RW Johnson, one of South Africa’s most formidable political writers and intellectual contrarians, has died.

Known to friends as Bill, Johnson spent more than six decades first challenging the injustices of apartheid and then the misgovernance of the African National Congress (ANC).

He opposed apartheid as a young man before moving to Britain, returned after democracy, and became one of the most forceful and outspoken critics of the ANC government, including the period shortly after it came to power and when it was unfashionable to do so.

To admirers, he was the country’s most perceptive political analyst, with a rare command of history and institutions. To critics, he was abrasive, pessimistic, and provocative. Both sides agreed that Johnson could not be ignored.

Born in England in September 1943, Johnson arrived in Durban as a schoolboy and studied at the University of Natal. He became active in student politics and campaigned against segregation in universities, detention without trial, and restrictions on freedom of speech. His activism attracted the attention of the South African Security Police, who arrived to detain him shortly after he had left for Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship.

At Magdalen College, Oxford, Johnson studied politics before returning in 1969 as a Fellow and tutor. He remained there until 1995, teaching generations of students.

South Africa, however, remained the central focus of his intellectual life. In 1995, Johnson returned to the country to direct the Helen Suzman Foundation.

Perhaps his most famous piece of work was How Long Will South Africa Survive?, first published in 1977 and later revisited for democratic South Africa in 2015. He also edited a book on South Africa’s first democratic election with Lawrie Schlemmer as well as other books on South African politics and a critique of the French left, published in the early 1980s. He released two memoirs, Look Back In Laughter, published in 2015, focusing on his time at Oxford, and Foreign Native: An African Journey, published in 2020, which recounted his life in Africa.

His most recent book was A Roving Eye, a book of his essays, which was published this year.

For many years Johnson wrote for the London Review of Books and was their preeminent authority on Southern Africa. He was also, for many years, a correspondent of the London Sunday Times, writing on South Africa, Zimbabwe, and further afield.

Johnson’s work on Zimbabwe changed Helen Suzman’s view of the situation in that country, which influenced the broader view on the country for many South African liberals.

Johnson had little patience for the liberation movement’s claim to permanent moral authority. Nor did he spare universities, newspapers, business leaders, or the liberal establishment when he believed they had surrendered judgement to fashion, fear, or convenience.

In a 1995 interview, he set out the principle that shaped his public life: “If you don’t stand up for liberal values, you’re not a liberal but something else.”

That conviction left him isolated. Many former allies believed he had moved to the political right. Johnson insisted that he had remained a liberal while the meaning of liberalism around him had changed. He was anti-apartheid without becoming an ANC loyalist, liberal without deferring to liberal institutions, and deeply attached to South Africa without romanticising it.

His prose reflected the man. It was learned but rarely academic, combative without being obscure, and driven by an extraordinary store of historical knowledge and political anecdote.

Johnson was also a survivor. In 2009, after cutting his foot while swimming in a KwaZulu-Natal lagoon, he contracted necrotising fasciitis. The infection caused organ failure and required the amputation of his leg. He recovered and continued writing for more than a decade.

Johnson became a columnist for The Common Sense in December last year and he soon became one of the publication’s most popular writers, writing on a variety of issues, from the collapse of South African municipalities to space exploration to the decline of South Africa’s newspapers.

Frans Cronje, the editor of The Common Sense, said: “Bill was one of the most extraordinary people that I have ever gotten to know. He wasn’t always easy to deal with and his sharp wit ensured that you were always on your guard because he was such a formidable writer and thinker and you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of that. But at the very same time I, and many of those who knew him in a similar way, felt a great affection for him and saw him as a treasure. Between him, Lawrie Schlemmer, and John Kane-Berman we had arguably the three greatest liberal thinkers South Africa produced in the second half of the 20th century and they collectively shaped the country to a very considerable degree.”

Johnson’s predictions were not always right, and his judgements were often severe. Yet his central warning endured. Countries do not survive on moral prestige, constitutional language, or historical entitlement. They survive when institutions work, power is constrained, elites tell the truth, and failure carries consequences.

South Africa has lost one of its last great public intellectuals. Johnson believed the writer’s duty was to tell the truth and hold those in power to account, no matter who they were. He did that for more than half a century.

Johnson is survived by his wife, Irina Filatova, his children, Richard and Rebecca Johnson, and his grandchildren, Noah and Ella-Bella.