Page 12 - SA Chamber UK Newsletter April 2024

OPINION

SA’S JOURNEY SINCE 1994 –

A SNAP-SHOT OF THE GOOD

AND THE BAD

By Angus Begg

I will never forget the early morning misty Natal Midlands of April 27, 1994. The queues
of kilometres leading to South Africa’s first democratic elections had assumed almost
biblical proportions, snaking over blonde, rural autumn hills and grasslands. The images
were packed with teary pathos, in stark contrast to the particularly bloody lead-up to
the big day in KwaZulu-Natal, where all hell was expected to break loose as me-we-us
prepared to cast our votes.

I remember writing a piece ten years ago.

“For those who’d dedicated their lives to it, their time had come. For the woken and sensitised

general public, and most of us in the media, a collective wrong was about to be righted.”

Pietermaritzburg in late autumn was to be our base, and I would be forever grateful. I
was covering the area for SAfm radio – the reinvented morph of Radio South Africa at
the time – sharing a room with fellow radio journalist Johan Botha, who was reporting

for Radio Sonder Grense, the new name for Radio Suid-Afrika.

It was all a bit dreamy. It was a little over a year on from a coma I’d slipped into after a
car accident – after returning from the ‘Black Hawk Down’ of Somalia in 1992 – yet here

I was, deemed fit to cover the KZN Midlands for SAfm.

So confident were analysts that political violence would swamp the province that we
were given ancient flak-jackets as part of our kit. A South African friend editing for Sky
News at the time told me the UK broadcaster had even commissioned armoured cars

for their news crews in the province.

After a day of heavy sweat, Johan and I elected to take our chances and leave them
in the room.

Brit, Zulu and Boer

We never saw armoured cars, but yes, there was violence, albeit of a more historical
nature, connected to local clans’ allegiances. In the river crossing trading post settlement
of Tugela Ferry, a particularly far-flung rural area in what was (and still is to many)
geographically known as Zululand – far from any commercial centre, one night we saw

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SA CHAMBER UK NEWSLETTER APRIL 2024