Adam Small
Africa Day, 25 May, brought to my mind that journalism, practised as a matter of art and wisdom, serves our continent, and indeed our world, well.
Sound journalism is an art in that, aesthetically, an attention-catching layout is called for: the placing of columns, pictures and photographs, advertisements, and the like. (I learnt something about this when still very young, as co-editor of the University of Cape Town’s student newspaper of the time, Varsity, and its student literary journal, Groote Schuur.)
Good journalism is also a matter of wisdom – this in respect of its captioning and headlining, from main articles to plain news reporting. Careful reading of incoming work is required and, in the case of a daily, this has to be done with urgency: the responsibility involved is enormous.
The best journalism also presents itself as an education of readers of the paper, as well as of its writers. The perceptive writer and the paper he or she writes for, have a sensitive rapport: the paper makes the writer sense its stature, and the caring writer, even if under pressure, comes forward with writing to meet the paper’s demand.
Letter writers, too, must consider this imposition of quality. The “business” of journalism, with all its components (kinds) of writing, is a symbiotic affair.
Letters are an important part of the make-up of a newspaper. Mostly, letter writers seem aware of the fact that their contributions add to the substance of the paper. This identifies another greatly important function of the press: the exposure, through letter writers’ opinions (among other things), of happenings in the community – by way of criticism and commendation alike.
When a reader of this paper, a while ago (Cape Times, 22 April), “warned about a pile of junk that had been dumped into a donga which floods into the Kruis River in the Breede-Gouritz area during heavy rains”, with severe consequences for people’s health, the Department of Water and Sanitation responded slovenly: the justly angered letter writer said it responded “with gibberish and prattle”. Importantly, the matter had now come to the notice of our public!
Now and then, however, there surfaces misunderstanding, and even bad misconception, of the purpose of a newspaper worthy of the name. As I write, there comes to hand one such example of letter writing which confuses a newspaper’s duty with the bringing of bad tidings (20 May). Under the caption “Why stoop so low?”, the paper is taken to task – castigated, in fact – for headlining a report on 17 May, "Coloureds are lazy" – notice the quote-marks. These words, said the report, were those of a “resources officer at retail giant Pick n Pay”. The remark, and its denial by the retailer, appeared boldly on the front page.
Again, I can only commend the newspaper for bringing this expression of downright racism to notice in the open. Surely, there was nothing amiss with the paper’s stance!
I ask myself, how does the demeanour of our Pick n Pay letter writer differ from what happened under apartheid? If only under apartheid, too, more people would have put matters out in the open, like this paper did in this case.
Paging through past writing of mine, I realised how scars remain, and stay for long when the injury was deep. I have sympathy with those who, in their arguments, still writhe from apartheid, more than 20 years after our democratic effort started.
The scars I mention are memories showing on the surface of underlying suppressed bitterness. I have recorded some of these, opening them up in my playwriting and poetry – and even if these books are burnt, other people would have the texts (or, somehow, the wind will blow pages of it into the fence of Time from where they will be plucked and read! The thought is NP van Wyk Louw’s).
I show readers two such scars (memories of a very personal nature): There was this bus ride, long ago, between Wynberg and Hout Bay. At the time "Whites only" and "Non-whites only" plaques disgraced even the inside of our public transport vehicles. In a poem of 56-57 years ago, I describe this ride of a young coloured woman, expecting her first child: “Happiness should be just to feel alive, and to praise the day ... We’re journeying to the sea, to stand there on the salty rocks and watch the dabchicks dive."
What were those boards in the bus about, that shouted at you, six months with child, you may not sit? – though there were many seats vacant in that bus for "whites only"! And stood you did.
They were voices from hell.
(If only our loud protesters of today could know this kind of thing face to face, at first hand, and not – so to speak – by proxy only!)
At another level of brute racism, the same young woman was buying a dress in Bellville. She thought she should try it for fit. The “white” shop assistant enquired from her supervisor, who responded, after looking the young woman up and down: “It’s all right, she can fit it. She looks clean!"
Recently (but concerning things way back), I attended a performance of a play of mine, Joanie Galant-hulle(Joanie Galant an’ them). The drama is the kind of work that “brings things into the open”. (As Cissie Gool said, “The truth is on the walls".) The play was excellently produced by Ms Lauren Hannie, who also played the lead role. She was splendidly in control of a cast that exposed apartheid’s heart of vulgarity. The play concerns the forced removals of the time from District Six, when the District, under the Group Areas Act of apartheid, was declared a “white area”.
The trauma of it all infirms and destructs Joanie mentally. A massive scar was building on her helplessness and anger ... The end of the play finds her a broken woman, staring vacantly, remembering, and saying who she used to be, the proud woman of the past: “Ek is Joanie Galant” (“I am Joanie Galant”).
Recently also I travelled to the University of Pretoria, to try – with others – to be helpful with problems the university is experiencing right now. On this outing I was struck (again) by the sheer innocence of young Afrikaans people, who just have no knowledge of apartheid and its evil wading through the souls of black (“non-white”) people over the years.
Young English speakers, of course, are essentially in the same boat (more properly, float)! I do not blame them: how can I, if they appeared in life a generation or two too late for “inside knowledge” of the Thing? Still, they have heard about it – have plucked those book-pages Van Wyk Louw talked about, from the Fence, and are asking questions (my own children and grandchildren are part of this landscape – and I feel my responsibility as source of information for them, almost unbearably heavy!).
(I brush aside the bewailings about apartheid by some of my “white” fellow writers and – against this background – some of my young “black” fellow writers. Perhaps I don’t have a right to this either ... But, really, what do they know, and what can they feel about this past misery?)
However, I have lots of time for the curious – young people in particular, like a grandson of mine, Leopoldt, who lives in Pretoria, and who does not know how to describe himself as far as “colour” (of the skin) is concerned! The young man was applying for university entrance a while ago. My advice to him was, to the devil with it: for our bureaus, believe it or not, still require that on their forms (inherited from apartheid), to have one’s "race" be declared!
I conclude, then, by saluting this paper for standing by its duty, and thus by a wholesome ethic of journalism. (I am aware of slips of language by individual journalists, but speak, here, of the overall orientation of the paper.)
On a pleasant note, finally, I mention two uplifting telephone calls that came in as I wrote. They were made in the wake of my writing of "Trees" (13 May). One was from a gentleman with many years of intimate knowledge of the theatre, and who is also a nature lover; the other from a university researcher on trees – both of them pleased about the presentation of these plants in another dimension, thinking about things (popularly speaking) “outside the box” – which is also what I was suggesting to my grandson in Pretoria: compel these compilers of questionnaires, as far as you can, to see the world differently from apartheid.