ABSTRACT
The telephone rang and out of the fog of sleep I reached over and picked it up. “You won’t believe this,” said the voice of my assistant. He sounded genuinely excited. “It’s really big news. Have you got a pen ready?” My heart began to race. He would never dream of calling me at 6 o’clock in the morning without good reason. I was a BBC correspondent and this assistant—whose name I will spare—was my eyes and ears in South Africa’s tangled and troubled world of black township politics. He was plugged into the main black organizations in a way that no white reporter could ever hope to be.
