Waiting for the Revolution (1960)

My father, Beaudry Glen Pautz (know to all as Beau), was a journalist, raconteur and writer all his life. In the 1950's and 60's he worked as a reporter on the Daily Dispatch, an important regional newspaper based in the harbour city of East London in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. His colleagues and friends were and interesting bunch and, if you have the time, please read David Denison's look back to the days when he joined the newspaper in the 1950's. My father is mentioned in the article.

In 1959, Beau and my mother followed one of his colleagues to London where they both worked on Fleet Street and got to travel Europe. my To cut a long story short, Donald Woods, my father and my mom (then heavily pregnant with me) returned from the UK soon after the Sharpeville massacre to report on the country's descent into revolution. My father was sure that the writing was finally on the wall for the Apartheid regime, and that the people were about to rise up in a wave of liberation. Sadly for him, that took another 35 years to reach fruition, and he died before South Africa's first democratic election in 1994. Luckily he did live long enough to witness Nelson Mandela's release.



I was visiting my mother in South Africa in August 2009 and came across this wonderful photograph. Taken towards the end of 1960 (or early the following year), it shows my father interviewing an amaXhosa gentleman enshawled in a blanket and wearing traditional headgear. I have no idea of the context, or what story my father was pursuing, but I think it's a really cool shot.

See more photographs from the old days in the old country in this set on Flickr.

Cheers MAlfaRK ©