RW ("Bill") Johnson, 65, the Sunday Times correspondent in South Africa, author and frequent reviewer of books in the London Review of Books, is in hospital in Durban after becoming infected with a life-threatening bacterium, which required the emergency amputation of his left leg at the knee and partial amputation of fingers. He was infected with 14 strains of narcotising fasciitis when he cut his foot on a rock while swimming in a lagoon in a region of the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal, described by his wife, the Russian-born historian, Professor Irina Filatova, as "paradise".
With grim irony, Johnson was struck down on the eve of publication of his new book, South Africa's Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid (Penguin), an unsparing look at the decline of South Africa from the hubris of the Mandela years.
The source of contamination in the water is reliably believed to be untreated sewage which seeped into the river feeding into the lagoon at Trafalgar, close to Johnson's and Filatova's holiday home, from an impoverished squatter camp upstream. The lagoon, in which he had swum very frequently in the past, forms part of the Mpenjati Nature Reserve. Swimming in the lagoon has since been banned.
Emergency email consultation with Professor Gus McGrouther, professor of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Manchester, enabled amputation of an infected hand to be avoided.
While Johnson lay between life and death in hospital in Margate, prior to being transferred to Durban, the Johannesburg Sunday Times, carried a review of Sampson's posthumously published autobiography, The Anatomist, which reported a cable from Mandela to Sampson - "What can you do about RW Johnson?" - in the early 1990s.
The reviewer, Chris Barron, noted that Mandela "clearly regarded Sampson as a useful member of the ANC's public relations team" (see here).
If this was not the case, Barron continued, Sampson "should have disabused him of the notion. He didn't. What he did do, although he doesn't mention this in his book, was approach several Fleet Street editors and asked them not to publish Johnson. They were suitably gobsmacked."
It was a commentary on the life and work of the "sharply critical Oxford don-turned-journalist, RW Johnson", as Barron described him, that this extraordinary revelation was published while Johnson hovered between life and death. Johnson remains in a critical condition.
The sanitary quality of many rivers in KwaZulu-Natal is reliably known to have declined drastically over the past few years. Human sewage is reported to be pouring directly into the river feeding the lagoon at Trafalgar, in which Johnson was infected, with no treatment whatsoever.
Paul Trewhela is a friend of Bill Johnson.
Notes: A publisher's announcement concerning Johnson's forthcoming book is available here. A report on the book by Shaun de Waal in the Mail & Guardian (26 March) is available here. An official report on the state of water services in South Africa is available here.
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