Born in Kroonstaad in the Free State, South Africa (then known as the Orange Free State), John van Zyl studied at the University of the Orange Free State before going on to Oxford to read for a second undergraduate degree in English. As a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, van Zyl headed the media studies department for 20 years and founded the university’s School of Dramatic Art at the University of Witwatersrand. Alongside his academic research and leadership, he has worked as an activist, serving as programme director of the Director Cinema Community Filmmaking Project and executive director of ABC Ulwazi, an educational radio production and training house that was named Africa’s best education NGO in 2000. He was also one of the founders of Classic FM in South Africa. Van Zyl’s published works include Media Wise: An Introduction to Visual Literacy and he has won a number of awards for his journalism, including, in 1984, the Thomas Pringle Award. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 7 October 2025.
John van Zyl
Orange Free State & Exeter 1958
‘Radio was instilled in me at an early age’
I grew up on a farm quite a way out of Bloemfontein. I had to do a lot of maintenance on the farm, so I’m quite good with my hands and have learned to figure out things. I think that sort of rootedness paid off later when I was setting up an NGO and figuring out how community radio can work.
I went to school at Grey College, the oldest school north of the Orange River. Its quality was that it fostered mutual respect between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking white boys. In the mad way of the apartheid world, that was regarded as being very, very progressive. Classes were offered in English one day and Afrikaans the next, so it turned you into a completely bilingual person, which I am to this day. It’s about 60 years since I left Grey’s, and it’s now a completely non-racial school admitting both white boys and black boys. At school, I took English and Latin, and I was the best English student. I took part in debates and I took part in radio programmes, so radio was instilled in me at an early age.
The Nationalist party were the people who pushed through extreme apartheid, and although my family was anti-Nationalist, they belonged to the United Party, which was also a white party. It favoured a slightly kinder apartheid, but whichever way you looked at it, it was still apartheid. I think, as a child, I drifted along knowing that I opposed the government but with very little awareness of the real horrors of apartheid.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
I went on to the University of the Orange Free State, which was just up the road. English and Latin were my majors. In many ways, it was an unpleasant experience, because it was a Christian National university, but I persevered, because my family didn’t have the money for me to go anywhere else. I went on to do honours in English, and my thesis was on the Afrikaner way of life as depicted in English. That proved quite controversial, and luckily the Rhodes Scholarship came along just as I was finishing up the thesis. I applied, and I was supported in applying, and I won the Scholarship.
I had ten months to fill between winning the Scholarship and going to Oxford, and I decided to go to Perugia to learn Italian. After a month or so, I hitchhiked down through Italy and went from one place to another like a drunkard, drinking in architecture, before I went back through Europe to Oxford. Being in a place where nobody speaks your language and just learning things was quite an important part of my growth.
‘I suddenly understood’
There’s no doubt in my mind that I needed the Oxford tutorial system desperately. Despite having read voraciously from the age of five onwards, I didn’t have the necessary level of discipline. And I remember going to extraordinary lectures, like those by the art historian Edgar Wind that introduced me to the interaction between literature and sculpture and painting and music. Alongside my academic work, I joined the Oxford Film Society and discovered a group of people who thought like me. I produced a film and learnt an enormous amount, although I did also reject Kris Kristofferson (California & Merton 1958) for a part!
I also remember to the day when I suddenly understood what apartheid was really like. It was 1960 and I was at Oxford and on 21 March, the Sharpeville Massacre occurred. 59 innocent people were killed by the police, and the reaction of the people around me and the English newspapers just brought home to me that something was terribly wrong. From that moment, I started joining anti-apartheid movements and working actively to do something about it.
‘Community radio is incredibly effective’
When I went back to South Africa, I found a job as a screenwriter for a group of people making nature films. That was fascinating but I didn’t see much of a future in it. Then, a job came up in English at the University of the Witwatersrand. At Wits, I had to teach a bit of everything, but it was quite staid: no novelist later than Thomas Hardy. So, I started running classes on the theatre of the absurd, on American novelists like Philip Roth and John Updike. I developed a whole new series of adult education lectures and started offering courses in modern drama and scriptwriting and the history of film.
Wits noticed what I’d been doing and in 1970, they introduced a new subject called History of Drama and Film. Then, they established a School of Dramatic Art, and I became the head of the media side generally. The great thing was that we could invite black students to attend It was the law that there were black universities and there were white universities, but if a subject was not offered in a black university, then black students would be allowed to attend a white university. We could have as many black students as we wished, and at first there were only a few, but then they joined, and what a difference that made.
Wits was increasingly an oppositional force, and police and soldiers invaded the campus regularly. It was a very violent time. While I was working at Wits, I was also writing newspaper columns, reviewing television, and that gave me the chance to point out when programmes were pure propaganda, just demonising the ANC. I would get hate mail and we were taken to court on a number of occasions, although we always won. What happened to me and my white relatives and colleagues is nothing compared to what other people endured – just listen to Kumi Naidoo’s (South Africa-at-Large & Magdalen 1987) story – but the threat was always there.
I’d been lucky enough to spend some time in America where I’d learned about documentary filmmaking. Back in South Africa, I’d been teaching scriptwriting and filmmaking in the black townships when the French government asked me to run the Direct Cinema community filmmaking project for them in southern Africa. We gave young people cameras and asked them to go and make documentaries. I was very proud and very grateful to be given the opportunity to help with that work. It was a chance to work with people from different cultures and see things through their eyes.
I was coming to the end of my tenure at Wits and thinking that I wanted to set up an NGO, something to do with community radio. I got a position as a visiting lecturer at the Radio Netherlands Training Centre. Back in South Africa, I was invited to a conference about working towards a new South Africa, and I became part of the delegation dealing with community radio as part of that. New licences were being granted and it was a complete reorganisation of the communications industry. Community radio is incredibly effective. It’s economical, and you can broadcast in any language. We got our NGO up and running and we started to train people. People began writing programmes about HIV and AIDS, for example. They weren’t didactic, but they used stories and language in a way that was worked for communities.
“I am human because I participate. I share”
I have two children from my first marriage, Paul and Anna, and in 1990 I remarried Charlotte, my Dutch wife, who brought two stepchildren. So, the children and grandchildren are amazing. Home now is a little village called Franschhoek, which means ‘French Corner.’ It was established in 1688 by the French Huguenots.
A group of us in Franschhoek got together to try to do something to redress the injustices of the slave history of the Western Cape and the communities still affected by that. We focused on areas like housing, schools, job prospects and we asked Archbishop Tutu to be our patron and he agreed, which was wonderful. Archbishop Tutu said that ‘A person is a person through other persons. But even more, we say, I am human because I participate. I share.’ No matter how smart you are, unless you connect to other people, you’re going to miss out on something. It’s about interacting and trying to be kind.
Transcript
Interviewee: John van Zyl (Orange Free State & Exeter 1958) [hereafter ‘RES’]
Moderator: Anya Chuykov [hereafter ‘INT’]
Date of interview: 7 October 2025
[00:00:09]
INT: Okay. Hello everyone. I am delighted to be here today with John van Zyl, Orange Free State and Exeter, 1958. John’s contributions to South African society have been immeasurable as you will learn here today. He founded the School of Dramatic Art at the University of Witwatersrand, which is among the first of its kind globally. He has pioneered community radio, fostered communities of black filmmakers and as an activist has used film and journalism to critique apartheid propaganda. And there are so many more achievements that we will go into today. They have earned international recognition and his NGO, ABC Ulwazi was named Africa’s best education NGO in 2000. To me John truly embodies the spirit of a Rhodes Scholar. We always talk about fighting the world’s fight and I think your life is a testament to that. I’m thrilled that others will hear your story and experience your joy and storytelling. So let’s jump right in. How are you doing today John?
RES: Very well thank you. Very well. Very excited to be doing this stuff. Tell all my children and all my grandchildren that are going to be there, they were the ones to get the links, they’ll all go and listen to that. Well at least I hope so. But the chances are good that they might do that.
INT: They sound so wonderful. And just two quick formalities before we get into the interesting stuff. But could you please just say your full name for the recording?
RES: My full name is John Andrew [s/l Fullard 00:01:41] Van Zyl.
INT: Lovely. And do I have your permission to record this interview?
RES: Yes, yes, you have my permission to record this interview.
INT: It’s always good to know otherwise this wouldn’t go so well. So where are you joining us from this interview today, where is your home?
RES: Home is a little village called Franschhoek which means French Corner in the wine lands of the Cape, that’s way down south. It’s a small village of about 3,000 people. But it punches above its weight in terms of being sometimes known as the wining and dining capital of South Africa. It also has an internationally known literary festival. And we’re very pleased that our next festival will have people like Philippe Sands and Peter Frankopan attending. So that keeps us- There’s a lot of things happening and the beauty of living in a village where the chemist is two steps away and the doctor is three steps, and all your friends are four steps away, that you can go out to dinner and come back in two ticks. It is, and it’s beautiful. This is, I must, it’s in a valley between the very high mountains and it is green throughout the year and it’s got these old houses. It was established in 1688 by the French Huguenots. And they planted the first [unclear 00:03:18] and since that stage it’s been, it’s just been here and it hasn’t lost its character. So it’s a wonderful place to retire to.
INT: Gosh I mean it sounds absolutely wonderful. You said wine lands and my ears just perked up. But it sounds like you’re very happy now and I’m really looking forward to kind of hearing what led you to this beautiful place and this beautiful retirement. But I think we should start with, you know, where were you born and what was life growing up like?
RES: My goodness, I was born in the very opposite environment to the one in which I find myself at the end of my life. I was born in a little town called Kroonstad which is in the north of the Orange Free State. And it is known mainly for the fact that many people have left it. Well known people have left it. Herbie Kretzmer, the man who wrote the lyrics for the musical Les Mis, he left there. And a number of other journalists, local journalists and writers, poets, Antjie Krog have been there. Anyway, so I left there and then moved to a slightly bigger place called Bloemfontein which is the capital of the Orange Free State. And I lived on the farm. So I really am a farm boy. And we had Jersey cows and sold cream. And lived quite a way out of town. So I commuted in and out of town to my school and helped out on the farm. But I grew up having to do quite a lot of maintenance on the farm, so I’m quite good with my hands and I have learnt to figure out things. And I think somehow some of that has brushed off later in my life with setting up an NGO, figuring out how a community radio can work, that that sort of rootedness actually paid off. I went, my school was Grey College. The oldest school north of the Orange River, 1852. 1832 it was founded. And when I went to it 1947 to 1952 the great quality of the school was that it fostered the mutual, the respect of English and Afrikaans speaking boys, white boys. And you know in a mad way, the mad way, the apartheid world, that was kind of regarded as being very, very progressive. And so English speaking, Afrikaans speaking boys played rugby together and they sat in the same classes and there was a- It’s a parallel medium school so you had grade one English, grade one Afrikaans all the way through towards the end of the higher classes. They were often offered in one language one day and one language the next day. So it turned you into a completely bilingual person which I am to this very day. And so, and of course the ironic thing is now, and it’s about 60 years I think since I have left Grey, it’s now a completely non-racial school with black boys. It’s still a boys school but black boys and white boys playing rugby. And Grey is known as being one of the main rugby producing schools in South Africa. And how life changes.
INT: Absolutely. You’ve experienced this I mean so much throughout your career, just seeing your society completely shift. But I mean it sounds like your school was, you know, I’m even kind of leaning towards using the word idyllic, you know, having this community where everyone kind of came together and both languages were celebrated. But did you have much of an awareness of the apartheid and kind of the darker sides of that when you were growing up? Or were you fairly shielded?
RES: I didn’t you know, I didn’t. And I can quite honestly say that although our family was anti-nationalist, which is, the Nationalists were in the majority and they were the people who really pushed through the apartheid, extreme apartheid, the party that my family belonged to the United Party was also a white party. And it kind of favoured a slightly kinder apartheid but it was still whichever way you looked at it, it was apartheid. And so I think as a child I drifted along knowing that I opposed the government but absolutely was very little awareness of the real horrors of apartheid. And I know almost to the day that I suddenly understood what it was all about. When I was at Oxford it was in 1960 on the 27th April, March, 27th March 1960 with the Sharpeville Massacre. And the way in which 59 people were killed, innocent people were killed by the police. And the reactions of my friends, of my tutors, of everybody around, what I read in the English papers, brought home to me something was terribly, terribly wrong. And from that moment I started joining anti-apartheid movements and I started working actively to do something about it. So that’s the political side of my life. So I went to Grey College and I was a good English student. I was the best English student and I took English and I took Latin. And I took part in debates and I took part in radio programmes.
[00:10:05]
So radio was instilled in me at an early age. And there used to be all sorts of nice educational, Talk the hind leg off a Donkey, I remember was the one programme, a debating programme. But I loved studios, the quietness of a radio studio, the smell of the air conditioning and the general silence and you’re putting the earphones on and you’d listen. And I have never forgotten that. And so, oh so from there I went to the University of the Orange Free State which was just up the road. And English and Latin were my majors. And I continued with that but it was quite, in many ways an unpleasant experience because it was a Christian National university. It was the closest one to home and we didn’t really have money to go to further, another university, so I persevered there.
INT: What was difficult- Was the faculty difficult? Were the students very different from you? What made that experience quite difficult?
RES: Well it was predominantly Afrikaans speaking. It was entirely white and entirely these Christian National education and its support of the government. So it was, I was quite, quite alien in that. But I still mingled in the student body and I arranged concerts and I took part in activities. I played a lot of tennis, that was where I got my tennis qualification from. But I was very glad. So my BA was English and Latin and then I went on to Honours in English. Then I did an MA. But at that stage I began to realise that this was not the place for me because it was just too conservative. And the thesis, the subject of my dissertation was the Afrikaner way of life as depicted in English, South African English fiction. Now that was an unholy [overtalking 00:12:47]
INT: Yeah, yeah.
RES: Because it wasn’t another thesis on the comma in Shakespeare, or you know Milton’s later Prosody or whatever. The really conventional stuff. And I was out of that. I wanted to join things together that hadn’t been joined together before. And nobody had ever thought of writing an MA dissertation along those lines. I think it was [overtalking 00:13:21]
INT: What was the- What was the reaction from your peers or again the faculty? Did they, were they supportive of that? Or was everyone like, oh gosh we don’t want to touch that? You know, it’s too controversial.
RES: Well thank God the Rhodes came up just as I was finishing it.
INT: Right, okay.
RES: In fact I wrote the last chapters after I had left. So I taught at my alma mater, at Grey College I taught English and Latin. I first did my BA, then did my Honours. And then I taught for two years. And then I got the Scholarship. So I was slightly older than the other Scholars when I arrived in Oxford.
INT: But you had a clear direction that this was absolutely the right thing for you. Before we kind of fly off to Oxford, I just want to take a moment to think about another aspect of your childhood which is, you know, your family and your friends. And I just wanted to ask did you have many siblings growing up? What was the dynamic like in your family? Can you speak to that?
RES: I have one brother, he’s four years younger than I am. He’s still alive. He’s 86 now. And he studied chemical engineering at the university and did his own thing. Went to work on the gold mines. And my family were farmers, although my father also had ironically another job as the administrator of a very large black township which was, which is ironic, very ironic. He was, he was a very kind man and very, yes and he did a good job. But it’s the old, you know, it's a very tricky thing working within a system when [unclear 00:15:24] disapproves of the system but doing your job well and as kindly as you can. So that was a contradiction that one has to live with, think about and which I just, just all right.
INT: Yeah an interesting tension but I suppose again as a Rhodes Scholar or just even, you know, myself working at Rhodes, it’s something we think about all the time is these tensions between good things and bad acts and all sorts. At this stage I always like to ask if in that first 18, 20 years of your life, did you have a role model or someone that you feel like shaped you to become who you are now? Is there anyone that kind of comes to mind?
RES: It’s, I have thought about that a lot and, you know, I’d like to say of course Obama, you know, of course Bishop Tutu. But that’s ex post facto and I found it very, very difficult to find someone. I had a very good maths teacher, a man called <Name 00:16:34> who was also instrumental in my getting the Rhodes, that I admired very, very much. And in some ways also my father, he was a model of someone who had a tough job and a tough life and managed to do it admirably, respectfully and kindly. And so he persevered, he persevered. So on the one hand there was the farm with fairly bad climatic conditions. And we have a little Dachshund which-
INT: Oh! I welcome all Dachshund interruptions.
RES: We’ll edit it out at some stage. Anyway so that’s my answer, that I wish I could say there was someone that I really- But I can’t.
INT: No, no, absolutely. And I think it’s just interesting to think about, you know, what kind of influences you might have had. But it sounds like you were very much emerging to be your own change maker. So we’ve started talking about Rhodes. Can you tell me a little bit more about your application process because the selection is notoriously quite difficult.
RES: Yes. I, I was- I had applied and I was supported. And I knew that I should read for the honours school in English because I was, I wanted to make sure about my discipline. And I wasn’t sure about it. So that, and also of course at that time in 1958, postgraduate degrees were not that common. Not as they are today. But if I would under different circumstances, then I think I would have done a postgraduate degree. But I was pleased to do that and I was eventually absolutely vindicated by the discipline of the tutorial system. There’s no doubt in my mind that I needed that desperately. That in spite of my being a [s/l fox 00:19:19] and having read voraciously from the age of five onwards, I read the classics by the age of 10 etc., I didn’t have that discipline. And sitting down in front of the tutor with my essay and having to defend it and think about it was absolutely, absolutely essential.
INT: Gosh yes. I mean you shared with me before this interview that Oxford kind of changed your life in three key ways. And we’ve heard about how it brought your awareness to the apartheid regime but you did share that the tutorial system, the lectures and societies were the kind of three ways that you really changed. In terms of the tutorial system how did that shape your studies or maybe push you into different directions?
[00:20:06]
RES: You know the thing is if you, as I coming- See I came- I lived in, I grew up on a farm. I was a farm boy, right. So I got the Scholarship and then I had 10 months to do something else before I could come up, I finished teaching in December and the university started in the next September. So I had 10 months in which to do something.
INT: Right.
RES: So when I arrived in London I took one, just after Christmas in ’57, I looked around, it was cold and I read all the Dickens that I could but it was, it was cold.
INT: It didn’t prepare you.
RES: And so I looked around and I saw that there was a, in Perugia in Italy there was a school for Italian. And I absolutely zoomed to Perugia and took a course in Italian. But because I had done Latin it came really easily. And after a month or so I was conversant enough in Italian to stop being a farm boy. And I started hitchhiking down through Italy and I moved and I travelled. And in my one pocket I had a book of architecture, European architecture, I still remember it well by Nicholas Pevsner, European Architecture. In my other pocket I had Kenneth Clark, European Art. And I absolutely went like a drunkard, I went from one place to the other, drinking in architecture, art, till I came to Naples. And also I jumped on a boat and I went to Palermo in Sicily. And I started walking around Sicily till I came to a little town called Trapani which was a fishing village and it’s absolutely southern point of Sicily. And I stayed there for about two months, no more than two months as a fisherman. And then I realised that I was cutting, getting short, so I hitchhiked and moved back through Italy, back through Europe, back to London and then to Oxford. So I needed that as well to just find out things, see things, be on my own, not be [overtalking 00:22:50] And just to learn things and be in a place where nobody speaks your language and you have to speak their language. And to be independent. And that was quite an important part of my, in my growth.
INT: How did that experience challenge you? I can imagine that would have been quite daunting, you know, coming from a farm, growing up in quite a rural area and going and just seeing the world. How, what challenges did you experience?
RES: Yes, yes, I remember. Absolutely. I had never been out of South Africa and I remember when I left London, I took a train, the first, over the channel and stopped off in Cologne. And I got out of the train in Cologne and walked out into the square in front of the station. And I got hit by this cacophony of voices, I didn’t understand a word. And I looked around me and I walked around that square three or four times just, I was, I was absolutely dumbfounded. And then after a while I settled down and said, okay where is the youth hostel, on a map, or a thing. But that, that sense of alienation, that sense of absolutely being on your own and you’ve got to sink or swim, you’ve got to go out and make up, pluck up enough courage to go into a restaurant and have somebody speaking to you in a different language, showing you a menu of which you don’t understand one word. Point, that one.
INT: Well, and you just hope you get something nice. Oh gosh we’ve all been there on travels when we don’t get something we expected at all. I’m so impressed with you as a young man, it just sounds like you wanted to push yourself and you wanted to go further and you knew that you could. So because to put yourself through something like that, I mean it is fun but it’s also scary. So I think it takes a lot of courage and conviction to do that. So when you did come to Oxford can you tell me about what those first few weeks were like? How was the Oxford experience? How was the first few weeks of college life? It must have been totally overwhelming.
RES: All right. So we have just spoken about my cultural shock in encountering Europe and people who spoke a different language. So I arrived at Oxford and I found what looked to be quite a familiar place but people spoke a different language.
INT: Yes.
RES: So I then had to put my head down and to begin to understand who these people were and where they came from and of course the great thing was that, that Rhodes House was there. And to me it similarly bewildered people from Canada and New Zealand and India and so forth. And that was quite a safe haven. But very soon, I was in a room with a young man who was I think five years younger than me. He was a bell ringer and he was studying divinity. We were not really compatible.
INT: No. Who chose that?
RES: That’s the way it was and the staircases were cold and the bathrooms were across the quad, etc. And so I think it took a couple of weeks to be able to be accustomed to that. And then tutorials started and I started making friends. And really very soon you settled in. You adapt. I adapted and I was, good Lord, adapting to Oxford was far easier than adapting in some ways, than adapting to Sicily. But it was nice, it was very nice to have my gown and to sit at the Scholars table. And then to understand how the tutorial system worked. And then the second step that happened which was part of my fox nature was to join the Oxford Film Society. And then to discover a group of people who thought like me, who were interested but who knew far more than I did. These were people who read, you know, as I think I’ve said, 1958 was the huge rebirth of cinema worldwide, absolutely. The French New Wave, the Italian Neorealists, the Scandinavians, the Germans. And all of the people from the Film Society who had been there for a couple of years, they were reading what the French were writing about cinema in French, Cahiers Du Cinema, and things like that. So I felt I was at home. I felt I really was at home. And, yes, yeah.
INT: You had some amazing names in your film club. I mean was Ken Loach, is that his name, that you mentioned and just a few other interesting, lots of interesting people that kind of changed your way of thinking. What did the Film Society get up to? What did you, what did you all do as, when you met up?
RES: Well we, after a year we brought out our own film journal called Oxford Opinion. And we all wrote for that and it was a serious journal, it came out I think once every two months. I remember Sight and Sound was the old, rather old-fashioned British Film Institute brought out and we thought that was fuddy-duddy and we were in favour of the French New Wave and their way of thinking of things that the auteur theory, etc. So we seriously discussed and seriously wrote and seriously watched movies. And they were at least, every week there were at least four films. And then down town of course the Scala theatre, is it still there?
INT: No we’ve not got- We’ve got the New Theatre and, oh my goodness, but no, not a theatre called that.
[00:30:04]
RES: Right. That was showing double features, four movies a week. And only foreign films, only really, really good classic films. So we were watching a lot of movies and documentaries. And then we made a film as well and I produced a film, Zuleika Dobson. It was from the Max Beerbohm story I think, Max, Zuleika Dobson. And I was the producer and I had to cast it. And eventually, as the story goes [unclear 00:30:39] an American, a rather skinny American from Magdalen came in to ask to audition for the main role. And I said, “No, sorry. No.” Sent her away. It was Kris Kristofferson.
INT: No. Oh my goodness.
RES: I rejected Kris Kristofferson.
INT: You were brutal.
RES: I know. I know. [overtalking 00:31:10]
INT: That’s hilarious.
RES: -ill judgement.
INT: That’s really funny. I mean I, you know, I used to, me and my friends used to write musicals and I produced them at my university, Durham University where I went. And I mean it’s so hard to balance that and also excelling in your studies. How did you find balancing these kind of two sides? Or did you find they were quite complementary, your studies and your Film Society work?
RES: Well when the- I think it was- We took quite some time to do, it was in my third year I think when we did this film. And it took up quite a lot of time. But I learnt an enormous amount just on set to see how the camera was set up and which lenses you chose and then later how it was edited and old-fashioned film that you, on a Steenbeck editor that you used. And that was important, you could talk about movies till the cows come home but unless you have some idea about lenses and about film density and editing, it helps, it just gives you the extra bit of stuff to think about.
INT: Yeah. That is, I mean that is just the most incredible experience. I mean Oxford completely introduced this whole new world to you didn’t it. And you also mentioned to me that you had some, you attended some amazing lectures. And that was also quite a big part of your academic journey. Do you want to share a bit about that?
RES: Oh goodness, yeah, there were always lectures and always inter-disciplinary lectures or open lectures. And one that’s remembered to this day was a, I think he was Austrian or German or Austrian called Edgar Wind who was a huge art historian. And he gave a series of lectures on the Playhouse on Renaissance art. And that introduced me, absolutely true, about the interaction between literature and sculpture and painting and music. That was the wonderful thing too, for the first time to say, what’s the difference- You take Bach and you take Shakespeare and you take Milton and you take Schubert and you take Rembrandt and somebody else, and you start looking at those in some sort of connected way. That’s a very, very important thing. And I have carried that through my life. When I was, just to jump forward, on my first sabbatical I was in Moorhead State College in Minnesota. And I was teaching, team teaching in humanities 101. Humanities 101. And so the Professor of Music gave lectures, the history of music. Professor of Art gave lectures on that. I gave lectures on the history of literature. And then we all sat in on each other’s lectures and then we had tutorials and we had to regurgitate what we had learnt. So that was fascinating but thank God I’d had some sort of insight previously and I could put that together in those humanities courses, interactive. [overtalking 00:35:12] always asked again and again and again, when I hear of piece of music I think, gosh I wonder was that the time that Tolstoy was writing? Was that, when was that?
INT: Yeah. I think I, you know, I studied history and I often take for granted this inter-disciplinary approach to looking at, you know, history or literature, whatever it might be. But you know it’s important for one to remember that this wasn’t how things were studied. That was a breakthrough that was made, you know, let’s look at these as interlinking fields. So again this is one of my, this is one of my quirky questions, but I just want to ask about Oxford, if you had to do it all over again, if there was anything you had to change or would do differently, would there be something?
RES: Yeah I thought about that a lot. And given what happened in 1958, I would not. I would not have done anything else. And I don’t think that there was really a choice. If I- It’s a very difficult question to answer because you have to unlearn things, you know, and you say, oh I would- I don’t know, it’s- I think that I did exactly the right thing.
INT: Absolutely. I mean it sounds like it was just the most incredible life changing experience. I mean to have your mind stretched and your ability stretched in so many different ways, I mean that’s you want from an educational experience, right.
RES: Exactly. I mean I might have- I don’t think- I have never thought about it till this second, done PPE maybe, maybe.
INT: Yeah.
RES: But that could have been a possibility. But that would have been such a waste in some ways of what I had already done and where I was going.
INT: No, it seems like you were on a clear trajectory. And how long, so you were in Oxford for three years in total. Am I right in saying that or was it-?
RES: I was there for three years. I was very- It was initially for two years but at the end of two years I went to see the rector, Kenneth Wheare, a very gentle, lovely Australia rector of Exeter. And then I went to see Bill Williams and was also such an affectionate and kind person. And I said to them, “Look, things- My first year was just finding out things. I hadn’t even started to learn anything. I was just finding out things. Second year I have just passed and I think I’m beginning to learn things but I need a third year.” And so they took pity on me. “Sure, sure, you can have a third year.” And I am very pleased. I’m absolutely delighted because that third year really, really enabled me to settle down and to do some deep reading and deep thinking. And I needed that. So, so I don’t really think I would have- To answer your question properly, I don’t think there was an alternative for me. You see in the end I really needed this sharp focus of the tutorial and having to read Paradise Lost word for word for word for word, [overtalking 00:39:03] This narrow thing. And that is complemented by the breadth of the Film Society and the people in that community. So I was both digging down and also-
INT: Widening and broadening your horizons, yes.
RES: Yeah.
INT: I mean what a beautiful thing to say, to sit here and say, you know, that, it happened exactly as it should. I mean that’s pretty incredible to still be able to say that. So as you were kind of nearing the end of your third year in Oxford did you have a clear sense of what you would go on to do next? It sounds like obviously your horizons had broadened and life probably felt full of opportunity. So, yeah, did you know what you’d do?
RES: Well my life was constrained by my parents in South Africa and I knew I had to come back here. There was a choice between going into filmmaking, being a screen writer somehow, going into documentary, or English.
[00:40:14]
And so when I came back I did in fact immediately find a job as a screen writer for a group of people who were making nature films. There was all sorts of interesting things abouts the translocation of rhinos from one place to another and animal conservation. And I found that fascinating and it was, I could write and I wrote a couple of movies. But then I didn’t see much of a future in that. And then a job came up at the University of Witwatersrand in the English department and I took that. And that’s really-
INT: Brilliant, yeah. So things kind of fell into place. Before we dive further into your career I just want to ask is there anything else about your childhood or time at Oxford that you’d like to mention that we maybe haven’t got to?
RES: I was- At Exeter I was the Chairman of a club called The Levellers. And we used to meet at times, two or three times a term and invite really famous people to come and have a glass of port with us after dinner in our rooms. And we had Isaiah Berlin and David Cecil, big luminary. Boris <Name 00:41:59> I remember. But they were quite happy to come and sit around with a bunch of undergraduates and just chew the fat. And that was nice. It was nice coming up close to great people and listening to them chatting. That was something I liked. I was also Chairman of the Travel Club and arranged student tours to unknown countries and used to go to the embassies in London of Romania or [overtalking 00:42:35] to get visas for kids to be able to travel. And had a lot of travel writers come and talk to us as well, that was great. Of course the Film Society also invited famous film directors to come and talk and show their movies. Jo Losey and various other people. So I think- And also during the vacations, during the breaks, I also took, went off and travelled mopping up the rest of Europe that I hadn’t seen and went to Scandinavia and elsewhere. So that was nice to go to do that, to do that travelling. And it was so easy in those days and student travel, Eurorail tickets were fantastic. So you know can you just see how I was absorbing stuff.
INT: You made the most of it. I mean when we talk about making the most of your time you really took up every second. And what I’m impressed by is you weren’t just part of societies, you were the Chairman. You were producing films. You were just taking such a leadership position. I mean again do you think that kind of naturally started to bring out those leadership characteristics in you?
RES: Yeah, it’s curious, it’s- It’s- I have- No I don’t know, it’s difficult to explain. But I have never really thought of myself as being a leader. But I have gravitated to doing things throughout my life. And it’s my fascination for the unusual, for the new is part of the creativity, that’s the word I think that I like, you know. Bringing two things together that previously had been unrelated and seeing something new. I mean that- Koestler wrote a book about that act of creation, about putting two things together, it’s like a joke, a joke- How do you put two elephants in a Volkswagen, you know. Two in the front seat, two in the back seat. So you bring things together that have not been related before and then it’s a joke or an invention or a new thing.
INT: Yes. Totally. So you were a doer and sometimes that required taking those leadership positions. Interesting. And just, I mean again this is throwing in this question out of curiosity, but what was your favourite place in Europe that you travelled to? I’m always interested to hear what the favourite was.
RES: You know that’s where there’s a thread. I loved Amsterdam. I loved Holland.
INT: I’m going for the first time next month so I’ll need your recommendations.
RES: Oh goodness.
INT: Yes, they’ve opened the Eurostar to Amsterdam.
RES: Anya you will so love Amsterdam, you know. There are all the museums. There’s the Concertgebouw for music. And then there’s the canals. They are so beautiful in the day when the mist hangs over them and the seagulls are around. And the bells are ringing of the different churches. It is the most- And you know it’s a city, it’s one of the [overtalking 00:46:16] the great cities of Europe. And it’s, there are no cars. There’s these narrow cars but it’s bicycles.
INT: Oh my goodness, you’re making me very excited.
RES: Oh you will fall in love definitely. You will fall in love.
INT: Gosh. Yes, as a fellow kind of history and architecture geek, I’m looking forward to it.
RES: Good. Excellent. You’ll enjoy that.
INT: Brilliant. So, okay we’ll flash forward again to your time when you started as a lecturer in English at the University of- And you say, is it an Afrikaans pronunciation, Witwatersrand, is that correct, or close enough?
RES: Wits, let’s talk about Wits. Everybody knows when you talk about Wits. Wits.
INT: Wits. Wits. We’ll go with Wits. Yes tell me about your time when you started working there.
RES: Well okay, so I was just a lecturer and it was a set syllabus and you had to teach a bit of everything, introduction to the eighteenth century, Milton, a bit of Shakespeare and this and that. Very, quite a staid sort of unadventurous thing. No, no novelist beyond Thomas Hardy, anything like that. [overtalking 00:47:46] So I reacted by starting my own parallel classes and the bright students and third year students wanted to know more. So I started running classes on theatre of the absurd, on American novelists and Philip Roth and John Updike, people like that. And, you know, theatre of the absurd, Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot etc. And that was great because from that then I developed a whole new series of, not extramural, adult education lectures in which I- And there was a very strong tradition of adult education in Johannesburg. And, and there were also summer schools at the University of Cape Town and the University of Rhodes, the University of Grahamstown. And I started offering courses in modern drama, modern literature, script writing, history of film, history of Scandinavian film, etc. And I spent much more time in fact with my extramural lectures as my, I suppose about the same, and my normal lectures at university. And that was fine because that was, catered to my wider interests.
INT: Yes, your thirst for knowledge.
RES: My thirst for knowledge. And also creating a new syllabus. What I used to do was to say, what do I don’t know anything about? And I’d say, I know nothing about Norwegian drama. I know nothing about Ibsen. I know nothing about Strindberg. So I would then create a course on the theatre of Strindberg or of Ibsen and then offered the course. So in that way I kept broadening, broadening my knowledge and finding things out. That was really-
[00:50:08]
INT: So you were almost, you were almost learning with the class as well, which is quite an interesting way round of doing it, right. I mean that’s incredible.
RES: Yes. Yes. Exactly. Because you then share that same excitement that you find in when you are finding things out, you then share it with your class, you know. Like the opposite is standing in front of a class, a lecture of say 500 students and telling me about Samuel Johnson and Dryden and eighteenth century English literature of which you have not the slightest interest. And neither do they.
INT: No.
RES: [unclear 00:50:52] But that was, that was really nice.
INT: That’s amazing. We have to, you know, take a moment to appreciate that 50 years ago, so congratulations on the milestone, you were able to create a new department, The School of Dramatic Art. Can you talk me and viewers kind of through what led to this creation and why it was so important at the time in South Africa.
RES: Right, right. So because I had been giving all these lectures, the university people took note of that and they introduced, in 1970 they introduced a new subject called History of Drama and Film, the course which you could take. And then they saw the success of that, it was so great and that was a team teaching thing from the Department of Russian would talk about Russian drama, the French taught French drama. So team teaching was good. But then the rector of the university thought that with all of this going on it would be a good idea to establish a School of Dramatic Art. And it should actually have been a school of drama and film but the government didn’t like the idea of film being added. So they said it has to be a School of Drama, of Dramatic Art, School of Dramatic Art. And so they started that and I was then, then became the head of the theatre, the head of the television and film side, media side generally. And somebody else became the theatre, movement, stage design part. And the great thing was that we could invite black students to attend because in the complicated system of apartheid, there were black universities, there were white universities. And that was it. That was the law. But if a subject was not offered in a black university, then black students would be allowed to attend a white university. And so this although progressive and filled with very smart and very angry and very left wing people, it was forced by the government to be white. But we could then, we had an intake of 40 students a year and we could have as many black students as we wished. At first there were only a few because the idea of that hadn’t yet gone into black schools for kids to think about as a career prospect. And then they joined and what a difference that made. That was just such a wonderful multicultural universe that we had with the, the black students bringing in elements of dance and of song into theatre for instance, that just was made for very dramatic, very interesting productions. So and it was just so delightful to see the interaction between our own students. They saw themselves as a very special group and they fell in love and they were together, they cast each other. It was a really wonderful thing to happen. And from-
INT: And it’s such a reminder that diversity, it’s not just important for, you know, equality or just for representation, it’s also important intellectually because we learn and we stretch ourselves when we’re surrounded by people from different backgrounds and cultures that can bring new perspectives. I mean that’s the value in it, right. Your kind career has been quite interesting in that you started as head of studies in, is it 1976, which was during the apartheid and when you retired it was over. So obviously you’d had experienced quite a big transition in your society during that time. How did you see that affect, you know, life at university? What were your kind of perspectives on that time? I’m just curious to hear what that transition looked like.
RES: Well Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 but up to that stage because Wits University, Witwatersrand University was increasingly an oppositional force, there were student protests and there were student marches. And there were lectures that were regarded as being subversive. The police and soldiers invaded the campus regularly.
INT: Okay.
RES: And students learnt to do- Tear gas.
INT: Yes.
RES: Act against tear gas. And, and put wet cloths over their faces. And many of them, you know, the police used to come with these sticks and beat them across their backs and they would show you. So it was very violent and my, people were assassinated by- A very good friend, Professor of Anthropology David Webster, he was shot outside his house. And also I remembered that a Rhodes Scholar, the one who preceded me, from the Free State Rhodes Scholarships, in, it would have been 1957, called Robert Smit, was assassinated at that time. He was, he worked for the World Bank and he’d obviously discovered something wrong that the government had been doing in terms of money. And he was assassinated, he and his wife were assassinated in front of their children. And in Durban Rick Turner, Professor of Anthropology, he was also murdered. So it was a violent- It was a violent time. And my son, he started a law degree but he a student activist. And he started the End Conscription Campaign. And the police were after him. And in the mornings the Reverend Peter Storey the head of the Methodist Church would phone us and say, “Quick, quick, the security police are coming today. Get Paul to a secure house.” And then they would disappear for a couple of days and they would come back again. So those were very, very tight days. And lecturers were proscribed, in other words they were only allowed to do their lectures, and weren’t allowed to have any social life. So if you had a party somebody could come in who was proscribed and they had to stand in the kitchen and not talk, talk to one person at a time.
INT: Oh my gosh.
RES: So all of that was happening and then Mandela was released but, just to tell our story chronologically, I may just remind you that I was asked to start, the French Government asked me-
INT: Yes, yes. So I suppose we could either go chronologically or thematically in term- But I think go with whatever feels-
RES: Well it kind of fits, fits together and then we- I’ll be guided by you. So the question is how did you experience the transition, how could you see this about to happen? And one of the ways was, I was teaching script writing and teaching filmmaking in the black townships. There were places there that you could, organisations, the Federated Union of Black Artists, you could teach young black actors and writers elements of screen writing, script writing, which was my interest. Then the French Government detected that I was doing this and they asked me to run the Direct Cinema Community Filmmaking Project for them in Southern Africa at the same time as I was doing my job, which I then did.
[01:00:16]
And we took young people and gave them cameras and told them to go out and make documentaries. And they made documentaries about township life, about their own conditions, about the conditions of women, etc. And showed it to themselves when we had been going for a while. And they were amazed. They had never seen themselves represented because we had television in 1976, sorry not- We had television in 1976 but that was white television. They were no black people on television at all. Maybe someone putting petrol in your car or mowing the lawn. And suddenly these smart black kids saw themselves represented. And that was extraordinary, extraordinary. They started making really good, good movies. And we sent them to, took them to Paris to the documentary festivals, the Cinéma du Réel in Paris. And they won prizes. And that was in spite of there being no opportunities for blacks to make movies. But they could start doing that.
INT: I mean that is so powerful, you empowered a group of young black filmmakers to represent themselves for one of the first times. I mean, and you won an award for this work didn’t you. Am I right in saying so?
RES: Well the French were very kind and they made me a Chevalier for doing this, Ordre des Palmes académiques, if I get it right.
INT: I wasn’t going to try.
RES: And that was, I was very- I was very grateful, I was very proud to be given that at this-
INT: It’s beyond incredible and I mean as well as, you know, being, you know, teaching and lecturing and also doing this work, what is it that you loved about working with young people and kind of what they brought to the table? What was it that you liked?
RES: It’s what I could learn.
INT: Yeah.
RES: I’ll tell you a quick little story.
INT: Please.
RES: One of the women made a documentary about the Salvation Army hostel in town. You know the Salvation Army looks after-
INT: Yeah.
RES: [unclear 01:03:01] And they wanted to make this documentary about the man who was the head of the Salvation Army. A big, big guy who used to bring these little white hoboes that came in off the street, the tramps. And he used to shave them and comb their hair and he would give them a bit of money to go out and do things. And he and his wife would help etc. etc. And I watched that and I said, “Wow, that’s great. What a depiction of power you’re showing in the way that this man is dealing with these decrepit human beings.” And then one of the black girls said, “That is a very South African film.” So I said, “Well what do you mean?” She said, “Didn’t you see that the people that made up the beds were black women. The people who served at the tables were black women. No matter how low you are as a white in South Africa, you will always still have a black woman to serve you and to do things for you.” And I hadn’t seen that.
INT: Yes, yeah.
RES: I learnt, I learnt to look better. It’s just an example. And there are many other examples of working with people from different cultures and seeing things through their eyes, how enlightening that is.
INT: I mean gosh that is so powerful. It’s, the way we see is in itself a privilege right, it’s an indicator of our privilege. And the fact that I think sometimes you don’t see these patterns as, yeah, I mean that, honestly working with young people is just, must have been a most incredible experience. So before this interview you kind of described that your professional life you would kind of group it into three key areas. So that’s the academic, the journalism and then as an anti-apartheid activist. So I thought perhaps we could finish off that kind of academic chapter and speak a bit about your book Image Wise, and also about your sabbaticals if that sounds good. So first and foremost you wrote a book called Image Wise and you also experienced having that made into a TV series. That must have been quite amazing. So you can tell us more about that.
RES: That was really the experience. I realised with all my, there’s a couple of things came happenstance that they started to introduce film study at schools, at a couple of schools. And then they needed to have a textbook. So I decided to do that and also a couple of other universities had introduced film studies. So I wrote the book and it was very popular and it sold out second, third editions very, very quickly. And then the SABC, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, government body said that they wanted to make a television series. Would I write the television series if we pay you money for it. I said, “Okay, sure I’ll do that. I’ll do that.” And I was involved in it but the usual problems of making an extended series like that, that the young director didn’t really, wasn’t, didn’t really understand what he was supposed to do. And so it, you had to fight to get your images done. And then when it came to news, then the SABC intervened very editorially very heavily because I had shown how you can use certain images to do something and how the omission of [overtalking 01:07:09] how powerful that is in not giving the full picture. And so we had to fight like hell to try and get the coherence of that, that done. But so eventually a series came out which was passable. And I was quite- I was happy for it to happen because there was enough stuff in it for it to work. Although it was a fight to do it.
INT: Definitely. I mean it sounds like there was a lot of moments throughout your career even just in, you know, having to name the department The School of Dramatic Art and not including film in the title. There is just so many moments like this where you were up against the government and what it was telling you to do and what it allowed you to do. That must have felt, as a creative did that feel quite frustrating to be constrained in that way?
RES: Oh absolutely. And also I was in my middle career of being a newspaper reviewer of films and of television, particularly the television thing. Then the television news was pure propaganda. And so every day when I had to write, every week when I had to write my column, then I could say “Look this is, they’re demonising the ANC. They’ve demonising Nelson Mandela. These are the words they’re using about him. They’re not true. That’s not who he is. This is Archbishop Tutu, this is who he is, not what you are saying.” And I used to write that weekly column, weekly, weekly. And that was- And about the wars that South Africa was waging in Angola and in Mozambique and elsewhere, which was top secret, nobody was supposed to know about it. And I would write about that. And then I would get hate mail and I would get- The newspaper was taken to court by the government on numerous occasions for, yes, treason and lying etc. etc. But we managed to win all the cases because they didn’t have a leg to stand on. But that was the atmosphere in which you were working. But it was good. People read my column and they learnt to look at television in a different way. It was good. [overtalking 01:09:41]
INT: Yeah, don’t take what you see just for granted particularly images. I mean gosh. But I guess, sorry I’m just so fascinated by this topic, because you had already mentioned that, you know, quite a few of your contemporaries had been assassinated, that, you know, they were after your son in many ways. Was that quite scary to write those columns? Or did you feel like it was a risk worth taking and that it was, you know, you had to do it?
[01:10:07]
RES: Well you see it was- It’s difficult to answer but I must answer it properly. We were already in our family because of our- And I’ll have to talk about my son Paul, because he eventually became the Executive Secretary of the Truth Commission under Archbishop Tutu when he was only 26 but he was a student activist. And so his life was in danger and his friends lives were in danger. And I remember once he led a protest march of black students to an empty white school in a white suburb. And the school was empty. It hadn’t been used for years. And in the township, in Soweto there was, there were no- There were no classes, classrooms. They were all full. And this thing was empty. So he led a protest march and immediately the police came with the helicopters and the cops etc. And they nabbed him and put him in the back of a police van. And I knew he was quite- He was anxious about- He was claustrophobic. So then people phoned me and said, “Paul’s been caught by the police. What are you going to do about it?” So I drove there, drove out to it and I did this terrible thing which I- And I went and found the police commissioner and I spoke to him in Afrikaans because I was completely bilingual, you know. “Oh captain, captain, this is me, I’m Professor Van Zyl. My son is here the naughty boy. He’s been leading this thing, you know. I’ll take him home. I’ll take him home and talk to him.” And so this guy said, “Oh, of course. I feel so sorry for you for having such a terrible son. Take him.” So I took him home and we sat in the car and I said, “Thank God you’re not in jail. Thank God you’re not in jail.”
INT: Yeah, yeah.
RES: So you were living very much on the edge. And as I say, never mind what happened to me and my white colleagues, people were- Listen to Kumi Naidoo’s story which I listened to. What people, what they endured was not comparable at all. But anyway, it was there as a threat.
INT: But I think it’s important to understand, you know, the fact that you were writing these columns and you were speaking out during this climate, right. It wasn’t just I suppose, I think it’s important for people listening to understand what it took and what the stakes were when you were doing that and how you really were as, you know, the phrase I used earlier, kind of fighting the world’s fight. I mean that is what that looks like. It’s not always easy and it's not always straightforward. Just to take a moment on your various sabbaticals because you did quite a few and they were quite interesting weren’t they. So you mentioned already your first sabbatical in Minnesota where you had those incredible kind of almost lecturing and the tutorial experiences. Did you- How was that? What was the focus of that particular sabbatical?
RES: Again taking it in context that was 1966 I think, that was the middle of the Vietnam War. And kids would come to you and say, “Look I can’t flunk this subject. If you flunk me in this subject then I’m out of here and I’m on my way to Fort Bragg to be commissioned.”
INT: Gosh.
RES: So that was an added moral obligation in the way you treated, you dealt with your, with the students. But, but it was- Oh a little story. When I arrived in Moorhead Minnesota at the airport, Herron Airport it was called, I was met on the tarmac by this tall gangling guy, a bit out of the movies, who said, “Hello John. My name is- I am Professor Clarence Glasrud but you can call me Soc.” So I learnt [overtalking 01:14:52] Soc, an abbreviation for Socrates.
INT: Okay.
RES: So I thought, this is so informal, this is fantastic. And then I discovered, introduced to the American academic system where you have a Chair, you have a department, at the head of the department is the Chairman. And there’s a committee that runs it. It’s not a head as we have in South Africa or a head professor. But he was the Chairman. And the way the whole department was run was run as if it was a business. And there was a research Chairman and the this Chairman and the- They had meetings and that informality and the fact that you called each other by your first names.
INT: Soc.
RES: Wonderful. It was absolutely- And all the students immediately they called me John which they have done throughout my life. But that democracy of American academics I really appreciated. That was a learning step for me and I’ve always kept that whatever else I have done and in The School of Dramatic Art we ran it on that democratic level. So-
INT: I think that must have been quite- That would have been quite important to your style of teaching though where you kind of collaboratively work together, right. You can’t do that on an unequal basis. So, it kind of makes sense that you liked this approach because it worked well with your style of teaching.
RES: Yes. Yes.
INT: Yeah. Very interesting. Another sabbatical brought you back to Oxford in 1972 to complete your PhD dissertation. What was the pilgrimage back to Oxford like? How was it? Tell me about it.
RES: Good God I came back to Oxford with a wife and a little two year old boy, at just two years old. And I don’t know whether the Squirrel School still exists, the nursery school called the Squirrel School. It’s down- [unclear 01:17:03] go down there somewhere. It was near Dragon School.
INT: Dragon School, yeah no, I don’t- It might do, I’m going to be honest, I don’t know enough about primary schools in Oxford but maybe.
RES: It’s somewhere over there. Anyway, so that was lovely. And I used the library at Rhodes. I used the Bodleian. I used the English library which I have forgotten where that is, that’s somewhere in town.
INT: Yeah.
RES: And that was a wonderful time, a wonderful year. And we had a little car and we could travel around, the Trout and the Perch and the places around.
INT: Oh amazing.
RES: That was really nice. And it was very- But my tutors were both still there and Jonathan worked with at Exeter and Reggie Alton at Teddy Hall. And I think both Kenneth Wheare and Bill Williams were still there. But it really, it was amazing to be back.
INT: Yeah. But very different with a wife and a child. I mean gosh that would have-
RES: Very different.
INT: Very different times.
RES: Yeah. Yeah, and I used to say, this is the wall I used to climb over, this is where we used to do this.
INT: Yeah, yeah, this is where I got very drunk but now we’re being sensible.
RES: Exploring the pubs together, [unclear 01:18:39] and the Turf, and the, whatever, whatever, yeah exactly. And then the second one was, that was the second one, and then the third one, oh that was a very good one in Philadelphia at Penn. And I, it was sort of a double job. I taught English in the English department and it was a very good English department. And Philip Roth was also a lecturer there. There was a huge awe of him. But we met at the Coffee Pot. And then I was part of the Annenberg School of Communications. And I learnt about ethnographic film. And filmmaking, documentary filmmaking. And that stood me in stead when I did that French Direct Cinema.
INT: Yes.
RES: I learnt stuff there which I could use, which I could use again there. So that was a very exciting time and I loved Philadelphia and I liked the staff and the people, they were good. Very different to the Midwesterners back in Minnesota. These were East Coast people, smart, clever people. And that was nice, it was good. And then, by that stage I had two children.
[01:20:12]
INT: Yes.
RES: [overtalking 01:20:14] Paul was seven or eight and Anna was four. And, oh and the story. When we arrived the faculty came around and said, “Look we’ve got a problem. We haven’t got a school for the kids of faculty. We better do something about it.” And we found an old theological college, beautiful old stone theological college that had been abandoned. And a group of us, about 30 I suppose, set about turning that into a school. And being America, you hired a head and you hired the teachers. And we all rolled up our sleeves, we painted and we put glass in the windows, etc. etc. And the kids loved it and we loved it. And the wonderful thing was, that stays with me forever, once the school was running, when I would walk from my classes at Annenberg back home our apartment, we’d pass the school. And I would pop in and say to the class teacher Candy, “Hi Candy. Where’s Paul?” “Paul’s in the corner there. He’s, they’re talking about myths today,” or something. “Why don’t you go and join them and see if you can help them.” And I would sit down and I would enjoy that. Because you know I had grown up and I think most people grow up where the school is a, you know, you don’t intrude.
INT: No.
RES: It’s off limits. You never go into the classroom, go and do your thing. And here you were able to go into the classroom and sit down and chat a bit and then it was just such a liberating idea of schooling.
INT: Yes totally. And so different to how you grew up. I mean I just love the idea of you mucking in and, you know, painting the school and sorting everything out. It just kind of brings me back to when you were talking about your childhood growing up on a farm and not being afraid to ever get stuck in, you know. Not afraid of hard work.
RES: I knew how to use a paint brush [unclear 01:22:37] And every morning I know that particular class that Paul was in, he was eight I think, would sit down and they would first have a chat about their parents and their siblings and how things are at home, etc. And so Paul learnt very early on to speak his mind and to discuss things and to give advice. They learnt to advise others, other kids. So there was a huge merit in that.
INT: So these sabbaticals they didn’t just kind of benefit you, they very much benefited your kids and the experiences that it gave them, right. Yeah.
RES: Oh totally, totally. Yes. Yes. They still talk about the American, about the Philadelphia experience, very much so.
INT: How long were you in Philadelphia?
RES: A year.
INT: Okay, so very, a very impactful year.
RES: Yes.
INT: Gosh. Before we jump into your final sabbatical which I believe was in The Netherlands, I suppose, you know, you’ve mentioned you had two kids and you were navigating this really exciting and busy career with a growing family. I’m just curious to hear how that was in terms of balancing both aspects. Was it quite difficult or did you find it easy to kind of switch off and go into dad mode?
RES: Oh I think, it was not difficult. It was easy.
INT: No, ah.
RES: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No I have always, you know, short answer, it was-
INT: Loved it.
RES: Integrate outside lives, inside lives and teaching. And that is to the huge benefit of my children because, you know, they’ve- They have grown up internationally and I think that has been very good for them.
INT: Absolutely. No it sounds, I mean it’s a dream childhood. Going abroad and going to different schools. So much fun. Your final sabbatical was in The Netherlands and introducing the concept of community radio, which of course you’ve done a lot of work on that. Can you tell us about that experience?
RES: Yeah. So apart from the fact that, as I told you earlier that Amsterdam as you’re going to find out, is my favourite place, I realised I was coming to the end of my tenure at Wits. And I had to think about the future, what I was going to do. So what I wanted to do was to set up an NGO and to do something about the community radio. And so I then got a position as a visiting lecturer at the Radio Netherlands Training Centre in Hilversum which is about an hour away from Amsterdam. And it’s a very good, it was always excellent, very good training place for community radio. People came from all over the world particularly South America. The community radio really started in South America with Radio Santa Maria in Colombia. And there was a link between them and Hilversum. So it was absolutely great to talk to people from other countries about the problems they had. And financial problems, problems with making programmes, government interference, getting a licence [overtalking 01:26:38] So, so there were a lot of things that I could learn.
INT: Absolutely. I mean that’s shaped a lot of your work kind of post-working at Wits which we’ll definitely jump into. And I’m- It’s amazing to see how each of these sabbaticals shaped you in so many ways, right. I think sometimes you don’t get that clear link. But this is just direct, a direct impact on you and your work. Talking about your kind of parallel careers, so we’ve spoken about the academic, we’ve touched on the journalism, your life as a journalist and film critic as well. So you talked about your newspaper column. Was there anything else you did? What was the work on the film critic side? I’m just curious to hear about that.
RES: Right. When I first came back, well my first job in 1961, would it have been, ’61, ’62, a new newspaper had just started, very posh Sunday newspaper, they tried to do something like The Observer.
INT: Okay.
RES: And they were advertising for a film critic. And so I came fresh from Oxford, from a brief stint as a screen writer. And I got [overtalking 01:28:03] And I just loved the idea of writing for this big newspaper. And there was a very clever smart guy that I owe so much to called Percy Baneshik who was the arts editor. And so the first time he sent me out and I went and did my reviews and I came back proudly with my script and I gave it to him. And he looked at it and he took out his red pencil, and he went- And he red pencilled almost the entire thing. I was mortified. How could he do this? I have got a degree from Oxford for God’s sake.
INT: Yeah.
RES: Anyway, no, no, no you can’t write like this. If you write for a newspaper you’ve got to write clearly, short sentences. You never start with this, got you check everything. So I said, “Oh sorry, sorry.” And I went back and I rewrote [overtalking 01:29:06] And then there were fewer red lines next time and then fewer still. Anyway the amazing thing is he taught me to write clearly, in journalese, how to write clearly and precisely and so forth. And he also taught me how to write fast because on a Friday afternoon there were three movies released, 3.00 o’clock, 5.00 o’clock and 8.00 o’clock. I had to attend all three and then I had to write my review by 11.00 o’clock that night. So I used to take-
INT: Oh my goodness.
RES: In the dark while the movie was going on, I had a little torch and I used to make notes then go home and then sit down, and then write a, what is it, 900 words, 900 word column and hand it in the next morning 9.00 o’clock deadline.
[01:30:00]
But so that really taught me to write fast and to think on my feet and to write clearly. So the discipline that he taught me I had to add the added discipline of writing fast. You can’t scribble and think about what is this, what is this. You’ve got to make up your mind and you’ve got to write fast. So in terms of journalism, newspaper journalism, that was a good learning curve.
INT: Yes, a baptism of fire, gosh I mean, I would be so nervous but that’s, that must have been quite good fun if you like films and writing and the challenge of it must have, you know, kept you going. Notably you were awarded The Thomas Pringle Award for your journalism in 1983. What was this award for? Can you tell me more about that?
RES: Oh it’s an annual award for achievement in journalism. So if someone has done a huge investigative journalism series and it’s been well acclaimed, then such a person would be eligible for that. Or somebody has consistently written about music or else, anything. But for my television column, which I then wrote from 1960- No from 1976, well we didn’t have television before 1976, so I started writing it ’76 until ’92 I think it was. It was the longest running television column. And so it was a recognition of the quality and the durability of my column. [overtalking 01:31:51]
INT: Something to be very proud of. I was going to say congratulations but that would be probably about 43 years too late from me. Very impressive. That’s amazing. The final kind of strand of your career was an active anti-apartheid activist. So we’ve spoken a bit about your work with the South African community documentary filmmaking. But this was rooted in your attendance of a conference called Freedom of the Airwaves. Can you tell us a little bit more about that conference and attending that was like?
RES: Right. Right. So, so gradually then towards 1990 I ran the Direct Cinema Programme from ’84 to ’88 for the French Government. And that linked into the same context as other young black filmmakers who were often working really on the edge of safety in making their programmes, their news programmes etc. etc. And so I was then called into the, it was called FAWO, the Film and Allied Workers Organisation, FAWO, which is sort of a trade union and sort of leftish. They then invited me to attend the Jabulani, Jabulani means let’s rejoice, Jabulani, Freedom of the Airwaves Conference in Holland, in Doorn. And I was very happy to be invited to do that, that I had the credentials to be able to be invited. And that was quite a high powered meeting with a lot of the ANC people in exile who hadn’t yet come back to South Africa, working towards a new South Africa. And particularly restructuring the South African Broadcasting Corporation because over the years there had been His Master’s Voice, totally, totally propaganda, state controlled everything. And how we were going to change that. And in the way that matters became organised, I became part of the delegation dealing with community radio as a new aspect, something completely new. So the old SABC was dismantled then and it was turned into three new things, a public broadcaster, a real public broadcaster, and a number of new radio licences were granted for people to have their own radio stations, independent radio stations, and then the community radio sector. So when we came back there were all sorts of meetings to organise this, put this together and set up new committees and new government departments, it was a complete reorganisation of the communications industry.
INT: Gosh.
RES: And I had then just retired and so the thing that I had in my eye of doing an NGO, ABC, the applied broadcasting sector, we then set that up to supply people to the community radio sector, presenters, writers, etc. etc.
INT: Brilliant. For those, just quickly, for those that might not be so familiar with community radio as a concept, can you just explain why that was so important in this kind of restructuring of South African Broadcasting and the important role community radio plays in that.
RES: Yeah. That’s, you’re absolutely right, should be precise about that. I think possibly, of course in America there are dozens of little independent little radio stations. So every town has a dozen little radio stations that play music and carry news and so forth. Not quite so common in Europe I think. But, but also very common in Latin America. But so the concept then of community radio was a very political one. It was meant to be the people’s voice and the slogan was Let the People Speak. And so it was conceived of very theoretically and quite didactically, this is what it should do. And they then handed out licences to people that applied for them. They handed out 70 licences dotted all over South Africa, all the townships had a couple of community stations everywhere. And of course community radio is incredibly effective and very, if it works, it was economical, you can broadcast in any language. It comes to you from your, you know, your radio and so there’s not the question of print material that is expensive or you can’t transport print from, to little towns. It was all the advantages that you could possibly think of. But what the government did not do, did not understand in spite of all of our protests was they didn’t subsidise the sector. Didn’t put a penny into it. They gave them licences which cost nothing and they said, go. And so typically then a group of youngsters in the township would get together and they’d find an empty house somewhere or other, a shack somewhere or other and somewhere or other they would then get enough money to have a low power transmitter and a low power microphone and something to, for music, to contain the music. But it was completely from the beginning, it was not viable because it was completely a volunteer thing. And if people are really living on the margins of society and there’s not a lot of money around in a township, to expect people to do this for free just was crazy. And we worked, absolutely we- People who were involved in developing this went to the government time after time to say, “You can’t do that.” So we then started- I went out and I became a fundraiser, this was something, and I was actually very good at it and I got money from the Ford Foundation, I got money from the Kellogg Foundation, from governments, Danish Government, Dutch Government etc. And we got our NGO up and running with 17 people. And we started getting people in to train them. And we trained them well but we sent them back but there was no response. It didn’t work because they didn’t have the means to produce or to broadcast. And so we realised that we had to start producing programmes ourselves. And so we got writers in to write, you see HIV and AIDS is one of the huge problems in South Africa, it’s the highest number of people, you know that.
[01:40:13]
INT: Yeah.
RES: And so it was a programme, Living with AIDS, all the hundred different topics involving HIV and AIDS. Started writing programmes about them. Telling stories. Using local languages. Using characters. Creating little stories, not didactic, you know, use a condom, use a condom but you create a whole string of stories, people that are recognisable, speak the same language as you and they discuss the things about condoms and that’s the way you work.
INT: Absolutely.
RES: So we became a production house. And that effectively for the 10 years that I was at ABC Ulwazi before I retired, we turned out hundreds and hundreds of- We put them on CDs and then we sent the CDs by post to the different stations. And at the same time then we would invite them, the people from the stations back to ABC Ulwazi to teach them how to best benefit from the programmes. In other words find out who are the local HIV people working in the field and get them to come and talk to you and absolutely use the stories to, at schools and local communities, to understand what it is. It’s no use just broadcasting the thing to whom it may concern unless you know that somewhere somebody is going to listen to it and to be able to integrate it and understand it.
INT: Absolutely. It’s about getting that message out there. And I think it’s important, I know I mentioned it earlier, but it did win the award for the best education NGO in Africa in 2000. So I just want to mention that again because I think it’s an incredible achievement and just such a testament to the work you had put it. It’s amazing.
RES: Yeah. Yeah. I know. I just wanted to tell you one quick thing.
INT: Yeah please.
RES: ABC Ulwazi, we were 17 people and this was absolutely multiracial, multicultural. Men, women, boys, girls [overtalking 01:42:40]
INT: Everyone.
RES: And so first thing I introduced this kind of learning from Minnesota way back then, [overtalking 01:42:48] 10.00 o’clock every morning, tea, compulsory tea. Everybody had to sit down, tea. And everybody had to tell a story about what they had done, what they’re doing. And so these were people that were actually not accustomed to speaking to one another, you know. That was the interesting thing. And then there was an Indian, there was an Indian girl, Hindu, a Muslim, and then it was time for the fast. And then she would say, “I’m fasting now because of-
INT: Ramadan, yeah.
RES: Exactly. And then everybody would say, “Talk to, how, what happens?” And so there’s that sort of interaction, social interaction, cultural interaction was great, was absolutely great. And people worked together in a completely democratic way. And then on a Thursday we had the, our business meeting, staff meeting. And every one of the staff took a turn at being the Chair of that meeting. So everybody from the person at the telephone to the producer had to arrange the meeting, arrange the minutes and see that the minutes of the last meeting were there. And they all learnt to do that and they got very, very strict in fact.
INT: Yeah.
RES: [unclear 01:44:31] “You don’t speak out of turn.” And they learnt to run a meeting.
INT: Yeah. I love the way that you run, you know, an organisation and you empower everyone to just, you know, be their best self, learn new skills and have the confidence to say [unclear 01:44:48] Can I have worked with you John, please. Come and run- That’s amazing. We need to talk about this. You shared with me that you met Archbishop Tutu in 1998. Wow. Can you tell me more about that?
RES: Say that again?
INT: Can you tell us about your experience meeting Archbishop Tutu in 1998?
RES: Oh, okay, okay. So my son Paul, the activist did a first law degree at our university. Then when we went to Holland on my sabbatical, he went to Leiden University and he did an LLB in international human rights law. And he then came back and at that stage they were busy putting together the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And Archbishop Tutu identified him as being the right person to become the executive secretary. He was only 26, you know, and it was- But he had been an activist, he really had a very good record. So he then appointed him. And through that we got to know the Archbishop. And the wonderful warm person that he is, he was just delightful. He became part of the family and we call, I call him father and, well we call him father. And then when the Truth Commission was about to start, I got very worried, people got very worried about how the press and broadcasting, the media were going to report on the proceedings. Because the danger was that people who had suffered tremendous trauma during the apartheid regime had to tell their story. And if you were filming this and filming this in close up, people would be victimised a second time.
INT: Yes, yes.
RES: So you had to just engage certain rules of distancing and if somebody breaks down not to zoom in on that but to turn the camera away. So we had a conference about how to televise it, how to write about it, how not to sensationalise it, how to respect people’s lives and to understand the human rights involved in this because there was very special human rights of dignity and integrity and care. And so we, myself and then Charlotte my wife and we got to know the Bishop Tutu very well in organising these things. And it’s also a lovely story about the first time he came to the first conference on reporting the Truth Commission. He asked Charlotte whether he could find a little place, a dark place to pray before the thing. And so she found like a broom cupboard and she put him in the broom cupboard and she locked the door, or closed the door. And the door locked. I said, “Oh my goodness, Archbishop Tutu is locked in this broom cupboard.” And so we rushed around looking for someone, a janitor, someone who find the key to unlock it. And eventually in the nick of time they managed to unlock it and he came out. And so that’s how we got to know him. And then later on quite recently here when I had retired, we set up something called The Franschhoek Valley Transformation Charter in which 30 of us came together to try and do something about redressing the injustices of the slave history of the Western Cape. Slaves were introduced into the Western Cape in 1652 by the Dutch colonisers who brought slaves from Indonesia and from Burma for the whole of Southeast Asia to work here in the vineyards etc. And at a certain stage there were more slaves than Dutch in the Cape. And there was a great deal of intermarriage between the sailors and the women that came in.
[01:50:04]
And as a result there is in the Cape a Creole population known, it’s been a huge contested area, known as the coloured people, as coloured people but brown people. But slaves working on farms were terribly badly treated till very, very recently. And there was a terrible system where slaves were actually paid, workers were paid with a cup of wine at the end of the day. Cheap, cheap wine instead of food and proper wages. The Dop system it was called. And so it’s a very, it’s a cultural group of people that have been very damaged over very many years. And so we wanted to do something about that, about housing, about job prospects, about kids, about schools, about nursery schools and the Charter project tried to do that. And we asked the Archbishop to become the patron and he said he would be delighted to do that. So in June 2011 he came to Franschhoek and he arrived, in the big church was going to be the inaugural ceremony. And he came into the church and he had a prepared speech and he looked around at this church filled with faces with anticipation and love and wonderment. And he put away his prepared speech and I wish I could do his accent well enough, but just a slight approximation. He said, “When I was coming here today I looked up and I saw God and God was crying. And God was crying because there is so much evil in this world and people are so sad. And then God saw me come to Franschhoek and he looked at Franschhoek and he saw what was happening here and God smiled.”
INT: Oh my gosh, John that made me tear up. That’s so beautiful.
RES: Imagine everybody in the church was in tears.
INT: Oh wow, wow.
RES: They were- It was moving and extraordinary. And this saint like person that he was, you know, that’s what he said. And that’s all that he had to say. God was smiling.
INT: Yeah. It’s still making me tear up. God, I mean that just is so profoundly spoken from the heart, right.
RES: Yes.
INT: And just to hear the beautiful intentions behind this work. I mean it’s just- I think sometimes nowadays especially you get the sense that, you know, where is humanity, right. And to hear stories like this just, yeah, it’s heartwarming.
RES: Yeah it is.
INT: So when we talk about retired life I suppose that you’ve been quite haven’t you. You have stayed very active and engaged and I think, you know, normally we think well you know reading a book or relaxing. But you’re starting up commissions, you’re going to conferences, you’re starting NGOs. What keeps you going John? What keeps you so motivated to keep contributing to the communities around you?
RES: Well firstly, and this is a silly thing to say, but I am very fit, that I have for the past 60 years done gym every morning.
INT: Wow.
RES: And I have my own little gym in my garage, or if when we still in Johannesburg there was a gym close by. But I have kept myself physically very, very fit. And I play tennis as you know. And I walk every day, I walk a couple of kilometres every day. So I think keeping my body active has been very important. I have been very lucky. I’ve had one knee replacement a couple of years ago but that’s, for the rest I’m fine. And then I think that I, I have been married twice. And Susan was my first wife, she was in the English department and she is the mother of our three children. And we have remained great friends throughout our life and she’s just last year at the age of 78, no 68, 78 [unclear 01:55:10] she retired from this having broken a record for being the longest serving academic at Wits. From 1962 till last year. Anyway-
INT: That’s so impressive.
RES: So we’ve got the three lovely children and then in 1990 I remarried Charlotte, my Dutch wife who brought two stepchildren. I’ve got two stepchildren. They both live- Chris lives in Singapore and [s/l Franka 01:55:49] on the island of Lanzarote where she’s a musician and an organiser. And so, and the children and the grandchildren are amazing and interested and all very, very deeply involved.
INT: Yeah. Your family just sounds so wonderful and you’ve shared with me before that, you know, your children, you end up going on all sorts of travels, to Singapore, to London, to wherever it might be, and you truly are an international family.
RES: Yes. Yes. So, and Anna lived in Singapore for 20 years. Her husband Nick was the branch manager for Standard Bank for Southeast Asia and he had an office in Hong Kong but lived in Singapore. So all three of her boys went to United World College and then they have been in London now for the last five, six years. And in London they went to the American School, American International School.
INT: Oh great. Gosh. And you’ve spoken a lot about your son Paul who it sounds like you are very close with as well.
RES: Yes. Absolutely. We are- I’m very, very, very proud of him. He has three children as well. Max is a graduate from King’s College. And at the moment he is heading up a project for the British Football Association to create, get enough money to provide assistance for housing for their fans.
INT: Really important work, yeah.
RES: Yeah, yeah. So that’s again, that sense of working for the community. So that’s him. And then Theo is 17 and he is at the American University. He is a good footballer and he’s the editor of the school newspaper. And Layla is 13 and she is a writer, and she is already written two or three novels. She’s just-
INT: Wow! And she has her grandpa to proofread.
RES: [audio distorted 01:58:23] And she’s at the new St Thomas’s School in London which has just opened up. And on the other side on Anna’s side we have Jamie who is studying film and digital communications-
INT: No way.
RES: At the Southbank University. Sam at McGill doing urban development. He is now going to spend a year at the University of Copenhagen. And <Name 01:58:55> who is now just finishing school. So this variety.
INT: The most wonderful bunch of- And you must be so proud. I mean they’re all making impact in their own different ways but they- I mean John it has to said, your energy and your joy and your stories and your smile, it’s so- You’d be an amazing- I’m sure you’re an amazing grandparent and I’m just curious, you know, as we come to the end of the interview, what do you do for fun outside of, you know, just changing the world and doing all these amazing projects? What do you do to relax? You shared you’re going to the theatre tomorrow. Is there anything else you enjoy?
RES: Oh I, I paint. I took up painting a couple of years ago. I don’t know if you can see in the top right hand corner of-
INT: Are those yours? Wow.
RES: That’s one of my paintings.
INT: It’s very good.
RES: Thank you, thank you. I did it absolutely on- I took no courses, I did nothing, I just checked out on the internet-
[02:00:06]
INT: You’re a natural talent.
RES: And those colours, all my paintings are those colours, quite- I just love those colours. So that and reading. I read, I still read voraciously. Both Charlotte and I read. She’s a book reviewer for the local newspaper.
INT: Oh wow.
RES: And we read and we read and we read. And that’s, that’s part of our life.
INT: And life is good. You live in the wine, you know, this beautiful place with mountains and the vineyards. It sounds amazing.
RES: Yes. It is. It really is.
INT: Yeah, it really is. I mean as we’ve reflected on your journey just throughout this interview and thank you again for sharing your story, one thing was really clear when we spoke was, Oxford really changed your life and the trajectory and took you on from the Film Society, the tutorial system. And just, yeah, the impact it had on your intellectual freedom. This month, in fact just last week we welcomed our new cohort of scholars. So I’m curious to hear if you have any words of wisdom or advice to share with today’s Rhodes Scholars.
RES: Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. You know I had a little text here from the Archbishop. I mean I, this is a most terrible time that we are living in and I think it’s a time of tyrants and it’s a time of war and it’s a time of the worst possible things. But Bishop, the Archbishop said, “A person is a person through other persons. But even more we say I am human because I participate. I share.” I think that only connect is another phrase, that people be kind, that no matter what you are studying, no matter how bright and smart, and this one, unless you are kind it’s, there is something lacking. And unless you connect to other persons you’re going to miss out on something. So it’s a small thing but I dare not give any other advice, anything, it is based upon my life which has been based on interacting with people all the time. And trying to be kind.
INT: The most important lesson as you say for these difficult times. And I think that your life and your story is a testament to if you have strong values and if you’re kind to people and you look for the connection between humans, you’ll do great things. It’s amazing.
RES: Yeah.
INT: So we’ve come to the end which I am very sad about but I just wanted to ask is there anything that we didn’t mention or anything that you would like to add at this moment?
RES: Anya I don’t think so. I think we’ve covered, we’ve covered about everything. What was the most rewarding part of it, I mean this has been a lovely- It’s been such a lovely talk, I think you did it terribly well, very grateful to you I think that’s- You’re terribly professional and you did it extremely well and I’m so happy about that, was just the research of trying to put together these 5000 words, which if you want me to I could send to you, if it will be of any use.