Mike Loewe
The most ambitious public relations stunt by a South African newspaper is degenerating into farce as two ill-prepared women climbers scramble for the top of Mount Everest.
South African mountaineer Cathy O’Dowd, a Rhodes University photojournalism masters student and daughter of Anglo-American director Michael O’Dowd, will carry with her the hopes of her sponsor, the Sunday Times, some South African mountaineers and people who want her to reach the summit for South Africa.
However, O’Dowd will be only too aware of calls back home for her to resign and join three top South African climbers who quit in protest against the style of expedition leader Ian Woodall, a man nobody in the South African mountaineering world really knows.
And O’Dowd’s black comrade, Deshun Deysel, will probably be filled with terror. Deysel is not a mountaineer. In the words of one mountaineer this week, she is “the victim of a cynical experience in political correctness”.
The South African mountaineering world is questioning how British ex-patriate Woodall got to lead the trip. Mountain Club of South Africa sources criticised both his leadership and the selection procedures used in selecting the women in the team.
It has also emerged that the club has been trying in vain for four years to raise sponsorships to send a large, all-South African expedition to the Himalayas.
The mountaineers this week warned that with Woodall’s questionable leadership qualities, Deysel’s safety was likely to rest in the hands of Sherpa mountaineers who are expected to lead the party to the summit.
There seemed to be universal agreement that Deysel was selected because she is black — the only climbing experience she had was an easy hike up Kilimanjaro in an all-women selection exercise which even O’Dowd questioned at the time.
Deputy president of the Mountain Club Dries Bekker warned that if Deysel died on Everest — and deaths are not uncommon on this peak — the sponsors and expedition leaders would be guilty of “gross neglect”. Some mountaineers, such as the Mountain Club’s expedition sub-committee head John Moss, went so far as to worry about whether O’Dowd, a highly respected mountaineer, had notched up enough high-altitude experience for the climb.
O’ Dowd’s decision to power ahead, presumably for glory and to keep the hopes of a South African ascent alive while Cape Town climber Ed February resigned, could also have repercussions on unity in the South African climbing community.
February, one of the three climbers who returned to South Africa in protest at Woodall’s “militaristic, secretive and disempowering” leadership style, is South Africa’s first black climber to have punched through into the upper echelons of the white- dominated mountaineering world.
In the late 1970s, February and the cream of the Mountain Club’s young climbers broke away and formed a club, The Bats, while accusing the Mountain Club of being elitist, conservative and racist. The club in turn claimed that February was obnoxious and unruly.
An article February wrote for the British magazine Mountain sparked a 10-year boycott of the South African mountaineering community. It only ended when February again wrote to Mountain and suggested that, with a negotiated political settlement in sight, South Africa’s mountaineering fraternity should be given the benefit of the doubt. Since then the Mountain Club has been accepted back on to world mountaineering bodies and foreign climbers have started coming to South Africa in greater numbers.
The Bats included two famous South African soloists (those who ascend using only boots and chalk): Chris Lomax and Andrew “ADK” de Klerk.
De Klerk, one of the three who resigned from the Everest expedition, is world-renowned and has since managed to join an American expedition. In South Africa his name is legend. The other climber who resigned, Andrew Hackland, is regarded as one of South Africa’s rising alpine talents.
This leaves Woodall, his father, brother and a Frenchman to complete the South African-funded team.
With President Nelson Mandela’s appeal to the expedition to negotiate a settlement going unheeded, the credibility of the expedition has all but vanished.
Sunday Times acting editor Brian Pottinger was quoted on Thursday saying the newspaper was considering ending its association with the climbers.
Meanwhile, news about the much-heralded expedition which was supposed to flow on the Sunday Times’s Everest Internet homepage — billed as the highest Netpage in the world — – has trickled to a halt. — Ecna