About this site

This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

Johnson, Shaun

Click here for list of interviews

Shaun Johnson is Chief Executive of The Mandela Rhodes Foundation, which is dedicated to building leadership capacity in Africa.

A leading figure in the alternative press of the 1980s and former president of the South African Students' Press Union, he became a newspaper editor and award-winning writer, before being appointed Deputy Chief Executive of Independent News & Media South Africa prior to taking up his current position.

He is a member of Independent News & Media Plc's International Advisory Board, and is Chairman of the Cape Town Partnership.

Mr Johnson was educated at Hyde Park High School in Johannesburg; Rhodes University in Grahamstown; and at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He won academic and sporting awards at both universities.

He was for many years a prominent commentator on South African politics in both local and international media, and was one of two South Africans whose work was chosen for inclusion in the Penguin Book of Columnists. In 1994 he published Strange Days Indeed, the bestselling book on South Africa's transition, which was endorsed by Nelson Mandela. His first novel, The Native Commissioner, was published in the Commonwealth by Penguin in early 2006.

This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. Return to theThis resource is hosted by the site.