By Khoisan
It was in the winter of 1979 when I first encountered the captivating and humorous presence of Ronnie Morris.
We had been selected to attend a "leadership course" which, as we discovered later, was a winter school for educating and crafting young militants into revolutionaries.
That meeting, at the Dora Falke Centre in Muizenberg, was the start of what turned out to be a friendship lasting almost three decades.
On Saturday, just after sunset, I received a message on my cellphone from Cape Argus executive editor Joseph Aranes that read simply: "Ronnie Morris passed away."
Like the copy that Ronnie delivered, against tight deadlines, for more than 25 years, it was a message that made me stop and reflect on its content, and on the meaning of the life of the person whom I held in high esteem, as a comrade, a colleague and a friend.
When I met Ronnie, it was a special, idealistic and romantic time in South Africa.
He had come to the winter school as a representative of Bridgetown High School - a tall, strongly built fellow, with his trademark spectacles and the signature hairstyle of that time, the afro.
In those two weeks we received a crash course into the internal workings of the apartheid system, and a very strong dose of revolutionary education that later was unleashed as a catalyst for change in the Western Cape and points beyond.
It was Ronnie's zeal, his commitment and his enormous reservoir of energy that set him apart in that crazy gathering of youths.
He stood out then, as during most of his life, because he believed in the possibility of change, did not flinch at the sheer size of the task at hand, questioned everything and, despite the high degree of repression under which we had to undertake the mission, he always found time for laughter and humour.
I recall how we, as part of a task at the winter school, produced a batik of a boot tramping down on an explosive device, of which we were very proud, but which may have shocked some in our society at that time, which was steeped in a cautious conservatism.
It was with this very same dedication that Morris threw himself into the consumer boycotts, including the boycott of products from Fattis and Monis, where workers were engaged in a strike that produced a watershed labour victory.
Less than a year after the school, we parted ways and did not see each other for more than a decade.
When activist Keith Dumas and I connected with Ronnie in New York City he was already an accomplished journalist who had been selected for an exchange programme to the US.
As we traversed the Big Apple, from upper Manhattan to Union Square and Chinatown, he was his brilliant and entertaining self, a revolutionary filled with optimism, a fearless journalist who went to the burning barricades to bring back the story, and a worldlywise man whose idealism had been tempered by a healthy dose of reality.
We drank and let ourselves go a bit that night and when we said farewell, as dawn broke, he was a refreshing presence to have been with.
That is the Ronnie Morris I shall cherish and celebrate. In almost 15 years that we engaged with each other after I returned from the US, inside and outside the Independent Newspapers Group, I have always known, and been proud of, the Ronnie Morris who walked with pride and dignity in many newsrooms.
He feared no one, and he was not owned by anyone.
He wrote truth to the powers that be, was a card-carrying member of no party, except the fraternity called journalism.
He rejected mediocrity and, for posterity, his copy is a vindication that one can get a message to the lowliest of readers, without writing down to them.
Today his computer is silent, no copy will be filed on deadline, because he had another deadline to keep.
He went forward, like any good reporter, without borders, a great man of his time, a father to two beautiful girls, a son of a family and a true working-class hero.
Gai Tse Harra, Ronnie Morris, we will miss you.
- Khoisan is editor of Rootz magazine
