Thami Mazwai of the Black Editors’ Forum in The Mark Gevisser Profile
Last Saturday night at the Carlton Hotel, while a band trundled tonelessly through a rendition of Stand by Me in the function room next door, Thami Mazwai’s Black Editors’ Forum (BEF) gathered to contemplate its relationship to press freedom, to the white mainstream media, to the African National Congress government, and to guest speaker Thabo Mbeki.
About 60 people were there — black editors, journalists and professionals. If there is such a thing as a black middle class, then its publicist — perhaps self-appointed — is Mazwai, editor of Enterprise magazine. He introduced Mbeki to the gathering by quipping that, in some circles (the “white media” that have been lambasting him for his call for state regulation of media to ensure affirmative action), he is seen as the deputy president’s subaltern in a sustained assault on press freedom and
The room erupted into laughter at the absurdity of the notion. Mbeki then gave one of the more masterful speeches of his career. With his trademark style of the elegant assailant — creeping up on you with the knife-edge of an argument beneath the night cover of Proustian syntax — he urged the BEF to join his government in the task of black upliftment that must remain a central part of transformation.
When his speech was over, Sowetan political editor Mathatha Tsedu rose to challenge him. It’s all very well for you to speak about black empowerment, he said, but why aren’t you helping bail out the African Bank? Why aren’t you making sure that small black businessmen get government contracts?
Mbeki countered by singling out one of the few palefaces present: “I see Anton Harber is here,” he said, looking over at the Mail & Guardian editor. “Now criticism and complaining is what I expect from him. This forum, on the other hand, has to see itself as a change agent, and not just criticise.”
Roll up your sleeves, Mathatha, and stop whingeing like a whitey. Get with the programme. It dovetailed perfectly with perhaps the most cynical conceit of Mbeki’s speech, when he rallied his audience by quoting, at length, from a newspaper editorial attacking African National Congress policies as “the very antithesis of reconciliation” and accusing the party of fighting a struggle that is already over.
Here’s the cynicism: anyone who reads Johnny Johnson’s daily rants on The Citizen’s leader page will recognise immediately the crusty style of this reactionary campaigner. He is way to the right of a mainstream print media that behaves, on the whole, like a kindly — if occasionally reproachful — aunt to the ANC. But Mbeki pointedly did not identify the author: he wanted its misguided opinions to stand metonymically for the entire corpus that is the white media.
Interestingly, though, his audience did not rise to the whitebait. One woman, a candidate advocate, asked (not in so many words) what Mbeki had done, since taking power, to help the ordinary black person. He responded very sharply indeed: those who were starving and who now get one slice of bread a day are very pleased with the government’s performance. It is only those “who have not yet graduated from a Toyota Corolla to a BMW who are saying to the government, ‘after 16 months, what have you achieved?'”
Mbeki knew he was among a group of people who are dissatisfied with the slowness of transition. While white South Africans — in the private sector and in government — bemoan affirmative action, many black professionals still believe, often quite correctly, that there is a glass ceiling to their upward mobility. And so the deputy president was simultaneously wooing his audience (come on board, chaps, and the end result will be your own advancement) and gently rapping it over the knuckles.
It may indeed be risible to say that Thami Mazwai is acting on Mbeki’s behalf in an assault on press freedom. Firstly, Mbeki, for all his expressed irritation at media criticism and his ill-conceived plans for TV airtime, has never once suggested curtailing press freedom. Secondly, Mazwai was correct when he wrote, in the latest of his fortnightly Business Day columns, that “if it is press freedom we are talking about, then we black journalists … know more about the subject than anyone else. We went through detentions, torture, exile, personal and newspaper bannings.”
But it is equally correct to say that, at the moment, Mbeki and Mazwai are allies, in that they have both taken up arms against the whiteness of the mainstream media; the former because he perceives it to be hostile to the government’s transformation agenda, the latter because he believes it is thwarting black economic advancement. Perhaps it comes down to the same thing.
But if Mbeki uses the scalpel so gently it takes a while to notice the incision, Mazwai’s preferred weapon is the battering ram: “The white media goes out of its way to hammer black enterprise and achievement. If you look at the history of apartheid, there has been a systematic campaign to portray blacks as failures,” he tells me. “The white media is interested only in scandals, corruptions and failures of the government.”
There is only one way to remedy this situation, Mazwai says: the state must regulate the media. It should do this by placing its immense advertising accounts only in publications that have the requisite number of blacks — and carrots: funding media organisations owned by blacks. It should also limit foreign ownership in the media. This would enhance rather than limit press freedom by encouraging a diversity of voices: “I and my colleagues in the Black Editors’ Forum oppose a government-owned media,” he wrote in Business Day. “However, ownership and control by the minority is just as undesirable.”
Cape Times editor Moegsien Williams, who worked with Mazwai on the Sowetan, says that his commitment to press freedom is irreproachable, and credits much of the paper’s success to “the way Thami drove his journalists, expected the best from them, sent them back again and again”. Mazwai was the day-editor of the Sowetan for over a decade. Before that he helped lead the team of black journalists on The World which, some say, provided the only real coverage of the 1976/77 uprisings.
He has had two spells in prison: the first in the early 1960s for Pan Africanist Congress activism; the second in the early 1980s, for withholding evidence against one of his sources. He was involved in founding one of the anti-apartheid media unions in the 1980s. He has been at the very typeface of media activism in South
His political trajectory — from PAC hothead to strident capitalist — is not as surprising as it may at first seem: “black upliftment” (shorthand for the establishment of a black middle class) has always sat, uneasily, alongside radical socialism in the PAC and the Black Consciousness Movement. Mazwai finally parted with the PAC in 1990, but notes now that most of the 28 000 members of the black elite who buy his magazine are “Africanist in orientation, whether they are PAC, ANC, IFP or even National Party. There is an immense pride in being black and an achiever.”
Thami Mazwai’s blustering persona — flailing arms, spluttering inarticulacy weirdly at odds with the facility of his written prose, and rumpled and distracted image — often leads those who dislike him to dismiss him as a buffoon.
But to highlight the obvious contradictions — a strident free marketeer calling for state regulation — misses the point: Thami Mazwai lives and dies by the credo of black economic advancement. That, rather than the free market, is his ideology, and if a regulated environment suits it, then so be it. He has set himself an agenda that he is pursuing singlemindedly; he has tapped into the currents of the ever- expanding black elite and developed a product that is perhaps second only to the porno-market in magazine growth.
Enterprise, he says, “focuses on achievement by blacks in the business economy. I’ve gone out there to look for those stories of measurable success and come back to write about them. Obviously, some of those stories turned sour. Some couldn’t perform, although we gave them lots of coverage. That’s not my problem. My task is to let blacks see themselves in a positive light.”
He is using exactly the same approach to black advancement in government as he does to black advancement in private enterprise. In an Enterprise special series, for example, every provincial minister is getting a whole page of uncritical publicity- fluff: Mazwai, a good journalist, is doing the government’s job better than the inept South African Communication Service ever could. “Previous apartheid governments were given this opportunity, and they were then measured against what they said after a year or two. Why must this not apply to blacks?” Mazwai wrote in his July Enterprise editorial. Little wonder government official Frank Meintjies singled him out, in a recent broadside against media coverage of the RDP, for special praise. Little wonder some might think he is acting as Mbeki’s agent.
His critics in the media world allege that he is setting himself up to be one of the black editors who the newspaper groups might be bullied into hiring by his own campaign; or setting his own publication up as one of the beneficiaries of selective government advertising. He certainly wasn’t complaining about foreign ownership of the media, they say, when it seemed that he was about to launch a business daily with Swedish funding.
But listen to Moegsien Williams, the first black editor ever of a traditionally white daily: “82 percent of my readers are black. And yet I am only the sixth black person to be hired here, out of a total staff of 60. So Thami’s stand helps me immensely, in that he is sensitising my bosses to the need to fix up these problems. When I go speak to them, I can say ‘look, this is what Mazwai is saying’. The pressure is good.”
Mazwai tells me that “very few blacks differ with the sentiments I express” and other black journalists express irritation that he seems to be talking on their behalf. “He comes from an era,” says one, “where there were very few black voices allowed — Qwelane, Klaaste, Thloloe, himself. And so he got into the habit of speaking for all black people, because he was one of the few who had a voice.”
Mazwai has that peculiar relationship with his readers that writers (poets laureate or publicists) often have with their clients: he does not live among them or like them. He, like them, might have a cellphone (40 percent of Enterprise readers do, according to the magazine’s research), but his home is in Pimville rather than in Kelvin or Noordwyk and is, like its owner, utterly without the pretensions and trappings of yuppiedom. He has had a difficult life: his wife died, three years ago, after delivering their fourth child; for much of his young adulthood he was an
Thami Mazwai has neither the brilliance nor the free-thinking iconoclasm of those Kofifi-era journalists whose glamour he so admired growing up in the 1950s in Western Township. But, unlike Can Themba or Casey Motsitsi, he got over his addiction; he survived. He knows how.