/ 21 October 2011

The darling of the media

The Darling Of The Media

Redi Tlhabi (née Direko) is one of but a handful of media personalities talking to the nation from a multitude of platforms. She hosts the 9am-to-midday slot on Talk Radio 702 and 567 Cape Talk and a TV talk show, Redi on Mzansi (Mzansi Magic, channel 107 on DStv). For a few years she also had a column in the Sowetan, which was discontinued a few weeks ago, and now she writes for the Sunday Times.

When e.tv’s 24-hour news channel was launched in 2008, Tlhabi was co-anchor with Jeremy Maggs of their flagship news bulletin. She left in 2009. “I left because of a heavy workload. It had become increasingly difficult to juggle my two jobs and everything else that I have to do in between,” she told TVSA, a television industry website.

Redi on Mzansi has had diverse guests over the past few months. It has run a frank interview with footballer Benni McCarthy, a ­mediocre conversation with ­musician Lira and a fascinating interview with politician Tokyo Sexwale.

The last was one of the best programmes engaging with a local personality that I have watched in recent months.

Break from the norm

Lulling Sexwale with her charm and carefully calibrated questioning, she was able to ask him to answer rumours about his alleged links to the underworld as well as the ANC’s succession debates. The result was like a love child ­produced by the hard-edged Tim Sebastian, former host of the BBC’s Hard Talk, the relaxed but probing CNN’s Piers Morgan, and the familial and homely Oprah Winfrey. More of that, please!

The idea behind the programme, she told me at a coffee shop next to Primedia, Radio 702’s parent company, was to break from the usual “political and news-driven shows” that she had presented in the past to “explore a different aspect” of her personality.

Tlhabi has worked on Kaya FM as bulletin editor and at the SABC as anchor and producer in her decade-long career in the media. When she and her fellow executive producer, Ben Cashdan, approached Mzansi Magic with the concept, one of the ideas that probably won them a slot on the channel was that viewers would get to see “the lighter side of prominent South Africa”.

“We want to see a side of our newsmakers that we don’t normally see — what do they do in private, their ­family life,” she said.

This represented, in part, Tlhabi’s refusal to be pigeonholed as a news junkie. Often, she said, she would go to a party where someone would wander in her direction to discuss a topic she had recently debated on her current affairs shows.

“But I am a wife, I am a girl, I like to buy shoes, I like to run, I like to talk about art, music and theatre,” she said.

Keeping it natural
Last year the Catholic-raised Tlhabi married medical doctor Brian Tlhabi, whom she described as the “most important person in my life”, at the Our Lady of Lebanon Church in Mulbarton in the south of ­Johannesburg.

Of all the media in which she has worked, it is radio that comes naturally to her. “I find radio more exhilarating — it’s real, it’s what’s happening at that moment.”

I spent a Thursday ­morning ­watching her work: she took calls, shared news tidbits with her ­listeners, interviewed a guest — Proudly South Africa’s chief executive ­Leslie Sedibe — and mediated the debate on South Africa’s shrinking ­manufacturing capacity.

One of her producers told me that the show received an average of 300 calls a day. And Tlhabi has a tough job not just because of the volumes of calls, but also because of the different shades of people who phone in to air their views.

Their opinions are often conservative, sometimes ­liberal, occasionally nationalist. When Tlhabi says “South Africans are ­hungry for debate”, she is ­speaking a truth.

The 9am-to-midday show attracts the housewife, the unemployed and the office worker with access to the radio; the result is mixed. When, for instance, she expresses ­support for affirmative action, some ­callers phone in to lash out at her being ­”racist”; if she opines that the ANC is failing the nation, there are callers who dismiss her as a “coconut”.

It is an invidious position, reminiscent of Wole Soyinka’s novel The Interpreters, about Nigeria’s educated elites who are not exactly Westerners but find themselves cut off from their indigenous cultures. One of the people I talked to even dragged Marx into the topic, ­describing Tlhabi as belonging to the class of black people known as the “comprador bourgeoisie”.

Keeping it credible

But labelling is easy and tells only part of the story. What cannot be questioned is Tlhabi’s commitment to South Africa’s Constitution and the role that the media, both private and public, has to play in society. She was critical of the pliant journalism at the SABC, calling for what she termed a “credible, competent and professional broadcaster”. Tlhabi described the style of interviewing at the SABC as one of “darling questions that ministers are only too happy to answer”.

Born in Orlando East in 1978, the humanities graduate from what was then the Rand Afrikaans University, now the University of Johannesburg, first stepped into the studio of the university’s radio ­station.

Tlhabi is now studying for a ­master’s in literature and violence. Why study that?

“I am a woman living in South Africa who is afraid for her safety,” she said tersely, adding that she wanted to know why South African men perpetrated so much violence against women. It could not just be poverty, she argued, because other African countries had poorer people.

She is passionate about books, but one guest on to her radio show, Zukiswa Wanner, had a not-so-pleasant experience. She told me that in 2007 when her debut novel The ­Madams was published, Tlhabi invited her on her show.

Prior to the interview Wanner sent an advance copy of The Madams to Tlhabi, only to be asked on air to tell listeners what the book was about. “When she interviewed me on Mzansi Magic with Rian Malan last year, though, she’d read Men of the South, so maybe she learnt from past experience,” Wanner said.

Journalism is a high-pressure industry, one must point out, and mistakes happen all the time.

It is clear Tlhabi cares about the written word — she spoke enthusiastically about Earl Lovelace’s most recent novel, Is Just a Movie, and Morgan Tsvangirai’s autobiography, At the Deep End.

The last word

As a person who has worked in radio and television for most of her professional life, she described ­writing as “very hard”. “I get butterflies in my stomach before I write.”

She is plagued by the doubt that anyone who has written columns experiences at one point or another: “What makes you think you have something to say that people want to read?”

The last word should be left to Fikile Moya, now an executive ­editor at City Press. He was editor of the Sowetan when Tlhabi started writing a column for the daily.

“We chose Redi because she ­represented an urban, ­sophisticated, independent and strong-willed ­perspective. We saw in her a township-born black woman who made no apologies for having a good ­education and [who has] the intelligence to use it well. We were proven correct.”

So there!