The day of reckoning is nigh

I think this should begin with a truth-in-journalism disclosure: I know R.W. Johnson well enough to call him Bill. Since this opens me to charges of bias, let me start by acknowledging that Professor Johnson (a former leader of the ‘Magdalen Mafia’ at Oxford and author of a witty book on the subject) is unpopular in certain circles down here in South Africa. In spite of his record — 12 books, platforms at several esteemed British publications and an engaging prose style — Johnson has been shunned by local book fairs and banished from our op-ed pages. In the early 1990s, the African National Congress went so far as to attempt to shut him up in London, too, sending an emissary to tell several British editors that the man was a reactionary whose scribblings should be suppressed.

This animus dates back to 1977, when Johnson published the first version of How Long Will South Africa Survive?, a book remembered today for its central heresy: he described the ANC’s armed struggle as a feeble affair and predicted that the apartheid regime was more likely to be toppled by economic and moral pressure from its western trading partners.