 |
| Meg Greenfield |
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”.
No comments:
Post a Comment