The Donald Woods I know

Excerpts from a tribute by John Ryan, Assistant Editor of the Rand Daily Mail, reprinted on October 25, 1977 at the time Donald Woods was banned.

THIS bleak morning I would like to ease the melancholy with some of my choicest anecdotes about Donald James Woods.

But I won't, because I can't. Because the best stories about Donald require a certain vocal facility which he doesn't have right now. Nor, by proxy, do I, for him.

So you'll have to do with a mute facsimile of the main, For to depict Woods without a voice is like trying to sketch anyone else without a face.

That voice was manifest in the written word as much as the spoken. It was and is the vehicle of something which can only be called charisma.

Charisma Woods has in more quantity than anyone else I have ever met. He is an unmitigated extrovert, yet an extrovert who very carefully stops short of becoming a bore. A certain sensitivity is needed to meet the danger. Donald possesses it to the last pore. And it is the reason he now finds himself banned, and silenced and bereft of company.

It is an extraordinary balance in man, the ability to listen. Donald became the sounding board of many issues which otherwise might have been left unsaid.

But the extent of his extroversion mustn't be underplayed. He was and is a showman. And, restricted to speaking to one non-family person at a time, he will feel the loss of an audience as keenly as the loss of his voice.

Wood is the sort of person who would find himself in a lift crammed with strangers, clear his throat and say: "I suppose you're all wondering why I've asked you to be here ..."

(His wife) Wendy is a concert pianist. Donald, by comparison, knows a few chords. He still can't sightread, that I know of, yet he's written an African symphony (orchestrated by Wendy) which he is hoping the SABC would broadcast at some time.

But it was in the role of concert pianist, of a sort, that Donald was to appear again, after I hadn't seen him for some years.

That was in East London, at the City Hall, in 1957. He was muddling through "The Alligator Crawl", that classic piece of Fats Waller stride. His impediment soon became clear.

He was wearing white gloves and I remember thinking: Good God, Woods, with that sort of cheek, you should go into politics!