The Angella Johnson Interview
His name reminds me of the opening words of the national anthem Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. “Snuki Zikalala Africa,” I find myself chanting hypnotically after each of his news reports for SABC television. Okay, I know that sounds really Eurocentric, but you’ve gotta admit, it does have a certain lilt.
Zikalala, who works in the economics and political section of television news, laughs when I tell him. It seems I’m not the only person to have made the musical connection with his Swazi name. “That’s where my grandparents came from, but I was born in Alex,” he offers. The name Snuki came from his mother’s love of snoek fish when she was pregnant.
A former MK commander who served his 17- year exile in Botswana and behind the Iron Curtain, Zikalala (46) has been a television labour correspondent for three years.
He was the first SABC reporter to catch my ear when I arrived in this country – largely because he used a word out of context in a report. It was a glaring malapropism I’ve since dumped in the trashcan of my memory, but which marked him out for my attention. I grew to look forward to his studious bespectacled face popping up on my screen and his unusual cadence.
Women apparently find him particularly appealing (maybe it’s the Woody Allen intellectual thing), but it has not been an easy road to stardom. “People looked on me as a communist when I arrived,” he says. Many were suspicious of his left-wing politics. “One particularly hostile [white] colleague told me recently that he now realises that I’m a human being.”
A journalism major (his PhD thesis was on the SABC as a propaganda machine), Zikalala was working on the South African Labour Bulletin when he saw the SABC post advertised in a national newspaper. He arrived to find the corporation still resistant to stories about black people. When eight children from Soweto were killed in a kombi accident, a white female colleague was dismissive. “This kind of thing happens all the time, why bother to cover it?” she told Zikalala.
There was a similar antipathy towards stories about labour issues, which were viewed as communist. So he started to attend morning conferences and argued against this apartheid-style censorship. “I explained that economics was part and parcel of labour and the viewers must know what’s going on. It was difficult, but eventually they listened.”
There is passion in his voice when he speaks about labour issues. Zikalala is driven by his sympathy for workers. “They have been downtrodden for years and I want to make sure their views are heard. Poor people’s rights are still not respected; they are underpaid and exploited.”
He complains that big companies will woo black managers to show they are progressive, “but if you go to the shop floor you will find that racism is still rife and separate facilities exist for black and white staff”. As for those who employ visible blacks at inflated salaries: “It’s just window-dressing. They are usually put in human resources, where they can deal with black staff. They’re not independent and have no input in the decision-making process.”
You might think from reading this that Zikalala is some kind of communist zealot. Not so. He used to be a socialist, but he’s now a social democrat (sounds very new-age Tony Blair to me – a capitalist with a conscience). “It means that I believe in equality, in levelling the playing field and narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor,” says Zikalala smoothly.
His roots are strictly labouring class – mum was a factory machinist and dad a company driver. Zikalala, his four brothers and two sisters grew up in Alexandra township where they owned a two-bedroom house. But in 1962 the family was moved to Diepkloof as part of the National Party’s social engineering programme.
“I was about eight and I remember my mother crying a lot when some men came one day with a truck and told us to pack what we could. They just took the house my parents had bought and put us in a Zulu speaking part of Soweto – it was part of their divide-and-rule policy,” he recounts.
Ethnic rivalry was rife at his Orlando school. “I was part of a Zulu-speaking gang; we went around armed with knives and tomahawks. It was very violent and a case of survival of the fittest.”
His father had two wives and Zikalala was largely brought up by his mother. He helped to make ends meet by selling peanuts and lollipops on commuter trains after school. Although he was a good pupil, money was in short supply and at 15 he went to work as a delivery boy for a Johannesburg company, matriculating later through a correspondence course.
Soon Zikalala was knee-deep in ANC youth activities. “I was in town doing deliveries when I met Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and we started talking politics. It was she who suggested that I get involved in underground politics.” He describes her as inspirational and very brave. “We distributed leaflets at night and held lectures about the struggle. Sometimes it was done at my home, and I’d tell my mother it was a church meeting.”
But in May 1969 Zikalala and Madikizela- Mandela were among some 160 activists arrested. “They [the police] kicked down my door at about 2am in the morning, confiscated some of my Marxist literature and carted me off to Pretoria.”
After being interrogated and tortured, he was held for a year in solitary confinement. “When I came out they slapped a banning order on me, but I managed to get work as a computer punch operator. They sacked me when I started organising workers.”
He eventually skipped the country for exile in Botswana where he ran an ANC cell from 1974 to 1978, married Pinkie – a teacher also in exile – before being expelled as a prohibited immigrant. The ANC sent them to Bulgaria where he studied journalism and Pinkie became a doctor. He stayed for 11 isolated years.
It took four years for news of his mother’s death to reach him and two years before he heard that a brother had been abducted and murdered by men wearing police uniforms. Meanwhile Bulgaria was not living up to his socialist Utopian expectations. “I had cherished the ideals of the country but realised they were false. It was state capitalism. There was no democracy.” Working for a trade union magazine (he speaks fluent Bulgarian) Zikalala became disenchanted with writing propaganda.
“There was also lots of racism; you couldn’t walk with a white woman without being beaten up. White students would not sit with us. I realised it was difficult for white people to respect black people as equals.”
Zikalala returned home in 1991, but was promptly arrested in Pretoria while getting identity documents with his wife and three children. He spent two months in solitary until Chris Hani interceded. “I used to hate everything to do with white people – especially the police and the army. It’s not easy to shake that passion, but I’m trying to keep a spirit of reconciliation.”