Part 52
When I think back to the times that unexpected opportunities occurred out of the blue, I usually took them, blithely unaware of the future consequences, and luckily most of them turned out well.
However, there were also opportunities that, had I taken them, my life would have been very different and in most cases the outcome would have been disastrous.
As I mentioned in my blog last week, a new person was added to my section of Lintas Advertising. His first name was Ronnie. We became quite friendly almost immediately. He was interesting and amusing but, above all, we both expressed our frustration and anger with the ever-growing repressions of Apartheid and its effect on the majority of South Africans who were people of color.
However, we did differ strongly about the way in which this iniquitous system should be opposed. I was not a political person but, since my return to South Africa about two years previously, I had decided that I should join one of the opposition parties. The United Party was the majority opposition party in parliament but, since the death of the world statesman Jan Smuts in 1950, it had lacked powerful leadership and was becoming increasingly ineffective in its efforts to stop the National Party in power from pursuing its disastrous policy of Separate Development (Apartheid).
In 1953, the writer Alan Paton helped to form the anti-Apartheid Liberal Party of South Africa. It was in the global tradition of liberalism at the time that espoused liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. It worked towards a peaceful transition of power and was fully multiracial. I had the pleasure of meeting with the great man and listening to his very sane and practical view of our beloved country.
I was attracted to both the liberal ideals and to Alan Paton, who had succeeded Margaret Ballinger as party leader in 1955. Paton had written one of the great classic South African novels in 1948 entitled Cry the Beloved Country. It was made into a film in 1951 and starred the American actor Sydney Poitier in only his second movie.
Anyway, the point was that my philosophical and religious viewpoint was that a peaceful transition of power in South Africa was the only sensible answer to the destructive forces of Apartheid. Neither the ruling National Party nor the opposition African National Congress, were prepared to consider the possibility of a peaceful handover of power.
Ronnie was a determined activist. He could see no prospect of the Liberal ideal ever succeeding. I enjoyed debating this with him at length, and when he suggested that we share an apartment together, I readily agreed. Only then did I begin to realize that he was way to the left of my moderate liberal ideas. He introduced me to a couple of activists including his girlfriend whom he later married. Then one day he introduced me to a Durban lawyer, Roly Arenstein, who invited me to have a coffee and a chat.
For the first time in my life I was confronted by a genuine dedicated communist. Roly spoke to me endlessly, using all kinds of Marxist key words and phrases. I restated my views that I was opposed to Apartheid but insisted that a peaceful transition of power had to be achieved. He coined a phrase for me that I’ve never forgotten. It was pure gobbledygook. He said I was a Nihilist Existential Hero but I should look to other solutions to the South African problem. In other words, join the Communist party! I declined and fled.
I told Ronnie in no uncertain terms that I was not about to join the Communist party, which was banned anyway in South Africa. A few weeks later, Ronnie disappeared from the apartment and the job, leaving me with all his belongings and his Marxist literature.
Some days later, the press was full of the manhunt for the communist Ronnie Kasrils, who had apparently blown up a couple of electricity pylons. They commented on the fact that he had not harmed anyone and this was somehow praiseworthy. I wondered whether I had influenced him in any way.
Sadly, his later behavior indicated that he was quite prepared to resort to violence. He went into exile and was a founding member of uMkhonto we siswe (Spear of the Nation), which was the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC). In 2004, ten years into the new Democratic ANC-led government, he became Minister of Intelligence Services for four years. He was a strange, rather likeable but very confused person, whose well-meaning intentions had been perverted by political extremists to follow a path of destruction rather than construction.
A week or so after Ronnie’s disappearance, I was called into the office of Lintas’ Managing Director and was fired. When I asked for the reason for my dismissal, I was told that my employment contract stated that they did not have to give any reason for a dismissal. Not that I had any doubt that it was my association with Ronnie that was their reason. There was nothing wrong with my performance. So, for the second time in a couple of years I had been fired for reasons unrelated to my work.
As the world enters into another period of critical decisions, both political and coping with the pandemic, we need to have access to truth and verifiable facts in order for all of us to make properly informed decisions on our way forward.
Until we have ExoBrain operational, I don’t see any prospect of being able to rely on any media data from any source whatsoever. ExoBrain will be carefully monitored and very secure but it behoves us to ensure it is fed verifiable data from which we can build a new generation of well-informed humans capable of making sane decisions.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.