newsRW (Bill) Johnson (September 1943- July 2026) – A big-hitter against apartheid before 1994 and a courageous fighter for free speech ever since
RW Johnson delivers the 2016 Barry Streek lecture – one great journalist honoring another
With the death of RW (Bill) Johnson on July 21, 2026 South Africa has lost one of its best known and most controversial public intellectuals. TREVOR GRUNDY makes this short tribute to a man whose legacy is to inspire a new generation of South Africans to tell the truth – whatever the consequences.
For over half a century, this clever and courageous man did his best to tell the truth about a country he lived in and loved.
His hammer-like verbal and written blows landed on the skulls of apartheid supporters before 1994 and hopefully on the ever-bulging stomachs and bank accounts of senior ANC corrupt politicians ever since.
RW Johnson – known as ‘Bill’ to friends – believed that a writer’s first duty is to tell the truth and hold those in power to account. RW Johnson was one of them. In South Africa and other parts of the free world, he will never be forgotten.
‘Bill’ Johnson was born in England in September 1943. He went on to be educated at Natal University and Oxford University where he was a Rhodes schola and a fellow in politics at Magdalen College for 26 years.
He was active in student politics which attracted the attention of the South African security police and much of his early life was spent in England. But South Africa remained at the centre of his intellectual life and after his return to South Africa in 1995 he directed the Helen Suzman Foundation.
His most famous book was published in 1977 and How Long Will South Africa Survive was a seminal masterpiece which attracted the attention of anti-apartheid campaigners worldwide.
Later, he revised the book and the object of his dislike was the new breed of ANC sycophant. Men and women who have shaped the Cyril Ramaphosa government.
He wrote widely for some of the world’s best known English language newspapers and magazines including the London Review of Books, the Sunday Times and numerous publications in South Africa.
In recent years, RW Johnson was accused by several of his many critics of attacking thr ANC leadership and abandoning the liberal values that made his famous and dangerous before Mandela’s release in 1990.
In 1995 he said – “If you don’t stand for liberal values then you’re not a liberal but something else.”
That conviction in the latter days of the Rainbow Nation made him an almost isolated crusader at a time when to criticise the ANC was to be marked and then scarred as an apologist for the apartheid years.
In short, he groomed himself to be an anti-apartheid activist without becoming a slavish stooge of any political party.
RW Johnson was a physical as well as a political survivor.
In 2009 he cut his foot while swimming in a Kwa-Zulu-Natal lagoon. He contracted necrotising fascilitis. Inflection caused the amputation of his leg. He recovered and continued writing and lecturing almost util the time of his death.
RW Johnson , one of the last of South African public intellectuals
An article about his death appeared this week in a South Africa magazine called The Common Sense.
While praising Johnson’s contribution to a free South Africa, it said the academic’s predictions were not always correct and his judgements were often severe. But it added but “his central warning endured. Countries do not survive on moral prestige, constitutional language, or historical entitlement. They survive when institutions work, power is constrained, elites tell the truth and failure carries consequences.”
In a nutshell, those are the words and the thoughts of a man of worth, who was often isolated in a land now sadly run by political and moral pygmies.
RW Johnson is survived by his Russian-born academic wife Irina Filatova, their children Richard and Rebecca and grand-children, Noah and Ella -Bella.