Ep. 10: John Allen | Author & Journalist | Set The Agenda
This week on the podcast, host Mungi Ngomane is joined by John Allen, a South African journalist with experience in newspapers, news agencies, a journalists’ union, churches and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Over the course of his career, John has worked in the U.S., the U.K and South Africa, and has won awards in South Africa for his excellence in defence of press freedom, and in the U.S. for excellence in church journalism. John shares his experience working with Mungi's grandfather Archbishop Desmond Tutu for years, and how he went on to write a biography about him titled, "Rabble-Rouser for Peace". The two speak about the importance of relationships and our human qualities that are missing from our resumes, and the skills needed to be a decent journalist in this time of immense misinformation and disinformation.
Full Episode Transcript
Mungi Nogomane: Hi, I'm Mungi welcome to the Everyday Ubuntu podcast.
John Allen: If you can't be critical and withdraw yourself from your own comfort zones, then I, as far as I'm concerned, you can't be a decent journalist.
Mungi Nogomane: Welcome to Everyday Ubuntu podcast. This week, my guest is a south African journalist and author John Allen.
In this episode, we discuss his career in South Africa, as well as the us and the UK. He shares his experience being a journalist during apartheid, and also what being the director of media relations and communications for the truth and reconciliation commission. He was very honest about not knowing what to saying to him and tough moments and provided perspective on the lack of economic liberation in South Africa today, as a true south African, his greatest hope for humanity is that the concept of Ubuntu will take hold and spread globally.
And you won't be surprised to know that I hope for the same. Here's our conversation.
Welcome John Allen to the Everyday Ubuntu podcast
John Allen: Hello, monkey and good morning. It's lovely to speak to you.
Mungi Nogomane: Thank you. And I'm excited. And I'm going to just jump in and ask you my first question. And actually my mom helped me come up with it and it's about how our resumes are not a full explanation of who we are as a person.
And so I want to ask you what's missing from your resume.
John Allen: I think from anybody's resume, what's missing is. People's human qualities. So for example, if you look at my professional life, which my resume is all about it leaves out the fact that for me, relationships are really important that you can go through life, you can achieve a lot and you can be.
Well-regarded and for what you've achieved, but you could be a lousy person. And if I've got a choice of being prominent and a lousy person or not so prominent and regardless. Person who is a decent human being then I think I'd certainly like to say that I'd prefer to be the latter.
Mungi Nogomane: I, I would as well also, seeing right at the bat about how relationships are important to you, that's so Ubuntu of you just have to say that.
John Allen: Yeah, it's fun to work together and at the moment I work in an office. A dozen to 15 people, all younger than myself. In fact, I've formerly stepped down and had younger people take over the jobs that I was doing.
Mungi Nogomane: Yeah. And speaking of your work, you became a journalist at 18 right out of school. And so I wonder if you always knew was it always going to be journalism or how did you fall into
John Allen: journalism? No, I actually was meant to go to university to study history. And I did British a levels in history of geography and English and at school, my history teacher said, she said she thought I could be a good historian if I wasn't so lazy.
I think I would've loved to do it. But what happened is that probably a year before I left school, I really had itchy feet and I spent most of my holiday. My school holidays, hitchhiking around Southern Africa Zimbabwe Namibia all over South Africa and I was restless. And I realized that if I went to university, then I would probably not settle down to not just probably a waste of my parents' money, frankly.
And so I turned to journalism just as an option and I didn't necessarily think I was going to be there long. I thought I might be in journalism for a year or two and then not go to university. When the travel bug had gone down a bit. But when I got into a newspaper, I had to sign I had to go on a six months training course and sign a contract for two years after that.
And by the time all of that was over, I was thoroughly immersed in journalism and married as well. So I never went to university.
Mungi Nogomane: But then you were a journalist during apartheid in South Africa. And so what was your experience like as a journalist in that time?
John Allen: It turned me into the person I became.
The enormous value of journalism as a white journalist under apartheid is that it gave you if, as long as you took the opportunity, it gave you access to communities that most white south Africans didn't have access to. Black south Africans knew white south Africans, very well. They were their bosses and their parents bosses and and the whites ruled their lives.
And and they spoke their minds to whites at risk because they might lose their job or become unpopular. Whereas white south Africans didn't know black south Africans at all 99% of cases. It was a master servant relationship celebrity. Even today. It's not as bad as it was, but even today, it's islands of middle-class privilege.
Amid the sea of poverty and and journalism enabled me to escape those islands of middle-class privilege, even if it was only four trips for work and get to know the real South Africa. And so actually not having a degree. Being a little limiting, so some about my decisions, but in terms of life experience, I've never regretted it.
It's made me what I am and it's given me all sorts of fantastic opportunities. And so I've loved it. Yeah.
Mungi Nogomane: And so then, obviously people have their critiques of media and journalism and whatnot, but what do you think, or what are the problems that you see with journalism?
John Allen: I, it well, it depends on what country you're in overall.
I've been exposed to British journalism a lot, and I've been exposed to American journalism a lot as well from when I lived in the states. I must say I, I like the focus in American journalism. On reporting the facts on the legwork, if you like, on getting out and getting onto the ground. And I, there's no objectivity, because we're all products of our backgrounds and our costs.
So there's a it's, it's a fallacy to say there's objectivity in journalism. But to get out on the ground and mix with people and listen to other people and get a story from different sides. That's the most important thing is to go out. And if there's a dispute, there may be two sides to an issue.
There may be four sides in issue. Try to immerse yourself in the sides of each of those people and reflective their views in your reporting. British broadsheet high quality journalists. Is the reporting can be quite opinionated. I quite enjoy it but I, in a way, I like that sort of old American distinction between the op-ed page or what used to be called the op-ed page and and report.
So when, when, when people do the legwork, get out into the ground and go and report and go beyond the natural boundaries, that for me is what journalism should be its weaknesses, or when it's not that when people go in with preconceived ideas a lot of what I'm seeing some of the American media do is not journalism at all.
It's just a television version of inflaming popular prejudices.
Mungi Nogomane: Yes. Yeah. So y'all know Fox news is not
John Allen: journalism. Yeah. It's that's not, for me, that's not journalism, people may, they may pass as journalism for them and it's an aggregate. We have similar kind of issues.
We have a real crisis, I think in, for journalists and in society in the way that the most. Extreme radical, emotionally driving opinions. Inflamed social media, the more, the strongly held opinion attracts you and you say, wow, right on. Or alternatively, if it's against you you get mad with it and inflames you, it doesn't add to anybody's sum of knowledge.
It doesn't add any new perspectives to you. And how can you solve a problem in the world if you don't look at it from different perspectives?
Mungi Nogomane: Yeah. Do you think, I imagine it has, how has society sort of perception of journalism changed or do you think that there are still huge misconceptions about the work you do and the work that other journalists do in society?
John Allen: It's strange people express a lot of, misconceptions and prejudice judgements about journalists it's, but extraordinarily the very comments they make are a consequence of them having listened to journalists. When I was on the newspaper, 2030 years ago, we used to say, you wouldn't change people's minds.
You wouldn't change people's basic outlook, but you set the agenda. You provided the stuff, which they would discuss and debate and talk about, I liked journalism. An essential function of a democratic society. If you gain to vote in a democracy, you need to know what the issues are and you need to hear different views.
And then you need to cast your vote based on what you hear. And if the journalist, if a journalist is doing his job properly, they're actually giving people information on which they can make decisions about their lives. Whether it's the movie you go to see that night because you look up review of a movie, or whether it's who you vote for in your life.
In your local constituency and your local government, or whether you're voting for the president, you're making, you're making decisions based on being well informed. And you depend on journalism for that. Yeah.
Mungi Nogomane: I feel like though, having been in the U S last year the journalism just didn't go like that extra step.
It seems like the questions for those on the right sort of stops. Sure. Being like, okay you said is actually racist instead of us saying, what do you mean by this? What you said has been historically said by other people to be a racist thing. Like why, it's the inability to bring that out and think of facts and history as what they are.
And so that's I guess not necessarily a struggle. I think journalism is important, but that sometimes I'll watch, a new show and I'm like, why couldn't we just ask that question, but it was just on the tip of your tongue and you just refuse to ask this of this person. And I don't know if that has to do with the inner workings of politics in the U S with the media and, whatever is happening in the back room, but it's just always interesting to think about.
John Allen: If you can't be critical and withdraw yourself from your own, from your own comfort zone. Then I, as far as I'm concerned, you can't be a decent journalist. And and yeah, I, American journalism that I've said, I admire a lot of it. It's had it's real faults. I lived in New York September 11, when was it?
2001. I lived across the river in Jersey city and I came out of the path train through the world trade center. And I heard a screaming sound and that was the first plane going into the north tower. So I was right in the middle of it. And what I found in the weeks and months afterwards is that living in an autocratic society where you had limited human rights it actually prepared you for what was going to happen during the Bush years in the United States.
I remember sitting in my office. I was director of communications in a church in downtown Manhattan, Trinity church. And I was sitting in my office watching live Colin Powell on television, speaking to the UN security council. I think it was the security council motivating the case. Against Iraq.
And it didn't convince me at all, because he as far as I can see, he didn't lie, but the, you know, but the facts he was sitting out and the way in which he was putting the case and the nature of the facts was such that it kinda looked like in the pot idea or a politician, I had to say that about Colin Powell.
Cause I think he's a decent man, but in South Africa, when the minister of defense went into parliament, if you passed his words, if you looked, if you read between the lines. You knew that they were torturing and killing people and they were dead squats. He didn't use those words, but if you, but afterwards, if you looked at those large, you've say, no, it was concealed within those words.
It was the opposite with Colin Powell. I didn't hear anything in those words, which justified them going to war. Most of the American media did. We had a lot of friends in the states who left in the late seventies and early eighties, white south Africans who left South Africa because they wouldn't have their sons serving in an apartheid military.
We had forced military conscription for white men here and after nine 11, And, you wouldn't, weren't very popular. If you were a foreigner and you were questioning what was going on in America in response to nine 11, especially the militarism. And but you'd get together.
And after we greeted each other, we hadn't seen each other for years. We looked at each other. Wow. Isn't this just like living in South Africa under apartheid, it's the, the raw reactions to being attacked as Whitesville, they're under attack from the ANC. And and to see the politicians, making the kind of, having the instinct of gut-level responses of a pothead politicians, it was a bit sad.
Mungi Nogomane: I know that in 2004, you wrote Rabble-Rouser for Peace. A biography about my grandfather, but this interview is not about him. But I wonder what the process and the research is like when you're writing a biography on someone.
John Allen: I was lucky because I had met him. In 1976. And that was your granddad had been based in Britain, although he, most of his time has been traveling around Africa, but your grandmom and your parents were living in Britain.
And he came back to South Africa to be the Dean of Johannesburg. So I met him 1976. In the period from 76 through 2 82. So for the first six years of a very active time that he spent I had a lot of the documentation and I knew him. I'd interviewed him dozens of times gone to lots of preschools.
So I you know, I wasn't in the in the position of a historian, who's got to dig it all up from the archives. I had quite a lot of material. Then I, when I went off and worked for a journalist union for a couple of years and didn't have a lot of contact, just a little bit of contact. And but then I actually worked for him for 13 years, beginning in 1986 through the end of apartheid.
And so there, I was a journalist now most people, most journalists will tell you that moving from journalism into public relations, Is a step down and you only do it quite reluctantly when you have to make some money and journalism doesn't get paid enough. But actually in my case, I didn't have to do that a tour, you know, because people see journalists who go into PR as spin doctors.
I know this interview isn't about your granddad, but I have to say. He didn't need a spin doctor. I was
Mungi Nogomane: going to say, are you going to tell us he needed one? And
John Allen: he didn't because he didn't spin. He didn't spin. He told the truth as he saw it now. He was, if people find it hard to believe, but in those years and the apartheid years, he was demonized in the white community.
When I came to Cape town to work for him in the mid eighties an acquaintance of of my wife's family told us quite seriously that that we were absolutely wrong. That in fact, he was the devil incarnate, he was he was, he was a communist red devil and I knew what he thought.
And I knew what he said, and it's his story I've seen. Neo-cons, American neo-conservatives review a collection of speeches. And this is a collection I put together in 94, which covered 20 years of his ministry. And the neo-con wrote a review of that book, which said about your granddad's philosophy and thought the consistency of the thing is beautiful.
And this is somebody who is ideologically totally opposed to him. Of course there was a measure of, is a measure of shared feeling because your granddad believed that your faith and your beliefs, ought to affect your politics. And of course, so did the neo-cons. So there's a bit of similarity there, but anyway, the point I'm making is that when I went to work for him, I knew that the image of him presented in south African media, which was dominated by white media.
What wasn't. And all I needed to do. There were white Anglicans, all thought this white man's coming to, be as press secretary. So now, it was white man is going to calm him down a bit to make it a bit more acceptable to Whitesburg. But that wasn't my job. My job was to make sure that when he got into trouble as he did every month.
He got into trouble for the right reasons. A good trouble. Yeah. John Lewis' phrase, good trouble. In other words, it was for what he was saying. And not for what people misinterpreting. So in the period that I was with him, my intense focus was on documenting and collecting material. So for those 13 years, which was the height of the struggle against apartheid followed by the violence of the transition to democracy followed by the years of the truth commission for those 13 years.
Collected an enormous amount of material. Then when I took two years off, work and got an advance to write the book, the fun came when I then had to research his life before he became famous. And there were files in Geneva. London and Johannesburg. And so you built up a picture of his life and his student years in particular by finding records in three different archives in different parts of the world and triangulating them so that you built up a picture.
And that was a lot of fun.
Mungi Nogomane: I don't think I'll be writing a biography on anyone anytime
John Allen: soon.
You ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of your favorite homegrown films and TV shows? It's time to pop some popcorn, go behind the camera and meet the people who are making it happen. I'm Marriska Fernandes, host of the maple popcorn podcast and this new series you will discover exclusive interviews with Canadian icons and hear them talk about Canadian flicks and even break the fifth wall to share set anecdotes.
This podcast is produced by The Brand is Female and powered by telephone Canada. Subscribe now on the podcast app of your choice, and don't miss an episode, stay in the know by visiting telefilm.ca/seeitall at all.
Mungi Nogomane: And, speaking of, apartheid in South Africa and then the violence as it ended, and then the TRC, I wonder in these sort of tough moments that the country has had, but, we also have our own tough moments.
What sort of has sustained you? Or what keeps you going and
John Allen: That's a tough one. For me, the biggest, the times the biggest strain, the eighties were a time of violence and a lot of confrontation. You'd find yourself in scenes where, and obviously this was with your granddad where the police had their fingers on the trigger or the triggers at one hand.
And you're angry, young people with bricks and big stones, which they were throwing at the police on the other. Yeah. And you found yourself not voluntarily on my part between the two. That actually wasn't as much of a strain, because you knew where rights and wrong were.
You knew on what side of the struggle you were and things weren't clear cut in the early nineties when there was violence within communities say, in communities around Johannesburg stoked by the forces of apartheid, the forces of apartheid were, we're setting one group of black south Africans against another group of black south Africans.
I found that. I found that very difficult to handle because it's one group of the priest being manipulated by really evil evil, apartheid, right-wing white forces to attack another one and to see that happening was I, what sustained me? I don't know, actually. I when I got away after the TRC for a few years I got some therapy later.
But even that it changes you get to that, you know, exposure to violence, changes everybody, obviously. And I'm at mine, wasn't nearly as bad as the people who lived in those communities. So yeah it's I'm in a, I'd like to say my faith did. But it sounds flippant because it was a struggle.
Mungi Nogomane: Yeah. It has to be a lot of things. It has to be it, everyday looks different, so it could be faith one day and who knows what the next day.
John Allen: And after a trip away, when you're exposed to it coming home to family, now I wasn't living in a community. I used to have enormous admiration for priests because they were sent to pastor a community.
Which was under violent attach. They didn't necessarily come from that community. They've come from another community elsewhere, but their job was to be a priest to be a shepherd of their people, no matter how rough and how violent it got. So I was, extraordinarily fortunate. I didn't live in that community.
We had our exposure to it, but, and then you could go home and I could be on the beach with your children. Huge numbers of people didn't have that option. The vast majority didn't have that option. Yeah.
Mungi Nogomane: This sort of guilt that comes with being able to leave a situation of oppression and go take a break.
John Allen: Yeah. No that's hard. That's hard. I remember your granddad's struggling when we were in the middle of one violence situation. During the early nineties, he'd gone to an area where the police were regularly coming and attacking young people. And they were on the post office at a place called I think it was saber king and and and he went there with all of his Bishops.
And as the police came in, the armored vehicles, the bishops all in their bright red cassocks, they spread out in a line to form a line between the young people and the army and the police. And it was magnificent to see there was an Australian radio journalist who wrote afterwards. That he'd never seen such courage and such witness and sacrifice by the church anywhere.
And and he was really impressed by it. But the fact was that when they had to go back to their meeting to their Senate meeting, they had to leave the area. And the young people were saying no, don't go. The police are going to attack us as soon as you go, but you can't, they couldn't stay.
Yeah.
Mungi Nogomane: And. One question I have for you is what I know that you were the director of media relations and communications for the TRC. What does the director of media relations and communications for the TRC do? What is that role entail?
John Allen: Overall the job was ensuring that the media had access to the, to, to hearings and to information.
From the commission. So the south African truth commission was unique for its time in that before then the truth commissions, which had been set up principally in Latin America had not been, they had not operated publicly. They tended to be in. Probably oversimplifying it, but they tended to be bodies of scholars and researchers who would collect all the research, had collected all the information and issue a report and the report, which appeared afterwards about what had gone on in El Salvador, a place like that was what made the news in our case The NGO community had lobbied parliament because the truth commission was set up by parliament.
Once the ANC had taken off taking power and the NGO community lobbied parliament to ensure that the hearings of the truth commission would be public. So it was a matter of being the liaison to ensure. That the journalists could have the access to arrange for outside broadcast vehicles from the national broadcast to be at hearings to liaise between, the commission officials and the outside world costs.
I meant to make sure during hearings that the media had access to documents which were being, which were being referred to and then issued press releases about important developments from meetings and things like that.
Mungi Nogomane: And did you know, did that role teach you anything about yourself or South Africa or humanity that you think is important?
There, there was a lot that was said there and it was heavy for people.
John Allen: Yeah. In my case, if you talk about it being heavy I had already gone through the experience of the early nineties. You can spread at a secondary level. Maybe to violence. So it was it coming a day later to where people had been massacred children have been massacred the day before.
But certainly was interesting for the interpreters of the hearings because there was simultaneous interpretation going on, interpreters for maybe half a dozen language would sit in little boxes at the back of a hearing. And through headsets that provide interpretation as an interpreter.
Or as a radio journalist, these are the two people, affected a lot, as well as commissioners listening. As an interpreter in particular, in the morning, you might be interpreting the widow of somebody who'd been murdered or somebody who had been tortured. And they're interpreting in the first person because they had to be speaking that, they were that person speaking in a language.
So Yeah, they did this to me. They gave me electric shocks and the consequences of electric shocks was this. And maybe the witness would start crying. Now the interpreter didn't start crying. But some of them nearly did. Then in the afternoon, you might be hearing from the policemen who had done the torture and he was saying I took a pair of tongs or whatever, and I put them on them and I sent an electric shock through the witness.
So they were taking on the interpreters, were taking on the first person stories of both victims and perpetrators of human rights violations. And it really affected them. Actually there was a, there was an American theater and film producer who who developed a play, who developed a whole series of events, which he took to many conflict areas of the world based on the experiences of the interpreters.
I can't imagine that. And, so to answer your question, I wasn't as effected as those people were because I didn't have to listen to every word this is being said, I kept her, I, if I was at a hearing and mostly the media liaison officers who were accountable to me who were at hearings, but even then with or they were there we mainly were just keeping an eye over things and making sure journalists had what they needed to do their jobs.
Mungi Nogomane: So then, speaking of the TRC, what do you think of where South Africa is now?
John Allen: I'm not a great proponent of the TRC simply because I was a court reporter who reported on the trials of political prisoners in Pretoria, in the early 1970s, when the ANC was banned. And when Nelson Mandela was in prison and, because of journalism, I was exposed to the kinds of things that had happened in the country.
And in an ideal situation, you would have had justice and you would have had people going to jail. But the balance of power in the country when Nelson Mandela and his, and the other leaders were negotiating, a settlement was such that the liberation movement did not have the military power. To unlike in Germany where the Germans with the Nazis had been defeated after world war two and they could lay down, they could hold Nierenberg tribunals.
We didn't have that situation here. The military power was actually still largely in the hands of the apartheid state and the liberation movements. The ANC didn't have the military power to, to enforce trials the, and then on the other side, the reason the apartheid government was forced to negotiate is that particularly because of things like sanctions they were losing control and it wasn't as if the ANC was going to March into Pretoria and take over the government with the ability forces.
But as a matter of the center was falling apart. The, they, they the country was going downhill economically yeah and they were losing their capacity to lead, to, to borrow money. They were getting themselves into huge debt. And they were, and they were losing control.
And so of course they may have had military power, but they didn't have legitimacy. The people wouldn't listen to them because 80% of south Africans, all black south Africans, And they would say I was sick of apartheid. Part. They suddenly had the power if they wanted to stay way on a day that wasn't a public holiday, like June 16, which is the, when they celebrate the youth uprising of 1976, the youth rebellion all the country would come to a stop.
And black people couldn't afford to have a strike lasting months because they had to feed their families. They so you had legitimacy on the side of the liberation movement and military power on the side of the government. So they, they have to come to some kind of agreement to get themselves over this hump where they would have a new democratic government and the military, the apartheid military, she said to Nelson Mandela if you're going to put us all on trial, we're going to fight.
We, and know the young people today in South Africa who say no, Mandela sold us out. He didn't, he should have defeated apartheid property because we, we may have had political liberation in South Africa, but we haven't had economic liberation, the vast majority of the wealth is still in the hands of whites.
So the young people today who said Mandela sold us out. My response to that, and I don't, I don't really respond, but my response to that would be. I'm not sure you would have been alive to, to criticize Mandela. Because you want to look at Syria 600,000 people. Did you know, did you think Mandela would have been better taking us into a war where we might've lost half a million people, and because of all of that, the TRC the deal was now most TRC is up until then.
There had been blanket amnesties you got to Chile with a punish it or a place like that. Now he, they were in a similar situation when they were out at the military dictatorship, but there, there was blanket amnesty for everybody on the military side. And they got away with, that's what they got away with and that they said, okay, we'll give up power, but you give us amnesty.
We, you're not going to put us on trial. And here there was this middle of the road compromise, which was unique in the world at the time. And it hasn't, I don't think it's been followed very often since, because it's so controversial and that was okay. You can have amnesty in other words, you won't get prosecuted.
If you come and tell us what you've done, the whole truth. It was amnesty in exchange for the truth. So now at the moral. At an ethical level, especially as a white south African, as a beneficiary of apartheid, I can't defend that morally, it's not for me to judge that. You must be part of the oppressed to, to really have a valid opinion on that.
However, there is one thing. One of our constitutional court judges served as the chief war crimes prosecutor in Yugoslavia. And he told me basic his thesis and I'm oversimplifying it a bit was at least in our process, we got some truth out because there was an onus. If you wanted to get amnesty you to come and tell the truth.
And it produced probably a lot more truth. It didn't produce justice. It wasn't about justice because you were getting away with murder. You were getting amnesty so the deal was you'd get away with murder, but in exchange for the truth. And although often they lied or they try to whitewash how that, how badly they had tortured and killed people.
But broadly you got. You've got 20,000 victims who were people who were declared victims and who got very limited reparations. That was a scandal that the government didn't give them enough. But and whereas we had one big trial here and it's difficult to prove your case when you put policemen on trial, who are torturers and the victims did.
Yeah. So who, where are your witnesses how do you prove beyond reasonable doubt? Cause we have the same standard of proof as most justice systems in a criminal trial to get, you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt. When they'd killed, their victim, how are you going to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they had killed the person?
This judge's conclusion was that, we if we had tried to have trials, like Nierenberg, there would have been a lot of acquittals. And white south Africans would have said, no look, these people all acquitted, they, they all, 80% of them were acquitted.
Mungi Nogomane: Yeah. It wasn't that bad if all of these people
John Allen: were. Yeah. And of course also you wouldn't have been able to have, I'm just, we didn't have enough prosecutors to prosecute everybody. You can think of 20,000 victims and thousands of amnesty applicants, you you would have taken, I don't know, a hundred years to investigate the cases.
We didn't have enough police or prosecutors to go off to everybody. So we probably got more truth out of it than we would have had. That's, it's a very, it's a very pragmatic rationalization of the process. I can't defend it on sort of moral grounds. It's just as a matter.
Practical politics. We probably got more truth out of it than we would have if we'd gone for trials. Yeah.
Mungi Nogomane: And, we also like to think that we saved more lives after the fact, because there wasn't this then as you've said, that they had the military power. So yeah. And thinking of all that you have reported on and seen and experienced, what is your greatest fear for humanity?
John Allen: Some years ago, a Canadian historian wrote a book about world war one in the beginnings world war one. And it was actually quite a shocking account of how they stumbled into world war one. They really, I, it was a build up, but it was just in the diplomacy and of the various agreements between countries, the alliances treaties and alliances between the countries, once something, the assassination of somebody here suddenly triggered a whole lot of events.
Which sees millions of people getting killed. And that's frankly, what frightened me about the last four years in the United States so much, is that and, stupid decisions taken by people without enough. Consideration of the facts of what they were doing.
So I guess that's on an international level. That's a worrying thing in South Africa. It's the enormous disparity economic disparity between black and white. It's not sustainable, it's not sustainable something, we have to act more radically to to it's not gonna, it's not gonna happen as Ronald Reagan used to say in about trickle down economics, not in South Africa.
Mungi Nogomane: Yeah, I don't believe the things that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher used to say about economics. So we don't even need to give them a platform here. And then what would you say about what is your greatest hope for humanity?
John Allen: Actually that the concept of an Ubuntu philosophy, which you have written so well about would take hold and spread.
There was a south African journalist called Allister sparks. He was like, South Africa is Bob Woodward. He also did a book on your granddad and as he got to see his thinking. And the integrated nature of it. Your granddad used to say, sorry about talking about your granddad again, but that's been half of my life.
So I haven't got too many other reference points, he used to say, you wasted so good at pulling things apart at analyzing and dissecting stuff, but you're not so good at putting them together. And many used to say that you too much if affected by Hellenic thinking, but the Greeks where you separate the material and the spiritual.
At all sorts of levels, at, in people's relationships with one another, the, this is not foreign to Westerners who was a John Dutton said, no, man is an island. No, man is an island. Exactly. And I've seen, the theologian who was killed by Hitler, Dietrich, Bonhoeffer.
I've seen what he stood for described as Ubuntu. That's not necessarily only an African thing. But anyway, Allister in this book developed, he took Samuel Huntington's idea of a clash of civilizations, which was popular 20, 30 years ago. And compared that to your granddad's thinking, whereas one is, one is seeing people as I don't know, the Christian West against the Islamic middle east, or there's a clash of civilizations.
And the other is looking for the common humanity of all people. And although it isn't exclusive to Africa. I suspect. That's what Africa has to offer to the world actually. That idea of my welfare depends on your welfare. Absolutely. If you hurt me, you need to put things right with me. If we do survive together and and I can't be happy if you're not happy and, and that cuts both ways.
And so that, that would be my hope.
Mungi Nogomane: I like that hope. Thank you, John Allen so much for coming on the Everyday Ubuntu podcasts.
John Allen: Thank you. Mungi it's been great fun. And as you hear some people say, oh, this guy's a little bit too much of an African, because he talks too much and at too much length.
Mungi Nogomane: but it's wonderful.
John Allen: I could be a bit long-winded, but I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks for having.
Mungi Nogomane: I hope you enjoyed this conversation today, and don't forget to hit subscribe and give the show a rating and review wherever you enjoy your podcasts. Follow me at on Instagram. I'd love to hear from you and get your feedback on the show. I'll be back in a week with a new episode. Thank you for listening to everyday. .