 This book is about Islam in the west, not about race.
In case there is a suggestion that I have racist views in writing Another Sisyphus, please take the following into consideration:
In 1968/9, when I was 26 years old, I drove a 1937 Austin 7 Ruby saloon across the Sahara Desert and down through the Congo to marry a girl in South Africa. The car didn’t make it, but eventually I did in February, 1969.
I worked in Apartheid South Africa as a journalist for the Rand Daily Mail, and wrote monthly dispatches for the Irish Independent.
We were writing our wedding invitations at the end of August, 1969 when two Special Branch police officers knocked on the door and threw me out of the country. It was the practice at that time to expel six priests and six journalists a year, pour encourager les autres.
We returned to England where I worked as the assistant press officer for the Liberal party – my boss was a man called Mike Steele - through the 1970 General Election. We kept postponing our wedding without telling my fiancée’s South African-born mother why, which was because we were planning to join Peter Hain’s ‘Stop the Seventy’ cricket tour protests.
We married two days after the General Election, on June 20, 1970; Peter Hain was at the wedding reception. I stood against him the following year for the Chairmanship of the Young Liberals. He won.
Five years later, now an amateur hang glider pilot, I stood for election to the governing council of the sport – the BHGA - and won a seat, openly saying I wanted to campaign against the FAI holding the World Hang Gliding Championships in South Africa in 1977. I subsequently came second in the British Nationals in 1976, was appointed Chairman of the Competitions Committee (I thought a competition which placed me second best in the country needed a complete overhaul), and then said I would not be taking a team to the 1977 FAI World Hang Gliding Championships.
Those championships were cancelled; I believe, and it’s acknowledged elsewhere, that my public stand had a great deal to do with that cancellation.
In 1978 I told the British team I had sent to the FAI European Hang Gliding Championships that they had to withdraw if a South African team took part.
The South Africans didn’t, but I later paid a political price for these views.
I spent ten years at BBC Radio London as a reporter, presenter and programme editor, and then fifteen years in television, starting at TV-am, again as a reporter, presenter and editor. I have since worked in financial journalism.
In all those years, and those occupations, had I been a racist, isn’t it absolutely likely this would have become known and I would have been outed?
There is nothing racist in Another Sisyphus.
I do have doubts about Islam, though, and express them.
I think this is called getting one’s arguments in first, to what is a knee-jerk reaction these days to any criticism in England of another culture. BM
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