Robert Kirby : LOOSE CANNON
I keep telling the editor of this paper that he needs to get much more with it, to shrug off the air of 1960s priggish decency that pervades the entire Mail & Guardian enterprise. Just because Jeff Zerbst worked in what were then The Weekly Mail offices shortly before he joined Hustler, doesn’t mean the newspaper, itself, has to remain in a state of reactive chastity.
Jeff has long since flown off to Australia and a throbbing career in one-handed magazines. Scant chance he’ll come beetling back for a job should the M&G suddenly start behaving like all the other normal, god-fearing, white-owned, neo-colonialist, racist slushsheets with which it competes for a corner in the minds of the rapidly diminishing numbers of South Africans who canstill read.
What this paper must do is prepare for the chance that South Africa might have Dr Bengu in charge of education for a long time to come.
Dr B calls his master plan outcomes-based education. And the M&G should acknowledge what that proposes. Given a few more years careering downhill, the way they have since Sibusiso took over, South Africa’s schools will be discharging great swathes of enthusiastic young people on to the streets. Of every colour, social classes and creed, these youngsters will have one thing in common.
With few exceptions they will all have been be extremely badly taught. When they go out into the world they’ll want a newspaper that does not dispute the innocence of their unfound minds.
The M&G must be timely with harvest for these modest appetites. It must begin to plough a few meadows down in tits-and- arsehole country. This paper must become, both visually and intellectually, far more salacious.
The M&G needs to introduce a page devoted entirely to sleaze, sex, local gossip, real or imagined democratic carnal excesses and aberrations. A “Perv Page”, something to add to a media bucket only partly filled.
The Sunday Times has run one of these pages for donkey’s years. Great literary minds like Rian Malan’s have confessed to regular masturbation before the Sunday Times cleavages. See where those fondling fingers took him?
Clearly both a social and cultural need is filled by pubesquint journalism. And while admiring the Sunday Times for its taste and courage in publishing its Back Page, it has dealt exclusively in the squalid doings of overseas celebrity folk. They never peep any closer to home. This is where the M&G should leap in.
A Perv Page could run molten headlines: “Was Marike actually a drug-crazed man- eater?” or “Shell House hottest confess to late-nite Ecstasy orgies” or even “Frene’s weakness causes her to become desperate for love”.
South African showbiz glitterati writhe with scandal. “Gordon Mulholland toasts his 100th mentally disadvantaged ballet dancer”; “Will Pieter de Klerk’s credit card ever catch up with him?”; “Colleagues claim Allister’s nose has turned permanently brown”.
It’s easy to imagine the headlines. What will be even easier will be the burden of the public protector. If anyone needs breathing space it is he.
Time to get shot of the vast backlog of corruption, looting of public funds, theft of starving people’s money to build private video studios for the church leader’s cute- nosed little wife. All the horror and grief Andy Duffy, Mungo Soggot and company have been dumping on the protector’s bony shoulders.
In any case, we out here in the democratic open are getting stressed out by week after week of government shadiness. We need more of the sort of corruption with which we can identify.
No ordinary citizen relates to someone like Peter Mokaba casually spending $7 000 on a Hi-Lift Gucci Corset. This is not the ordinary man’s peccadillo. We crave more common offensce.
If the Perv Page carried the sordid details of how, in a fit of uncontrollable sexual desire, voluptuous Ronelle van Zyl exposed herself to Ronnie Kasrils, we’d know exactly how they both felt.
So please, Philip, let me implore you in public to reconsider. The M&G has shown that it is quite possible to publish full frontal photographs of nude female pop singers, not to mention all those exploitative lithographs of unclothed Herero women.
If you feel wary of the whole venture, start unobtrusively with a page three girl.
Can you imagine how your sales will go boom-boom if you persuaded Patricia Glyn to bare all, along with other giantesses of the feminist triumph: Nadine Gordimer; a buck-naked Mary Metcalf; Jani Allen?
Just think of your circulation.