Reflections on Boesak at 70

Ryland Fisher

PRIEST-turned-politician-turned-priest Allan Boesak turns 70 on Tuesday. Many young people who missed the 1980s and maybe even the 1990s could be forgiven for asking: Allan who? Recent history has not been kind to Boesak, who was once internationally arguably the most recognisable of South Africa’s anti-apartheid activists.

Boesak’s rise in the Struggle hierarchy was meteoric. After studying theology in the Netherlands from 1970 to 1976, he returned to occupy several crucial positions in South Africa, among them in the theology department at the University of the Western Cape (UWC).

His doctoral thesis, Farewell to Innocence (1976), is still considered a profound text on liberation theology. Boesak has written 17 books and edited a few more. He became the moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa and oversaw the church’s signing the Belhar Declaration against apartheid and all forms of discrimination in 1986. In his role as president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches – a position he held from 1982 to 1991 – Boesak began to play an international role in moves to isolate the apartheid regime.

He based his opposition to apartheid on his religious beliefs. His oratory style, reminiscent of Martin Luther King Jr’s, was a major strength and helped to fill stadiums and halls throughout the country.

The chant of “Boesak! Boesak!” followed him wherever he spoke. Boesak’s Foundation for Peace and Justice supported the Struggle financially and was often used as a conduit for people and foundations from overseas to support it. In the early 1980s at a conference in Lenasia, Boesak issued a call for a united front against apartheid. This led to the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) on August 20, 1983 at the Rocklands Civic Centre in Mitchells Plain.

The UDF played a major role in the opposition to apartheid, especially at a time when most organisations in the liberation movement were banned and their leaders exiled. In 1985, Boesak, along with Winnie Mandela and Beyers Naudé, won the human rights award given annually by the Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights.

Also In 1985, Boesak called for the release of Nelson Mandela during a march from Athlone Stadium to Pollsmoor Prison where Mandela was held at the time.

Boesak was unable to lead the march, however, because he had been detained by the police shortly before. The march continued and ended in clashes between police and protesters. In many ways this open defiance by a wide range of demonstrators was a turning point in the Struggle.

A few years later, Boesak played a key role on the day of Mandela’s release from Victor Verster Prison in Paarl, when he calmed the waiting crowds on the Grand Parade as the organisers of the welcome rally contemplated for several hours whether they should risk Mandela speaking in a very exposed situation.

In 1991, Boesak became the ANC’s leader in the Western Cape and went on to serve as economic affairs MEC in the province. In 2008 he defected to the ANC breakaway party, the Congress of the People (Cope) for a short while before leaving the country to lecture in the US. He occupies the Desmond Tutu Chair for Peace, Global Justice and Reconciliation Studies at the Christian Theological Seminary and Butler University in Indiana.

While Boesak’s contribution to the Struggle was immense at times, he made some, probably avoidable, mistakes.

This is maybe why Boesak is not mentioned in the same breath as Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Desmond Tutu, although there was a time when his international profile was arguably even bigger than theirs. The first mistakes were the affairs he had, one with a colleague at the South African Council of Churches, another with the woman who later became his wife.

The first affair, with Di Scott in 1985, was costly and damaging because it was exposed by the security police who had bugged a bed where he was sleeping with his lover. They gave this recording to a Joburg newspaper which then reported on the affair. The second affair, which took place around 1990, was with Elna Botha, who was at the time married to a well-known television news anchor. It was the final straw for Boesak’s loyal wife, Dorothy, who left him.

He later married Elna and they are still together after more than 20 years. Boesak was always a larger than life character and he was severely criticised for moving into a house in Constantia at a time when living in Constantia was seen as the preserve of rich white people. Nowadays, of course, it is the preserve of rich people, irrespective of colour.

His most recent mistake was exposed a few years later when the American singer Paul Simon accused him of misappropriating a few million rand that had been donated to his foundation by Simon and two overseas foundations for development projects.

Boesak was charged with fraud. He opted not to testify in his defence. He felt if he gave evidence he might implicate some of his comrades, something he did not want to do. He was convicted of fraud in 1999. He spent just over a year of a three-year sentence in prison. Boesak was pardoned; his record was cleared by President Thabo Mbeki in 2005 and he was able to return to the church.

In many ways, Boesak’s story is one of missed opportunities. He should have gone down in history as one of our greatest statesmen and many people, particularly from the Western Cape, still think he was. This was evident in July 2008 when he spoke at a rally in UWC’s great hall, at the annual Ashley Kriel lecture. More than 2 000 people filled the hall which resonated with the “Boesak! Boesak!” chant.

Boesak’s speech, delivered in his trademark staccato style, did not disappoint. It transported one back to the 1980s when Boesak was the biggest drawcard at rallies throughout South Africa, the unofficial king of the Struggle.

When he reflects on his life on Tuesday, Boesak must surely realise that at times he has lived a charmed life, despite the hardships of Struggle and prison.

But he will also surely see that things could have turned out significantly better for him and he could still have enjoyed international recognition and acclaim were it not for his having made some bad choices along the way.

(First published in the Weekend Argus on Saturday, 20 February 2016)

Let’s start with political leaders

It was an honour to attend the launch on Thursday of the Racism Stops With Me campaign, which is supported by Independent Media and a few partners.

It was good to hear Mayor Patricia de Lille tell the assembled guests, which included a who’s who of politics and business, that the city intends to roll out phase two of its racism campaign next week.

Speaker after speaker related personal and political reasons for why we need to combat racism as a nation.

The Independent Media initiative is honourable and long overdue. The city’s initiative is as admirable.

But it will take much more than a gathering at the Mount Nelson of apparently like-minded people to make an impact on the racism in our city.

And it will take much more than a publicity campaign, which is effectively what the city’s initiative entails, to change the mindset of racists who, as De Lille rightly pointed out, appear to have influence way beyond their numbers.

The major challenge in tackling racism is consistency and stamina.

The battle against racism cannot be a campaign with a fancy launch, a start-point and an end-point.

It is something that needs to be imprinted in our DNA. It is something that we need to address every day in all our actions.

The launch is but a start. Now the hard work begins. The bad news is that a campaign like this can never stop.

Long after the million T-shirts produced by the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (Sactwu) have been sold and the R3.5 million grant from the Fibre, Processing and Manufacturing Sector Education Training Authority – to help develop citizen journalists – has been spent, there will still be a need for a campaign against racism. Long after the city has distributed all its pamphlets explaining racism, there will still be racists.

Over the past 10 years or more, I have tried to do anti-racism work with corporates and government departments, but it has been difficult. Most businesses don’t like you to mention the word “racism”.

There is a sense that if you don’t talk about it, then maybe it won’t exist. Yet we come from a past where racism informed so much of what we did – where we could live, who we could marry, the education we got, the jobs we could do, etc – it is difficult not to mention it by name.

Most corporates also don’t really want to address societal issues unless they impact on their bottom lines.

Most are satisfied merely to comply with what the government and the law expect from them.

Corporates need to be convinced it is in their interest to create a more harmonious work force, which could be the end result of a campaign to inform the public about the dangers of racism.

So many of our beliefs are based on ignorance, and education – not in the formal sense – needs to play a major role in any campaign against racism. When I launched One City, Many Cultures at the Cape Times in 1999, its aim was to deal with racism and related issues, such as cultural and religious intolerance.

The initiative has continued since then, with various degrees of success, but we have seen how support has wavered, depending on who is in political power – in the city, the province and nationally – and how much publicity incidents of discrimination get in the media.

Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa, speaking at the launch of Racism Stops With Me, talked about the need to recommit ourselves to the values enshrined in the constitution and to fight for a non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa.

This is at the heart of any campaign against discrimination. One must not only know what one is opposing. One must know what one is striving towards.

At the heart of discrimination is a lack of respect for people who look and sound different to you.

The whites who engineered and implemented apartheid were able to maintain it – and believe in it – for so long because they had no respect for black people.

Here I include Africans, coloureds and Indians, unlike what some people are doing nowadays, because that is how black is defined in our constitution, which is the supreme document governing our lives in South Africa.

Racism can only survive if the one party (oppressor) feels no empathy towards the other (oppressed). But racism thrives especially in situations of inequality.

South Africa is a hugely unequal society. Part of this could be put down to 50 years of apartheid but the ground work was laid during 300 years of colonialism.

As long as inequality exists in our country, it will be easy for racism to flourish. In a country where the majority of people are black it is to be expected that the vast majority of poor people will be black.

The situation will not be changed by making sure that the majority of white people become poor. We need to find ways of uplifting the majority of people and decreasing the gap between the rich and the poor.

Part of how we do this is by creating opportunities that are accessible to everyone. This would be in line with the constitution and the Freedom Charter, which talks about how everyone should have equal access to opportunities, whether they are social, political or economic.

I am glad Independent Media is launching its campaign in a year when we have municipal elections because it is will be needed to keep hot-headed politicians in check – maybe even some of the people who were at the launch.

People who were shocked at the recent racist utterances by EFF leader Julius Malema and the equally racist and childish retort by ANC Youth League president Collen Maine, should brace themselves for much more of the same over the next few months.

It is an election year and my experience is that politicians lose their minds when faced with having to convince voters where to make their crosses.

Let’s focus on them first in our campaign against racism. If leaders are allowed to be racist and irresponsible, then what is to stop their supporters from doing the same?

(First published in the Weekend Argus on Saturday 13 February 2016)

District Six’s diversity should live everywhere

The best way to remember District Six and preserve its legacy is by making sure our children and their children grow up in a society where all colours, cultures and traditions live in harmony, writes Ryland Fisher.

This week I have been nostalgic about District Six. I have been looking at old photos, reading old articles and listening – over and over – to songs by David Kramer and Taliep Petersen which gave life to so much of District Six’s character.

Yet, it was only when I was on Espresso on SABC3 on Thursday morning, talking about the 50th anniversary of District Six being declared a white group area that I suddenly remembered the impact of what had happened.

Before my interview, they showed footage of the bulldozers flattening homes while residents’ possessions stood on the pavements.

Those images almost made me cry because it brought back vivid memories of one of the cruellest acts of the apartheid government.

I remembered going to interview Naz Ebrahim, who was the leader of the District Six residents, in her home in Rochester Road in 1980. She was one of the last people to resist removal and her home stood out like a beacon among the rubble of houses that had been demolished. Her home, Manley Villa, was the last house to fall in that street.

Much has been written about District Six in the past week – including in this column – and I don’t normally write about the same thing two weeks in a row.

But the question that has been nagging me is the best way to preserve the legacy of District Six, a place that influenced many of us as we grew up and continues to influence us today.

District Six was in many ways what Cape Town, and indeed South Africa, is struggling with today.

It was a community where people lived together and in harmony despite apartheid-imposed differences.

Apartheid was an evil system that not only destroyed communities, but also people’s souls. It was designed to divide people, thus giving a minority power over the majority.

Now South Africa is maturing as a democracy – we are celebrating 22 years of democracy this year – it is important to strive for a society that is everything apartheid was not.

District Six was such a society. It allowed Africans, coloureds and whites to live together as neighbours. It was a melting pot of cultures reflected in the music and art generated in the area.

The best way to remember District Six and preserve its legacy is by making sure our children and their children grow up in this kind of society.

We must learn to respect and enjoy each other’s cultures and not confine ourselves to narrow cultural experiences.

We often hide behind tradition and culture as a way of excusing ourselves from exploring other cultures. There is still intolerance of difference.

The response this week to Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela, marrying a Muslim woman – from Muslims and Xhosa traditionalists – showed how far we have to go as a society.

The chiefs opportunistically want to depose Mandla as a chief while many in the Muslim community have asked questions about his conversion.

I love that somebody from the Xhosa tradition and of royal blood married a Muslim.

This could debunk many myths about perceived differences between groups in our society. This is partly what we fought for when we opposed apartheid.

We wanted the right to live where we chose and the right to get married to whoever we wanted, irrespective of differences.

We are fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world but it is also one of the most diverse and we should do more to explore this diversity.

We need to get out of our residential areas, many of which are still race-based, and go into communities where we would not normally go. We might just be pleasantly surprised when we realise most people are not very different from others.

It is easy to shelter from things that might appear strange to you but, sometimes, if you are prepared to open your mind, you will find “strange” cultural experiences can be enjoyable.

This would show a rejection of apartheid and its architects and would be the best way to memorialise the spirit of District Six.

It will probably be impossible to rebuild the vibrant community that is District Six in the area where it was situated, but we can build it everywhere in Cape Town and South Africa.

Let’s learn to embrace each other, appreciate each other’s cultures and not point fingers at people who fall in love across religious, racial or cultural barriers.

If we do this, it would give new meaning to the cry: Long live District Six, long live.

(First published as a Thinking Allowed column in the Weekend Argus on Saturday, 13 February 2016)

District Six stands as a monument to tragedy

The barren piece of land on the outskirts of Cape Town stands as a painful reminder of a shameful period in our history, writes Ryland Fisher.

Much has been written about District Six, especially over the past 50 years since it was declared a white group area. And much will be still be written, especially in the coming week of the 50th commemoration on Thursday, February 11.

There will be those who reminisce about what things were like in the district; some will remember the vibrancy, some will argue it was a slum.

But irrespective of what District Six was, it remains a blight on Cape Town. The barren piece of land on the outskirts of the city stands as a painful reminder of a shameful period in our history.

There is a part of me that feels it should remain barren, because it is almost a living monument to a time when people thought that they could control others’ lives simply because they looked and sounded different from them. They used bulldozers to force people out of homes where they lived reasonably comfortably and relocated them dozens of kilometres away.

But the best response to those who wanted to create a piece of white heaven close to the city centre – and which they called Zonnebloem as a kind of “up yours” to the residents who were removed – would be to make sure that people return to the area in their thousands and restore some of that vibrancy of years gone by.

Of course, things will never be the same in District Six.

I didn’t grow up in District Six, but like everyone on the Cape Flats, I have family and friends who lived there. I remember as a child going to District Six at New Year from Solent Court in Hanover Park with Boeta Leimie, one of the few people I knew who had a car.

I remember the car getting stuck as we went up one of the hills and all of us having to get out to push.

Fortunately, there were about eight of us in a car meant to seat five, which made pushing a bit easier, but it was still uphill. I also remember the thrill of seeing the klopse (minstrels) walking down Hanover Street, especially the “atchas” who were a group dressed as Native Americans and led by a devil dressed in red and armed with a huge fork.

The devil and some of the other members of this troupe, some with mini axes (not real ones, I think) used to chase us down the street and we ran into people’s houses to escape. We were terrified and excited at the same time.

Thousands of people used to line the streets, waiting to see their favourite minstrel troupe, in much the same way they do nowadays in Adderley Street.

Later, as a teenager, I remember going to one of the few clubs in town that allowed blacks and later sleeping at a friend’s house in the Bloemhof Flats, until one day he told us that they were also being forced to move to make way for whites.

It is difficult to keep memories of a place like District Six alive. It has been 50 years since the area was declared white and more than 40 years since the bulk of evictions took place. Most of the people who applied for some kind of restitution for losing their homes in District Six are now old; some are dead.

If and when they return – and at the rate things have been moving it looks like never – they will move into an area that is completely different to what they left behind. They will have to build a new community, just like they had to do in Hanover Park, Mitchells Plain, Manenberg and all the other places to where they were relocated.

Many will probably be disappointed when they realise it is not the same.

My father-in-law is almost 80 and has dutifully attended all the land claims meetings in Mitchells Plain over many years, after he put in his claim.

Yet after every meeting he returns despondent, after hearing yet another story from officials.

It is because of people like him, who desperately want to return to District Six, that the government needs to fast-track its processes. It is disgusting, to put it mildly, it is taking so long to sort this out, even though I understand the complexities. I remember attending an event outside the Moravian Mission Church in District Six in November 2000 when then-president Thabo Mbeki handed over keys to the first residents who would move back.

More than 15 years later, nothing much has changed in District Six and very few people have moved back. This 50th anniversary presents the authorities – at local, provincial and national level – with an opportunity to make amends and get people back into District Six.

We cannot afford to have more people die without realising their dream of returning.

(First published as a Thinking Allowed column in the Weekend Argus on Saturday, 6 February 2016)

You don’t have to agree with someone to listen to their words

Ryland Fisher

A few years ago I tried a little experiment. I wrote a column for a website and headlined it something on the lines of “Blacks can be among the most racist”. Of course, a large number of white people agreed with me and many black people disagreed.

The following week, I wrote a similar column and headlined it something like “Whites can be among the most racist”.

This time many black people agreed and many white people disagreed with me.

I wrote roughly the same thing in both columns, but most people, it appeared, did not bother to read beyond the headline to reach whatever conclusion they wanted to reach. I have always believed all of us have potential to be racist and this was the premise of my book on race.

Although I sort of expected it, I still could not believe the vicious comments written under both columns.

Most, it seems, prefer arguments that confirm their beliefs and prejudices and when someone says or writes something with which they disagree, they often show their disagreement in an almost violent way.

We are so set in our belief systems it is often difficult to comprehend there could be a different argument that might be superior to ours.

I see this every day on social media with the people who like certain things I post, but ignore others or sometimes make their voices heard if they disagree with something I have posted.

I do not agree with everything I share on social media but, as a journalist, I find it useful to share with my friends and followers information I think they might find interesting. I don’t vet information according to whether it fits into my belief system.

This is particularly the case with politics, which is in many cases akin to a religion in South Africa. You have people so die-hard in support of certain political parties they can never find anything wrong with what is being done by that party or its leaders.

I have seen how when one posts something that is positive for the ANC, one gets big thumbs-ups from ANC supporters and sneers of “ANC lackey” from DA supporters.

When one posts something that is positive towards the DA, the reverse is true.

I understand people have political preferences and I have never hidden my allegiances, but that does not mean one should close oneself to ideas that supposedly come from outside of your dominant political position.

One of the trademarks of great leaders like Nelson Mandela and others was an ability to listen to different viewpoints and take the best from different political positions.

If FW de Klerk wanted to show that he could rise above political positions, as did Mandela regularly, then he would not have presented to the Human Rights Commission complaints only about what he termed black racism.

He should have asked them to investigate racism. Full stop.

We seem to have lost an ability to be politically tolerant and we seem to believe everything that comes from someone with a different political home from us must be viewed with suspicion.

A well-known columnist, who used to write for Independent titles, found out the hard way this week how intolerant most people can be, when he posted something vaguely positive about President Jacob Zuma. He eventually deleted the post.

I am not arguing for a situation where all of us have to agree all the time, but I am arguing for all of us to at least listen to one another.

I love nothing more than a decent debate on just about any topic and I don’t mind having my mind changed if faced with a superior argument.

Of course, political tolerance is not easily achieved, especially in election year when something seems to happen to all politicians as they become even more hostile and vicious towards their opposition than usual.

Over the next few months, the newspapers, radio, television and social media will be full of attacks by politicians on rivals.

Most will be spurious.

But political tolerance is especially necessary in an election year.

Those of us who are not active in politics might believe we cannot influence politicians. We can.

We need to engage politicians, especially at times when they are desperate for votes.

We need to let them know what type of behaviour we expect, and not just what policies they support.

If politicians are intolerant to one another, it is highly likely they will also be intolerant towards the people who voted them into power.

(First published as a Thinking Allowed column in the Weekend Argus on Saturday, 23 January 2016)

It’s what you say, not how you say it

Journalists are not often aware of their power and influence, and quite often they say or write things that should be best kept private.

Andrew Barnes is the normally respected senior news anchor on ENCA, the 24-hour news channel which is a sister channel to eTV.

In an off-the cuff remark after a clip on the matric results last week, he quipped that somebody should speak to the Minister of Education, Angie Motshekga, about the pronunciation of “epitome”.

He was quickly suspended from duty by his employers, despite issuing an apology.

Part of Barnes’s problem is his assumption that English is the standard by which every other language should be judged.

It was pointed out to him very quickly that most black people in South Africa – and that is the majority – speak English as a second or third language and most white people do not know how to speak any indigenous languages.

I have never really bothered about pronunciations because it is the content of what people are saying and not how they say it that should be important.

Language prejudice could be seen as another form of racism, as evidenced when the SABC started employing black on-air staff, most with “non-English” accents. The outcry from white people was horrendous. It was like the world, as they knew it, had come to an end.

I grew up speaking Afrikaans in the Western Cape, until 1976 when, in protest against the police killing of students who were protesting against being taught in Afrikaans in Soweto, I decided to only speak English.

It was only after we became a democracy that I started to speak Afrikaans again.

But one of my biggest regrets – and one of the things that apartheid did very successfully – was to make sure that people such as myself never had the opportunity, when we were growing up, to learn to speak Xhosa, like people who lived in townships down the road from where we lived.

As a result, my knowledge of Xhosa is very limited, and I speak English with a strange accent (at least to people who claim English as their native language). But I have no problem with “murdering” English words, even if I’m on radio or TV or doing public speaking, because I have confidence in my beliefs and arguments.

I trust that people will look beyond how I say epitome, machine or anything else, and will listen to my arguments instead.

But because of my upbringing, I don’t only struggle with the Queen’s language. I also struggle with some Xhosa words and even some Afrikaans words, because the strand of Afrikaans with which I grew up could at best be described as Afrikaaps. “Pure” Afrikaans can be a very complicated language and most people on the Cape Flats do not speak “pure” Afrikaans.

My children, who had the benefit of a much better education than me, often point out my mispronunciations, but it is not something that has ever bothered me.

I only hope that next time Barnes, or any other journalist, decides to make a judgment on pronunciation, they consider whether they know how to say “Gedleyihlekisa” or “Mahlamba Ndlopfu”. We live in South Africa after all.

Why white people cannot use certain terms

When I saw the tweet by journalist Carien du Plessis referring to pantypreneurs, it reminded me of a movie a few years ago in which a young white rapper hangs out with a group of black rappers. He is accepted into the group and is very comfortable in the group until one day he refers to one of the other rappers as “my N…”

He could not understand the outcry he caused by using the N-word when he was using it in a friendly, almost loveable way, just like he had seen or heard the others use it among themselves.

The problem was that he was not like them. Despite dressing like them, speaking like them, rapping like them, he was different. He was white and white people are not allowed to use the N-word. It is different when black people use it because they take ownership of an offensive word and use it almost in a satirical manner.

Du Plessis fell into the same trap.

No matter that the term “pantypreneur” is used widely in ANC and SACP circles, that did not give her the right to use the word, because, not only is she not an ANC member, but she is also white. And a journalist, to boot.

The ANC responded with venom, withdrawing Du Plessis’s accreditation to cover their birthday celebrations.

This is one of the conundrums of identity politics. This is why there was so much interest in the case of Rachel Dolezal, who was head of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in the United States when it was discovered that she was white.

As a black woman, Dolezal could speak with authority about issues related to black people in the USA. As a white woman, she lost that authority, no matter how much she claim that she identified with black people.

Du Plessis finally apologised to the ANC and was allowed to cover their birthday celebrations and, in a column, she tried to explain her slip-up as an affront to women. But it was not only an affront to women, but black women in particular.

Du Plessis said that “sisters” should not do what she did to other “sisters”. That is part of the problem. Even though she is a woman, Du Plessis will never really be a “sister” because she will never be able to change her skin colour, even though people used to be reclassified in apartheid South Africa.

"Sisters" is a term of affection used mainly among black women, in the same way as "brothers" is used among black men.

In the same way, the white rapper would never be accepted as black.

If anything, I hope that this incident will encourage people to be more circumspect before they tweet. It is not worth destroying your credibility and your career because of 140 characters.

Let’s tackle racism where it lives

It has been an interesting week in terms of race relations in South Africa, with social media storms over remarks made by KZN estate agent Penny Sparrow, mobile gym owner Justin van Vuuren, economist Chris Hart and eNCA anchor Andrew Barnes, among others.

Sparrow and Van Vuuren made seriously derogatory comments about black people, Hart referred to black people’s sense of entitlement in a series of tweets and Barnes made disparaging comments about Education Minister Angie Motshekga’s English pronunciation.

Throw in remarks about Hashim Amla and Temba Bavuma’s performances before this week’s cricket Test and you have another eventful week in South Africa. Hopefully Amla and Bavuma would have silenced some of their racist critics with their performances.

The most surprising thing about the outrage over the racial comments which surfaced this week is that it has surprised people.

These kinds of beliefs have been widespread throughout South Africa for a long time and could, until recently, be found in abundance in the comments section on news websites.

The challenge is not to suppress such views, but to find ways of channelling them into something positive. It might not seem possible, but it can be done.

A few years ago the One City, Many Cultures Project, which I chair, hosted a function for about 1 000 older people in the Western Cape to coincide with the International Day for Elderly People on October 1.

We had bused in people from old-age homes from across the province and, as is our custom, we made sure we included homes from diverse areas.

At the end of the function, I was approached by a white Afrikaans-speaking woman who was about 90 and she thanked me for inviting her. She said it was the first time she had been to a function with people of other races and she had enjoyed it very much.

I thought about how this could have been possible and realised this woman had probably grown up in a whites-only area where she only interacted with white friends and probably worked only among whites. When she retired, she moved into a whites-only old-age home (yes, we still have these in the Western Cape and probably also elsewhere in South Africa). As a result, she had managed to remain sheltered from the majority of her fellow South Africans.

Those who were shocked by Sparrow and Van Vuuren’s racist comments on social media should understand this context. There are thousands, if not millions, of South Africans who never interact with people who are different from them and, if they do, it is often only in an uneven relationship such as madam and domestic worker.

The old woman may have had similar views to Sparrow before being exposed to people who looked and sounded different to her.

Sparrow’s comments, while disgusting, are not unexpected from someone who is ignorant of the lives of the majority of South Africans. One wonders what kind of interaction someone like Sparrow has had with black people and whether she has bothered to learn from this.

My experience is that what passes for racism often is based on ignorance. Because people do not know other cultures and practices, they often adopt ignorant positions.

A few years ago I was discussing race with listeners on Radio Sonder Grense, the Afrikaans radio station. One caller talked about how “they steal our farms, rape our women and kill our neighbours”. When I asked who “they” were, he said “the blacks”.

I explained to him that, in a country where the majority of people are black, it probably stands to reason the majority of criminals are black. But this did not mean the majority of black people support crime; in fact, most black people I know are opposed to crime and doing their best to fight it. After I spoke for a while, he said: “You know what, you have a point.”

I realised he probably based his world view on his ignorance and the ignorance of those around him. This was probably the first time his view had been challenged.

I was glad I was able to influence him positively, in the same way we were able influence the old woman positively by creating an opportunity for her to interact with people whom she may not otherwise have met.

But how many people go through their lives without such opportunities?

When we became a democracy, it was convenient for white South Africans to embrace the philosophy of a “rainbow nation”, one in which all of us walk hand-in-hand into the sunset, singing Kumbaya, my Lord, etc. This meant they did not have to deal with their guilt over apartheid. But you cannot go from a situation of severe repression and oppression to one in which we all live happily ever after.

There are a couple of steps we missed in between and the fact we tried to take a short cut to democracy is back to haunt us.

An important step would have been an acknowledgement from white South Africans that they had benefited from 50 years of apartheid and 300 years of colonialism and an apology to those who had suffered. We could have even instituted some reparation tax to ensure we started to undo some of the damage of apartheid.

But we need to go further. White people need to understand they are a minority in South Africa and can no longer act, as they did during apartheid, as if they are the majority. They need to make a concerted effort to begin to understand the languages and cultures of the people who form the majority.

Racism should no longer be seen as a black problem. It should be a problem which concerns all of us.

I believe racists can be found among whites and blacks and those of us with progressive views need to take ownership of the struggle against racism, in much the same way as we committed to the struggle against apartheid.

We need to move from what we oppose to the kind of society we would want to live in and in which we want our children to live. Instead of saying we don’t want racism, we need to say what we want instead. What we want is a society based on non-racialism, non-sexism – in fact non-discrimination of any sort. But it is also a society in which everyone will respect the right of everyone else to fulfil their potential and to have access to the same opportunities, whether in housing, education or employment.

If we deal with racism within this context, it should be easier to identify when people are being racist and to deal with them. It is important to effect a mind-set change in our society. We need to create an environment where life will be uncomfortable for racists. Too often one is confronted by racism and one does nothing about it.

My commitment is to point out, via social media or other means, every incident of racism I encounter and I would encourage others to do the same. It is only when racists realise they cannot live among us if they continue with their old ways that they will change.

The struggle against racism is not an event or a series of events, such as social media comments by Penny Sparrow and others about which we get upset. It is a process that involves pointing out racists, ostracising them where necessary but also rehabilitating them if it is possible.

As long as we don’t deal with racism in a concerted way it will always be a major part of the problems in our beautiful country.

(This first appeared in the Weekend Argus on Saturday 9 January 2016)

We have three chances to remember

Special anniversaries are good opportunities to reflect on what has changed, celebrate the positive and learn lessons from the negative, take stock of what still needs to change and make a renewed commitment to ideals which might be long forgotten.

For instance, the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, supposed to have been celebrated last year, could have been used to mobilise South Africans around the vision contained in what remains a hugely significant document in our history. It could have been an opportunity to encourage all South Africans to assume responsibility for taking our country forward.

Instead, apart from in one or two political speeches, one hardly heard about this anniversary.

It was an opportunity lost.

Another was a chance to celebrate the many anniversaries associated with 1985, a watershed year in the struggle. The year was marked by almost daily protests and a desperate declaration of a state of emergency by the apartheid government, resulting in mass detentions and bannings. In many ways, 1985 marked the beginning of the end of legalised apartheid.

This year we and especially the government, will have at least three more anniversaries that should be used in the manner for which they were intended.

February 11 is the 50th anniversary of the day when District Six was declared a white group area, leading – two years later – to the forced removal of thousands of residents from Cape Town.

On June 16, it will be the 40th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, which brought students – and particularly high school pupils – to the forefront of the liberation struggle for the first time.

And, on August 9, it will be 60 years since the march by thousands of women on the Union Buildings in Pretoria. That protest was against the pass laws but contained much broader demands related to the liberation of women.

It will be interesting to see how the government and the ruling party will reflect on these three anniversaries in a year when they will try to focus on the local government election, but will probably be distracted by a continuation of student protests that marked last year.

Together, these anniversaries represent opportunities to focus on some key issues, including education, language, housing and land restitution, urbanisation and gender inequality.

I would not be surprised if all three are mentioned in the president’s State of the Nation Address at the beginning of February, but there is a need for more than a mention.

This is especially so in the case of District Six. The ways all three spheres of government have handled the District Six restitution process has been nothing short of disgusting. That most of the land still stands empty more than 20 years into our democracy serves not only as a reminder of one of the great apartheid atrocities against the majority population in Cape Town, but also as an indication of the politics which have been allowed to engulf the restitution process.

I know of many people who have been patiently waiting to move back to District Six – as they have been promised many times over the past 20 years – only to be sold new excuses every time they attend meetings called by officials. Many fromer residents are in their eighties and nineties and would love to spend their final years close to where they grew up and had their families.

The 50th anniversary of the declaration of District Six as a white group area presents the government with an opportunity to show intent with regards to the restitution process and the best way to show that is by building some, no, many houses.

The pass laws were apartheid’s weird way of attempting to deal with urbanisation. The apartheid government tried to use pass laws to keep Africans out of cities – except as cheap labour – confining them to rural homelands.

The 60th anniversary of the women’s march provides an opportunity to focus on an issue with which government is still grappling: how to retain people in rural areas. This is something that is never easy to deal with as people will always flock to where there are opportunities usually absent in the rural areas.

Creating opportunities in rural areas requires huge investment and, in a country such as ours with so many conflicting demands on the fiscus, this does not always feature high on the agenda.

Women were particularly hard hit by apartheid pass laws because, while their men were working in the cities, the women were left behind to look after families. For many women, this situation remains unchanged.

There is a need to examine gender issues in our society, which is becoming more and more conservative. Part of conservatism, in my experience, is assigning certain pre-determined roles especially to women. Patriarchy is very much a part of the conservatism that is becoming more pervasive in South Africa, maybe in the world.

Hopefully, this year August 9 will be more than a public holiday when women are supposed to be pampered with manicures, Champagne breakfasts and retail specials. Hopefully, we will be able to seriously reflect on things still impeding the proper contribution and emancipation of women.

Education is bound to feature high on the national agenda once again this year, especially with student protesters having drawn first blood in the form of achieving the removal of certain offensive statues on campuses and freeze on fee increases.

However, the battle on both fronts is far from over and will probably dominate much of the political landscape this year. Further student protests on campuses throughout the country will undoubtedly test the tolerance levels of the government and police.

Hopefully there is a national plan to handle protests and that any plan is based on level-headedness and maturity. One also hopes students are aware it is going to be difficult to secure free education or even another zero percent increase for next year.

Reflecting on the 40th anniversary of the protests which began in Soweto in June 1976, it is also important to consider subsequent protests that engulfed our country, including this province.

For the Western Cape, the 1976 protests laid the basis for the many student-led protests of the 1980s. The Soweto uprising anniversary will also provide an opportunity for a long overdue discussion on language, but this needs to occur in the context of a changing global environment.

Should our focus continue to be promoting – even though unequally – our 11 official languages, or should we be looking at creating global citizens by focusing on language spoken in more populous global markets?

All of this might be too much to be in a year when the government’s main job is going to be stabilising our economy.

Perceptions (right or wrong) of corruption and of comrades feeding at the public trough are not helpful in regaining the confidence not only of the financial markets, but also of the people of South Africa.

In many ways, this is going to be a watershed year for South Africa. We will be faced with many choices, including whether to pursue nuclear power and what should be done with failing state-owned entities.

Here’s hoping those who think they have power (the government) make the correct decisions and those with real power (the electorate) continue to hold them to account.

(First published in the Weekend Argus on Saturday 2 January 2016)

I seek a real Benson sell-out

The announcement this week that George Benson is to tour South Africa next June brought back memories of my first interaction with the legendary and popular jazz guitarist many years ago.
When Benson came to South Africa for the first time in the early 1980s, I was a young reporter at a paper called the Cape Herald, which was aimed at the “coloured” community. But more than that, I was also a political activist involved in youth and civic structures in Hanover Park.
Up until his visit to South Africa was announced, Benson had been, as we used to say on the Cape Flats, “my biggest fan”. Don’t ask. We used to speak like that. People used to ask me, as a child, whose dad I was when they meant to ask who my dad was.
But I digress.
The very first vinyl I bought was Benson’s Weekend in LA, an album I still have to this day and which I still listen to on vinyl when I have a chance.
Benson was an integral part of my growing up years. I recall an English lesson at high school where one of my fellow learners explained that he listened to Benson’s music to broaden his vocabulary. He used as an example the word “masquerade” which he had heard in one of Benson’s songs. This encouraged him to consult a dictionary to find out its meaning. After that, he used the word “masquerade” at every opportunity.
But Benson’s trip to South Africa – while there was an international cultural embargo against the country in opposition to apartheid – was a difficult pill to swallow for someone like me, who was committed to the struggle.
I could not bring myself to attend his concert even though I could legitimately claim to have been working.
The concert, of course, was sold out within hours.
I did, however, attend the press conference he held on arrival at the then DF Malan Airport, where I asked him why he chose to come to South Africa and break the cultural embargo. He replied that he was “only a musician and not a politician”, which was the typical response of all artists who defied the cultural boycott and came to South Africa.
The following day, the Cape Herald carried my story on the tour and the press conference – ahead of the concert – with the headline saying something along the lines of “Benson is a sell-out”, a clever play on his ability to fill the Good Hope Centre and what we perceived to be his political opportunism or, at most, his political naivety.
Not going to that concert tested my commitment to the struggle in a major way. Like most young people on the Cape Flats I grew up with his music and knew the words to most of his songs. I consoled myself by saying that this was a small sacrifice to make for the struggle. There were many others who had made much bigger sacrifices.
However, I quietly enjoyed the opportunity I had to meet him at the press conference and to ask him a question, which meant that I engaged with someone who was one of my childhood musical heroes, even though I was now disappointed in him.
I did eventually go and see Benson perform, twice, but this was many years into our democracy when most people had forgiven others for their apartheid-era indiscretions or had politely forgotten about them.
I figured that, if Nelson Mandela could forgive FW de Klerk and PW Botha and have tea with Betsie Verwoerd, and the ANC could accept people like Vlakplaas commander Dirk Coetzee and apartheid spy Olivia Forsyth into their ranks, then I could forgive Benson for breaking the cultural boycott but also for destroying my belief in one of the people I grew up admiring as a youngster.
Thinking about my first interaction with Benson made me realise once again how far we have come as a country where we no longer have to contend with sports and cultural boycotts against us, where we can all enjoy supporting our sporting teams when they play against foreign opposition and where we can go and watch whatever musicians come into our country without feeling like we are betraying the struggle against apartheid.
If I get an opportunity to see him perform next June, and I probably will, I will do so without any hang-ups and will sit back and enjoy the music. I will probably sing along too, in the way we do in Cape Town.
I hope this time he will be a sell-out once again, but without the negative political connotations.

(This was first published as a column in the Weekend Argus on Sunday 8 November 2015)

 

Inside the mind of Riah Phiyega

Ryland Fisher looks at General Riah Phiyega’s short but eventful stay at police headquarters.

Riah Phiyega was less than two months into her job as national police commissioner when the Marikana massacre took place. She had been appointed in June 2012, and the massacre came in August. But this incident will define her legacy and in effect invalidate whatever good work she has done since.

It appears Phiyega may be out of police headquarters sooner or later.

President Jacob Zuma has informed her of his decision to institute a commission of inquiry into her fitness to hold office, in line with the recommendations of the Marikana commission. Zuma has also asked her to convince him why she should not be suspended while the probe takes place.

She is following the same unceremonious route as her predecessor, Bheki Cele. Cele was asked why he should not be suspended while an inquiry into his fitness to hold office got under way. He was suspended and would not return to police headquarters. He was axed.

It looks highly unlikely that Phiyega will survive Zuma’s chopping board. The Marikana commission’s report, released by Zuma on June 25, was damning about her and the SAPS. Among other damning findings, it found that the police’s plan for dispersing the crowd of striking miners was defective.

It also called for an investigation into Phiyega’s fitness to hold office and into the then-North West Commissioner, Zukiswa Mbombo, who retired at the end of June.

Judge Ian Farlam also recommended that the National Prosecuting Authority probe the police’s actions to determine if there had been criminal liability.

Once Zuma made the commission’s findings public, it was clear Phiyega’s days were numbered – and that she could leave the police as controversially as she had come in.

Phiyega’s appointment was controversial, not only because she had no policing experience, but because she was a woman, and a black woman at that. Her appointment, in an environment dominated by men, and until recently white men, was always going to be a risk for Zuma, who appointed her.

But her managerial skills had been proved in several high-profile corporate appointments.

That Phiyega is sensitive about her status as a black woman was illustrated by the SMS she sent to Dianne Kohler Barnard, DA spokeswoman on police, and which landed her in another media storm this week.

In the SMS, Phiyega said: “I am black, proud, capable. Get it clear, you can take nothing from me and eat your heart out. I am not made by you and cannot be undone by you.”

In many ways, Phiyega has been her own worst enemy. It is difficult to know how many of her actions with regards to the media are guided by advisers or whether she acts on her own.

I had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time with her recently, including at a conference on the National Development Plan (NDP), where she took part in a panel discussion I chaired, and interviewing her for two hours for a publication on the NDP, produced by Topco Media.

In all my interactions with Phiyega, I’ve been impressed by her commitment to her job and the transformation project she has undertaken in the police service, something that, if it were not for Marikana, might have seen her being remembered as having been a great leader of the police.

I interviewed her at her office in Pretoria in June. Although I was meant to speak to her only about the NDP, I got in a few questions about other things, such as her views on being a woman in a male-dominated environment, and how her family related to all her pressures.

Phiyega started by telling me why, although she was born Mangwashi Victoria Phiyega, everybody called her Riah.

“‘Ria’ is the last part of Victoria. Where I come from you are named after somebody and it’s a prescribed process. When you are the first boy in a family, your first son would be named after your grandfather and so on. We are all girls in the family and I am the second-born. I’m named after my father’s aunt.

“If my father had his way, he would probably have chosen short names because he believes that those names are successful. For instance, my sister is Abigail and we call her Abi. My other sister is Matilda. We call her Tilly. ‘Ria’ comes from Victoria, but my dad said I must put in the H and then it becomes Riah.”

Phiyega said her appointment had taken her by surprise.

“It was an industry I never thought I would be in. I didn’t have colleagues in this industry. But I had a conversation with the president. I listened to what he had to say and I realised that he had done his homework.

“The president said we had good policing skills in South Africa, but we needed to look at a revolution that was not yet complete. (The SAPS) was integrated 20 years ago, when 11 entities were brought together under General George Fivaz. A lot of work had been done to integrate the police, but one of the things that had not completely been done was to look at the change in management processes of building a SAPS with a new culture.

“We needed to define that culture and ensure that the administration and management went along on that journey.

“I understood we had good policy, but we needed to assist the organisation with that transitional process of bringing into the police governance, administration, management, building a common culture and seriously embedding the gains we had made over the past two decades.

“I think the president had looked at those qualities. He looked at where I had been and what I had done, and thought I could do the same in the police. I’m simply a director-general of this organisation. The national commissioner is the director-general of the police and has to administer and manage the environment.

“We have moved into a structure that is starting to show that there is the core business of the police, which is policy, and the resource side, which is sitting in our resource management administration.

“Then there’s the corporate side of policing, which is looking at how we’re managing our people, our strategy, our legal matters and so on. We are not short of people who know how to police. They are there, they have the capability, and they are leading.

“There is perhaps a disjuncture in the conversations that are taking place in the public. The success of the police will always depend on a good director-general who must administer the organisation and allow the core business of the organisation to be run by those who know how to police.

“But the director-general should also ensure the core business, the management and the administration of the organisation, are well-blended.”

Phiyega did not experience resistance to her appointment at the time.

“I experienced an organisation that had a need to do particular things. My attitude was that I’m not coming here to impose myself.

“There’s a serious mutual process. I was coming to learn. I had my own skills set. I was bringing something to the organisation and I was going to learn a lot from the organisation too. If you are a general manager and you have those skills, you can take them anywhere. They are portable. Tomorrow you can put me in any other organisation. When I get there, I learn what the business is about and I bring in my management skills.

“I had something to share with the organisation and I had a lot to learn in terms of the business of the organisation. That is why I didn’t find resistance. They were willing to work with me and to walk me through the organisation, and I was willing to share with them, to look at how we could shape our business.”

At first, however, Phiyega did feel uncomfortable as a woman.

“This is a completely different matter. Now we are talking about transformational issues. Being the first black woman to lead this organisation after a period of 100 years was never going to be easy. I mean, we’re talking about the boys. I didn’t play golf with them. I didn’t go with them to the pub.

“Some of them probably found it difficult to engage me in an unconventional and informal manner.

“It was a learning process for the organisation as well as for myself, to navigate an environment that is so male-dominated and male-oriented. Because of my management skills, I was able to put gender aside. I was able to work with people.”

Phiyega said special epaulettes had to be created for her uniform.

“The women’s ones are very short and because they had never had a woman general, they had to go and create special ones. There are a number of things that one is piloting. If another woman becomes a general, they must find we have paved the way.

“The men in the police service have had to become used to gender issues. All I needed was for them to see a woman could do it. One of my commitments is that I will get through my term to show it can be done. It’s not a gender issue.

“The other issues around this transformation are the introduction of new management processes and building a new governance approach. Some people find it difficult to adapt to your approach in managing the organisation.”

A lot of progress had been made in the police service by the time she became commissioner. She did not have to bring in her own people.

“When I joined, the organisation had 10 years of unqualified audits. That in itself tells me a story about the organisation. Something was going right. I came into an organisation and said I wanted to look at crime performance. I looked at it, found them to be doing it year on year, and said I wanted us to do a longitudinal analysis.

“When you do a longitudinal analysis, you see crime has been coming down. There are problem areas, but when you average the trends over the past 10 years crime has been coming down steadily.

“There were steeper declines at the beginning because they were coming from a high base. Now you are starting to see lower, marginal declines. That made me believe something was going right and there were people in the organisation we could use to advance our strategy going forward. My plan was to discover this capacity in the organisation and look at how we could create a platform for sustaining this success.

“For instance, provincial commissioners have a term of five years, which can be extended for another five years. Some of them are in their second term. Succession becomes a reality. We could have gone out and looked, but we decided to find the capacity in the organisation to build a new team.

“I’m planting and I hope when we finish the planting season there will be those who continue watering and tending whatever plants we have planted. My approach has been to start building a team, using internal SAPS people, and it’s really yielding (results).

“We have just appointed six lieutenant-generals, all from inside. They are good people and I can see that it is taking the organisation in the right direction. We will start seeing a strong SAPS that supports all those good qualities that I found within the organisation.”

Phiyega said the media tended to focus on the negative. “There are so many positive things happening in the police, but the narrative that one sees in the media says something else. Policing is one of the highly contested areas and justifiably so, because it’s an environment that is imbued with a lot of constitutional powers. We can disenfranchise you.

“Everybody is concerned about how we use that power and you then have an avoidance attitude by society. When people are in trouble, they want police, but when they are not, they want to look at the police to see what they are doing. You never have a comfortable relationship in terms of views, attitudes and perceptions of the police.

“Being aware of that, we can do better. We should do better by starting to ask what it is that we should do to ensure that the community understands what we are doing and appreciates the successes we are having. They should be allowed to criticise us because it is through that criticism that we are going to grow. We have to ensure that we build a good, solid communication platform. I know I’m being chastised for appointing a lieutenant-general to be in charge of communication. But with the nature of the reputation that we have, with the narrative that is out there, you can’t do otherwise.

“When I came into the police three years ago, there were many stories in the media without comment from us. The attitude was that there were too many things on which to comment. We have gone through a structured process, which means that we must be in the press, but for the right things. When you watch TV today, they’ll tell you about the fact that we’ve arrested people. They will tell you about the success that has taken place.

“We are now deliberate in what we are taking out there, but the culture of vilifying and talking ill of the police has not stopped.

“All we are doing is saying people should also see the work we are doing as the police. In terms of the criminal intelligence issues, we have done a lot and there are no new stories coming out there.

“But, in terms of the media, it is always a replay of Mdluli, Mdluli, Mdluli. Those political nuances and stories, about the politics of policing, are being continued over and over again.

“In terms of the restructuring, there are probably people who are feeling left out. You will never agree with everybody in terms of how you shape and position the organisation. There will be some stories in the media relating to that. Some people are feeling unhappy, some people feel that things should go this way or that way.

“The police, the National Prosecuting Authority, and the Hawks are platforms that people have interest in and they want to control those. If you have people who are solid in terms of where they’re taking these organisations, you’ll always find some people have issues.”

Phiyega said she was comfortable in her position.

“I’m very okay and I think this organisation is going somewhere. There are many police in this organisation who are working hard, who are focused.

“We’re being short-changed by this crafted narrative that circles on these few negative things. The reality is that, if indeed, the negative narrative was happening, South Africa would be on its knees.

“You can give us Malamulele (in Limpopo, whose residents staged protests early this year, demanding a separate municipality), De Doorns (in the Western Cape, where farmworkers went on strike in 2012) or Marikana, give us whatever, this country will not be on its knees because there are hardworking policemen and women.

“In the past three years, we have made so many arrests, whether it has been with regards to mall robberies or cash-in-transit heists. We have arrested big criminals such as Radovan Krejcir. We made a decision that we will not allow this man to continue. We will arrest him.

“He has been in jail for more than a year. I don’t think he ever thought that this service could put him in jail for a year. He had (allegedly) corrupted so many of our police (officers) and we’ve cut through all those things. This is why we’ve arrested our own with him to say, ‘You will stand there and account for what you have done’.

“I am worried about the negative narrative. But it is okay, I think the truth will vindicate whomever it vindicates.”

Phiyega said she had lost friends since becoming police commissioner, but her family had stood by her.

“I hope that by the time I have finished, some of my friends will still be there. I have caused damage to my family relations because it’s a consuming role. I have a very supportive husband. I know that I’m probably affecting all of them, but they are supportive and I think they’ve become policified, too, if there is such a word. We can now have discussions about the police.

“Being commissioner is not the type of role that leaves you space for other things. It is a jealous road. It consumes you almost completely.”

Phiyega said she hardly had time for anything outside police work.

“If you have a day of doing nothing, it feels like you have had a long weekend. If you can just wake up and not do anything until one o’clock, be at home, you feel like you’ve had an entire weekend.

“I don’t think leave exists in the police. I was looking at our target for members to take leave.

“Ten days a year is compulsory. We are not able to put it at 100 percent. We’ve said at least if we can achieve 65 percent, it will be good.”

About the media

The media do not have an appetite for good stories, so we have to force ourselves into their space. They don’t have an appetite for the things that I’m telling you. Yet we continue to tell them and invite them,” says National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega.

The media were recycling stories about her.

“One relates to Marikana, and you will find a lot of other historic issues. You will find stories related to (former crime intelligence head Richard) Mdluli. You will find issues related to the transformational journey we are taking, including the changing of structures and people.

“You may see stories related to (suspended Western Cape police commissioner Arno) Lamoer, which also has to do with crime intelligence. Any time you read a story about the national commissioner, it will be related to all those issues and then they will throw in that she’s not even a policeman.

“They never talk about the work that we are doing.”

Marikana

At the time of the interview, the Farlam Commission report on the Marikana massacre had not been released, but national police commissioner Riah Phiyega appeared confident that the police would be vindicated.

“When Marikana happened, I was one month and two weeks in this organisation.

“There’s a whole historic picture about the stories that have been put in the press in terms of Marikana. We have very clear devolved roles and functions.

“In terms of Marikana, one thing I can say is that the police fully co-operated with the commission. We put our side of the story and we are waiting for that report.

“I’m sure it will have recommendations and we’d be willing to implement those recommendations.

“The second thing is that it is a very, very sad incident indeed, and we are looking for processes that will help us to bring in reconciliation.

“We still have a duty to police everybody in the country and there are a lot of lessons that have come out of (the commission) in terms of our operations and all those aspects.” 

(First published in the Sunday Independent, Weekend Argus and Sunday Tribune on 23 August 2015)

How do we pay tribute to our fallen musicians?

When I heard the news early on Monday morning (23 February 2015) that well-known Cape Town singer Zayn Adam had passed away, I resisted the temptation to do what we normally do in these situations nowadays: go onto social media to see what people are saying.

The reason is that I wanted to reflect for a moment on this man with the beautiful voice who had given me so much joy through his music. I must have heard him sing "Give a little love" dozens of times, but every time he sang it, it was special.

Zayn had a special kind of voice, one that did not grow old with him and, even though he became frail at times over the past few years, his voice remained beautiful, especially when he sang ballads. There were so many songs that had previously been sung by others that he had made his own.

He passed away at the age of 68 in a Groote Schuur hospital bed early on Monday morning after a short illness. He was buried according to Muslim rites on Monday afternoon.

He had done well in recent months and had been booked to do a few major shows over the next few weeks, including a reunion with his bandmates in Pacific Express, one of the Cape's top bands in the 1970s, at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival next month, and as a supporting act to overseas artist PP Arnold next week.

Whenever one of our talented musicians die in South Africa, I always think about how we don't really appreciate them while they are in good health and in their prime. Too many of our musicians die penniless with their families struggling to pay medical bills and funeral expenses.

I decided a while ago that I no longer want to attend benefit concerts for musicians who have fallen on hard times because the nature of our support should be such that our musicians, if they are talented enough, should be able to sustain themselves through their performances and recordings.

Part of the reason for our musicians' struggles could be our obsession with overseas and particularly American music. We tend to think that music is only good when it comes from America. Yet, South Africa has some amazing musicians who could teach the Americans a thing or two.

But if you go into any music store, you will find more sales of American music as opposed to South African music. If you go to clubs and theatres, you will find people support overseas artists and productions more than they support local productions, unless of course, the locals do cover versions of American music.

We also seem to appreciate our artists more once they have "made it" in the United States of America.

Government does not help either, with support for local musicians being almost like an afterthought. A good friend, who has achieved huge musical success overseas but remains committed to South African music, believes that you only have to look at what music our ministers listen to in their cars to understand the problem. He believes that you are more likely to find the music of Beyonce in their cars then, say, Ringo Madlingozi, Vusi Mahlasela or Abdullah Ibrahim.

The best way to pay proper homage to someone like Zayn Adam - and the others who have gone before him, like Mirriam Makeba, Winston Mankunku, Robbie Jansen, Basil Coetzee, Brenda Fassie, Sipho Gumede and Hotep Idris Galeta, among many others - is by making a commitment to support local music.

This does not mean that we should not support foreign music. However, we need to support our musicians by attending their shows and buying their music. Otherwise all our kind words on their passing will be nothing but platitudes.

• Monday, 23 February 2015

Is there an increase in racist incidents in South Africa?

Whenever I am interviewed on television or radio, I inevitably get asked whether there is an increase in racist incidents in South Africa, given the prominence such incidents are receiving in the media nowadays.

My reply is always that I do not believe this is so. Racism and racist incidents have been with us forever, before, during and after apartheid. And just because something is not reported in the media, does not mean that it does not exist.

Maybe there has been a change in attitude in the media with regards to the reporting of racist incidence. Or maybe more people feel comfortable about approaching the media to report on racist incidence of which they might have been victims.

One of the things that many people forget is that the media can only report on things that they know about. If nobody tells them about a racist incident, then they are not likely to report on it.

So, when someone notices that the media is beginning to report prominently on racist incidents, they could be encouraged to come forward and relate their own stories.

It is of course good that the media are reporting more and more about racism in our society. My observation over most of the past 20 years of our democracy has always been that we are trying to pretend that racism no longer exists in our country.

This is understandable, in some instances. For instance, we went from a situation of serious repression and social engineering based on legally-enforced racism, to one of reconciliation. Make no mistake about it, apartheid was an evil system and it is understandable that many South Africans - especially those who could have been perceived to have benefited from it - would want to move on from apartheid.

However, not talking about racism and pretending that it does not exist, did not make it disappear.

The only way to deal with racism is to make people aware that it exists. We need to look at its roots and discuss ways in which we can make sure that it does not happen again.

Only once we have successfully dealt with racism can we hope to see a decrease in racist incidents in our country.

• 19 February 2015

A lesson from Jakes Gerwel: What it means to live in peace with each other

Something that Hein Gerwel, son of the late Professor Jakes Gerwel, said at the renaming of Vanguard Drive in his father's honour has convinced me of the difference between leaders of Gerwel's generation and the ones we have today.

Hein said his father's last words to him and his mother, Phoebe, was that they must learn to live in peace with each other.

This notion, of all of us living in peace with each other seems to escape our leaders and political commentators today. It is no longer about what we can all do to create a better life for all our people. It is more about how we can ridicule others and minimise their contribution so that I and others who agree with me can benefit.

We are still a year and a bit away from next year's local government elections, but I am worried that, as we come closer to this event, politicians and their followers will become more virulent in their outburst, without due concern for the consequences of their actions.

When Gerwel spoke about his family members living in peace, he could have also spoken about society in general. Trying to live in peace with each other does not mean that we have to necessarily agree with everything that everybody else says, but it does mean that we have to respect their right to say it and not try to break it down just because you disagree with their politics.

If our politicians learn to treat each other with respect, it might permeate down to their members and our society could eventually learn to respect each other more. We need to accept that sometimes, even if only sometimes, somebody with who you normally disagree might have something sensible to contribute to a particular debate.

Tolerance: the lesson of Madiba's life

The rain poured down unexpectedly and heavily in the city centre of Cape Town yesterday morning, on a day which the weather forecasters said would be sunny with temperatures reaching up to 30 degrees centigrade. It was probably, I thought (and I am not religious at all), the gods crying for Nelson Mandela.

My emotions have been up and down over the past few days. There have been moments when I have felt that we should celebrate – especially the end of 95 special years on earth of a special human being – but there have also been moments when I have felt that I just wanted to bawl my eyes out.

Even in death, Madiba has had this up-and-down effect on me and, I suppose, the rest of the world.

Madiba has always been my hero, even when he was on Robben Island and I was a youngster growing up on the Cape Flats. To have been editor of the Cape Times when he was president of our country, and to have to interact with him on a regular basis, was something that I could never have dreamed of when I was younger.

In many ways, Madiba has been all things to all people. It has been amazing in the past few days to witness people paying tribute to Madiba while completely rejecting the African National Congress, the party that he served as a loyal servant for most of his life.

Madiba is on record as saying that he will go the Pearly Gates and immediately inquire about the local ANC branch. This seems not to have put off the millions of people throughout the country and the world – including the opposition Democratic Alliance – who continue to idolise our country’s greatest son.

I have been wondering over the past few days what it was about this Communist, leader of the ANC’s military wing umKhonto we Sizwe, and, by all accounts, rabble rouser in his youth (he used to regularly break up the opposition’s rallies, according to people who knew him then) that made him so special.

What probably made him so special is the fact that he has always had Ubuntu, he has always and would do everything in his power to help people. The other thing is that he was never afraid of change or changing his views.

Yesterday morning I received an email from a friend who pointed out that British Prime Minister David Cameron – who last week described Mandela as “a hero of mine” and announced that flags at 10 Downing Street would fly at half-mast in honour of Madiba – had once belonged to a right-wing student organisation that had initiated a campaign to hang Mandela and others like him.

I could not help thinking about why some people keep on harping on about the past, especially at this time when we are mourning the loss of Madiba, even though I understand that in South Africa, the past is still very much with us.

But to want to persecute Cameron based on what he did in his student days was a bit out of line, I thought. We all did stupid stuff when we were students.

I was among many who felt betrayed when the ANC co-opted the homelands and discredited “coloured” and “Indian” leaders immediately after the organisation was unbanned. When the Nationalist Party, which had been responsible for killing so many of our people in defence of Apartheid, eventually disbanded and joined up with the ANC, it was not unexpected but I still felt disgusted.

Yes, you can say that politics is all about numbers but there was something about Madiba’s values in all of this, including the ability to embrace people who might have been on the other side of the fence – or even worse, the other side of a gun barrel – from you.

I have been honoured for the past year or so to edit easily the biggest book that will ever be produced about Nelson Mandela, called the Mandela Opus. His passing last week has given us an unexpected but probably fitting final chapter for the book.

For the past few months I have been traversing the country speaking to people about their relationship with Nelson Mandela and I have never experienced anyone who was so universally loved.

The lesson that many people I interviewed will take out of Madiba’s life is his humility.

The lesson that I am going to take out of Madiba’s life is to try to be more tolerant of people who might be different to me and whose history and background might not be the same as mine.

However, I remain mindful that embracing Nelson Mandela need to go much further than embracing an individual. It needs to extend to embracing the values that he held dear, including a commitment to non-racialism and non-sexism and a commitment to a more equitable society, one in which everyone would have equal access to opportunities and to basic requirements such as housing, education, justice and safety and security.

Embracing Madiba’s values are not easy for most people because our natural inclination is not to be non-sexist and non-racist. Our natural inclination is not to seek out people who are different to us and befriend them.

But if we really and truly want to keep Madiba’s legacy alive, we need to embrace these values in more than words. We need to live them. Otherwise Madiba and his values will soon become a thing of the past. DM

(First published by the Daily Maverick on 10 December 2013)

Media transformation: Still a difficult issue, after all these years

The recent spat involving City Press editor Ferial Haffajee and some of her staff, over transformation and the political allegiance of the paper, probably indicates that, at least, we have moved on from the challenges that I faced as an editor in those early days of South Africa’s transition. But it also shows a worrying trend in our society where decisions are made more on the basis of political allegiance than what is good for a particular industry.

In the mid-90's I became one of the first black editors of a major newspaper in South Africa. I guess I could have substituted “major” for “formerly white-owned and controlled” because that was the reality of South Africa’s media industry at the time. In many ways, it was merely reflecting a society that was only then beginning to change.

In those days, my major challenges revolved more around how to make sure that I change the demographics of my newsroom without upsetting the white reporters, who were in the majority by far. I felt that changing the demographics was important if I were to produce newspapers that more accurately reflected our society.

Haffajee is right in her assertion that she will not tolerate black or white racists. She is also right about her paper’s focus on the president and the ruling party, because of the important and prominent role they play in society.

Of course, I would have done one or two things differently.

I would never have made this issue public, as Haffajee did, but I suppose that is the danger of belonging to the Twitter generation. In our eagerness to express ourselves quickly and in less than 140 characters, we sometimes don’t think through what we are about to tweet.

Most newspapers or media houses, as is the case with most businesses in South Africa, have transformation issues. Often, each and every group (whether based on race, religion, gender or other conveniently divisive measures) feel discriminated against. Most feel they do not have enough access to resources and opportunities, while other groups do, and that this limitation of access is purely based on group dynamics.

I have also often seen, in more than 30 years in the media industry, that cries of racism can sometimes be the last refuge of incompetents. People of dubious ability often use race dynamics to hide their own imperfections.

Unfortunately, in the case of City Press, they have an editor who could be perceived to be “not black enough” by some people, no matter how much Haffajee might protest.

I have the same problem. I have always and still describe myself only as a black South African, but it is amazing the number of people who more and more look at me in a puzzled manner, as if I have not taken a proper look at myself in the mirror lately. Many of these people who question my blackness are people who we once used to consider as progressive, but they seem to have forgotten the teachings of Steve Biko which drove many of us through the struggle years.

I suppose almost 20 years of democracy is enough time to redefine some people’s identities.

But I digress.

The main reason I would not have taken City Press’s issues public is because, as editor, you are supposed to have the back of your reporters. One of the first things I learnt is that you defend and protect your reporters publicly, even though you might smack them privately. If you engage with them in a public fight, you tend to lose some of your moral authority as an editor.

I have always believed in the power of persuasion and I have never subscribed to the dictum that the editor is always right. If you are able to persuade me, then I would be prepared to change my views, even though there are certain lines that, like Haffajee, I draw in the sand. I don’t think anyone will ever be able to convince me to abhor racism, sexism and other -isms less than I do at the moment.

Now that the genie is out of the proverbial bottle, it is important to deal with the issues that have been raised by the City Press reporters instead of just dismissing them and expecting the reporters to “lump it”.

City Press, as should other newspapers, needs to understand why some reporters, who are supposed to operate within the boundaries of fairness, if not objectivity, can feel that their own publication is not fair towards a particular political party or a politician.

City Press needs to satisfy themselves that, indeed, their coverage has been fair and unbiased. They can only do this scientifically and not based on perceptions, even though perceptions are probably very powerful, especially where politics and politicians are concerned.

My humble advice, especially to the journalists who have questioned Haffajee’s agenda, is to set out to produce the best journalism that you possibly can and to try to cover our society in as comprehensive a manner as you can.

If you report on society properly, you will discover that it will include reports about the good and the bad done by politicians and political parties. You will probably find that your focus will be more on the ruling party because, well, they are the ruling party.

But to be fair, the DA is the ruling party in the Western Cape and, even in that province, they are not put under the same microscope as the ANC. Maybe there is some merit in that criticism, not necessarily only towards City Press but to the media in general.

The good thing that can come out of what is going on at City Press at the moment is that the media industry will take an introspective look at their role in society, not only in relation to the ruling party and the president, but at how we report on a society in transition.

It is clear to me that the media has failed in many ways in that task. What the City Press incident can do is to provide us with an opportunity to address that and in the process we might be able to benefit everyone, including the media industry.

However, we will not be able to do it if we think that this issue is only about City Press and that other editors can get away by smirking in glee that it is not them who are involved.

This incident is giving us an opportunity to really put a microscope on the entire media industry. It would be good to see if Haffajee, as well as all the other editors in our country, are up to the challenge that this opportunity presents. DM

(First published by the Daily Maverick on 20 October 2013)

Denis Goldberg: Rivonia Trial's 'Baby' turns 80

The selflessness of Denis Goldberg, even in celebrating his birthday, is a reminder that that the struggle against Apartheid was never about personal enrichment or entitlement, but always about improving the lives of the majority of South Africans.

On Saturday night, I was privileged to be among a reasonably small group of people, including many from overseas, who gathered in Hout Bay, Cape Town, to celebrate the 80th birthday of Denis Goldberg, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia Trial in 1964. He served 22 years in prison before being released in 1985.

For someone who had sacrificed so much so that South Africans could eventually gain their freedom, the event was relatively low-key with no celebrities, big businessmen or high-ranking politicians present. The only politicians I observed were former minister of arts and culture Dr Pallo Jordan and ANC MP Ben Turok.

While the occasion was meant to celebrate Goldberg’s special day (his birthday was on Thursday 11 April), it was more about the Kronendal Music Academy, of which he is a patron, and included several performances by students of the academy.

The students showed what can happen in a divided suburb like Hout Bay if people set their differences aside to work together. Hout Bay is a unique suburb in Cape Town because one has to cross a mountain to gain access to it. But the suburb is also racially divided, with the village and the valley being mainly white and rich, with Hangberg being mainly coloured and Inzamo Yethu being mainly African.

The academy’s jazz band has already travelled to Germany, a trip made possible by Goldberg’s close association with that country, and two students from “shanty town in Hout Bay” (Goldberg’s words) have been accepted to study music at the University of Cape Town.

Goldberg, in a very short speech which was surprisingly devoid of politics, said he made no apology for turning his birthday party into a fundraiser for the academy. He had asked all guests, instead of birthday gifts, to make donations to the academy. On Saturday night, he announced that the 150 or so guests had donated about R70,000 to the academy, enough to pay the salaries of a few music teachers.

“When I was a small boy, I was given socks and hankies and now I have too many! So please, no personal gifts, make a donation to KMA instead,” he wrote in his invitation.

The Rivonia Trial started in November 1963 and ended in June 1964, when Goldberg was sentenced to life imprisonment with seven others senior ANC leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. Apart from Mandela and Goldberg, the only surviving Rivonia trialists are Ahmed Kathrada and Andrew Mlangeni.

Kathrada sent an email to Goldberg, apologising for not being able to attend his birthday party and pointed out that, at 80, he still remained the “baby” of the Rivonia trialists.

The selflessness of Goldberg, who gladly played second fiddle at his party to the young students of the music academy, displayed a characteristic that is sadly become almost non-existent in our society today.

He chose to spend his birthday party – others will still be held in Germany and London later this month – with close friends and people associated to the projects that he now promotes, such as the music academy and a psychiatric practice in Gauteng.

He chose to promote these projects instead of focusing on his own achievements.

Speeches were not made by political associates, but rather people who have been involved with Goldberg as friends over the years, including Hillary Hamburger, who has been helping to organise lecture tours for him in Europe, and Lynn Carneson, who spoke about how her dad, Fred Carneson, had recruited Goldberg to the SA Communist Party. Fred had been the general secretary of the SACP and an editor of the original The New Age newspaper.

Goldberg’s contribution to the struggle was acknowledged in a special 40-page publication containing articles written by people who had been influenced by him over the years. They included South Africa’s ambassador to Germany, Makhenkosi Stofile, SACP deputy general secretary and Deputy Minister of Transport, Jeremy Cronin, and former Rhodes University journalism professor, Guy Berger, who had been imprisoned with Goldberg at Pretoria Central Prison, where white political prisoners were sent under Apartheid, while their black counterparts were sent to Robben Island.

I could not help thinking on Saturday night that the ANC and the government had missed an opportunity to pay proper tribute to someone who had made a huge contribution to the struggle which was led by the party when it was still a liberation movement.

We are almost 20 years into our democracy, but already there is a generation of young people who are not aware of the sacrifices made by people such as Goldberg so that they can enjoy the freedoms they enjoy today.

South Africans have very short memories and that is why it is necessary for us to record the stories of people such as Goldberg and the other Rivonia trialists, along with the thousands of people who supported the struggle throughout the years.

The best way to pay tribute to someone such as Goldberg is to make sure that his legacy lives on way beyond his 80th birthday. Young people need to revisit what drove people such as Goldberg to sacrifice in the way they did, without any guarantee that we would one day achieve our freedom.

Goldberg and others like him were driven by a desire to see a non-racial, non-sexist and more equitable society, something that we still have not achieved and will probably not achieve for a long time.

Our leaders need to continuously recommit themselves to these goals and remind themselves that the struggle was never about personal enrichment and entitlement. It was always meant to be about improving the lives of the majority of South Africans.

It will be a pity if we lose the commitment to these ideals as we lose people such as Goldberg, as we inevitably will.

Happy birthday Denis Goldberg. I hope when I turn 80, I will be able to reflect on a life lived even half as well as yours. DM

(First published by the Daily Maverick on 14 April 2013)

Johnny Issel: What he meant to me

The first thing I did when I heard last Sunday that Johnny Issel had passed away was to listen to my vinyl of Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier. I thought it appropriate because this was the theme song of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the early 1980s and Issel was a founder member.

As I listened to Marley singing about “If you know your history / Then you would know where you coming from / Then you wouldn’t have to ask me / Who the heck do you think I am” I could hear the voices of Kay Jaffer and Mike Evans urging people to attend the UDF rally in Rocklands, Mitchells Plain, on August 20 1983.

I found myself reflecting on what John James “Yacoub” Issel (born August 17 1946, died January 23 2011) meant to me and many others of my generation. But I also found myself thinking about the significance of the 1970s and 1980s and the impact of those two decades.

Issel was a larger-than-life character in many ways. He was the founder of the UDF, even though he was banned at the time (like he was for most of the 1970s and 1980s) but he was so much more.

Most of the people who joined the struggle in the Western Cape in the 1970s and 1980s were influenced in some way or other by Issel.

It would take a book to list properly Issel’s involvement and achievements in struggle, and a newspaper article has serious limitations in this regards. So, very briefly:

Issel was born in Worcester and came to study at the University of the Western Cape in 1969 at the age of 23 after he had worked to earn money to study. He joined the South African Students Organisation and very soon became immersed in the work of black consciousness organisations, where he interacted with people like Steve Bantu Biko and Peter Jones.

He later joined the Food and Canning Workers Union where he worked with legends like Oscar Mpetha, Jan Theron and Elizabeth “Nana” Abrahams.

But it was in the 1980s that Issel’s contribution to the struggle had the most impact. He started the decade as founder and organiser of Grassroots community newspaper. Organiser was a strange title for the person who was in charge, but we were very sensitive about titles in those days and CEO, managing director or even executive director would have been a bit of a swearword, especially at an anti-capitalist organisation.

Issel was involved in most if not all of the progressive formations in the Western Cape. He played a role in the formation of the Cape Youth Congress, the Rocklands Ratepayers Association, the Cape Areas Housing Action Committee, the Clothing Workers’ Union, the End Conscription Campaign and two organisations targeting the white community at the time, the Cape Democrats and Jews for Justice. He also worked at some point for the Churches Urban Planning Commission and helped to establish 25 advice offices throughout the Western Cape. Many of those advice offices still exist.

Issel also played a key role in campaigns such as the red meat boycott and the schools boycotts in 1980, several strike support committees throughout the 1980s, the march to Pollsmoor in 1985 to demand the release of Nelson Mandela, and the Save the Press Campaign in the late 1980s.

But while he was promoting legal opposition to the apartheid regime, Issel also played a major role in popularising the ANC in the Western Cape and in South Africa while the organisation was banned.

He was the key driver behind the first public unfurling of the ANC flag at Hennie Ferrus’s funeral in Worcester, which was soon followed by more public displays of the ANC flag. At this time, one could be jailed for at least five years for possessing, let alone displaying, an ANC flag.

When the ANC was unbanned in the early 1990s, it was almost logical that Issel should be appointed as its Western Cape organiser. This time the title organiser was appropriate, because the ANC hoped to tap into his considerable experience of organising communities.

He later became a member of the provincial legislature, before bowing out to join a private company. Later on he left the country, disillusioned with the state of the nation. He only returned a few years ago after suffering a stroke in London.

In the early eighties I was a young reporter at the Cape Herald newspaper, which was owned by the then Argus Group and which targeted the coloured community. One of the first times I met Issel was at a meeting where the Writers Association of South Africa decided to become the Media Workers Association of South Africa, something Issel encouraged.

A few years later Issel and Rashid Seria, who fluctuated between journalism, business and politics, convinced me to leave the Cape Herald, where I was earning a fairly decent salary to go and work for Grassroots for about a fifth of what I was earning.

This was one of the best and worst career decisions I had taken, because, while I was taking a serious cut in salary and leaving the mainstream environment for a “struggle job”, I learnt much more at Grassroots than I would have learnt at the Cape Herald, not only about journalism but about dealing with people.

But Issel influenced me in other ways too. I was a founder executive member of the Cape Youth Congress and remember Issel putting me and other Cayco executive members through three-hour Saturday morning political education classes where we discussed in-depth the writings of people such as Marx, Lenin and Gramsci.

Issel was far from a perfect human being, even though he was remarkable in many ways. His relationship with his family was rocky at times and he had two failed marriages. He was also headstrong and had little patience for people who shied away from working during the struggle. Somehow he managed to get most of us to do things that we would not normally have done.

Attending Issel’s funeral on Monday and interacting with a range of former activists from the 1970s and 1980s this week, I realised that those two decades had a major impact on many political activists, in the same way as they had a major impact on the history of our country.

I found myself thinking about why so many of us look back fondly especially on the 1980s as an exciting period in our lives from which we can learn many lessons for today.

I wondered why someone like former cabinet minister Jay Naidoo wrote an autobiography which focused mainly on his trade union days in the 1980s. I wondered why at Issel’s memorial service in St George’s Cathedral on Thursday night, there was so much focus on his activities in the 1980s and not in the last 20 years or so.

Maybe it is because the 1980s was the final decade of apartheid and there is a feeling that the role played by people inside the country in ending apartheid has not been acknowledged enough?

Maybe we are trying to send a message to the current leadership of our country that there were leaders in the 1980s who had different values, who were committed to the struggle to liberate our nation, because they were committed to the upliftment of all our people.

Maybe all of us are trying to reclaim our struggle credentials and the integrity and moral high ground that come with those credentials.

But maybe it is true that we did things differently in the 1980s. We organised communities along non-racial lines and it was not unusual for groups of volunteers from all over the Western Cape to descend on specific communities on Saturdays or Sundays and knock on people’s doors to talk to them about the struggle.

It was not unusual for coloured communities to show solidarity with African communities and vice versa.

In some weird way, race has become a much bigger divisive factor, especially in the Western Cape.

Maybe Issel’s passing is a reminder of the non-racial society that we fought for passionately in the 1980s and which we still hope to achieve.

(First published in the Weekend Argus on Saturday January 29 2011.)

A birthday with strangers

I have just spent my 50th birthday with a group of strangers in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Well, most of them were strangers until two days ago, but by the time of my birthday on Saturday/Sunday (depending on which time zone you followed), most of them had become close friends.

The occasion was an “International Dialogue for Thoughtleaders in Journalism”, hosted by Images & Voices of Hope, an organisation that looks at the impact of public storytelling and public message making on society. It was hosted at the Seasons Centre for Renewal at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, one of the most restive places I have ever visited.

There were only 24 of us, each having made his or her mark in journalism in some way or other, including Pulitzer Prize winners and Nieman or Poynter Institute fellows, among many others. The participants have their roots in diverse places such as Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Canada, India, Japan and, of course, the United States.

This was the third meeting of the group and the first that I attended, but I have had contact with various people in Images & Voices of Hope since 2003 when I attended one of their dialogues at Peace Village in New York State. In October 2006, I attended another dialogue at Peace Village where I received their Award of Appreciation for Print Media (for Media that Transforms the Public Space) in recognition of the “One City, Many Cultures” project that I initiated at theCape Times.

I have always supported their vision of creating a better world through the use of the media. So when the invitation came for me to attend this conference, I had no hesitation.

I immediately accepted, and had to ask my daughter to postpone 50th birthday celebration that they were planning for me. I once attended a 50th birthday party which was held when the birthday boy (if that is politically correct term) turned 51, so I did not think this was a problem.

I was nervous, because turning 50 is supposed to be a big deal and you are supposed to spend it with your family and closest friends. Even though, I must admit, I felt more nervous about turning 40 than I am about turning 50. Maybe part of it has to do with the fact that I’m much more comfortable in my skin at the age of 50 than I was when I turned 40.

But from the minute I met the conference organiser, who fetched me at Grand Rapids’ Gerald Ford International Airport, I knew that I had made the correct decision to sacrifice a birthday at home for a birthday with strangers.

The welcome I received on Thursday night, along with the four other people who attended for the first time, made me feel at home immediately. And over the course of Thursday night, Friday and Saturday, we discussed our concerns about an industry which all of us love and we shared some very intimate and special insights.

We talked about our values and intentions in journalism and we debated whether it was appropriate or even advisable for journalists to advocate causes. We even made some time for meditation and writing in our journals. I, and all the others at the conference, felt completely at home and felt that we could raise concerns we have never raised elsewhere before.

In the end, I felt this is where I belong, among close friends with whom I have so much in common, even though I had not met most of them until a few days ago.

They even sang Happy Birthday on Saturday night and bought me a very big and calorie-laden cake, but I suppose that is the way things get done in the US. Everything has to be big.

So while I missed my family and friends in South Africa, I found some new friends in Kalamazoo, a place I did not even know existed until a few weeks ago.

Thank you, my new friends, for making my birthday special. I have a feeling that many of you will still be in my life when I turn 60.

(First published on the Mail and Guardian Thoughtleader site in June 2010)

Freedom is still a distant dream

Now that the dust has settled on Freedom Day — April 27, the 16th anniversary of the first time all South Africans voted in a democratic election — it is worth reflecting on what it means to be free, what we still need to do to achieve more freedom and what we need to do to protect the freedom we have.

There was a song we used to sing in Hanover Park in 1976 when we were protesting against the imposition of Afrikaans. Yes, the protests were not only restricted to Soweto and many people were killed all over the country, but that’s another story, the rewriting of our history, which I can deal with in another column). The song included the words: “Freedom isn’t free, freedom isn’t free. You’ve got to pay the price, you’ve got to sacrifice, for your liberty.”

We never took much note of the words of freedom songs then, even though we sang along with gusto. I suppose this is probably why today not many people interrogate the words of the“Kill the Boer” song or “Umshini wami” before they sing it. There is a mindlessness that creeps in when one sings these songs, or any songs for that matter.

I have been shocked when I’ve heard four-year-olds sing “I wanna sex you up” or words to that effect and realise that they heard the song on radio and were just singing along. The same could probably be said of adults.

We used to believe that we would have to sacrifice in order to achieve our freedom and many of us were prepared to do so, because we thought that freedom for all our people would be worth the sacrifice of a few.

Now that we have had 16 years of freedom we are realising that freedom has never really been defined and we are asking ourselves whether the sacrifices made by many have been worth it.

So many sacrificed their lives, on both sides of the divide: from Ashley Kriel, Coline Williams, Anton Fransch, Hector Pietersen, Matthew Goniwe, Fort Galata, among many, to the young white men who were conscripted into the apartheid army to fight a war they did not understand or, if they did, they did not support. Many of their bodies came back from Angola in body bags and the media were not allowed to report on their deaths.

What is the definition of freedom? There are basic human values and expectations that we should support and we should demand as the minimum of a free society.

These values include a belief in non-racism and non-sexism, in fact a total disdain for discrimination of any sort so that we can move towards a more tolerant society.

We should also demand a society in which everyone would have equal access to education, justice, decent housing, the economy and job opportunities. Very importantly, we should demand the right to feel safe in our homes and our communities.

Many of these rights are enshrined in the Freedom Charter, the amazing document that was adopted at Kliptown in 1995 and which remains — or should be — a beacon of what we hope to achieve in our country.

The actions of all our politicians and political parties should be judged against their abilities to deliver on these values and expectations. Many times the ANC government has failed to deliver on these values — and that is sad — but I don’t know whether a DA government or any other would do any better.

The task of those of us who operate in civil society should be to remind our political leaders of the need to deliver on these values. We should move away from blind loyalty to any one political party and instead start judging parties on whether they perform, whether they are able to make sure that we are moving towards the kind of freedom we all desire.

I have no problem with supporting the ANC on one issue, the DA on another issue or Cope on something else. After all, this is what freedom means. The freedom to decide who I want to support politically without fear of repercussions.

Having said all of the above, I am not trying to discount the achievements of the past 16 years. We have made amazing progress as a country, but our country still looks too much like the South Africa of old. We still have too much poverty, joblessness, homelessness and crime.

We have a poor majority who are quickly running out of patience. They are still waiting to see the South Africa promised in the Freedom Charter.

My biggest fear is that if we don’t make a commitment to fight for these values and expectations, then we could lose the freedoms we have gained already.

The fight for freedom is an ongoing fight and the sacrifices many have made have not been enough.

The sacrifices today might be different but they are still important. They could include sacrificing part of your earnings to support deserving charities, getting involved in activities in disadvantaged communities, or getting involved in civil society groups that could pressure the government to deliver on values and expectations.

This is the only way we can preserve and build our freedom.

(Originally published in the Cape Argus on Wednesday 5 May 2010 and in the Marketviews May online newsletter)