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Bruce Haigh, an Australian diplomat who brushed apart the protocols of his career to supply covert help to anti-apartheid figures in South Africa, together with the banned newspaper editor depicted within the film “Cry Freedom,” died on April 7 in Australia. He was 77.
His sister, Christina Henderson, instructed Australian information shops that her brother had been medevacked from Laos when a cancerous situation worsened. He died in a hospital in Wollongong, south of Sydney, she stated.
Over time Mr. Haigh labored variously as a ranch hand (recognized on Australian sheep and cattle stations as a jackeroo), an oil rig employee; an Australian Military conscript in Vietnam, a diplomat, a champion of refugees, and a columnist and broadcaster decrying what he thought of extreme American affect on Australia’s safety and protection insurance policies.
However a defining instance of his dedication to underdogs and people he noticed as oppressed got here throughout his task within the late Seventies as a junior diplomat with the rank of second secretary on the Australian mission in Pretoria.
He arrived there shortly after riots on June 16, 1976, in Soweto, an enormous and racially segregated township close to Johannesburg, that turned a generational icon of protest towards white minority rule.
In accordance with John Matisonn, a veteran South African journalist, Mr. Haigh was the primary overseas diplomat to fulfill with Steve Biko, the chief of the Black Consciousness Motion who died in police custody in 1977, after a brutal beating in a jail cell. On the time, Mr. Biko had been pronounced a banned individual beneath apartheid-era legal guidelines designed to isolate and silence the federal government’s adversaries.
Mr. Biko had befriended Donald Woods, the highest editor at The Each day Dispatch of East London, who got here beneath a banning order after Mr. Biko’s demise and resolved to flee South Africa for self-exile in London. Mr. Haigh supplied to assist him and traveled to Lesotho, an unbiased African nation encircled by South Africa, to fulfill with Mr. Woods, who crossed the border individually disguised as a hitchhiking priest.
As soon as in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, Mr. Woods alerted his spouse, Wendy, to flee South Africa with their 5 kids. Utilizing United Nations journey paperwork, the household flew to London through Botswana.
These occasions fashioned the narrative of “Cry Freedom,” a 1987 film primarily based on Mr. Woods’s writing about his relationship with Mr. Biko and directed by Richard Attenborough. Denzel Washington performed Mr. Biko.
Mr. Haigh is portrayed within the movie as a journalist “for the needs of compacting the story right into a two-hour account on the display screen,” Mr. Woods wrote in a 1987 replace to his 1980 autobiography “Asking for Bother.”
Earlier, in late 1977, Mr. Haigh accompanied Mr. Woods to the airport in Johannesburg, the place he was flying to the USA for a convention.
As soon as Mr. Haigh had left the airport after saying farewell to Mr. Woods, safety law enforcement officials prevented the journalist from boarding his aircraft and instructed him that he was now a banned individual and can be topic to deal with arrest.
Underneath apartheid legal guidelines, banned individuals couldn’t attend social gatherings or meet with multiple individual at a time. Amongst different restrictions, they had been required to report commonly to the police. They weren’t permitted to put in writing or be quoted or consort with some other banned individual.
In accordance with Mr. Matisonn, writing within the on-line Each day Maverick, a South African information outlet, Mr. Haigh subsequently helped a number of different anti-apartheid activists to evade the safety police, together with Shun Chetty, the Biko household lawyer, who fled South Africa in 1979.
As a result of he had the safety of diplomatic immunity, Mr. Haigh instructed an Australian interviewer years later: “I used to be capable of take messages round South Africa. I used to be capable of shift individuals who had been banned from one spot to a different to fulfill with one another. I used to be capable of take individuals throughout the border.”
At one level the authorities planted a newspaper story that Mr. Haigh had been seen sporting solely pajamas on the dwelling of Mr. Biko’s onetime accomplice and fellow activist, Mamphela Ramphele, who went on to a number of high-ranking positions together with vice chancellor of the College of Cape City and managing director of the World Financial institution. Mr. Haigh’s response, Mr. Matisonn stated, was to dismiss the story with a quip: “I by no means put on pajamas.”
Bruce Douglas Haigh was born on Aug. 6, 1945, in Sydney, Australia. His household later moved to Perth. In 1964, he exaggerated his expertise as an equestrian to be enlisted as a ranch hand within the Kimberley area of northwestern Australia, the place he first encountered Indigenous individuals and cultures.
“There have been Black individuals talking one other language, they had been simple with one another, they had been in a majority,” he was quoted as saying in a weblog publish by the creator Julian Cribb. “I felt I used to be in a special nation. I used to be.”
Moreover his sister, he’s survived by his spouse, Jodie Burnstein; his son, Robert, from his first marriage to Libby Mosley; and his daughters, Samantha and Georgina, from his second marriage. One other son from his first marriage, Angus, died in 2016.
In the course of the Vietnam Conflict, when Australia was an American ally, he was a conscript with an Australian armored unit. Later, he studied historical past and politics on the College of Western Australia and joined Australia’s diplomatic service.
His first posting was to Pakistan, earlier than he went to South Africa and immersed himself in opposition politics — with out all the time declaring his actions to his personal authorities. “The Australian authorities had no concept of my position in serving to Donald and his household escape South Africa,” Mr. Cribb quoted him as saying.
He went on to different diplomatic assignments in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and again in Pakistan, the place he’s stated to have befriended Benazir Bhutto, who served twice as prime minister earlier than she was assassinated in 2007. He resigned as a diplomat in 1995 after a short posting in Sri Lanka. He spent a number of years as a member of an official panel that reviewed the instances of individuals in search of asylum.
Mr. Haigh left the panel in 2000 and went on to tilt towards Australian authorities coverage till shortly earlier than his demise.
In one in all his final articles this 12 months, he criticized Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, over a safety pact with the USA and Britain, saying he was “doggedly and dumbly following within the footsteps of his discredited predecessors.”
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