By Andre Jaquet
Keenness was my second name when I was
a junior diplomat responsible for press liaison at the South African Embassy in Washington in the
mid-1970s. Remember, those were tough times and all of us wondered whether there
wasn’t a better way to earn a living. Like, for instance, being a human cannon
ball in a circus. Let me share with you a cameo of my existence at the time.
“There are definitely some advantages
in this job and I must enjoy those rather than mope”, I mused. After all here I
am, lazily sipping a super South African wine on the terrace of a ritzy
restaurant on the Potomac. The evening is balmy and the lovely cherry blossoms
compete mildly with wafts of Chanel Number 5.
My Ambassador has asked me to arrange a private, off the record meeting
for him with Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post who is on her way to South
Africa for an in-depth look at the aftermath of the Soweto riots. She and I are
waiting for the arrival of our guest.
Then His Excellency rises to welcome
her and without warning launches into a harangue listing the wrongs done in the
United States to African Americans by successive white governments. Meg reads
the dismay on my face and later over coffee asks me what she will really
discover when she travels to South Africa. The best I can do is to mutter: “You
will find some things better than you think and some worse”. I was quite proud
of the little phrase I had come up with on the spur of the moment.
Five weeks later, the cover of the
magazine section of the Washington Post carried a banner headline: “SOUTH
AFRICA: IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK”.
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