Robert Kirby: Loose cannon Reading last Monday’s editorial in the Cape Times, I felt a cloak of nostalgia envelop me. At the best of times a second-hand emotion, nostalgia does, however, have its uses.
On this occasion it took me all the way back to 1966 and to a brief appointment I had with broadcasting history.
As an inmate of the SABC’s English Service announcers’ kennels, I was one of three chosen to commentate live on the funeral of Dr HF Verwoerd.
On the day, I was perched on a balcony jutting out from a fine Pretoria building belonging to the Standard Bank. From this eyrie I had an uninterrupted view, not only eastwards up Church Street from where the cortge would approach, but across Church Square – through which it would pass.
To this day I can’t imagine why the SABC chose me for this job.
I like to think it was because those in charge felt fairly confident I would not be overcome and thus inarticulate from the hideous grief I would feel as the brooding gun- carriage passed beneath.
The celebrations kicked off at the Union Buildings. Kim Shippey was the compre. His job was to describe the prayers, introduce the eulogies, sing along with the hymns and only hang his eyes out to dry as Hendrik and all his mourners slowly disappeared down Kerkstraat, in my direction.
After I’d finished my own melancholy description of the procession around Church Square, I passed Hank on to the dreaded Dewar McCormack who, with much sincere gnashing of his dentures, saw the father of grand apartheid into his Heroes Acre grave – or ”final sad resting place after a long and selfless journey of duty” as Dewar preferred to call it. He then helpfully informed the grieving radio listeners that the grave had been specially dug by pupils of the Sonneblom High School.
But what has all this merry recollection got to do, I hear you ask, with last Monday’s Cape Times editorial? I’ll tell you. It’s because that editorial showed that although Dr Verwoerd may be dead and long gone, his political drivel sloshes on.
I won’t go as far as to say the Cape Times editorial was written by the editor, Ryland Fisher, with the morose shade of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd actually whispering in his ear.
This is because Mr Fisher – or whoever wrote this editorial for him – was obviously more than capable of doing Verwoerdean drivel-impersonations unassisted.
Last Monday’s Cape Times editorial was an overdue acknowledgment that the Verwoerdean exemplar of fatuous political semantics has not been lost to the world. Some idiocies survive even the most passionate of transformations.
In commenting on what it describes as a ”major social event in the Western Cape” – a dinner party hosted by the Black Management Forum (BMF) – the editorial went on:
”But the question has been asked by some: ‘Why would a newspaper like the Cape Times, which strongly promotes non-racialism, support an organisation like the BMF which, surely, is a racially exclusive organisation?”’
The editorial then proceeded to explain the illusive distinction between ”racist” and ”racial”, concluding its argument by saying that, ”if a White Management Forum [WMF] held a similar social event, this would be a ‘racist’ affair since no white managers were ‘disadvantaged’ by the previous political dispensation … so there is not much to be done in the way of redressing factors negatively affecting white managers”. Of whose presumably ”racist” sinecures the very same nonracialist Cape Times has recently enthusiastically been divesting itself.
The editorial’s somewhat startling pay-off says that ”… while the BMF’s focus is racial, WMF’s focus would probably be racist”.
Now, we all know that Fisher occupies a seat once warmed by Tony Heard, but this does not mean Ryland has to be this assiduously slavish to puerile Cape Times editorial traditions – even Kosie Viviers couldn’t quite manage that.
What Fisher must do is concede a loftier mentor, that is, the late Dr Verwoerd who, in the idyllic summers of his fascist reverie, regularly emitted exactly the same brand of anile wordplay.
As Ryland draws distinctions between ”racial” and ”racist” our minds fly back to the Verwoerdean political thesaurus where it was recommended that ”apartheid” be better called ”separate development”. When that didn’t go down all that well at the United Nations, overnight it became ”plural relations”.
Prototype political correctness you might say. If ”genocide” sounds much nicer than ”ethnic cleansing”, why not ”racial” instead of ”racist”?
Nice to know Mr Verwoerd’s tortuous morphemics have a final resting place down in Newspaper House.