The spectre of institutional racism haunts two events, the death of Sam Nolutshungu and Wits academic William Makgoba’s recounting of his `victimisation’
A sudden bout of amnesia must have gripped polemicist Jon Qwelane as he sat down last month to attack the media’s coverage of the late Professor Sam Nolutshungu.
Under the headline “Once again, media shows its double standards” Qwelane recounted, in his weekly column in the Saturday Star, how a smear campaign had been launched against Nolutshungu after he belatedly rejected, for health reasons, the job as the vice chancellor of Wits University. Until he withdrew in January, Nolutshungu, a political scientist long-time resident in America, had been vaunted as the man who would lead Wits out of its morass.
“The conservative liberal mainstream newspapers launched a systematic assault on the professor, showing scant regard to the basic rules of journalism,” Qwelane wrote. ” Many people … were fooled by that type of reporting.”
It is a pity Qwelane had not checked his own files. In the same column, on January 25 this year, he had written: “I am very angry and disappointed with Nolutshungu, his illness notwithstanding. I am so angry that I am inclined to be uncharitable and ask why he is too ill to decline the Wits post but not too ill to continue his work in America?” The article was headlined: “Imagine if an `ill’ Mandela had baled out after winning the election.”
And then there is the Wits Black Staff Forum. In January, the forum’s chair Thembi Nkacha said: “I’m finding it hard to buy the health story and my brain is running around thinking outrageous things.” Last Sunday, his brain was presumably resting. Taking its cue from Makgoba and Qwelane, the forum slammed “the.liberal media in this country” for its “innuendo and racist insinuations … it was with disbelief, after the Makgoba affair, that we realised yet again that the media was out on a safari of malice, of slander, vilification and spurious discharge (sic) on Sam.”
The Mail & Guardian has become the main target of the campaign because of two stories we did, in the editions of January 17 to 23 (“Wits: The prof who got cold feet”) and February 21 to 28 (“Nolutshungu used Wits to get better job”). We have meticulously gone over our coverage of the story, to establish how we got it wrong and whether there was any way we could have done it differently. Clearly, we failed to prise out the vital piece of information that he was dying of cancer. But what we stand accused of is far greater in the scheme of things.
Last week, Wits academic William Makgoba – along with three other prominent black intellectuals – dubbed those newspapers who questioned Nolutshungu’s motives for jilting Wits as traitors to the cause of Africanism.
“These insinuations were hurting us Africans,” Makgoba said. “Sam was supported by an orchestra of African intellectuals, politicians, business and all other sectors of our society, with the exception of the conservative white liberal establishment and its media.”
According to our attackers, we should grovel, admit that we are racist, and apologise publicly for betraying the dream of an African Renaissance. The Sunday Independent, in an editorial, said: “We cannot but agree with most of the sentiments [of Makgoba and his allies] … we might have erred in approaching matters from a subconsciously Eurocentric perspective.”
The fact is that our treatment of Nolutshungu was no different from that which we mete out to everyone. We adopted a balanced, if irreverent, tone in reporting the race for the hottest seat in the South African academic world. Last October, the three original contenders – Nolutshungu, Njabulo Ndebele and Wits deputy vice- chancellor June Sinclair – stood before a packed Great Hall to explain why they should get the job. Each, in turn, was critically portrayed in M&G’s report. Sinclair “rocked from one foot to another as she spoke … her audience did not appear inspired”. Nolutshungu’s “smooth delivery did not disguise a lack of content”. Ndebele “spent more than 90% of his speech castigating Wits’s failure to get on with the transformation programme”.
We covered Nolutshungu’s victory the following week in an article which quoted several happy academics who were clearly inspired by the choice. “People were excited and exuberant and motivated for the first time – they bounced in the corridors after hearing him speak,” one academic said. We also noted how those who had once backed Ndebele – including Makgoba – chose at the last minute to throw in their lot with Nolutshungu’s supporters, fearing that Sinclair could otherwise edge in.
In January Nolutshungu rocked South African academe by withdrawing. While his official reason was health (one we quoted in our article), Wits academics and one of Nolutshungu’s long-time friends in Johannesburg painted a slightly different picture. Health was one of several reasons for his change of heart, they told us. Others included his realisation that there was more to the Wits job than he’d originally thought – that its finances were being cut, that many of its best academics were leaving.
The report also quoted Shadrack Gutto, co- chair of the Wits transformation committee, saying that next time the university should explicitly spell out the challenge of the job.
Nolutshungu was in constant contact with Gutto. We faxed our proposed article to Nolutshungu for a response. He faxed it to Gutto for his perusal. It was through Gutto that Nolutshungu indicated he did not wish to comment.
While Nolutshungu declined to respond to us he told his home town newspaper – the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle: “I’m not that sick or crippled. I just don’t feel robust enough for the job.” Wits, meanwhile, said that Nolutshungu had still been haggling over his package on Christmas Eve and disclosed that he had previously turned down a job at the eleventh hour at the university – that of deputy vice chancellor in 1992.
But Nolutshungu kept that discovery to himself, deciding instead after turning Wits down to secure a better position in the United States. The M&G established contact with two of Nolutshungu’s three colleagues at the Frederick Douglass Institute, where he had been acting director for two years.
We reported in a second article how, when asked in a staff meeting if he was really ill, Nolutshungu had answered “of course not” – he had merely been forced to find some explanation for the South Africans. He then quit the institute for a full-time post with Rochester University’s political science department.
Again, we faxed him the article, and again he chose not to respond. And that was that, until it emerged that he had a rare form of cancer. Our next article on the man was his obituary.
It is still difficult to understand what was in Nolutshunga’s mind at the time – the prospect of imminent death clearly affects a person’s attitudes in circumstances such as this. But we cannot help but feel – with all due respect to the memory of Professor Nolutshunga – that he acted somewhat in the way of a person who sees an accident about to happen and fails to do anything to prevent it. At any stage he could have told us he was suffering from cancer and we would have fallen over ourselves to respect his privacy. But he did not do so; instead he allowed us to publish what he seemingly knew was going to be an inaccurate report about the background to his decision. Nor did his close friends, who now say they were aware of the true facts of the illness, raise their voices on the articles at the time.
Did we make mistakes? In the final analysis, yes. We failed to report that he was dying. We deeply regret that. But what can be learnt from the experience? Very little. The methods of reporting we employed were to go to as many relevant sources of information as time allowed and to write the most balanced piece possible. We did not concoct a story, but relied on what people at the universities, black and white, told us.
All we can do is reflect with humility that journalism is an imperfect craft, but this should not deter us in our endeavours to get the story no matter how unpopular that pursuit may be. In a world where public figures – of every hue – often lie, steal from the public purse, play games of subterfuge, foment violence or cover up their infamies, the kind of probing journalism that the M&G practices sheds more light than the bland assurances of bureaucrats and press statements on the Sapa wire.
Such an approach is not risk-free. But to abandon this approach would, we believe, render a disservice to our readers.
Likewise, while we recognise that bland non-racialism can ignore the deeply ingrained legacy of racism in this country, we cannot accept that we should have treated Nolutshungu in any way differently from anyone else who happens to have a different skin colour.
The alternative is the slippery slope of paternalism, a mental return to the Bantu editions once beloved of the mainstream press, in which blacks were regarded as a seperate and different order of being. The M&G has a proud record of opposing racism in this country and neither in terms of editorial staffing, readership or content do we regard ourselves as a “white” paper.
If Makgoba wishes to imply that there is a pattern of racism and a constant demeaning of the image of Africans in the M&G, he should reread his own book, Mokoko, where he is at pains to commend us for our reporting on the Wits saga: “The Mail and Guardian, Business Day and the Sowetan were always balanced in their reporting. The most professional of newspapers were the M&G and Beeld …”
At the end of his book – and with obvious satisfaction – he includes (unattributed) Mark Gevisser’s fairly glowing profile of him.
One element of the Nolutshungu affair on which everyone seems to agree is that he was a brilliant academic, known until now for his work. It would be a pity if his memory were to be tarnished by being exploited as a weapon in another ill- informed rant about the racist, “conservative pseudo-liberal” white media.