite universities, there was no place for a sharp-tongued, critically minded white man at any university in the new South Africa. Instead, he became the first director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, leading it for six years.

It was the perfect base from which to advance what still seemed possible: a South Africa that transformed, as history required, without abandoning constitutional liberalism in the classical British tradition – individual rights, equality before the law, restraints on state power and accountable government – within the disciplines of a broadly market-based economy. As always, we differed on almost everything. No matter how critical I was about the ANC in my writing, at heart I was an indomitable Afro-optimist, confident that a constitutionally grounded South Africa drawing on the talents of all its people would be a world-beater.

Bill, in the opposite corner, was an incorrigible ANC pessimist of Chicken Licken proportions. Rubbing shoulders with so many exiled ANC luminaries had convinced him that the party, on the whole, was a gang of Stalinist-inclined hardliners, many of them intellectually mediocre, entirely ill-prepared for the mechanics of governing, and that South Africa would descend into the thuggery, theft and decline that marked most of post-colonial Africa. Gallingly, Bill turned out to be right and I wrong.

Bill, provocative by nature and accustomed to the rough-and-tumble of British public debate, did not hold back in his excoriating attacks on the ANC government. Even Helen Suzman, still involved in the foundation that bore her name, at times became annoyed at what she perceived to be needlessly goading broadsides. “I do wish he’d watch his words a little more carefully,” she once remarked to me, which was a little rich coming from a woman whose fame as a parliamentarian rested on the verbal flailing she inflicted on her political opponents.

It was not only that Bill’s words rankled an increasingly defensive ANC, especially the thin-skinned Thabo Mbeki who knew him from the exile years, during which, at different times, they also dated the same woman. The party was also becoming anxious about the influence he might exert abroad, given his international reach and reputation. At a time when virtually all of the foreign media was ‘on message’ about a benign ANC building a contented Rainbow Nation under Mandela’s saintly oversight, Bill’s doom-laden forecasts cut sharply across the prevailing narrative.

An increasingly compliant local media took their cue from the governing party, and he became the target of often vitriolic attacks, accused of being unpatriotic, racist and trapped in a colonial mindset. Nor did Bill do himself any favours. In 2010, with the world’s attention fixed on South Africa during the closing days of the football World Cup that it hosted, he ignited a firestorm with an exceedingly ill-judged blog for the prestigiousLondon Review of Books, to which he was a regular contributor on a wonderfully esoteric range of topics.

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