Brendan Boyle, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 68, was a top South African journalist, Reuters bureau chief, parliamentary correspondent, editor of the Daily Dispatch and executive editor of the Sunday Times.
He also edited a windsurfing magazine in Holland, trained as a circus trapeze "catcher" and worked as a ship's purser.
He covered the most tumultuous years of the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s for UPI and Reuters international news agencies, and was often in the thick of the action. He witnessed the horror of several necklacings.
On one occasion he had to be restrained by fellow journalists from going to the assistance of a woman who was being necklaced in Soweto after she had been accused of being a police informer.
On another he came close to being necklaced himself while covering the funeral of an activist in Atteridgeville, Pretoria.
In the 1990s Reuters had to find a safe house for him and his family after he received death threats from the Cape Town vigilante group Pagad.
SENT DOWN FROM RHODES
Boyle was born in East London on November 2 1950. He grew up at air force bases around the country where his father, Brig Brian Boyle, a decorated World War 2 fighter pilot (DFC 1941), was a fighter pilot instructor in the South African Air Force.
After matriculating at Christian Brothers College in Pretoria he went to Rhodes University in Grahamstown. He was sent down for a term in 1968 after he and other students occupied the university council chamber in protest when the University of Cape Town cancelled the appointment of Archie Mafeje as a lecturer in social anthropology under government pressure.
He quit university, went to circus school in Cape Town and joined Safmarine as a ship's purser.
In 1971 he was accepted for the Argus cadet course, worked on the Eastern Province Herald where he met and married fellow reporter Loesje Israel, and on the Argus in Cape Town.
A keen yachtsman, he was flown to Rio in January 1976 to cover the end of the Cape to Rio yacht race, and then sailed back as part of the crew on Dabulamanzi.
He was sent to the Argus London bureau for a year in 1977, but when the year was up decided he didn't want to return to SA.
BLOODY CLASH
He moved to Amsterdam where he worked as a stringer for UPI. He covered the bloody clash between thousands of police and protesters over squatter evictions from city apartments, in which 600 protesters were injured.
In 1984 UPI sent him to Johannesburg.
He covered the campaign to save 30-year-old activist and poet Benjamin Moloise from the gallows after he was found guilty of murdering a black security policeman.
He was in defence lawyer Priscilla Jana's office in 1985 when word came that Moloise would hang after president PW Botha rejected appeals from around the world to commute his sentence.
Boyle, who'd interviewed Moloise's mother Mamike, wept in front of his colleagues, something that Jana still remembered years later when she was SA's ambassador to the Netherlands.
In 1988 he joined Reuters.
THREATENING AND VIOLENT
While walking back to his car after covering the funeral of an apartheid victim in Atteridgeville he and Reuters photographer Juda Ngwenya were surrounded by a group of armed youths. They began manhandling Boyle and their attitude became so threatening and violent that he expected the worst.
Ngwenya spoke to them calmly for 10 minutes until, sensing a dip in the tension, he put his arm around Boyle, said with quiet urgency "we've got to fuck off", and shepherded him back to their car.
He told Boyle the youths had wanted to take him away and necklace him.
Boyle had no doubt that had Ngwenya, who died in 2016, not kept his head he would have been killed.
On February 11 1990 he covered the release of Nelson Mandela from Victor Verster prison.
Boyle was an incredibly competitive, as well as meticulously accurate, reporter. He thrived on the immediacy of agency work and getting the story out first. He claimed, as did Reuters, that his story on Mandela's release was the first on international wires.
He was in charge of Reuters in Cape Town when his TV crew filmed the murder of notorious Hard Livings gang leader Rashaad Staggie by the vigilante group Pagad in 1996. They threatened to kill Boyle and his two sons if he didn't hand over the footage so the police couldn't use it against them in court.
Boyle, who was also being threatened with arrest if he didn't hand it over to the police, had the footage secretly shipped to London. But Pagad's death threats became so serious that Reuters shipped their TV crew out of the country and wanted Boyle and his family to leave as well. When he refused they sent a terrorism expert from London to assess the situation, and, based on his advice, moved the Boyles to a safe house for six months after which he was sent to Johannesburg as bureau chief.
FIRED FOR PARTY POLITICS
In 2004 he became the parliamentary correspondent for the Sunday Times. In 2011 he became editor of the Daily Dispatch in East London and in 2013 executive editor of the Sunday Times.
He was fired six months later when he sent his CV as part of an application, later withdrawn, for a Democratic Alliance MP post.
He went to the Reuters training school in London to be trained as a trainer, and then trained journalists in several African countries.
In 2014 he became a senior researcher at the Land and Accountability Research Centre at UCT, focusing on communities affected by mining, and how billions of rands paid by the companies mining on their land was being stolen by a combination of government officials and traditional leaders.
He produced a documentary, This Land, about the mechanics of this grand theft and the complete lack of accountability.
His work made him unpopular, and he got roughed up in meetings by pro-mining thugs. Typically, this didn't stop him.
Boyle, who was diagnosed with cancer 18 months ago, is survived by his wife, Loesje, and sons Jordan and Jed. 1950-2019..