A silent man no longer
A government crackdown against political dissenters last October transformed South African Journalist Donald Woods into one of his country's silent men. In retaliation for his antigovernment editorials. Woods, 44, was "banned" for five years—which means that his movements were severely restricted, he was prohibited from returning to his job as editor of the East London Daily Dispatch and prevented from speaking with more than one person (except for family members) at a time. Government agents read his mail, bugged his home and phone, and kept him under general—if irregular —surveillance.
All that ended suddenly last week when Woods made a dramatic escape to the tiny, mountainous state of Lesotho. There he was reunited with his wife Wendy and their five children, who had driven from the family home in East London to meet him. After that came a tense, two-hour flight over South African territory to Botswana, then another to Zambia and on to London.
For at least a month, Woods told TIME Johannesburg Bureau Chief William McWhirter in Lesotho, the reasons for going into exile had seemed more and more compelling. The government had won a strong new mandate from the country's white electorate. The inquest into the death of imprisoned Black Consciousness Leader Stephen Biko, who had been a close friend of the Woods family and whose death Woods had criticized and questioned, ended inconclusively—although it did show, as Woods had charged, that the circumstances of Biko's death were extremely suspicious. The Woods family had also been angered and alarmed by a malicious prank that hospitalized their daughter Mary, 6. The child had received in the mail a STEVE BIKOT shirt that had evidently been dipped in some kind of acid; when she tried the shirt on, her face and eyes were burned. Most of all, Woods had grown restless and despondent at the prospect of spending endless days "sitting around, moldering, playing golf and chess."
The actual decision to escape from South Africa was made during a conversation in the family's secluded garden, the only place where Woods and his wife felt they could talk freely. Even there, they deliberately stayed away from the trees lest the branches contain hidden microphones. Already Woods had sought the advice of a few friends, some of whom were political activists like himself. One told him: "Go. You're the best one among us to talk to the [overseas] press." Woods had an additional reason for seeking exile; he was hard at work, in violation of the banning order, on a book about Biko, and was anxious to get it finished.