This week saw the publication of You Have Been Warned, a book on the first 10 years of the Mail & Guardian. At the launch, Judge Ismail Mahomed spoke of the paper’s past and its future
YOU Have Been Warned is not just the story of Irwin Manoim [who edited the book] or even of just Anton Harber, and Clive Cope, of Stephen Goldblatt and David Dison, of Joel Joffe, and Shaun Johnson, of David Beresford and Marilyn Kirkwood — or indeed of the scores and scores of gutsy, committed, but quite crazy and irrational men and women of different backgrounds and temperaments who defied the most elementary principles of accounting and newspaper wisdom.
Not only did they tilt gloriously at forbidding windmills of awesomely entrenched and intimidating power, but survived long enough to recount their tales with a mixture of lacerating agony and a warm and healing romance — and a sweet vindication, consistently interrupted by that state of restless integrity and passionate scepticism so central to the ethos which has sustained them.
You Have Been Warned is the exciting story of such men and women certainly, but it is much, much more. It is the story of a resurrected nation over a momentous decade, first recapturing its moral legitimacy from its historical desecration through the pain and the shame of racism, then celebrating that great triumph with the unalloyed adulation of the whole civilised world — and now seeking to consolidate and to defend its achievements, under the conflicting pressures of the often intimidating, despairing and massive legacy of its brutal past, the agonies and the manifest limitations of its present and the high, but legitimate, expectations and impatience for a better future for yesterday’s victims.
And it is the story of a nation confronting these deep conflicts — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes disappointingly, very often traumatically, but always with that faith and legitimacy, which is crucial and in which we must all share. It is our country and we alone can, and will, overcome.
It has been, for very many, a decade of untold suffering and sadness in this nation. But it has also been a decade of fulfilment and joy of a significance unmatched by any other in its massive consequences for the lives of those who have survived and those yet to be born.
The Weekly Mail, now the Mail & Guardian, has recorded this great decade for us with vigour and courage. But it has been more than just a faithful recorder of this history. It has influenced its course and direction, often by challenging the orthodox, by articulating the heretical, by confronting the smug, by defying the mighty, by inspiring the despairing, by outwitting the tyrannical, by dignifying the brutalised, by tempering the angry, by universalising the parochial, by exposing the untruthful, by mocking the pompous and by taunting the hypocritical.
It has gladdened many grieving and despairing hearts by kicking racial and gender bigotry publicly in the guts. But it has occasionally also disappointed by sometimes appearing to join in the apparent tiredness and emptiness of the hangover which has intermittently followed the celebrations, and even by growling ineffectively in that condition.
It has gladdened by its management of the tension between the state of intellectual scepticism fundamental to its own unarticulated ethos and the passion which compels it gloriously to engage in its moral crusades. It has disappointed occasionally by its response to the tension between the drive to uncover dramatic scoops when none might in truth exist and the deeper and more mature commitment to inform, to educate and to restructure the moral and ethical premises of our nation.
But both its formidable triumphs and its occasional disappointments are bonded by an integrity which is fierce and unfailing, and a compassion which is deep and consistent. Both must drive it to witness and to influence the next decade, as our nation begins to confront the awesome challenges of the next epoch — the obscene disparities in living standards between black and white in South Africa, the deeply disempowering legacy of apartheid, the pervading poverty, the cruel levels of malnutrition, the despairing homelessness and the debilitating joblessness. Political rights alone cannot meaningfully reverse any of these problems, however eloquent their constitutional articulation.
Perhaps, above all, there is the need to confront the demeaning corrosion of our moral and spiritual fibre, initially penetrated by the crassness and the lovelessness of apartheid but now sustained through its consequences, by levels of brutality, of murder, of rape, and of deceit which diminish us all in our humanity and bring shame to our species.
Whatever be the state of our material riches, we shall truly not be free until that moral and spiritual fibre is restored and renewed, and sustains the sinews of our resurrected nation as it prepares for a millennium in which genetic engineering on our own planet and technological forays and new insights into the infinity of the cosmos will compel a re-examination of the most deeply entrenched truths which have so axiomatically dominated our life and our living for so long.
May the Mail & Guardian continue for the next decade its formidable historical role, with the vigour and the integrity which has impressed so many for so long, augmented as it now is by an experience of rare intensity and pain and glory in the life of a nation.
I may not be around to celebrate the book of the second decade of the Mail & Guardian, but this does not disqualify me from praying for the next decade what Rabridinath Tagore prayed for his country many, many decades ago:
Where the world has not been broken up Into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee Into everwidening thought and action- Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
[You Have Been Warned is edited by Irwin Manoim and published by Viking at R120. It will be launched in Cape Town on Thursday]