Ruda Landman
She completed a degree in Afrikaans and English (though her accent was so broad that her only English-speaking friend asked her to rather speak Afrikaans to her), and then decided teaching was not her preferred profession.
So she set out to find a job. The newspapers were an obvious possibility, as was the SABC, but she failed her first announcer’s test dismally. It was, amongst other things, a general knowledge test. She had just spent a year as an Education student, having a whale of a time and taking zero notice of the outside world. She knew nothing.
She was employed by Die Burger in Cape Town, starting as general reporter, and enjoyed it enormously. Of course, that meant catching up with the events of the day very quickly, so a month or so later she went back to the SABC to do another test. This time she passed, and when there was an opening at the Afrikaanse Diens in Johannesburg in 1981, Ruda was on their list.
There followed two years in radio, and two years at Sarie magazine. Then television beckoned. She first read the Afrikaans news, and in 1985, the first live actuality programme in the country took off: Netwerk/Network, in Afrikaans and English on alternate evenings. She was part of the Afrikaans team - It was a baptism of fire. The interviewees, politicians, etc, had never known anything like this, and neither did they. 1985/6 was a very rough time in the country, with schools in chaos, thousands of people in jail, and the townships in flames. Censorship, police control over where journalists could go, leaders like Archbishop Tutu, Beyers Naudé and Alan Boesak blacklisted or banned … the space in which they could move became smaller and smaller, and she was happy to leave when her son was born at the end of 1986.
Ruda’s family is the single most important thing in her life. The marraige went through a rough patch when their son was about four, but they decided to hang in there and work at themselves and the relationship, for their own sake as well as his. It was unbelievably hard, but it was worth every wakeful night, every bitter argument, every tear: they will be married for 32 years in November. The three of them make each other happy from day to day, they do it consciously, paying attention, talking, spending time, they tell each other how much they care, they hug, talk and laugh. It is a blessing, but one that they earn every dayand they never take it for granted.
Ruda’s son was 18 months old when Bill Faure phoned to ask if she wanted to present a new programme he was putting together for the brand new pay-TV station, M-Net. She agreed without having the faintest idea of where it would lead. No one did.
In the next 19 years Carte Blanche forced her out of her comfort zone and into places and spaces she would never have entered of her own accord.
The country was changing – the Group Areas Act, the Mixed Marriages Act, the Population Registration Act, the Land Act and many others were repealed, some long before the more obvious changes of the early nineties. She sat in squatter shacks talking to women who were holding together their families in the midst of the most appalling hardship, and learned to respect people for who they were, whatever their circumstances and background. She had to unlearn a lifetime of easy, unconscious racism.
She travelled into Africa. In some cases she was shamed by their pragmatic can-do attitude, for example the AIDS programme in Uganda in the late nineties, when we were still arguing about the right to privacy and what was causing the disease. In other cases her blood turned cold as she looked into the abyss we had stepped back from – Maputo, a once-beautiful city in tatters; Mogadishu, another once-beautiful city in complete chaos, as it still is today.
Israel and Palestine made her deeply grateful for the combination of leaders we were blessed with when we faced that abyss. FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela were men who had the moral courage to say out loud things their followers probably did not want to hear, who then sold it to their followers, and signed on the dotted line saying, to misquote the Bible, “My people and I will adhere to this agreement.” Had we not had them, we could now have been building walls and fences trying to protect ourselves from one another.
Back home the Truth and Reconciliation Commission started, and once again it was her job that forced her to pay attention, to really listen. As an Afrikaner, she had to accept that her people, whom she had revered, had taken the lead in committing the kind of inhumanities that were graphically related in those halls every day. Once again her comfort zone was shattered and she had to recalibrate herself and her view of the world.
Television journalism is a funny old business, halfway between doing the story and being a story. One quote has often helped to restore her balance. It comes from the prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn: “One thing I have learnt over the years: the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking oneself seriously. The first is imperative, the second disastrous.” Like the owls in one of the Narnia books, she want echo: “Too-oo true-ue, too-oo true-ue…”
Since leaving Carte Blanche, Ruda had the time to “just do” things that might otherwise have been only a passing thought, like making cds with children’s stories for kids in hospital. She had time to work on a documentary series about the Border War for kykNET, which took months of dedicated hours and gave her no end of a kick. The world is out there. She’s fifty-five. Who knows what else is lying ahead!
Ruda, we salute you!
