Facing the fast bowling amid the cows

SEARCHING for a job... perhaps because I was lucky enough to be a white man, I never really needed to put myself out much to get one. 

Okay, fine, it has happened that I had to leaf through the classified pages of newspapers' “Careers" supplements and submit a few applications with curriculum vitae and the rest, and sit through a whole series of disastrous “where do you see yourself in five years?" interviews, with zero success. Nothing. Apparently “Marble Hall" does not come across as a well-considered answer.

Still, if there is such a thing as fate, it has treated me well over the years. The next chapter in my working life always arrived on time and without effort. A conversation at a party, a new acquaintance at a volunteer festival newspaper, an old friend at a boozy lunch. That's how these things worked.

The print media was still chugging along on all its cylinders back then, and the broadcasting industry's party fires burned high on brand-new rand notes from the state coffers. The world was simpler. Everyone who had a qualification in the industry had a job. Even a few who didn't have qualifications. Even a few who didn't have talent. Yes, that's how it was.

I was a radio reporter at the SABC in Johannesburg for about three years. It was a nice job. I had a Toyota Corolla at my disposal, a bottomless tank of fuel, and every day I had to cover a story somewhere in Gauteng with a Marantz cassette recorder hooked over my shoulder. Truck driver strikes. Illegal miners in mining accidents. Cash-in-transit robberies. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's amnesty hearings – weeks and months on end. Elections. By-elections. Occupations of apartment blocks by Nigerian druglords and prostitutes in Hillbrow.

Those were good times. My good pal Chris Burgess, who studied journalism with me, also worked at the SABC and we shared a house. At night we explored Johannesburg's wide and versatile nightlife. The Radium Beer Hall and Club 206 in Louis Botha Avenue, Tandoori and various other watering holes in Rockey Street, Yeoville. Sometimes, just for kicks, clubs in Hillbrow that were certainly irresponsible to visit, Bohemia in Auckland Park, the Abelarde Sanction in Brixton, XaiXai in Melville, hotels with real Hell's Angels in Roodepoort and Krugersdorp, and Catz Pyjamas for pizzas from 3:00 until sunrise.

Adventure calls

Somewhere along the way, Chris left Johannesburg to return to the family farm in the Eastern Cape (vague rumours of “writing a book") and I became restless at the SABC. Yes, the job was nice but I wanted to do more, I wanted to make documentary films. However, the officials at the corporation's human resources department figured I was appointed as a radio reporter and that was that.

I also needed more money. After three years in the adult world, you want to move on from your 1980 Passat station wagon student jalopy.

One day the phone rang on my desk in the underground bunker in Auckland Park. It was Chris. He was in Durban. He'd been appointed editor of Farmer's Weekly. He was very young for an editor, just 29. With his farming background and smooth demeanour, he had talked himself into the job. Where do you see yourself in five years? At Farmer's Weekly, of course!

But Farmer's Weekly, the oldest magazine in the country, was on its last legs. The weekly circulation was under 10 000 and the magazine was 20 years behind the curve of what was happening in the rest of the magazine industry, in all respects. In fact, it was mouldy, I well remember Chris's words.

Don't confuse Farmer's Weekly with Naspers/Media24's Afrikaans Landbouweekblad – that's a different title. Farmer's Weekly was started as an agricultural journal by the first English daily newspaper in South Africa, The Friend, in Bloemfontein. It was a proud old magazine with a healthy circulation in the 1950s and 1960s. But farmers had become fewer and fewer, especially English farmers, and the new black emerging farmers were nowhere close enough in numbers to build a new English readership. At the same time, the budget had shrunk, there was no investment in new talent in the editorial team, and so on.

Hospital pass? Bring it on

Chris had spoken with several more experienced journalists and editors in the industry about this job. They all advised against it. I distinctly remember the words “hospital pass". Well, by the time he called me, he had already been appointed two months before and was working in the editorial office in Mobeni in Durban. “You have to come. You have to come help, I can't do it alone." I could hear he wasn't finding his predicament amusing.

“I know fuckall about agriculture. I only know the difference between a Frisian and a Jersey by its looks," I respond, “and that's it!" I said it more to myself than to him because at that stage I needed very little encouragement to write a resignation letter just for the sake of a half-baked adventure.

“I'll worry about the agriculture, you do the rest," was his solution.

And so it came to pass that a few weeks later, on an overcast Monday morning, around 10:30, I showed up at the offices of Republican Press (RP) in the Mobeni industrial area in Durban.

Well, let me clarify a few aspects. The words “industrial area" carried a suggestion of order and efficiency. Not Mobeni. Real estate agents could have marketed factory units in Mobeni as “post-apocalyptic chic". As in many parts of the worn-out, humid, subtropical KwaZulu-Natal coastal area, it looked like civilisation (referring to concrete, tar and fences) had already lost the battle against nature some six years before. Tufts of grass burst through tarred roads in places, tattered wire fences were mere suggestions of boundaries, the potholes were so close to each other that only drunk people drove straight there, and the distinction between road, sidewalk and weed bed had long been a thing of the past.

Inside the fortress

When I finally located my destination with the help of a Durban street directory, I drove slowly past it two or three times, in total denial. This surely couldn't be the office of a national magazine company? I mean, it was supposed to be the home of respected titles such as Garden&Home, Country Life, Your Family, Living and Loving, People, Bona, and so on.

What I saw was a dilapidated factory, certainly from the 1940s, with a two-storey red-brick office building at the front, and behind it the typical sawtooth factory roof with rows of small windows to let in natural light. Every element of it was neglected and even derelict.

The windows at the front of the building had gone so long without being washed and were so damp from Durban's humidity that you could see what looked like old broken louvre shutters through them only sporadically.

About four cars were parked on the remaining scraps of tar in the parking lot, and the fact that one of them was Chris's old Isuzu 250KB diesel pickup confirmed my worst fears. I had never been a person for the kind of glamorous lifestyle portrayed in glossy magazines, and it was once again clear to me that I stood no chance of being engulfed by it any time soon.

The final image in my head before I went to face my new life like a man was a very dirty South African flag hanging limp and in tatters from a rusted pole.

After I wrestled my way through the broken aluminium double door that I guessed was the main entrance, I found myself in the foyer of the former headquarters of RP. It was a small room with plywood panels and one of those windows with a hole in the middle through which people talk, benches with torn green vinyl against the walls, and a single door to the interior of the building.

I stood at the window with the hole, and all I could see on the inside was a visitors' book with curled pages that hadn't had a visitor entry for three days. I must have waited for about ten minutes before an animated little Indian man scurried in on the other side of the window.

“Good day, Sir! I am Joey, Sir! Can I help you, Sir?!"

I explained that I had been appointed as the assistant editor of one of the magazines, but halfway through the first sentence, he continued: “Oh yes, Sir! Mr Chris, he told me! Come!"

He scurried out from behind the window and a moment later the door flew open. I followed him down a long twilight corridor that felt suspiciously narrower than the minimum standard.

Only about one in every 20 fluorescent lights worked, and the blue carpet blocs had a black footpath in the middle through them.

We eventually turned left and right up a set of stairs at a weathered perspex sign with an arrow that said: Rooi Rose, Scope, Keur. On one landing stood a steel filing cabinet, tilted with a large dent in it, as if someone had kicked it with great force. For a moment I felt proud that I was following in the footsteps of legendary journalists from the soft-porn magazine Scope, which carried South Africa's version of Rolling Stone and Playboy's gonzo journalism. Scope had of course closed years before.

At some point, I began to lose orientation, because we went down two more sets of stairs, and then up two more sets of stairs, deeper and deeper into the dark innards of Republican Press. The last time we turned left, there was a sign that said Scope (right) and Rooi Rose (left). We walked about 80m down a corridor, at one point carefully moving around a pool of water under a hole in the ceiling where electrical wires hung out.

I didn't notice any other people during this journey – only open rooms with a broken office chair or worn-out desk here and there. Finally, we reached Farmer's Weekly and Chris's office with two open windows full of wood pigeon droppings that looked out over the dirty little sawtooth roofs of the factory. Chris was slumped in an antique office chair with his feet on the desk, talking on the phone. One of his feet was in a cast.

Grab the bottle

He put down the phone, jumped up and grabbed a crutch with one hand and my collar with the other and said: “Come!" I hadn't even met the rest of the staff, but we were out of there again. We made the entire exodus through the sets of stairs and the life-threatening electricity hazard down to the factory floor where RP's ancient printing presses stood like petrified silverback gorillas in the semi-darkness.

“Joey, Cressida?" Chris asked, and Joey brought the keys to the front and gave them to Chris with a wink. “Of course, Mr. Chris."

I quickly learned that Joey was our gateway to happiness in the company, especially regarding mobility. There were two company cars, a lovely 2,4-litre six-cylinder Toyota Cressida from the 1980s, and a tattered old white Golf. We were permanently in command of one of the two. All it cost was that once in a while, when Joey called on you, you had to taste his wife's curry, or stare behind and under his counter at a few disturbing images in the world's cheapest pornographic magazines, and then enthusiastically agree when Joey wanted to lend you the magazine overnight.

Chris directed me to drive to a small shopping centre in a residential area and he limped to a coffee shop with tables in the corridors with pink floral tablecloths. “Three double vodkas with orange juice," Chris told the astonished waitress. The potency of the order didn't go unnoticed by me either, considering it was, after all, 11:00 on a Monday morning. Meanwhile, he was taking a hard drag on a Camel.

When the drinks arrived, Chris downed the first vodka in three gulps, put the second one in front of him and said: “Right, so here's the story."

The old Republican Press (RP), with headquarters in Durban (that dubious facility we had just escaped from) was not too long ago taken over by the Afrikaans press group Perskor, which has since been taken over by the Caxton group, a company with a fleet of commercial printing presses, a multitude of free suburban newspapers (knock and drops), and now also a magazine division.

Oom Corrie shocked

I quickly realised that the RP was a rich source of stories. It was founded and managed for decades by Hint Hyman and his wife, widely known as Aunt Baby. She was reportedly, at times, the editor of Garden&Home and Rooi Rose simultaneously, while also managing their Free State farm in Lückhoff over the phone.

Aunt Baby’s eyesight was said to be too poor for reading, so her secretary had to read everything from the magazines aloud to her. I also heard that RP published many syndicated articles from overseas in magazines like Keur and Bona. These articles would arrive in bulk by mail, and the usual practice was that Aunt Baby would lie on the couch while her secretary or a journalist read one story after another to her. As soon as a tear rolled from her eye, the story would be set aside – approved for publication.

RP was also the pioneer of the infamous photo booklets that could be bought in cafés all over the country. These were essentially soap operas in magazine format: Kyk, See, Mark Condor, Ruiter in Swart, Dr. Conrad Brand, Die Saboteur and Grensvegter. The Afrikaans NG Kerk and the National Party establishment were strongly opposed to these booklets, even though they were mostly harmless reading material.

Be that as it may, Chris then broke the news to me that the man who had appointed him – the new magazine manager at Caxton, Willem Struik – had been fired two weeks before Chris was supposed to start work. So, when Chris arrived at Farmer’s Weekly in Durban and introduced himself to the previous editor, Oom Corrie, it turned out that Oom Corrie had no idea that a new editor had been appointed. This led everyone to conclude that he was no longer in high demand. A young man stood before him, announcing that he was the new editor. The fact that no one had informed Uncle Corrie was an equally big shock for both of them.

I later heard that the story behind the news was even juicier. Whether it was true or not was hard to verify, but it is such a good story that one can’t leave it out.

We heard that the two top directors at Caxton who had fired Mr Struik – one Noel Coburn and Terry Moolman–  had been two young managers in the printing division of RP 20 years earlier. They had shown entrepreneurial spirit by using the idle printing presses at night (when they were switched off and uneconomical) to run it with a skeleton crew and secretly complete a few extra private print jobs - without management’s knowledge!

It wasn’t long before rumours of these activities reached management’s ears, and a certain Willem Struik was sent in to summarily fire the two men behind the scheme. The story goes that as they were walking out of the door, either Coburn or Moolman turned to Struik and said:

“Listen to me carefully. As surely as I stand here before you, the moment I’ve made enough money, I’ll come back and buy this printing press right out from under you – and you’ll be the first one I fire."

Regardless of how much truth there is to the story, the fact remained that Coburn and Moolman had indeed fired Struik right out from under us. We were now without any manager at Caxton in Johannesburg, stuck with a magazine in Durban, and no one knew why we were even there because Struik hadn’t shared much with his colleagues about the situation. And now, he was gone.

After the vodka

After a load of vodka and orange juice, we went back to the office, and Chris introduced me to the staff.

“What happened to your foot?” I asked on the way back. “Kicked a filing cabinet,” he muttered.

As I mentioned earlier, there hadn’t been much investment in staff over the decades – whether in salaries, training, or any other human resources refinements. The team consisted of a surprising mix of socially maladjusted but talented individuals, surprisingly untalented socially maladjusted individuals, alcoholics, and people across various spectrums. We even had a permanent “tikster" (typist) on the staff.

Oom Corrie, also known as “The Elephant" in the industry, was a big man in his 70s who moved with difficulty. He was a good and gentle old guy, but there was visible disappointment in his eyes about where life had left him. He sat behind an intimidatingly large wooden desk with a leather top and one of those big flat desk almanacks with a block for each day.

The huge desk was manoeuvred into a tiny prefab office, leaving barely enough room to walk around. At the corner of the desk was an ashtray inside a miniature tractor tyre, overflowing with cigarette butts. The walls were decorated with a few yellowed photos of rugby teams from the Pannar Rugby Week. On a cabinet stood a few dull silver trophies for Farmer’s Weekly cattle competitions. Oom Corrie sat on a cushion on his big old office chair because the leather seat had long since fallen apart.

If you asked Oom Corrie how he was doing, he would always answer: “Facing the fast bowling, facing the fast bowling.”

In the office next to Oom Corrie sat the assistant editor, Faan. He was an old Rhodesian who had rumours of covert involvement in the Rhodesian Bush War swirling around him. He was a man of few words, but when I appeared, he forthwith calculated – for the second time in a month – that his position in the hierarchy of succession had slid. He was now fourth, whereas just a month ago, he had been second, with the guy in first place already on borrowed time.

To make matters worse, the two newcomers outranking him were pipsqueaks.

He could also smell my lack of agricultural knowledge, like cheap deodorant. It didn’t matter how many times we tried to explain to him that Farmer’s Weekly urgently needed magazine expertise – not necessarily agricultural knowledge.

My fragile relationship with Faan completely collapsed after an argument about which headline to put on the front cover. I insisted that we use the line “Big bucks with exotic ducks” as the main headline, while Faan felt I was completely out of touch with the magazine's audience. I had to point out to him that there was barely an audience left, subtly suggesting that the readership had been lost –at least in part – under his leadership.

Job-hunting...again

Anyway, by now a new CEO was appointed in Johannesburg to replace Struik. His name was Gordon Utian, a man with a colourful background in the milling industry. He quickly became known in the hallways as “The Blow-Dried Dwarf”. It took Chris weeks to convince him that we had been legally hired and actually belonged there.

I ended up staying for four years. It took Chris and me about eight months just to convince ourselves that we could tackle this monumental task and pull it off successfully. Every morning we would ask each other: “Are we staying or are we bailing?”

Every night we would drive the Cressida to the big pier at the Durban harbour. On one side, a few metres away, large container ships entered and exited the harbour, on the other side many Indian anglers stood on the dolosse. Every once in a while one hooked a skate, followed by a spectacular fight of man against beast. In the middle stood a little caravan selling delicious samoosas. Chris would get himself a few smokes, and I would buy a case of beer from a liquor store on Point Road. Then we would sit there for hours, talking about what we had to do to save this magazine.

We managed to do it in the end, despite it having seemed impossible. Amid the carnage in the industry, Farmer’s Weekly still exists today.

We moved the entire magazine operation to Johannesburg – Chris and I personally loaded the desks and computers onto Caxton’s paper trucks over a long weekend. After a year, the magazine’s design was looking great, and circulation had recovered to healthier levels.

Now, with the closure of Vrye Weekblad, it’s time to job-hunt again. But I'm not sure if the “white man" factor will be as much of an advantage this time around.

♦ VWB ♦

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