Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon
Gnaw on this dainty bone if you will. “The unfair labour practice provisions and provisions against dismissal for arbitrary reasons and unfair dismissal for incapacity should provide some protection.” Or what about this plum, in reply to the question: What is sexual harassment? “The imposition of unwanted conduct of a sexual character on an employee?” Sharon Stone?
Two further extracts from the weekly published commentary to the television series, Buang, supplied by Wits University’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cals). I reproduce these in the process of answering Cals’s Robert Lagrange’s letter – in last week’s Mail & Guardian – complaining about my column of a week or three ago, in which the whole Buang project was the subject.
This column is not a way of getting my own back, so let me begin by admitting to my mistake, the one which Robert Lagrange termed “wild speculation”. I said Cals was a co-producer of the Buang series when, in fact, the Department of Labour dreamed up Buang and commissioned the SABC to produce it.
My error was that I assumed something which is pretty obvious to everyone: for all intents and purposes, the Department of Labour, Cosatu, Cals, and a few others, are all tenants of the same well-feathered nest.
It’s a set-up that makes things very convenient for Wits law professors: having all the major unions and the Department of Labour ready at elbow to run field-trials on all the exciting new labour legislation they cook up.
For, if ever there was a tightly sealed shop, it’s the above, the One-Stop Labour Law Superette. Workers’ Chains Forged on Our Premises. Small Extra Charge for Fitting.
In his complaint, I believe Robert Lagrange misses the point. And I dilate here only because his letter shows the argument clearly needs fuller explanation. What I was criticising was not the idea behind the Buang series, but the patronising tone of the newspaper summaries. Their simplified language; the use of coy little sentences; not too many polysyllables; the cosy little revealing scenarios. T his is exactly what Cals does with its contributions to Buang. Like so many others in the high-growth business of “liberal” education, Cals indulges the gauche habit of addressing black people in a vernacular usually reserved for backward children. Adult and mainly black readers are supplied with weekly summaries of the television storyline, written in a sort of sub-Enid Blyton prose.
Lagrange claims the characters in the Buang series do, indeed, have surnames. They just don’t ever get used. Stitching the pieces with the dehumansing argot of lawyers doesn’t improve matters.
The layout, typography and editing of the Buang newspaper commentaries are a consummate balls-up.
Numbered answers are supplied to un-numbered questions. Sometimes there are more answers than questions, or they publish the wrong set of answers. To describe the whole affair as sub-literate would be to praise it.
Not bad enough, the childish idiom, but the editing is amateur. Hence lines like last week’s: “Alpheus is unfairly excluded from normal activities like having his (?) cut by the factory “barber” or ” Lesego nearly loses his girlfriend over the incident who also can’t expect (sic) the idea that he could allow himself to be the victim of sexual harassment.” To be this sloppy doesn’t whisper of much respect for the readers.
The idea behind the Buang series is seasonably worthy. Its execution is an embarrassing disaster. As humiliating as the newspaper summaries, the television production, by exactly the same routines, addresses its audience as if they are mentally wanting.
Once again I recall Lionel Abrahams’s withering response – published some years ago in the Weekly Mail – to an agonisingly politically correct review in which Jeremy Cronin dripped incandescent praise on some very mediocre black poetry.
Abrahams dumped on what the Cronin review implied, that high “white” standards should not be applied to the work of black writers. Reviewers should stand on a lower critical rung when discussing the work of blacks.
In this wise, do the producers of Buang and their “partners” in Cals believe that black people cannot think in the abstract? That their intellects aren’t sufficiently evolved to absorb information by means of intelligent dissertation and response? That they can only deal with knowledge served up to them in little spoonfuls of tolerant explanation?
Or is this, like so much else, just another grave-robbery? Old Henk Verwoerd must be delighted they’ve at last come round to his ideas about how to keep education down at a level suitable for the Bantus?