A polite welcome back to the land of burned corpses and gun battles

COMING OUT of the northern winter, pale-faced and tired, we must have made a sorry spectacle queuing up at immigration. Eleven hours crammed in coach class with a toddler who refused to sleep had reduced us to gibbering helplessness. The darkened lights of the cabin had convinced him that he was trapped in a cave in whose depths lurked fearsome monsters. And so he had twisted and turned and jumped, and demanded to be walked up and down the aisle for hour after long hour.

I heard the man next to us groaning aloud on several occasions. Those of you who have travelled with small children on long flights will be familiar with the expression of terror that crosses the faces of fellow passengers as you approach.

"Please God don't let them be sitting near me," they whisper. I have done it myself. But as a parent you become defensive, resentful of those baleful expressions. There were plenty of them on the flight to Johannesburg. By the time we touched down I had stared down several resentful passengers. "To hell with you," I thought. "Were you never young?"

Once on the ground the aforementioned child decided to race through passport control on his own. I barely had the strength to run after him. The nice young woman stamping passports smiled indulgently. "Don't worry, sir, you can get him. I trust you to return," she said. And that was the first surprise of returning. The passport officers were - with one exception - black South Africans. I thought of the old days when working-class Afrikaners made up the entire corps of immigration staff; how during the State of Emergency in 1986 I would approach them shaking with nervousness, expecting to be detained and frogmarched on to the next plane home. They were days of subterfuge, when hundreds of reporters sneaked in pretending to be tourists.

All that nonsense is gone now. The welcome is friendly and the queues move quickly. The only shock comes when you enter the arrivals hall. As the doors slide open, the traveller is confronted with a press of humanity. All of South African life surges toward you, black, white, coloured and Indian.

What a contrast to the old days when you sauntered into a half-empty concourse to find a few black porters and mostly white faces awaiting the arrival of relatives and friends from Europe. A businessman told me that the number of international air carriers using the country has soared from 50 to more than 180 over the past few years.

I have come back to make a film for Panorama, trying to document what has and has not changed in some ordinary lives. Over the next fortnight or so I will be revisiting a few of the people whom I encountered when I worked here. Those years of the early Nineties, beginning with Mandela's release and ending with the first non-racial elections in April 1994, seem so distant now. How potent the atmosphere was back then: those were days when we spent our time racing around the townships counting the victims of violence, trekked up to Zululand to interview Chief Buthelezi or listened to the voices of the white right-wingers in small towns spread across the platteland.

Never before had I encountered such a mixture of hope and fear. For three years the country seemed to hover between exhilaration and despair. Those of us who covered the township wars between the ANC and Inkatha (and their police and military supporters) seemed to live on a permanent surge of adrenaline.

We were mostly young men and women, many on their first foreign posting, who seemed not to realise or care about the dangers into which we raced day after day. Roadblocks, burning vehicles, gun battles, necklacings, massacres, trigger-happy teenagers with rifles bigger than themselves - those were the images of the days of rage in Kathlehong and Tokoza and a dozen other dusty townships on the reef.

Driving around the townships now as an older man, a man with a child, I wonder about the risks that we took. Would I take them now? Almost certainly not.

I think back to that time and find it hard to recognise myself. Getting up before dawn, I would first listen to the early bulletins and ring the South African Press Association and then, flak jacket in tow, I would head for the township where the worst violence had occurred overnight.

I remember the shock of seeing my first burned corpse outside a migrant hostel in Soweto. The body was charred beyond recognition and the smell was nauseating. But the cameraman I was travelling with simply strolled over, dropped to one knee, filmed the body and returned to the car without the slightest expression of horror or disgust.

When I asked him if he had been bothered by what he saw, he shrugged. "You'll get used to it," was all he said. And I did. I got terribly used to it.

But as I say, they were different times. Most of the people I travelled with have moved on to other parts of the world. Many have become major figures in journalism. It is hard, though, to think of any story that could quite match the intensity of that South African experience.

A few, however, did not emerge alive from those strange days. I cannot come back here and avoid the memory of men I knew who died on the story. Ken Oesterbroek, one of the most talented photographers in the country, who was shot dead in the townships shortly before the elections; his colleague Kevin Carter, who won a Pulitzer and took his own life not long afterwards; Abdul Shariff, another photographer, who was killed just yards from where I was standing one fateful day in Kathlehong.

And, of course, my BBC colleague John Harrison, killed in a car accident while covering the unrest in the black homeland of Bophuthatswana. The other day I went to Grand Central Airport outside Johannesburg to take a helicopter ride over one of the black townships. As we stood in the warm dawn I remembered the last time I had been there: flying in on the chopper carrying John's body back from Bophuthatswana. God bless him and all who died in those momentous days.

But those days, if not the memories, are gone. They are part of a vanished era. The new journalism demands a different approach.

We were reporting a surge of history and so much of what we did was dictated by great events. The release of Mandela, the Boipatong Massacre, the murder of Chris Hani, the white referendum on change and, of course, the 1994 elections. I still feel privileged to have been a witness to all that. But I think I left at the right time. I think it would have been hard to acclimatise to the new journalistic reality, where the great historical moments are few and far between. The day-to-day reporting of the new South Africa is best reported by a new generation of foreign correspondents.

Now that the drama has gone in South Africa, journalists have more time to spend actually thinking; analysing the successes and failures of this new country, probing the record of the ANC-dominated government. The debate has changed and so too have the targets of press criticism. Now it is the ANC government which finds itself on the receiving end of damning editorials and which responds with a defensiveness that recalls governments of another era. How much of the criticism is justified, I simply cannot tell. I will try to find out and let you know.