The day after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, the white South African journalist Tony Hall, who has died aged 71, and his wife Eve joined the ANC. For the next three years their home was a closet venue for the organisation, before in 1964, facing jail as members of a banned organisation, they went into exile with their three sons. It would be 26 years before they returned home.
Tony became news and features editor of the Nation in Nairobi, and, after drafting the manifesto for the opposition Kenya People's Union, was again expelled. In Tanzania, he was training editor of the Standard newspaper, and did voluntary work for the ANC, Frelimo of Mozambique and the MPLA of Angola.
He had been born in Pretoria, to parents who ran a hotel. His grandfather, Arthur Lewis Hall, was a pioneering geologist, while his aunt Connie was South Africa's first woman lawyer. He was educated at Pretoria boys' high school and in the late 1950s read history at Witwatersrand University, where he first met Eve, a Jewish refugee who had survived the war in France undercover.
In 1959 he joined the Johannesburg Star, before moving to the Rand Daily Mail, for which he interviewed Nelson Mandela in hiding. Detained in 1962, he refused to reveal Mandela's whereabouts. He also covered the closing stages of the treason trial.
I met Tony in the early 1970s, when he was head of press at Oxfam. He gave me my second job in journalism as his assistant, and more importantly, a political education. To my disappointment, he and Eve moved back to east Africa, where, as Oxfam's press officer, in 1973 he broke the story of the first Ethiopian famine. For the next 20 years, he worked in Africa, the Middle East and India.
Unbanned in 1990, he returned home and produced A 2020 Vision for Southern Africa, which focused on completing "the emancipation and cooperation of the people of South Africa, and the region".
Last January, after 37 years, I met Tony in London. He was exactly as I remembered him, full of passion, warmth and kindness. A month later, back at their house in Matumi, he lay down on his wife's side of the bed, and died, where she had died last November. He was one of the few white people who stood with the ANC almost from the beginning. His sons survive him.
By Linda Grant
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