"It was the start of a close relationship, which has gone the way of most involving Roberts: it has ended in bitterness and regret for the other party "

"Roberts’s pursuit of anyone who says anything against him is so notoriously obsessive that few people are prepared to be quoted on him"


Profile: Ronald Suresh Roberts - Writer

On October 3 2004 we published the following profile of Ronald Suresh Roberts, by Chris Barron. Roberts sued the Sunday Times for defamation, but this week a High Court judge ruled that any damage to his reputation was self-inflicted.

Today we republish the article so you can see what all the fuss was about

When Ronald Suresh Roberts decides he needs to meet someone, he doesn’t beat about the bush.

“Are you one of those pricks selling out on socioeconomic rights?” was his opening line when he met former Cabinet Minister Kader Asmal during constitutional talks in 1994.

Roberts was all of 26 then, a brash Wall Street lawyer who’d come to South Africa to “observe” the elections.

Asmal, an urbane South African- born law professor from Trinity College, Dublin, who’d given his life to the struggle for socioeconomic rights in his homeland, told him to “f**k off”.

It was the start of a close relationship, which has gone the way of most relationships involving Roberts, most notably, of course, his relationship with Nadine Gordimer. That is, it has ended in bitterness and regret for the other party.

But not before it opened doors for Roberts ­ all the way into the President’s office. There he has been given the access he needs to write a book about Thabo Mbeki’s “intellectual traditions”, plus R1.2-million in the form of a corporate sponsorship drummed up for him by the Presidency.

Roberts, 36 (in 2004), was born in London and grew up in Trinidad. He was one of the top four pupils of his final year in Trinidad and won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, the same scholarship that his fellow Trinidadian, the writer VS Naipaul, had won before him.

He read law and earned a fellowship to Harvard, where he obtained his master’s degree.

At the age of 23 Roberts became the youngest lawyer at Wall Street law firm Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam and Roberts (no relation). Given his zealous political correctness, it’s interesting that he should have chosen to work for a firm founded by a US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson . He says he was attracted by its strong tradition of involvement in public interest law.

He found the reality “completely boring”, however, and after three years he left. Working at Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam and Roberts, “one of the most prestigious law firms in the world”, is something most young lawyers would kill for, he admits. But there was no excitement for him. “My parents had done all that. There was nothing special about it for me.”

His “sense of African diaspora”, which he says is “a visceral thing” ­ others once close to him say this is “sentimental rubbish” masking more prosaic considerations ­ propelled him to South Africa in 1994 to participate in the arrival of democracy.

Given the reputation he quickly established for himself in this country, one can only imagine that his sense of diaspora was greeted in New York by a sense of relief.

His US firm arranged for Johannesburg law firm Deneys Reitz to give him a job. After three months he left, saying he wouldn’t be the firm’s “smiling native”. In effect, he was told to leave when it was found he’d been making private business arrangements that created a conflict of interest for Deneys Reitz.

He was lucky. Had he been a South African lawyer, steps would probably have been taken to have him struck from the roll.

Roberts says he left because he was “bored”. Either way, his colleagues, who had found him insufferable, cheered his departure.

A partner at Deneys Reitz was Kate Owen, wife of then Sunday Times editor Ken Owen. They’d invited the homeless stranger from New York to stay with them. His behaviour was so objectionable, however, that after two weeks he was asked to find other accommodation.

He promptly slagged them off as typical white liberal hypocrites who professed liberalism while forcing the housekeeper ­ whom he’d treated like a personal slave, according to the Owens ­ to serve them tea in bed.

The only person who brings him tea in bed is his wife, objects Ken Owen.

The list of people Roberts has attacked in print is a long one. They’re mostly white and their sin in his eyes is that they’ve been critical of the government or of anyone black.

With evangelical zeal he scours documents for evidence of prejudice, and deconstructs speeches and articles to prove someone a racist.

After trawling through Owen’s newspaper columns, Roberts published an article denouncing him as one.

Owen responded in kind, calling Roberts an “egregious West Indian carpetbagger”.

A carpetbagger is “an unscrupulous opportunist without local connections” and Owen believes this sums Roberts up nicely.

“He has a genius for putting a vicious spin on what he writes. His debating style is terribly shabby,” says Owen.

Blacks who criticise the government are dismissed venomously by Roberts as whites’ lackeys and slaves to Eurocentrism.

Not for nothing has he been called the government’s “freelance hit man”.

About the only liberal Roberts has any time for is Alan Paton. The rest, he says, are “impostors” who provoke in him feelings of “outrage”.

Liberalism in South Africa is mythical, he believes. It’s a “mutant liberalism”.

He reserves special contempt for Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon.

His coup was his “exposé” of Leon’s brief career at the old SA Defence Force publication, Paratus, while he was doing national service.

This appeared in the press on the eve of local government elections in 2000, in time for Minister in the President’s Office Essop Pahad to quote it in Parliament as damning evidence that Leon had championed apartheid.

Roberts justifies his obsession with Leon on the grounds that “he embodies everything that is tutelary about the colonial mentality. He’s an icon of white mobilisation.”

Leon, for his part, refers to Roberts as “the David Irving of the Left” who “falsifies peoples’ pasts. Nothing he says can be taken on trust.”

Roberts, he says, has “imported” a tone of “condescending righteousness” into local debate.

Roberts’ obsessiveness goes beyond politics, however. His pursuit of anyone who says anything against him is so notoriously obsessive that few people are prepared to be quoted on him.

He pursued the SABC relentlessly for months after it unwittingly included someone charged with child abuse on a programme.

He waged an equally relentless battle against the body corporate of a block of flats, where he had a R700 000 apartment.

When the body corporate threatened to cut off his electricity and “name and shame” him because he refused to contribute to an umbrella M-Net subscription, he took them to the High Court and they were forced to back down.

Interviewing Roberts is difficult, not least because one has to vie with the gurgle and hiss of coffee-making machines in the background.

He does most of his work in coffee bars. Why? Well, Jean-Paul Sartre did a lot of his best work in cafés, he responds with what one imagines is a self-deprecatory chuckle.

The range of Roberts’ reading is impressive and he misses no opportunity to advertise it. Every question is followed by a pause while he tries to find a quotation (often from his idol, Edward Said) to answer it.

Either this has become such a habit that he finds it difficult to converse normally, or he is just unbearably pretentious.

After being taken in by Roberts’ slick erudition, Asmal ­ by then Water Affairs minister ­ couldn’t do enough for him. He employed him as a speech writer and policy and strategy adviser.

They wrote articles together, and a book called Reconciliation Through Truth, which Gordimer, with unintended irony as it happened, praised as “blazing honest”. On the other hand, a former deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail, Benjamin Pogrund, found evidence of “sloppy research” and “wearying repetitiousness”. Its attack on the liberal media (which bears Roberts’s trademark) as apartheid collaborationists, Pogrund found “disappointing in its shallowness”.

Asmal took to introducing Roberts as “my son” and wrote letters to corporations soliciting donations of between R100 000 and R150 000 to help Roberts pursue “the Nadine Gordimer project”. Today Asmal refuses to talk about him. But it is known that Roberts alienated so many people in Asmal’s department that eventually they informed Asmal they wouldn’t work with Roberts any more.

“To say their relationship has cooled is an understatement,” says a source close to Asmal. “Asmal’s door is closed to him.”

Roberts prefers to talk about “a natural evolution and dissipation of our relationship”.

Meanwhile, of course, he’s moved on and up. Now that Gordimer has disowned Roberts’ biography on her, the question on every lip is whether his relationship with the President will survive Roberts’s treatment of his life.

Roberts is confident that Mbeki is made of sterner stuff than Gordimer.

“Politicians spend a lot more time under the gaze of a discourse they don’t control, whereas it was an unusual experience for Nadine.”


Related Content : In the judge’s own words - Click here to access the judgment. (PDF)

With acknowledgement to Chris Barron and Sunday Times.