SOMEWHERE in Wellington or surrounds, there’s a valuable ivory-coloured laptop waiting to be returned to its rightful owner.
The laptop, an Apple Mac Handbook, is quite costly in itself, but its real value lies with what is stored on its hard drive: two completed manuscripts, one a novel in the style of Wilbur Smith, the other the snapshot memoirs of Peter Hawthorne, retired Southern African bureau chief of the weekly international news magazine TIME.
The very distinctive laptop was stolen a few weeks ago from Peter’s cottage in Uitsig, and despite advertisements in the Paarl Post, it has not yet surfaced.
“I still expect it to turn up, though,” he says optimistically.
All is luckily not lost for Peter, as he had emailed copies of the manuscript to his editor-daughter Tracy in Riebeek Kasteel.
And copies of the PowerPoint presentations on the history of Africa and its characters, which he regularly presents during lectures on ocean cruise liners, were saved on a flash disk which was safely hidden in a drawer, away from the unscrupulous hands of the thieves.
His memoirs, which take a 30-year snapshot out of his illustrious career as a freelance reporter in Africa, is currently at a literary agent in Gauteng.
“It seems that there’s a very good chance that it will be published next year.”
The anecdotal book, with the working title of “The King’s Eye and John Vorster’s Elbow”, encapsulates the 30 years from the sentencing of Nelson Mandela until his release from prison.
“It’s what I call the Mandela years,” says the man who has interviewed the who’s who of the South African political and economic sphere, such as Thabo Mbeki, Desmond Tutu, Helen Suzman, FW de Klerk and the recently deceased Piet Koornhof, as well as most political leaders in Africa of his time.
“I was on Church Square waiting to hear whether Mandela gets life or death,” he remembers. “And I was there again when he left prison.”
As a matter of fact, he was one of the first reporters to interview Mandela the day after his release.
The book’s title refers to JSM Matsebula, the private advisor to the King of Swaziland, and to the former South African politician John Vorster.
“He had very low blood pressure, and never flew anywhere,” he remembers.
“After he retired in disgrace because of the Information Scandal, I saw him on board a ship I was travelling on.
“He was quite an intimidating figure.
“We looked at each other, and he said ‘I know you’ and invited me for a drink.
“Then I made the mistake of asking him about his health.
“Fifteen minutes later, he invited me to listen to the clicking sound that the aching joints in his elbow make.
“And there I was, sitting and thinking that I’m listening to the president’s elbow.
“It’s these types of anecdotes that I have included in the memoirs, as well as the stories of a few other journalists.’
Before his retirement at the age of 68 he had reported on anything from the Soweto uprising, the apartheid situation in South Africa and Africa’s numerous wars, to the AIDS onslaught, blood diamonds and Wouter Basson’s trials.
And he was there when Dr Chris Barnard did the first human heart transplant.
“That was one of my first big breaks,” he remembers, and this helped to cement his working relationship with TIME. Cloete Breytenbach was his photographer at the event.
Their work was featured on the cover of numerous publications, such as TIME and Life and placed the spotlight of the world on the remarkable operation done in South Africa.
“I received quite a few herograms from my editor, saying well done on the story,” Peter remembers.
Afterwards Peter wrote a “quickie” about the events of the transplant. The book, “which had modest success”, was translated into various languages and helped to set up Peter’s career.
“Over the years we had a bit of a stand-off,” he remembers Dr Chris Barnard, “but in the end I think we had a respectful relationship.”
He was the last person to do an interview with the illustrious heart surgeon. The interview was printed in TIME the week that Dr Barnard passed away.
Peter (73) first came to Africa in 1955 as a young rooky reporter from Britain, when he started to work in Nairobi, Kenya.
“From my mentors in those days I learnt how to drink hard and stay up late, but also how to put my nose down and never give up on a story,” he grins.
He later set up his own one-man freelance outfit as foreign correspondent for the BBC, New York Times, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express – and also TIME.
He says this meant that he sometimes had to repackage the same story six times, each with a different angle or a different level of depth.
“You were simply too busy to be scared or apprehensive.”
“We had no cell phones, no laptops, no reliable airline travel,” he remembers the good old days, when foreign correspondents were helping to document Africa’s tumultuous political days firsthand with the help of Remington typewriters and telex machines.
He met his “loyal, hardworking” wife, Jessie, in the then Salisbury.
“She was a wonderful touch typist,” he tells about the valuable supportive roll that she played in his career.
She passed away a few months after the Hawthornes moved to Wellington from Camp’s Bay a few years ago.
Peter travelled widely across especially Central and Southern Africa, with only a few country’s stamps missing from his British passport.
“It is actually an awesome feeling to realise that sometimes your work would be read by at least 2,5 million people across the world,” he says of his work with TIME.
“I believe I tried my best to give a balanced view of the country,” says the man who had helped to keep the world abreast of what was happening in South Africa and Africa for nearly 50 years. And now at least he gets time for a game of golf.
