Thrill of world news fresh off the telex machine hard to forget

A long time ago in the middle of the night on February 15 1989 I was sitting in the office of the South African Press Association (Sapa) above the Kine Centre in central Johannesburg.

Sapa reporters had to take turns manning the news desk from midnight until morning to field local emergency alerts and monitor the international telex wires which spat out news from different agencies around the world.

When something important arrived we had to forward it on to our media and other clients around Southern Africa.

On the night I’m thinking of I fielded the first line of a historic story about the Soviet army withdrawing from Afghanistan after its decade-long occupation. This was their final exit and the opening line of the story was about the last tank rolling across a bridge on the border out of what had become the Soviet Union’s Vietnam War.

It was a line written by a reporter in the field in an Afghanistan winter all those tens of thousands of kilometres away and I was perhaps the first person in Southern Africa to receive it, thanks to technology.

Nearly 30 years later as I grapple with the new media tech of today, I sometimes think of that night and how we did things back then.

Later in 1989 I was sent up to what was then South West Africa to cover an apparent hostile incursion by the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (Plan), the armed wing of the South West African People’s Organisation.

On an empty road somewhere between Windhoek and Ondangwa I came across hundreds of crudely compiled pamphlets apparently directed at rural villagers, aimed at convincing them to join an uprising.

Was it real, or a convoluted counter-revolutionary move by the South African Defence Force? Either way,

I scribbled a short story, found a school which had a phone, called the office and dictated it to a colleague.

In September 1991, together with a dozen other journalists, I interviewed Unita leader Jonas Savimbi in Lobito, Angola, prior to the first Angolan democratic election.

On our return flight, I fell asleep at about  midnight while we refuelled at Jamba. When I awoke we had taken off again — but our Dakota was on fire and we were going down.

The three crewmen were killed in the crash and the rest of us very shaken when we arrived back at Lanseria Airport outside Johannesburg in the early morning. However, I ran into the airport building, found a phone, dictated a few lines to a colleague and was able to listen to my story on Radio 702 as we drove into Johannesburg.

In March 1994, about 20,000 IFP supporters marched to Shell House, the ANC’s headquarters at that time, to protest against the upcoming election which Inkatha intended to boycott, and ANC security guards opened fire,  killing 19 people.

I covered the Shell House Massacre with a large, heavy phone in a bag hanging from my shoulder.

I remember sheltering behind cars to avoid a stray bullet and trying to call my office and make myself heard in the pandemonium.

So there was technology back then but it was simpler and the real skill was to find a way to communicate quickly, vividly and accurately.

So why then am I such a reluctant tweeter and general social media practitioner?

Back then, it was easy to master the basic technology; it was just a vehicle to get it out there.

Nowadays I find technology can get in the way of the story and remove you from reality.

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