Cawe Mahlati, acting CEO of Bop Broadcasting, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
NIGHT has fallen over dirty-grey veld around Mmabatho; the sun has set behind the hulking Rhino Recording Studios, built by Bop Broadcasting during the height of its deluded grandeur. Cawe Mahlati and I wander through the boma and along a water feature, back to her Executively Thatched Bungalow, where we happen upon Martin Mabiletsa, senior adviser to North West Premier Popo Molefe.
“Martin!” she effervesces, rushing into his arms before introducing the journalist at her side as “someone who wants to expose me as a vapid nouvelle riche!”
“No, no,” the old man responds, a mirthful baritone to Mahlati’s shreiks, “not a vapid nouvelle riche! A brilliant nouvelle riche!”
Cawe Mahlati hit the scene, with big hair and a big mouth, as M-Net’s frontperson in the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s public hearings in 1994, chanting the mantra “Let The Market Decide!” I joked in print, at the time, that her hairdo could catch more signals than a satellite dish. After spending a day with her I can safely report that her brain is even more receptive. She might look like an Afro- cessorised kugel, but she is anything but vapid. Bold and beautiful, she is the star of her own soapie: peripatetic (she has lived in at least six countries), brilliant, iconoclastic, hyper-verbal, ambitious, brazen and aggressive.
Who else but a soapie queen would leave a powerful job as the senior black person in the fastest-growing pay-TV company in the world for a six-month contract at an ailing Rhino in the yonder that, to all intents and purposes, had already been consigned to the culling-pen? Mahlati saw the gap and took it.
When Mahlati arrived, it was a foregone conclusion — ratified by the IBA — that Bop Broadcasting was going to be subsumed, wholesale, into the SABC. But she has wheeled and dealed, lobbied and loopholed. When she took over the reins, her predecessor Solly Kotane had retrenched almost everyone there – — to the tune of R400-million. An amount that would have merrily bankrupted North West province. Unblinking. she stared the unions down to R150-million. She fired all the managers, and rehired those she needed on month-to-month contracts. She reduced the staff from 715 to 260. She got the province to give her R54-million for the upcoming year (down from R93-million, but a good deal more than zero, which is what was initially expected). She sent out a flutter of press releases declaring Bop back in business.
And it is. Mahlati believes she has found a loophole in the IBA’s report on public broadcasting: while it states that all the ex- homeland networks are to be incorporated into the SABC, it does not stipulate what should happen to Bop-TV, the flagship of the network. And it says quite clearly, says Mahlati, that “any assets not nessessary to the formation of a new national Public Broadcasting Service must be disposed of”.
Clearly, given the three channels it has been allocated already, SABC does not need Bop-TV. Compound that with the fact that the IBA has not yet licensed a commercial broadcaster, and you begin to see how clever Mahlati is. She is currently sketching “several scenarios” on Bop’s future: her clearly-favoured one is a partnership between the private sector and North West, with commercial services subsidising provincial public broadcasting. Pushy pushy gets the ball rolling. At a meeting in early March, a committee led by SABC chair Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri agreed to have a “bosberaad” soon to sort things out once and for all.
Is she involved in any of the consortia that might bid for a slice of the pie? She throws her head back and lets out a guffaw. “No!!! Not yet. I haven’t been invited.”
Mahlati’s riches might be nouvelle, but she comes from a line of Transkei missionary-class intelligentsia, literate for five generations. Her father, a Latin and Greek scholar, ran the famed Osborne Mission at Mount Frere. Her brother is a kidney transplant surgeon at Groote Schuur. “To all intents and purposes,” she says, “I ought to have been a yuppie. Had my parents not been black, I would have come out of Sandton. Directly.”
The picture she paints of her youth is of tweedy eccentricity in the “Little England” of the Transkei, all pies at the Central Hotel, piano lessons and catechisms (her father allowed them to choose their own religions; she, the perennial drama queen, went for Catholicism). She calls her parents “Mother” and “Daddy”: ex-Healdtown and Fort Hare, they were Unity Movement stalwarts who rejected the trappings of the material world.
How, I ask her, is it possible that a land with such a powerful elite could become as destitute as the Transkei is now? She answers by telling me about the Mount Frere public swimming baths: “After Matanzima and his crew took over, everything went to the dogs. They even closed the pool, because they were scared their children would drown. The barbarians didn’t even think about teaching their children to swim.”
Shrieking with laughter at the subversiveness of it all, Mahlati chooses to describe herself, to me, as a fusion of the amaqaba and the amagqoboka. The former are her mother’s people, the “people who smear their faces”, the “blanket people” — fierce anticolonial warriors or country bumpkins, depending on which side of the blanket you lie. The latter are her father’s people, the Christian converts — the “pierced” people. “They were the first quislings, really”, she says, “those who forsook their tradition and cultures as soon as they realised there was superior gunpower, and, for their own survival, aligned themselves with the British.”
Here’s the subversiveness of Mahlati: eschewing the “sellout” connotations of “gqoboka”, she says that “for me, the ethos of the amagqoboka is very important. Whoever imposes a particular superiority to me, I’ve gone out to learn it so I can beat them at their own game.” This is how she explains her rigid adherence to the market, her laissez- faire time at M-Net: “The reality of conquest, for me, is that you submit. The old African tradition is that once you’ve been conquered, you submit yourself to the norms and the rules of your conqueror, and you master those rules so that you can conquer again.”
Deep down, she confides, “I’m a qaba, totally! It’s just the outside that’s gqoboka!” Mahlati would not agree with the crunchy old Audre Lorde feminists of the 1970s that “you can’t use the master’s tools to pull down the master’s house”. It makes sense that the book that changed her life was Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae. She will not only live in the Master’s house — she’ll throw huge, fabulous parties there. She will show her cleavage; she will play with all that is pagan about her sexuality and her racial identity.
It also makes sense that, during her time abroad, her two mentors were Brigitte Mabandla and Lindiwe Mabuza. Both women challenge the categories of acceptable female behaviour even as applied by the gender-sensitive ANC. Mahlati is the wild woman, the outsider. Although she claims to be comfortable in all worlds, she often speaks of her own — that of Buppiedom — as if she doesn’t quite belong. As if she is a wisecracking observer who sees it all from the margins.
In her late thirties, she has neither children nor husband. Her understanding of sexuality is libertarian: “In South Africa, I’m not sure whether it’s better to be a wife or a mistress”; “Monogamy is a Christian imposition, an 18th century ideal that has lost its time and will not survive”; “I don’t believe you can police a penis. If it wants to, it will.”
Nothing irritates her more than the sanctimonious white left. The “nanny class”, she calls them, intellectuals who think they know best. Citing the Wits 13, Tony Leon, and Dennis Davis’s attack on the credentials of Human Rights Commission chair Barney Pityana, she makes the point that “white liberals do not have the humility of saying, ‘Perhaps I’m wrong, let me listen to you’. No. They go into the intellectual defence of a position they have taken, and they back themselves into a corner.” Like many in the new black elite, she believes that “in five years’ time, Afrikaners and Africans will have made up, and the problem will be with the English liberals”.
What is refreshing about her is that she doesn’t articulate these ideas from a perspective of Africanist essentialism. Listen, for example, for some classic Cawe rant on the idea that African society is communalist and egalitarian: “Nonsense! Bullshit! This idea from white feminists that there’s a sisterhood of black women together is absolute crap … There are deep class divisions. Those relatives of mine who are indigent and need to come home so that I can feed them, I treat them as servants. They clean and cook for me, I give them food in return. It’s not like we live together as one big happy family. Strictures and distinctions exist, particularly in African society, which is extremely hierarchical!”
Her particular take on the race-politics of broadcasting goes something like this: the white left conned black South Africans into believing they should be socialists, thus keeping them poor. Now they’re trying to con black people into believing they should have public broadcasting, “educational TV”, when in fact “all the people want from TV is to be entertained”. The very idea that you can have popular public broadcasting is “a fantasy”.
Her instincts here might be right — no one is denying that the masses would rather watch The Cawe Show than The Ivy Show — but her facts don’t neccessarily add up to her passions. Making a point about how a commercial Bop-TV could subsidise a public broadcasting station, she threw several examples at me of how this happens, including Britain, “where Channel Four funds the BBC”. In fact, Channel Four’s excess goes to ITV, and and the BBC draws its revenue from licence fees.
She also gave me a list of countries — France, Canada, Australia, Germany — where there is no local content quota, but where there is much local production because of government subsidy. She is dead right about the government subsidies, dead wrong about there being no local content quotas. The thing about Mahlati is that she — an experienced lawyer who has done time with IBM — thinks on her feet. There are thus bound to be factual casualties along the way.
There are also bound to be enemies. While there’s no doubt she did wonders for M-Net — – a clever, politically connected black woman praise-singing the market — one television source feels “she might have been more effective if she weren’t so damn abrasive”. That’s the way many of her staffers feel about her at Bop-TV too.
She is, says one broadcasting player, “10 steps ahead of anyone else in the sector, always strategising. This means she is a smoke and mirrors person.” An example: pick up some Bop publicity bumf and you’ll read that she is the corporation’s “New CEO”. Ask her what her salary is, and she’ll refuse to disclose it on the basis that she is a “consultant” on a short-term contract, and “not a public official”.
One way or the other her decision to move to Bop was masterful. She has relaunched her career. It could land anywhere. For the moment, though, Mahlati is in Mmabatho. Her hair is back down to scale, and she professes to not wanting to be anywhere else. It’s a Sunday night, she and Martin go looking for a drink. Everything is closed, even the O’Hagans that has become the Popo-generation’s drinking hole of choice. “Mmabatho!” she cries, in mock exasperation, out of Mabiletsa’s white Mercedes.