Seven Days: South Africa - The Black Future

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

Within a decade there will be change in this country. I am not afraid of going to jail. At the same time I will never hate the white man for what they have done to us. Even if they put me in jail, as Mandela put it: we shall love them. Bend us: we will still love them. We will take them as our fellow South Africans.

– Transkei politician Hector Ncokazi

To do my job properly, I had to let New Zealanders hear and see on TV what they had never heard or seen before, how the apartheid regime and New Zealand’s sporting connections with it affected “non-white” South Africans ... That would mean more trickery to deceive (Government media guide) George Hill, more risk of film being confiscated, and even of being thrown out of the country.

– Ian Johnstone, from his memoir Stand and Deliver, page 120

[The Zulu leaders] realise that the price of their independence would very probably be the permanent subjection of the black people of South Africa.

– Ian Johnstone on why the enforced formation of a separate Zulu homeland isn’t going to happen

The second Seven Days programme was masterly in balance and clarity ... Calm, sane and blessed with common sense and decency, mercifully free of the prima donna touch, (Johnstone) asks pertinent questions with a quiet voice.

– 1976 Listener review of The Black Future