Phillip van Niekerk:FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
On Monday morning I arrived at work and received the following e-mail from Charlene Smith, one of our correspondents: “I was attacked in my home on Thursday night and raped. I am writing about it, not only because I think `victims’ should speak out, but because, except for the cops, I was not treated well by hospital staff and battled to get AZT, which is critical to try and stop possible HIV infection. Please tell me if you will consider running the piece. I’ve started writing it and it’s a slow and difficult process, but I’m very calm and the writing is unemotional, you will see.”
Anybody who has been through a major life trauma will know how difficult it is to sit down at a keyboard and transform the experience into copy. You have to sift, to organise, to impose coherence on the disordered emotions that the experience leaves in its train.
I was shot in the head in 1992 and, newspaperman though I was, it took me three years and a thousand verbal recountings before I was able to put my feelings in print.
Charlene is one of the gutsiest people I know. She has had her fair share of blows in life but has always got up, dusted herself off and headed back into the fray. Not even the most cynical would have passed judgment if she had decided to pass on this one.
Instead, she produced a story on Monday, word-perfect and ready for publication, and agreed – against the advice of some of her friends – to allow us to publish it.
We decided to run with the story because it highlights the phenomenon of a rape society in a way that statistics never can. Its very rawness makes it an extraordinary, disturbing read.
Charlene is adamant that she doesn’t want to be a victim. And it is not only she who, at the end of the day, we should be concerned about. She will recover, even if she is sick with worry about the possibility of contracting HIV. What I’m not so sure of is the mental health of a society inhabited by sick people like her rapist who is now, hopefully, behind bars.
The Mail & Guardian mailbox has been overflowing with righteous Christians protesting against Zapiro’s cartoon last week which portrayed four Roman centurions – the South African police, the Mozambican police, the white press and the white public – pulling away the boulder outside Jesus’s tomb and finding it empty while Robert McBride hides behind a tree.
It was an audacious, outrageous Easter spoof – exactly what one would expect from Zapiro. For that we make no apologies. The letter writers have a right to their own opinions and beliefs, but those who made an issue of the fact that Zapiro is Jewish must understand why their letters remain unpublished.
Of course we expected some reaction. We never heard the end of it after we printed a joke about President Clinton and the Virgin Mary last year, and it wasn’t the weakness of the joke that was at issue.
I am more puzzled by the discrepancy between the strong feelings towards the cartoon and the silence around Philip Gourevitch’s powerful description of the Rwandan pastor who collaborated in the massacre of Tutsi refugees who sought sanctuary in his church. Now that’s real blasphemy, if you ask me.