Newspaper offices have never been known for their flash interiors and the one in East London - in South Africa's Eastern Cape - was no exception: worn stairs, doors leading to other doors, framed copies of out-of-date newspapers on the wall. Working in a black township a few years ago in another part of the Cape, I'd become an avid reader of the Daily Dispatch and, while waiting for a coach to Cape Town, thought I'd drop in and say how much I enjoyed its news coverage.
On the stairs was a large reproduction of the front page dated September 24th, 1977, its headlines reporting the death in police custody of the young Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. Nothing surprising in that. Biko was cherished by the Black people, and a copy of his political speeches was in the township library. The next front page - dated a month later - carried the story of the arrest and banning of the paper's editor. It was then the penny dropped: the Daily Dispatch was the paper edited by Donald Woods whose outspoken editorials gave both grief to the apartheid regime and hope to people like Nelson Mandela incarcerated on Robben Island.
It was a tricky time to be an editor, but when government agents sent Woods's small daughter a T-shirt sprayed with acid, he and his wife Wendy decided it was time to get out and let the world know what was going on. Borrowing the clerical collar and identity of an Irish priest - with the priest's own tape of We're All Off to Dublin in the Green to cheer him on his way - he made a dramatic dash to safety in neighbouring Lesotho and then, joined by Wendy and their five young children, flew on to London, arriving with two suitcases and just 500 rand (£300) in cash. There, with their UN refugee status guaranteed, Woods embarked on a series of lecture tours and later published his account of the Biko affair which was turned into the film Cry Freedom. His new book - Rainbow Nation Revisited - is a moving account of his return to South Africa in 1990 where he met up with friends - and enemies - he hadn't seen for 12 years.
The Woods have been exiles for 24 years, but their house in the London suburb of Surbiton has a settled air - African artefacts, family photographs and, in the kitchen, plenty of music tapes. We were there to drink a cup of tea: "My wife said not to forget the saucers," Donald Woods says, looking in the cupboard and producing two matching ones. Wendy Woods works for the Canon Collins Education Educational Trust, set up to help disadvantaged South Africans.
"When we had to abandon our home in East London," Woods says later in his study, "the authorities confiscated the contents. But a year later, they put everything up for auction, and my father-in-law bought it all - knives, forks, photographs, dresser - and we then bought it all from him and shipped it here."
This is the strange thing about Donald Woods: things always seem to come good for him in the end. Take the business of being banned. When two of his black reporters were imprisoned for their political activities, he managed to persuade the trustees of the newspaper to continue paying them their salary. Which was why, when he himself was banned, the precedent had been set and he, too, continued to be paid. (Forbidden to leave his house, he spent his time learning two whole movements of Chopin's B minor sonata.) Later, fleeing to London, he received so many offers of work that within two years he was able to buy the Surbiton house. Since the ban has been lifted, he and Wendy visit East London every year, which raises the question - where is home? "Well, this is home, though when I get off the plane in Johannesburg, that too feels like home," he says. "The only time when the two places are in conflict is when they're playing rugby or cricket. Then I'm definitely South African."
South Africa, he says, has never been short of leaders, people who seem able to confound the prophets of doom with their arguments and strategies. Biko was one, but so too is Thabo Mbeki: "He may not have been of the same stature as Biko, but he's certainly not far behind, and of course he was an admirer of Biko." Woods's only reservation about President Mbeki is that at times he seems to be badly advised. His statement that AIDS was caused by poverty rather than a virus and his support for Robert Mugabe are two cases in point. "Stealing private property is wrong. Mbeki should have said that," he says. Pressed on this, Woods says that maybe the land should be redistributed but definitely not in the violent way it was attempted in Zimbabwe. "When you're in power you have to avoid making statements that can be construed as stupid. It sounded like an evasion. I know Thabo Mbeki - he's a likeable guy - but I can't believe he meant what he said on the AIDS issue."
In Cry Freedom, the 42-year-old campaigning editor was played by Kevin Kline, and a photograph of the two in the book shows how successful the make-up department was. Fred Fitzgerald, now night editor of the Daily Dispatch, worked for Woods at that time: "He was a very genial person to work for, very laid back," he told me on the phone from East London. "Always took centre stage." Unfortunately, the stage was often the dock. Woods was prosecuted seven times, unsuccessfully, by the apartheid regime - though he managed to sue its agents five times, and win.
WHEN it first appeared, there were criticisms that Cry Freedom was more about Woods than Biko but, as he says in Rainbow Nation Revisited, the story needed to be told abroad from a white point of view. Black people didn't have to be told about the injustices of apartheid. Initially, he found Biko difficult: "He was forbidding and didn't set out to charm, and of course he could drink you under the table." Their friendship started when he managed to halt a typical Biko oration on the subject of the white liberalism by agreeing to take on two Black Consciousness reporters.
This book, though not the last, is a sort of ending: "I had an instinct to finish it off," Woods says, and does so by commenting on Black South Africa's ability to forgive. "It's something to do with their word ubuntu, which is untranslatable but roughly means compassion: if you need help, I must give it to you." It's also, he thinks, related to the Black people's sense of pride in themselves, as evidenced by how people without electricity or running water somehow manage to turn up for work in gleaming white blouses, well-pressed trousers and spotless T-shirts.
His university education broadened his view, though when he first arrived he encountered the full range of prejudices against Black people, Jews, communists - and Catholics. Why the last?
"Because they were the spawn of Satan," he says in a good imitation of Ian Paisley. With a great-grandmother who arrived in South Africa in 1821 from Cork, he has a gra for Ireland.
Woods toyed with the idea of working here in the 1960s but crossed back to London, did a stint on Fleet Street, returned to work for the Daily Dispatch and the rest is history - of the most momentous order.
Rainbow Nation Revisited , by Donald Woods, is published by Andre Deutsch at £17.99 in the UK