Speech delivered at Ken Owens 80th birthday celebration: 21 February 2015

1. Kens earliest years were spent in Pretoria. At night, during the Second World

War, with his father away in North Africa, his brother and he would say their

prayers, hoping that the war wouldnt end before they were old enough to fly

Spitfires.

2. On demobilisation, the family moved to the Klaserie area, now a game reserve.

I later heard stories of an untamed childhood with a pet lion and a pet giraffe

called Shorty. While his mother was a practical woman and a renowned rally

driver, his father was distant, and abusive of the farm labourers. Exercising the

privileges of race, unfairly and without mercy in the late 1940s.

3. Ken went to Lydenburg Hoerskool, where a growing political consciousness led

him to insist on the application of the United Partys dual medium education

policy that every white child should be taught in his mother tongue. This led to

resentment amongst his Afrikaans classmates and he tells of having his lips cut

with razorblades whenever he insisted on his rights. He recounts watching the

teachers get drunk on the night that the results of the 1948 election were

announced and one of them taunting him saying nou sal ons julle engelse

vasvat. He soon realised that what was happening to him at the hands of his

classmates was no different to what his father was doing to the farmworkers.

4. Before Ken arrived, the schools achievements were unspectacular, but that

changed during Kens time there, especially since one of his classmates was

Andre Brink. Ken and Andre vied for the school prizes. Although Ken won an

English essay award, Andre got the higher mark for English in the matric exam,

while Ken took the honours in Maths. They both got numerous distinctions.

5. Kens younger brother recently described to me that he would sidle up to them

talking at break, hoping to catch some intellectual pearls, only to find that in

actual fact they were only talking about girls.

6. Kens early passions are legend. When I first met him as a ten year old in 1985,

the stories were recounted jokingly.

7. He told us how when he had drunk too much at work, he would use his tie as a

cradle to lift his arm with glass in hand to his mouth.

8. Once, working in the Reuters office in London responsible for transmitting wire

reports by telex to the South African newspapers, he went on a bender, and

realising he was unable to do his job, hit upon the idea of painstakingly typing

a message, which he looped and taped onto the machine saying this service

has closed down until further notice, before chucking the typewriters down the

stairwell and heading for the nearest pub.

9. We heard that one night while motorcycling in central Africa with a friend, their

headlight failed. Having sat on the side of the road for half an hour trying to fix

it, they resolved that the moon was full and there was a clear white line in the

middle of the road which they could follow with ease. They hit another

motorcycle coming the other way, whose headlight had also failed and were

doing the exactly same thing.

10. While the truth of these stories was reinforced by the deep crevices across his

misshapen face - anybody could see they were no ordinary wrinkles of

experience the stories bore no resemblance to the man we had met.

11. There were no signs of his notorious temper. To this day, I have never seen

him raise his voice in anger. Harry, my younger brother, rightly describes him

as an island of sanity and security in our turbulent post-divorce world.

12. He was quiet, calm and rational. He taught me valuable life lessons. I vividly

remember him one day explaining to me in the garage in our house in Maple

Drive that one should return each tool to the toolbox before using another. One

of his mantras (to which I continue to aspire) was do it once, do it right.

13. This was probably borne out of a life lived under the discipline of the deadline

as a newspaper correspondent, a job he started on a whim one day after a brief

flirtation with law that ended when he awoke late on the day of his first attorneys

professional exam. I pause to remark that the thought of Ken as an advocate is

a terrifying one.

14. He walked into the Pretoria News one day and persuaded them to give him a

job, in the belief that if there was one thing that he could do it was write.

15. And boy, Ken can write. One of the singular pleasures of preparing this speech

has been the opportunity to read in full the decade of columns published in his

book, These Times, in 1993.

16. Given his particular habit of publicly laying into his close friends, the first thing

that struck me was that it would be a wonder if anyone actually came to this

party!

17. Jenny Crwys Williams said of him in 1989:

Controversial, provocative, scathing, unrepentant, Ken Owen has

enlivened South African journalism for over 20 years . His perversity

is legend; so, too, are his writing skills.

18. On retirement in 1996 Ken himself told Mark Gevisser

you dont practise journalism by backing down. Its a confrontational way

of life; an endlessly abrasive life ...

19. Gevisser commented:

There is no other media personality as mythic.

His weekly columns, bilious and brilliant, have defined South African

political commentary for over a decade: they were dark,

uncompromising, disorienting, vituperative. You read them not only

because they were the most literate and beautifully crafted sentences in

all the land, but because they were, like life itself, so exasperating and

so multivalent. They made their author an utterly credible character, an

almost novelistic anti-hero whose moods and malevolences, not to

mention passions, were manifest. The turns and tides of Kens bile were

more compelling than any soap opera.

20. He was called irascible in the memoirs of both Alex Boraine and Tony Leon.

21. In one of his columns, Ken himself admitted that his approach was one of brute

intransigence total war in debate

22. That may be so: but the prose was beautiful: In 1987, a list of recommended

reading was published by the Government. Ken had this to say:

The mind of the Chief Censor, Home Affairs Minister Stoffel Botha, is a

place of wonder, filled with beauty and wisdom. I know this to be true

because I have begun to read the official guide to the labyrinths of

Stoffels mind.

An understanding of Stoffels mind has become a matter of survival to

every editor since Stoffels views, as shaped by a panel of anonymous

advisers, displaced the laws that previously bound the Press. What

Stoffel regards as subversive is subversive; what Stoffel thinks may

promote revolution, promotes revolution; what Stoffel thinks may foment

hostile feelings, foments hostility.

In the past it was only necessary for newspapers, if they wish to avoid

prosecution in the courts, to know what the law said and obey it. There

was a law that forbade sedition, and another that forbade Treason. There

was a law against quoting anything said by Oliver Tambo or Joe Slovo,

even when they spoke the truth.

Fortunately there was no law against quoting nationalist politicians, even

when they lied.

23. The following week he was at it again, having read one of the books on the list:

Let me confess at once that I have fallen into criminal behaviour. My only

excuse - I recognise it is not a legal defence is that I was urged into

crime by the chief censor, Home Affairs Minister Stoffel Botha.

24. Who could forget Owens Laws of Social Dynamics (28 November 1985)

The purpose of the law is to create criminals in order to keep the courts

busy and the jails full, but too much law creates an oversupply of

criminals

This is Owens first law of social dynamics and it is a hard lesson to drive

into bureaucratic heads. But we are making progress.

South Africas best source of criminals has in the past been the laws

forbidding people to come to town. It is important to note that the laws

did not prevent people from coming, they merely created criminals

enabling us to convict and imprison 200 000 or 300 000 every year.

The system served to keep the prison warders and the law clerks off the

streets and, if one recalls Crossroads, it kept policemen busy pulling

away the plastic sheets under which old ladies sheltered from the rain.

25. Ken grappled with the big issues.

26. He undertook a detailed discussion of the rules for civil disobedience (8 June

1987).

The point of civil disobedience to unjust law is that it generates great

moral force which is vitiated if the dissident tries to escape the

consequences of his actions. There can be no taint of ulterior motive.

27. On the role of freedom of the press, answering Lenins question Why should

any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions

calculated to embarrass the government?

why indeed? There are two reasons. The first is that in a democracy the

general populace has a right to information so that it can make

reasonably sound judgments about its governance; the second is that

the populace has a right to make its opinions known and to learn the

opinions of others.

Both these rights the right to know and the right to be heard are

vested in the people, not in the Press itself.

28. Kens big bugbear, was communism. Even if you found it hard to share his

panic, it was worth the reading. Some of you may recognise the imagery in

more recent letters to the Business Day. On 11 June 1990, he wrote

As I have said before, the SACP is the rider, the ANC is horse, and until

the rider can be properly identified until the SACP members step into

the light it will be very difficult for anybody, liberal or nationalist, to deal

with the ANC. After all, what sort of fool bargains with a horse?

29. So Ken is still riding that particular hobbyhorse.

30. His other nemeses were the liberal universities. Even while both his wife and

two of his stepchildren were at Wits and UCT, he laid into both the academics

and the radical students:

When the bullyboys came for Piet Koornhof, the liberals remained silent

because Koornhof was not a liberal; when they came for Buthelezi, the

liberals remained silent because he was an unacceptable kind of Zulu

liberal; when they came for [Connor Cruise] OBrien who was

indisputably a liberal, the South African liberals, such as were left, were

mainly cowering in their bunkers. 16 March 1987

31. But he offered an olive branch in the Introduction to his book in 1993:

The universities have since reverted to the liberal standard which, in my

view they had for a time abandoned, and all that is left of the row is a

lingering public impression that I am an enemy, rather than a friend, of

the institutions of learning. Such is the cost of winning an argument in

public

32. And Ken also felt that he had won the larger debate around the end of apartheid.

He announced victory on 22 August 1992. Characteristically, he started with a

recognition of past losses:

To be South African is of course to be fashioned by apartheid. To be a

white South African is to have been shaped by bitterness, by humiliation,

by guilt, by dogged defiance, and yes, by a suppressed angry pride. To

be a liberal South African is to have been shaped by defeat.

33. But then follows: President de Klerk simply appropriated the entire liberal

agenda. The liberals had lost every battle and won the war.

34. I think that when it came, he was well pleased with the new South Africa.

Certainly, he would have been glad that this wish in 1989 came true:

When President de Klerk and his Broeders settle down to negotiate with

black South Africans, I pray they leave me out of any cosy special

arrangements they may try to make for white folks. Ive seen enough

funny constitutions to know that, for a minority, special status is a trap

and a delusion.

Racial arrogance tends to blind Africas white minorities to a simple truth:

in a world where all men are created unequal, and spend the rest of their

lives striving to make themselves even less equal, the principal of

equality before the law is the best shield of the weak. Equality, in fact, is

the best deal a minority can get.

Speaking for myself as a minority of one, I shall feel safest if I can rely

on the rights which the majority demands for itself. For me, the focus of

negotiation should not be on the special rights of the minorities, but on

the universal rights to be enjoyed by all South Africans.

If, in the negotiations to come, [black South Africans] can be persuaded

to create a state that guarantees their own liberty if they set up the

institutions of a modern liberal state I shall gladly snuggle for safety

into the arms of Mother Africa. [30 October 1989: Equality and Mother

Africa]

35. While Ken has of course continued some of his battles in the letters pages of

the local and national pages, one finds perspicacious gems and reminders of

continuity.

35.1 2 May 1988

At some point in the middle of an official briefing on President Bothas

plans to create nine more councils for Africans, I began to see how

change will come in South Africa not by revolution but by corruption.

35.2 17 April 1989

Corruption has rotted the very woof and warp of South African life. we

all know what has been happening: Eschel Rhoodie and the crooked

accounting in government, the first class freebie trips abroad; deputy

minister Hennie Van der Walt stealing trust funds; the officials giving

each other free Krugerrands at a party; the lavish parties to celebrate

such mundane events as the opening of a toll road; the fleets of

Mercedes Benzes in the basement of the SABC; the funny banks that

pay 30 percent or more in interest; the greed maddened crowds chasing

after riches in packets of rotten milk; the bankrupt State President; the

lies to Parliament; the Italian criminals in high places; the leaking of

government statistics to favoured people; the property deals; the father-

and-son government contracts; and so much, so much more.

These are mere symptoms of a deeper rot. At the heart of all these

examples lies a failure of the law to hold the allegiance of the people, a

failure of the authority of the state. The people of this country, excepting

a couple of million whites, hold the state and its agents in profound

contempt. That is, of course, the inevitable consequence of replacing the

rule of law with the rule of men.

35.3 12 April 1992

The Nats will soon be handing over to the ANC a wondrous machine,

an immense vacuum cleaner that sucks up money from people who work

for a living, and dispenses it to those whose work is simply to dispense

money.

35.4 In May 2009, Ken wrote the cover story of the Financial Mail setting out

a now-familiar theme that is even more relevant 6 years later.

The events at Polokwane disclosed to us that under SAs flawed

constitution, power lies not with the electorate, nor in parliament, nor

even in the presidency. It lies in the labyrinthine recesses of Luthuli

House where the ANC leaders plot and connive, and decide who will be

deployed to what job, and for how long.

The process is hidden from public view, reducing the entire constitutional

paraphernalia of elections, parliamentary debates and traditions, and

checks and balances to marginal relevance. The public clash of ideas

between government and opposition in an open forum where (if I may

resort to one of the noblest phrases of parliamentary democracy)

strangers may be present is little more than public theatre.

Parliamentarians pontificate, the opposition denounces and cajoles, the

media solemnly records public statements and gathers comments, all

the while hiding the brutal fact that the real debates take place in secret

at Luthuli House. To discover what happens there requires not simply

press freedom but something like Kremlinology, a reading of political tea

leaves.

36. What I searched for, almost in vain, however, was something personal.

37. I found only two references to Kens family.

38. First in June 1980 on being arrested under a section 205 subpoena for

information arising from an investigation into the Smit murder, he recounted the

support received from various sources including a woman writer whom I have

admired for half my life (and for whose praises I would gladly go to jail several

times over). He continued:

That was touching but it did not quite offset one very nasty consequence

of the fuss. In the mind of a 13-year old boy [Thats his son, Peter], I

soon discovered, the threat of a jail sentence evokes the most terrifying

images of Papillon eating cockroaches and pacing a cell with ever-

weakening stride. So my son worried (silently, I am proud to say) for the

10 days that the uncertainty lasted

39. And in 1988, he wrote:

I saw Cry Freedom last week in Londons Leceister Square where it was

playing to half-empty houses mainly, I would guess, to intelligent young

people whose interest in South Africa outweighs the failings of Sir

Richard Attenboroughs worst made movie

It is frankly a bad film: a fictionalised documentary that plods its way

through the sins of apartheid and the brutalities of the nationalist

regimen. But the effect on the audience is simply shattering. When the

movie ended half of them simply sat staring ahead and sat and sat

and sat. In the end they wandered out shattered and bemused. One

woman wondered towards Piccadilly sobbing all the way.

40. But none of this tells us much about Ken, or what he thinks personal happiness

or contentment might consist of, either generally or for him personally. There is

little glimpse of what fruits the ideals that he fights for might bring.

41. You see, unlike Andre Brink, who struggled with those questions in his writing

all his life, Ken found it unnecessary to deal with that issue.

42. The key, I think lies, in this. On more than one occasion, he has said that Alan

Paton gave South African Liberals (I think he meant him, personally) what he

calls a text to live by.

43. According to Alan Paton, the source of this text was (perhaps appropriately)

William the Silent. Perhaps even more appropriately, Ken thinks the true author

was Charles the Bold.

44. The text was this: It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, and it is

not necessary to succeed in order to persevere. [corrected]

45. Those of us who have lived with Ken for a long time, his wife of almost thirty

years, his six children his twelve grandchildren, have learned that underneath

this ascetic outlook, the surly appearance and the dry humour lies a man for

whom the requisites of human life and enjoyment, the very essence of humanity

for which one must fight with all ones being, are so sacred that they can barely

be mentioned in public - certainly, not in his writing. They are self-evident, not

to be trivialised by sentimentality.

Richard Moultrie

February 2015

1. Kens earliest years were spent in Pretoria. At night, during the Second World War, with his father away in North Africa, his brother and he would say their prayers, hoping that the war wouldnt end before they were old enough to fly Spitfires.2. On demobilisation, the family moved to the Klaserie area, now a game reserve. I later heard stories of an untamed childhood with a pet lion and a pet giraffe called Shorty. While his mother was a practical woman and a renowned rally driver, his f...3. Ken went to Lydenburg Hoerskool, where a growing political consciousness led him to insist on the application of the United Partys dual medium education policy that every white child should be taught in his mother tongue. This led to resentment am...4. Before Ken arrived, the schools achievements were unspectacular, but that changed during Kens time there, especially since one of his classmates was Andre Brink. Ken and Andre vied for the school prizes. Although Ken won an English essay award, A...5. Kens younger brother recently described to me that he would sidle up to them talking at break, hoping to catch some intellectual pearls, only to find that in actual fact they were only talking about girls.6. Kens early passions are legend. When I first met him as a ten year old in 1985, the stories were recounted jokingly.7. He told us how when he had drunk too much at work, he would use his tie as a cradle to lift his arm with glass in hand to his mouth.8. Once, working in the Reuters office in London responsible for transmitting wire reports by telex to the South African newspapers, he went on a bender, and realising he was unable to do his job, hit upon the idea of painstakingly typing a message, w...9. We heard that one night while motorcycling in central Africa with a friend, their headlight failed. Having sat on the side of the road for half an hour trying to fix it, they resolved that the moon was full and there was a clear white line in the m...10. While the truth of these stories was reinforced by the deep crevices across his misshapen face - anybody could see they were no ordinary wrinkles of experience the stories bore no resemblance to the man we had met.11. There were no signs of his notorious temper. To this day, I have never seen him raise his voice in anger. Harry, my younger brother, rightly describes him as an island of sanity and security in our turbulent post-divorce world.12. He was quiet, calm and rational. He taught me valuable life lessons. I vividly remember him one day explaining to me in the garage in our house in Maple Drive that one should return each tool to the toolbox before using another. One of his mantra...13. This was probably borne out of a life lived under the discipline of the deadline as a newspaper correspondent, a job he started on a whim one day after a brief flirtation with law that ended when he awoke late on the day of his first attorneys pro...14. He walked into the Pretoria News one day and persuaded them to give him a job, in the belief that if there was one thing that he could do it was write.15. And boy, Ken can write. One of the singular pleasures of preparing this speech has been the opportunity to read in full the decade of columns published in his book, These Times, in 1993.16. Given his particular habit of publicly laying into his close friends, the first thing that struck me was that it would be a wonder if anyone actually came to this party!17. Jenny Crwys Williams said of him in 1989:Controversial, provocative, scathing, unrepentant, Ken Owen has enlivened South African journalism for over 20 years . His perversity is legend; so, too, are his writing skills.

18. On retirement in 1996 Ken himself told Mark Gevisseryou dont practise journalism by backing down. Its a confrontational way of life; an endlessly abrasive life ...

19. Gevisser commented:There is no other media personality as mythic. His weekly columns, bilious and brilliant, have defined South African political commentary for over a decade: they were dark, uncompromising, disorienting, vituperative. You read them not only because they were the most literate and beautifully crafte...

20. He was called irascible in the memoirs of both Alex Boraine and Tony Leon.21. In one of his columns, Ken himself admitted that his approach was one of brute intransigence total war in debate22. That may be so: but the prose was beautiful: In 1987, a list of recommended reading was published by the Government. Ken had this to say:The mind of the Chief Censor, Home Affairs Minister Stoffel Botha, is a place of wonder, filled with beauty and wisdom. I know this to be true because I have begun to read the official guide to the labyrinths of Stoffels mind.An understanding of Stoffels mind has become a matter of survival to every editor since Stoffels views, as shaped by a panel of anonymous advisers, displaced the laws that previously bound the Press. What Stoffel regards as subversive is subversive;...In the past it was only necessary for newspapers, if they wish to avoid prosecution in the courts, to know what the law said and obey it. There was a law that forbade sedition, and another that forbade Treason. There was a law against quoting anything...Fortunately there was no law against quoting nationalist politicians, even when they lied.

23. The following week he was at it again, having read one of the books on the list:Let me confess at once that I have fallen into criminal behaviour. My only excuse - I recognise it is not a legal defence is that I was urged into crime by the chief censor, Home Affairs Minister Stoffel Botha.

24. Who could forget Owens Laws of Social Dynamics (28 November 1985)The purpose of the law is to create criminals in order to keep the courts busy and the jails full, but too much law creates an oversupply of criminalsThis is Owens first law of social dynamics and it is a hard lesson to drive into bureaucratic heads. But we are making progress.South Africas best source of criminals has in the past been the laws forbidding people to come to town. It is important to note that the laws did not prevent people from coming, they merely created criminals enabling us to convict and imprison 200 ...The system served to keep the prison warders and the law clerks off the streets and, if one recalls Crossroads, it kept policemen busy pulling away the plastic sheets under which old ladies sheltered from the rain.

25. Ken grappled with the big issues.26. He undertook a detailed discussion of the rules for civil disobedience (8 June 1987).The point of civil disobedience to unjust law is that it generates great moral force which is vitiated if the dissident tries to escape the consequences of his actions. There can be no taint of ulterior motive.

27. On the role of freedom of the press, answering Lenins question Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?why indeed? There are two reasons. The first is that in a democracy the general populace has a right to information so that it can make reasonably sound judgments about its governance; the second is that the populace has a right to make its opinions ...Both these rights the right to know and the right to be heard are vested in the people, not in the Press itself.

28. Kens big bugbear, was communism. Even if you found it hard to share his panic, it was worth the reading. Some of you may recognise the imagery in more recent letters to the Business Day. On 11 June 1990, he wroteAs I have said before, the SACP is the rider, the ANC is horse, and until the rider can be properly identified until the SACP members step into the light it will be very difficult for anybody, liberal or nationalist, to deal with the ANC. After al...

29. So Ken is still riding that particular hobbyhorse.30. His other nemeses were the liberal universities. Even while both his wife and two of his stepchildren were at Wits and UCT, he laid into both the academics and the radical students:When the bullyboys came for Piet Koornhof, the liberals remained silent because Koornhof was not a liberal; when they came for Buthelezi, the liberals remained silent because he was an unacceptable kind of Zulu liberal; when they came for [Connor Cr...

31. But he offered an olive branch in the Introduction to his book in 1993:The universities have since reverted to the liberal standard which, in my view they had for a time abandoned, and all that is left of the row is a lingering public impression that I am an enemy, rather than a friend, of the institutions of learning. ...

32. And Ken also felt that he had won the larger debate around the end of apartheid. He announced victory on 22 August 1992. Characteristically, he started with a recognition of past losses:To be South African is of course to be fashioned by apartheid. To be a white South African is to have been shaped by bitterness, by humiliation, by guilt, by dogged defiance, and yes, by a suppressed angry pride. To be a liberal South African is to ha...

33. But then follows: President de Klerk simply appropriated the entire liberal agenda. The liberals had lost every battle and won the war.34. I think that when it came, he was well pleased with the new South Africa. Certainly, he would have been glad that this wish in 1989 came true:When President de Klerk and his Broeders settle down to negotiate with black South Africans, I pray they leave me out of any cosy special arrangements they may try to make for white folks. Ive seen enough funny constitutions to know that, for a minor...Racial arrogance tends to blind Africas white minorities to a simple truth: in a world where all men are created unequal, and spend the rest of their lives striving to make themselves even less equal, the principal of equality before the law is the b...Speaking for myself as a minority of one, I shall feel safest if I can rely on the rights which the majority demands for itself. For me, the focus of negotiation should not be on the special rights of the minorities, but on the universal rights to be ...If, in the negotiations to come, [black South Africans] can be persuaded to create a state that guarantees their own liberty if they set up the institutions of a modern liberal state I shall gladly snuggle for safety into the arms of Mother Africa...

35. While Ken has of course continued some of his battles in the letters pages of the local and national pages, one finds perspicacious gems and reminders of continuity.35.1 2 May 1988At some point in the middle of an official briefing on President Bothas plans to create nine more councils for Africans, I began to see how change will come in South Africa not by revolution but by corruption.

35.2 17 April 1989Corruption has rotted the very woof and warp of South African life. we all know what has been happening: Eschel Rhoodie and the crooked accounting in government, the first class freebie trips abroad; deputy minister Hennie Van der Walt stealing tr...These are mere symptoms of a deeper rot. At the heart of all these examples lies a failure of the law to hold the allegiance of the people, a failure of the authority of the state. The people of this country, excepting a couple of million whites, hold...

35.3 12 April 1992The Nats will soon be handing over to the ANC a wondrous machine, an immense vacuum cleaner that sucks up money from people who work for a living, and dispenses it to those whose work is simply to dispense money.

35.4 In May 2009, Ken wrote the cover story of the Financial Mail setting out a now-familiar theme that is even more relevant 6 years later.The events at Polokwane disclosed to us that under SAs flawed constitution, power lies not with the electorate, nor in parliament, nor even in the presidency. It lies in the labyrinthine recesses of Luthuli House where the ANC leaders plot and conniv...The process is hidden from public view, reducing the entire constitutional paraphernalia of elections, parliamentary debates and traditions, and checks and balances to marginal relevance. The public clash of ideas between government and opposition in ...Parliamentarians pontificate, the opposition denounces and cajoles, the media solemnly records public statements and gathers comments, all the while hiding the brutal fact that the real debates take place in secret at Luthuli House. To discover what h...

36. What I searched for, almost in vain, however, was something personal.37. I found only two references to Kens family.38. First in June 1980 on being arrested under a section 205 subpoena for information arising from an investigation into the Smit murder, he recounted the support received from various sources including a woman writer whom I have admired for half my ...That was touching but it did not quite offset one very nasty consequence of the fuss. In the mind of a 13-year old boy [Thats his son, Peter], I soon discovered, the threat of a jail sentence evokes the most terrifying images of Papillon eating cock...

39. And in 1988, he wrote:I saw Cry Freedom last week in Londons Leceister Square where it was playing to half-empty houses mainly, I would guess, to intelligent young people whose interest in South Africa outweighs the failings of Sir Richard Attenboroughs worst made movieIt is frankly a bad film: a fictionalised documentary that plods its way through the sins of apartheid and the brutalities of the nationalist regimen. But the effect on the audience is simply shattering. When the movie ended half of them simply sat st...

40. But none of this tells us much about Ken, or what he thinks personal happiness or contentment might consist of, either generally or for him personally. There is little glimpse of what fruits the ideals that he fights for might bring.41. You see, unlike Andre Brink, who struggled with those questions in his writing all his life, Ken found it unnecessary to deal with that issue.42. The key, I think lies, in this. On more than one occasion, he has said that Alan Paton gave South African Liberals (I think he meant him, personally) what he calls a text to live by.43. According to Alan Paton, the source of this text was (perhaps appropriately) William the Silent. Perhaps even more appropriately, Ken thinks the true author was Charles the Bold.44. The text was this: It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, and it is not necessary to succeed in order to persevere. [corrected]45. Those of us who have lived with Ken for a long time, his wife of almost thirty years, his six children his twelve grandchildren, have learned that underneath this ascetic outlook, the surly appearance and the dry humour lies a man for whom the req...