The journalist thanked by Mandela who once worked for Reuters

As one of the many Reuter correspondents who reported from Johannesburg during the apartheid years in South Africa - the editor of The Baron was another - I admired the courage of journalists who worked on the Rand Daily Mail.

One of its best-known editors, who opposed the evil system of enforced racial segregation, was Allister Sparks. He died only last month at the age of 83. I was alerted by an obituary to the publication earlier this year of his autobiography - The Sword and the Pen: Six decades on the political frontier.

It was a surprise for me to learn that he worked for Reuters at 85 Fleet Street early in his career.

My time in South Africa co-incided with the creation of the infamous and brutal Bureau of State Security, with which Sparks dangerously brushed over the years. The Afrikaaner nationalist government was upset that the English-language media immediately dubbed it BOSS.

They vainly tried for a while to get us to call it BFSS, the Bureau for State Security. It was a period when apartheid laws were becoming harsher and more entrenched under Prime Minister Johannes Vorster.

I knew of Sparks, but never met him. I wish I had. He made contacts with ANC leaders in exile and black activists at home. One of his later journalistic investigations brought about Vorster’s downfall. Nelson Mandela, after his release from prison, praised Sparks and became a friend.

His autobiography explains a lot of things I did not understand or know about at the time. It analyses the thinking of the Afrikaaner regime, records the terrible oppression of the majority black population, and charts the transition to democracy.

One part describes how the country’s social structures and economy were so distorted by apartheid that it was a system ultimately bound to fail.

A lasting memory is of a prosaic experience that exemplified this for me. I had crashed my car on an assignment, and for several weeks had to take a bus from my apartment in the affluent white suburb of Rosebank to the Reuter office in central Joburg.

Every day, I waited for the whites-only bus and I was often the only passenger. Just a short distance down the country road was the bus designated for black people, mainly servants who needed a pass to work there. There was always a queue for it, and it frequently arrived full.

Apart from the shaming immorality of it, I felt no country could afford to run such a system that effectively required two separate economies, one for whites and one for blacks. At the time, I gave apartheid five years. It lasted another 25. ■