Ronald Suresh Roberts
Crossfire
In an obscurely reasoned editorial (“A new strain of racial prejudice”, July 23 to 29), the Mail & Guardian has announced the arrival of a “virulent” new anti-white racism. It blames this phenomenon on other newspapers, on their alleged “instinct to cosy up to the political power of the day”, churning out “sunshine journalism”.
Perhaps the M&G’s alternative brand should be called “moonshine journalism”? For only a drunken buddy of Krisjan Lemmer could mistake the attacks on Land Bank MD Helena Dolny for the sort of upbeat, happy-clappy stories usually understood as “sunshine journalism”.
We are meant to believe that M&G hacks are courageous attackers while other newspapers hire meek sunshine kids. Yet Lizeka Mda, whose attack on Max du Preez the M&G now judges “the low point of journalism in the new South Africa”, was herself an M&G staffer until almost a year ago. And from the M&G she launched a similar attack, not on a white lefty, but on the country’s president-in- waiting, Thabo Mbeki. Without any factual substantiation whatsoever, the M&G saw fit to print Mda’s self-described “urban legend”, “rumours” and “perception” and her conclusion that Mbeki was “supplanting democratic institutions with patronage to one man … There’s a name for that: dictatorship.” (“A short leap to dictatorship”, March 27 to April 2 1998).
Defending Mda, the M&G editor crisply summarised the moonshine journalism creed: “In politics perception is everything and even hallucinations, if they are genuinely received as reality by enough of the public, should be taken seriously.” (Editorial, April 3 to 8, 1998). Well, if Mda’s old hallucinations about Mbeki were so worthy, why are her new hallucinations about whites less so?
Contrary to the moonshine creed, hallucination has no defensible place in political commentary. Yet the M&G, having endorsed the view, in order to attack a black deputy president, that perception is all, now pontificates, in defence of a white parastatal executive, that facts are everything. The objection that the attacks on Dolny were based on “no other evidence than the say-so of a highly dubious source” comes oddly from an editor who defended the publication of anti-Mbeki attacks avowedly based on rumour, innuendo and urban legend.
The M&G’s old hallucinatory tricks continue, now, in new ways. The dodgy Bonile Jack’s “report” to Mbeki has no more inherent significance than, say, rightwinger “Suiker” Brits’s discredited “report”, last year, that African National Congress bigwigs were plotting a military coup.
Factual aspects of the Dolny affair are currently being investigated by tax attorney Michael Katz, that well-known black nationalist zealot. Yet Dolny’s self- appointed defenders, ignoring Katz’s ongoing labours, have themselves elevated Jack’s “report” to the status of final judgment, as though Mbeki were intellectually prostrated by the arrival on his desk of Jack’s allegations.
What is David Beresford really up to? Here is a telling non sequitur, from his London Observer article (“Slovo widow racist smear”, July 18): “The Star – which once smeared [Joe] Slovo by claiming he had murdered his first wife, Ruth First, has now introduced possibly the most aggressive affirmative action programme in the industry.” Hit squad propaganda. Affirmative action. Similarly brutal? Perhaps.
With friends like these, Dolny needs no enemies. In order to insinuate that Mbeki is purging the “few remaining whites” like Derek Hanekom from the Cabinet, Beresford mendaciously conceals from his foreign readership that there are as many whites in Mbeki’s as in Nelson Mandela’s Cabinet – and that more blacks than whites have departed.
It is clear that Dolny’s false friends have martyred her for their own racialised and reactionary reasons. Beresford tells his British audience that “the race card is being played again in South Africa, but this time its victims are white liberals who helped to fight apartheid”. Only much moonshine later could anyone confuse Slovo’s widow, a lifelong socialist, with a “liberal”.
Beresford is a careful journalist and this is not mere incompetence. It is a deliberate attempt to confer a common impression – of courage tragically betrayed – upon genuine white revolutionaries (such as Dolny) and Beresford’s tepid friends in the Democratic Party.
The racial aspects of the Dolny case (if they exist at all), involve not some specious new racism directed at “liberals” but the age-old intra-ANC “national question”: the relative places of blacks, whites, coloureds and Indians in a non- racial ANC. And Peter Mokaba, the noisiest advocate of confining minority influence within the ANC, was dropped by Mbeki.
As South Africa’s mutant liberals find themselves with increased parliamentary representation but decreased parliamentary clout, they have embarked on a new and vile campaign: they systematically confer unwanted martyr status on every hard-up white they can find.
Thus the opportunism with which the M&Gand the liberals at Business Day have treated Edwin Cameron, ignoring Cameron’s own public comment that racial representivity is legitimate for the Constitutional Court. Cameron himself, far from sulking, joined the Constitutional Court this week as an acting judge. Yet self-appointed sulkers like the M&G, in need of white martyr figures, have portrayed him as a kind of Edwin at Gethsemane. Did Beresford speak to Cameron before shoving his name into such a distasteful editorial?
Likewise Denis Davis, who was ludicrously attacked a “racist” by Barney Pityana, has hardly been disabled by Pityana’s misplaced venom. He works constructively as a member of the Cape High Court while others whinge on his behalf and for their own reasons.
And Billy Cobbett evidently demonstrates that emigration, too, is martyrdom. The only genuine whinger in the M&G’s whites- only martyrs gallery is Du Preez, a racial martyr now employed by a black-owned media group. Is this the new racism?
Behind the M&G’s vicarious crocodile tears is a divisive strategy intended to make more whites back reactionary “liberals” – hence Dolny’s unwanted rebirth as “liberal” victim.
In Parliament, Tony Leon whines that Ronnie Kasrils is a “token white”, implying that the only real white is a “fight-back” white. Meanwhile, Leon’s extra- parliamentary nose-wipers like Beresford create the supporting myth that whites who don’t “fight back” get mauled.