Seven Days: South Africa - The Black Future

Television (Full Length) – 1976

In 1976 Ian Johnstone became the first NZ TV journalist to visit apartheid South Africa. For this Feltex Award-winning report (one of three for Seven Days) he and a small crew strove — under the regime's close eye — to show apartheid's impact on blacks. Shots of Soweto, human rights meetings, and interviews (Bishop Tutu, students, campaigner Hector Ncokazi), undercut PM Johannes Vorster's case for separatism. Seeing Johnstone being denied service at a burger bar (he was with a black) unsettled Kiwi viewers, weeks before the All Blacks left for South Africa in mid-1976.

On the 18 hour flight to Johannesburg it began to sink in that this assignment was big time, more difficult and dangerous than anything I had tackled before .
– Johnstone, in his memoir Stand and Deliver, page 107