Speech delivered at Ken Owens 80th birthday celebration: 21 February 2015

1.

Kens earliest years were spent in Pretoria. At night, during the Second World
War, with his father away in North Africa, his brother and he would say their
prayers, hoping that the war wouldnt end before they were old enough to fly
Spitfires.

2.

On demobilisation, the family moved to the Klaserie area, now a game reserve.
I later heard stories of an untamed childhood with a pet lion and a pet giraffe
called Shorty. While his mother was a practical woman and a renowned rally
driver, his father was distant, and abusive of the farm labourers. Exercising the
privileges of race, unfairly and without mercy in the late 1940s.

3.

Ken went to Lydenburg Hoerskool, where a growing political consciousness led

him to insist on the application of the United Partys dual medium education
policy that every white child should be taught in his mother tongue. This led to
resentment amongst his Afrikaans classmates and he tells of having his lips cut
with razorblades whenever he insisted on his rights. He recounts watching the
teachers get drunk on the night that the results of the 1948 election were
announced and one of them taunting him saying nou sal ons julle engelse
vasvat. He soon realised that what was happening to him at the hands of his
classmates was no different to what his father was doing to the farmworkers.

4.

Before Ken arrived, the schools achievements were unspectacular, but that
changed during Kens time there, especially since one of his classmates was
Andre Brink. Ken and Andre vied for the school prizes. Although Ken won an
English essay award, Andre got the higher mark for English in the matric exam,
while Ken took the honours in Maths. They both got numerous distinctions.

5.

Kens younger brother recently described to me that he would sidle up to them

talking at break, hoping to catch some intellectual pearls, only to find that in
actual fact they were only talking about girls.

6.

Kens early passions are legend. When I first met him as a ten year old in 1985,
the stories were recounted jokingly.

7.

He told us how when he had drunk too much at work, he would use his tie as a
cradle to lift his arm with glass in hand to his mouth.

8.

Once, working in the Reuters office in London responsible for transmitting wire
reports by telex to the South African newspapers, he went on a bender, and
realising he was unable to do his job, hit upon the idea of painstakingly typing
a message, which he looped and taped onto the machine saying this service
has closed down until further notice, before chucking the typewriters down the
stairwell and heading for the nearest pub.

9.

We heard that one night while motorcycling in central Africa with a friend, their
headlight failed. Having sat on the side of the road for half an hour trying to fix
it, they resolved that the moon was full and there was a clear white line in the
middle of the road which they could follow with ease. They hit another
motorcycle coming the other way, whose headlight had also failed and were
doing the exactly same thing.

10.

While the truth of these stories was reinforced by the deep crevices across his
misshapen face - anybody could see they were no ordinary wrinkles of
experience the stories bore no resemblance to the man we had met.

11.

There were no signs of his notorious temper. To this day, I have never seen
him raise his voice in anger. Harry, my younger brother, rightly describes him
as an island of sanity and security in our turbulent post-divorce world.

12.

He was quiet, calm and rational. He taught me valuable life lessons. I vividly
remember him one day explaining to me in the garage in our house in Maple
Drive that one should return each tool to the toolbox before using another. One
of his mantras (to which I continue to aspire) was do it once, do it right.

13.

This was probably borne out of a life lived under the discipline of the deadline
as a newspaper correspondent, a job he started on a whim one day after a brief
flirtation with law that ended when he awoke late on the day of his first attorneys
professional exam. I pause to remark that the thought of Ken as an advocate is
a terrifying one.

14.

He walked into the Pretoria News one day and persuaded them to give him a
job, in the belief that if there was one thing that he could do it was write.

15.

And boy, Ken can write. One of the singular pleasures of preparing this speech
has been the opportunity to read in full the decade of columns published in his
book, These Times, in 1993.

16.

Given his particular habit of publicly laying into his close friends, the first thing
that struck me was that it would be a wonder if anyone actually came to this
party!

17.

Jenny Crwys Williams said of him in 1989:

Controversial, provocative, scathing, unrepentant, Ken Owen has
enlivened South African journalism for over 20 years . His perversity
is legend; so, too, are his writing skills.

18.

On retirement in 1996 Ken himself told Mark Gevisser

you dont practise journalism by backing down. Its a confrontational way
of life; an endlessly abrasive life ...

19.

Gevisser commented:
There is no other media personality as mythic.
His weekly columns, bilious and brilliant, have defined South African
political

commentary

for

over

decade:

they

were

dark,

uncompromising, disorienting, vituperative. You read them not only

because they were the most literate and beautifully crafted sentences in
all the land, but because they were, like life itself, so exasperating and
so multivalent. They made their author an utterly credible character, an
almost novelistic anti-hero whose moods and malevolences, not to
mention passions, were manifest. The turns and tides of Kens bile were
more compelling than any soap opera.
20.

He was called irascible in the memoirs of both Alex Boraine and Tony Leon.

21.

In one of his columns, Ken himself admitted that his approach was one of brute
intransigence total war in debate

22.

That may be so: but the prose was beautiful: In 1987, a list of recommended
reading was published by the Government. Ken had this to say:
The mind of the Chief Censor, Home Affairs Minister Stoffel Botha, is a
place of wonder, filled with beauty and wisdom. I know this to be true
because I have begun to read the official guide to the labyrinths of
Stoffels mind.

An understanding of Stoffels mind has become a matter of survival to

every editor since Stoffels views, as shaped by a panel of anonymous
advisers, displaced the laws that previously bound the Press. What
Stoffel regards as subversive is subversive; what Stoffel thinks may
promote revolution, promotes revolution; what Stoffel thinks may foment
hostile feelings, foments hostility.
In the past it was only necessary for newspapers, if they wish to avoid
prosecution in the courts, to know what the law said and obey it. There
was a law that forbade sedition, and another that forbade Treason. There
was a law against quoting anything said by Oliver Tambo or Joe Slovo,
even when they spoke the truth.
Fortunately there was no law against quoting nationalist politicians, even
when they lied.

23.

The following week he was at it again, having read one of the books on the list:
Let me confess at once that I have fallen into criminal behaviour. My only
excuse - I recognise it is not a legal defence is that I was urged into
crime by the chief censor, Home Affairs Minister Stoffel Botha.

24.

Who could forget Owens Laws of Social Dynamics (28 November 1985)

The purpose of the law is to create criminals in order to keep the courts
busy and the jails full, but too much law creates an oversupply of
criminals
This is Owens first law of social dynamics and it is a hard lesson to drive
into bureaucratic heads. But we are making progress.
South Africas best source of criminals has in the past been the laws
forbidding people to come to town. It is important to note that the laws
did not prevent people from coming, they merely created criminals
enabling us to convict and imprison 200 000 or 300 000 every year.
The system served to keep the prison warders and the law clerks off the
streets and, if one recalls Crossroads, it kept policemen busy pulling
away the plastic sheets under which old ladies sheltered from the rain.
25.

Ken grappled with the big issues.

26.

He undertook a detailed discussion of the rules for civil disobedience (8 June

1987).
The point of civil disobedience to unjust law is that it generates great
moral force which is vitiated if the dissident tries to escape the
consequences of his actions. There can be no taint of ulterior motive.

27.

On the role of freedom of the press, answering Lenins question Why should
any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions
calculated to embarrass the government?
why indeed? There are two reasons. The first is that in a democracy the
general populace has a right to information so that it can make
reasonably sound judgments about its governance; the second is that
the populace has a right to make its opinions known and to learn the
opinions of others.
Both these rights the right to know and the right to be heard are
vested in the people, not in the Press itself.

28.

Kens big bugbear, was communism. Even if you found it hard to share his
panic, it was worth the reading. Some of you may recognise the imagery in
more recent letters to the Business Day. On 11 June 1990, he wrote
As I have said before, the SACP is the rider, the ANC is horse, and until
the rider can be properly identified until the SACP members step into
the light it will be very difficult for anybody, liberal or nationalist, to deal
with the ANC. After all, what sort of fool bargains with a horse?

29.

So Ken is still riding that particular hobbyhorse.

30.

His other nemeses were the liberal universities. Even while both his wife and
two of his stepchildren were at Wits and UCT, he laid into both the academics
and the radical students:
When the bullyboys came for Piet Koornhof, the liberals remained silent
because Koornhof was not a liberal; when they came for Buthelezi, the
liberals remained silent because he was an unacceptable kind of Zulu
liberal; when they came for [Connor Cruise] OBrien who was
indisputably a liberal, the South African liberals, such as were left, were
mainly cowering in their bunkers. 16 March 1987

31.

But he offered an olive branch in the Introduction to his book in 1993:

The universities have since reverted to the liberal standard which, in my
view they had for a time abandoned, and all that is left of the row is a
lingering public impression that I am an enemy, rather than a friend, of
the institutions of learning. Such is the cost of winning an argument in
public

32.

And Ken also felt that he had won the larger debate around the end of apartheid.
He announced victory on 22 August 1992. Characteristically, he started with a
recognition of past losses:

To be South African is of course to be fashioned by apartheid. To be a

white South African is to have been shaped by bitterness, by humiliation,
by guilt, by dogged defiance, and yes, by a suppressed angry pride. To
be a liberal South African is to have been shaped by defeat.
33.

But then follows: President de Klerk simply appropriated the entire liberal
agenda. The liberals had lost every battle and won the war.

34.

I think that when it came, he was well pleased with the new South Africa.
Certainly, he would have been glad that this wish in 1989 came true:
When President de Klerk and his Broeders settle down to negotiate with
black South Africans, I pray they leave me out of any cosy special
arrangements they may try to make for white folks. Ive seen enough
funny constitutions to know that, for a minority, special status is a trap
and a delusion.
Racial arrogance tends to blind Africas white minorities to a simple truth:
in a world where all men are created unequal, and spend the rest of their
lives striving to make themselves even less equal, the principal of
equality before the law is the best shield of the weak. Equality, in fact, is
the best deal a minority can get.

Speaking for myself as a minority of one, I shall feel safest if I can rely
on the rights which the majority demands for itself. For me, the focus of
negotiation should not be on the special rights of the minorities, but on
the universal rights to be enjoyed by all South Africans.

If, in the negotiations to come, [black South Africans] can be persuaded

to create a state that guarantees their own liberty if they set up the
institutions of a modern liberal state I shall gladly snuggle for safety
into the arms of Mother Africa. [30 October 1989: Equality and Mother
Africa]

35.

While Ken has of course continued some of his battles in the letters pages of
the local and national pages, one finds perspicacious gems and reminders of
continuity.

35.1

2 May 1988
At some point in the middle of an official briefing on President Bothas
plans to create nine more councils for Africans, I began to see how
change will come in South Africa not by revolution but by corruption.

35.2

17 April 1989
Corruption has rotted the very woof and warp of South African life. we
all know what has been happening: Eschel Rhoodie and the crooked
accounting in government, the first class freebie trips abroad; deputy
minister Hennie Van der Walt stealing trust funds; the officials giving
each other free Krugerrands at a party; the lavish parties to celebrate
such mundane events as the opening of a toll road; the fleets of
Mercedes Benzes in the basement of the SABC; the funny banks that
pay 30 percent or more in interest; the greed maddened crowds chasing
after riches in packets of rotten milk; the bankrupt State President; the
lies to Parliament; the Italian criminals in high places; the leaking of
government statistics to favoured people; the property deals; the fatherand-son government contracts; and so much, so much more.
These are mere symptoms of a deeper rot. At the heart of all these
examples lies a failure of the law to hold the allegiance of the people, a
failure of the authority of the state. The people of this country, excepting
a couple of million whites, hold the state and its agents in profound
contempt. That is, of course, the inevitable consequence of replacing the
rule of law with the rule of men.

35.3

12 April 1992

The Nats will soon be handing over to the ANC a wondrous machine,
an immense vacuum cleaner that sucks up money from people who work
for a living, and dispenses it to those whose work is simply to dispense
money.
35.4

In May 2009, Ken wrote the cover story of the Financial Mail setting out
a now-familiar theme that is even more relevant 6 years later.
The events at Polokwane disclosed to us that under SAs flawed
constitution, power lies not with the electorate, nor in parliament, nor
even in the presidency. It lies in the labyrinthine recesses of Luthuli
House where the ANC leaders plot and connive, and decide who will be
deployed to what job, and for how long.
The process is hidden from public view, reducing the entire constitutional
paraphernalia of elections, parliamentary debates and traditions, and
checks and balances to marginal relevance. The public clash of ideas
between government and opposition in an open forum where (if I may
resort to one of the noblest phrases of parliamentary democracy)
strangers may be present is little more than public theatre.
Parliamentarians pontificate, the opposition denounces and cajoles, the
media solemnly records public statements and gathers comments, all
the while hiding the brutal fact that the real debates take place in secret
at Luthuli House. To discover what happens there requires not simply
press freedom but something like Kremlinology, a reading of political tea
leaves.

36.

What I searched for, almost in vain, however, was something personal.

37.

I found only two references to Kens family.

38.

First in June 1980 on being arrested under a section 205 subpoena for
information arising from an investigation into the Smit murder, he recounted the
support received from various sources including a woman writer whom I have
admired for half my life (and for whose praises I would gladly go to jail several
times over). He continued:
That was touching but it did not quite offset one very nasty consequence
of the fuss. In the mind of a 13-year old boy [Thats his son, Peter], I
soon discovered, the threat of a jail sentence evokes the most terrifying
images of Papillon eating cockroaches and pacing a cell with everweakening stride. So my son worried (silently, I am proud to say) for the
10 days that the uncertainty lasted

39.

And in 1988, he wrote:

I saw Cry Freedom last week in Londons Leceister Square where it was
playing to half-empty houses mainly, I would guess, to intelligent young
people whose interest in South Africa outweighs the failings of Sir
Richard Attenboroughs worst made movie
It is frankly a bad film: a fictionalised documentary that plods its way
through the sins of apartheid and the brutalities of the nationalist
regimen. But the effect on the audience is simply shattering. When the
movie ended half of them simply sat staring ahead and sat and sat
and sat. In the end they wandered out shattered and bemused. One
woman wondered towards Piccadilly sobbing all the way.

40.

But none of this tells us much about Ken, or what he thinks personal happiness
or contentment might consist of, either generally or for him personally. There is
little glimpse of what fruits the ideals that he fights for might bring.

41.

You see, unlike Andre Brink, who struggled with those questions in his writing
all his life, Ken found it unnecessary to deal with that issue.

42.

The key, I think lies, in this. On more than one occasion, he has said that Alan
Paton gave South African Liberals (I think he meant him, personally) what he
calls a text to live by.

43.

According to Alan Paton, the source of this text was (perhaps appropriately)
William the Silent. Perhaps even more appropriately, Ken thinks the true author
was Charles the Bold.

44.

The text was this: It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, and it is
not necessary to succeed in order to persevere. [corrected]

45.

Those of us who have lived with Ken for a long time, his wife of almost thirty
years, his six children his twelve grandchildren, have learned that underneath
this ascetic outlook, the surly appearance and the dry humour lies a man for
whom the requisites of human life and enjoyment, the very essence of humanity
for which one must fight with all ones being, are so sacred that they can barely
be mentioned in public - certainly, not in his writing. They are self-evident, not
to be trivialised by sentimentality.

Richard Moultrie
February 2015