R.W. Johnson has spent much of his life thinking and writing about South Africa. An anti-apartheid activist since his teens, he is one of the few people alive who heard public speeches given by both Verwoerd and Mandela before the latter was imprisoned. An ANC supporter, he narrowly escaped jail before arriving in England as a Rhodes Scholar. He went on to become a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1977 his seminal book How Long Will South Africa Survive? was published. Johnson's long exile left him with few illusions about the ANC and its Communist party allies, but with South Africa's liberation he returned to live in the new South Africa, and headed the Helen Suzman Foundation. R.W. Johnson is the South Africa correspondent for the Sunday Times.