David Beresford, a veteran foreign correspondent and associate editor of the Mail & Guardian, has been subjected to a torrent of abuse since publication of an article in The Observer about the Helena Dolny `scandal’. Here he explains his approach to the story
I was high in the sky over Namibia heading for South Africa when I opened The Star of July 15 to the headline: “Serious allegations against Slovo’s widow.” Startled I read on: Helena Dolny was being accused of “corruption, mismanagement, racism, nepotism and trying to more than double her salary” as managing director of the Land Bank.
Scanning the story I settled back in my seat and mulled over it. Could it be true ? I mused. I had never met the woman. Probably an old Stalinist like Slovo … No, that was unfair, he’d recanted and paid his dues … Heroic, really, the way he’d faced down the cancer. The images flickered through my mind of the gun-carriage carrying his coffin, the huge crowds of mourners at his Soweto funeral …
Slovo’s widow, corrupt? Why not ? I’d got it wrong, admiring Allan Boesak … Nepotism? Well, there’s a skills shortage … A racist, Slovo’s widow!
“Corruption, mismanagement, racism, nepotism and trying to more than double her salary.” Sounded like a line from a Monty Python comedy: “The state charges you with murder, rape and genocide,” thundered the prosecutor, “and pissing on the sidewalk.” At least pissing on the sidewalk was an offence.
I scanned the story again. Lots on Dolny. A whole biography inside … a Phd … 27 years younger than Joe … victimised for marrying a “terrorist” … But nothing on her accuser, Bonile Jack, “the former chairman of the bank’s board”. Why “former”?
“Have you got anything for us this week ?” asked The Observer’s news editor when I arrived back in Johannesburg. “Well … Joe Slovo’s widow has been accused of racism and corruption,” I said.
“You’re not serious!” exclaimed the news editor with the incredulity to be expected from a man who had been a passionate anti- apartheid supporter. “Why?”
I hesitantly started trying to offer hypotheses which might explain the seemingly inexplicable.
“Write us a piece,” he cut me off with the impatience of his breed.
Hurriedly I started phoning around. I could not reach Dolny – she was on holiday in the Comores. But others could help and the picture started building.
She had been given the challenge by Nelson Mandela, to reform one of the most hide- bound of apartheid institutions remaining in the country – the Land Bank, an all- white, all-male, all-Afrikaans institution when she had been appointed.
Opinions about her performance seemed to be judicious rather than friendly – seemingly she had an abrasive personality and was intolerant of incompetence with a blunt disregard for the gender, race, or previous political affiliations of the incompetent. Her achievements reforming the Bank were described, cautiously – one might almost say reluctantly – as “impressive”. The salary allegation might be true, she seemed to have high regard for her own judgment; maybe she had a similar regard for its value.
The picture of Jack which emerged was very different. The former director general of agriculture in that make-believe, tin-pot dictatorship of the Ciskei, he seemingly had motivation for a grudge – having been refused confirmation of his “acting” chairmanship of the Land Bank. Refusal followed the disclosure that he had quit from his previous job with the Independent Development Trust (IDT) after being accused of a serious conflict of interest.
A local colleague e-mailed to me the original article on Jack’s disgrace at the IDT. It had been published in the Cape Times, a sister newspaper of The Star. I double-checked and, sure enough, it was there in the Independent group’s archive.
By the Friday of that week there was obviously more to come out about Jack’s background – I had received a tip-off that he had been investigated for corruption in the Ciskei – but time was running out for The Observer’s foreign-page deadline. It was time to write.
I sat down at my keyboard. “Why?” the news editor had asked.
An apparent motive was emerging for Jack to have made the allegations against Dolny. But why The Star? Why had the newspaper which libelled Slovo in the old South Africa – accusing him of murdering his first wife, Ruth First – now smeared his widow in the new South Africa ? And with the racism charge, of all things.
I picked up an article someone had left on my desk, a recent racial tirade by a senior writer with The Star against the journalist, Max du Preez. I remembered the racial smear on a seemingly decent judge which recently had another senior writer with The Star apologising in the high court. The fuddy-duddy, pompous, pusillanimous, insufferably male and white- dominated old Star, galvanised by a new black radicalism. And I started writing, about a curious new trend in South Africa which had set blacks against their former white allies …
The upshot was an article of little more than passing interest to The Observer readers and hence to its sub-editors who buried it deep in the paper after hacking a third off the piece. (One sub, less then sensitive to the niceties of South African political nomenclature, compressed a reference to the “white left and liberals” by knocking out the “left” – an edit which inspired that peripatetic intellectual, Ronald Suresh Roberts, to indulge in a frothing polemic in these pages last week (Crossfire, July 30 to August 5) which concluded with the judgment that I was “extra-parliamentary nose-wiper to Tony Leon”!
Nose-wiper?
By contrast South African interest in the article was to be intense, at least in some quarters – notably The Star which went to the lengths of belatedly addressing an open letter to me, some 10 days after publication of The Observer article. The wave of abuse left me puzzling: what happened?
The Star was no help in providing answers. The nature of their attack was apparent from the Aunt Sally headlines to the two leader-page articles which offered analysis of the fuss: “Sections of our society believe all criminals are black, writes Jovial Rantao” and “Should black reporters expose white transgressors, asks Mathatha Tsedu.”
Sections of society have been known to believe in flying saucers, the immortality of Elvis Presley and FW de Klerk’s innocence, but I refuse to believe even that those who subject themselves to the regular perusal of The Star are in such a state of mental decline as to believe that “all criminals are black”.
As for Tsedu’s agonising over the probity of black reporters exposing white transgressors, if he would get around to reading this newspaper regularly he will quickly learn that this step can be taken without any deleterious consequences.
But it is obvious, even from these articles, that the nub of the charge was that I was somehow a “racist”.
With all due respect, I must plead not guilty to that charge. Nor am I guilty of the “I-am-no-racist-but …” school of hypocrisy. Nor, for that matter, will I accept the charge of “subliminal racism” which the associations of black lawyers and black accountants tried to weasel through the Human Rights Commission against the M&G and the Sunday Times.
To exploit a point previously made by another writer, if members of those august associations care to turn themselves in as (by way of Sigmund Freud) mother-rapists and parricides I’ll consider giving myself up as a subliminal racist.
Racial baggage I will admit to; it is carried fairly universally in this blighted age of ours. But if I am to be convicted of a more heinous crime with regard to racism I can only suggest they investigate the charge sometimes used among the orthodox in the Hebrew community, of the “self-loathing Jew”.
Who else but a “self-loathing white” could listen to his long-time hero, John Pilger, cross swords with Ronald Suresh Roberts (yes, the snotty one who seems to be among the melanin-blessed) in a scintillating verbal duel at the dinner table and find himself mentally urging: “Stick it to him, Ronnie!”
Shakespearean fans might be horrified to find me hesitating between the Bard and Nat Nakasa if some passing fairy godmother were unkind enough to offer me only a single wish. A rugby enthusiast, I remain convinced that all would be right with the Springboks if only they would pass the bloody ball to Breyton Paulse, and I fear a mental breakdown when South Africa faces the Wallabies in the rugby World Cup; not out of any perverse attachment for that notorious nation of sheep-shaggers, but loyalty to that wizard hovering around the base of the Aussie scrum, the melanin- blessed Georgie Gregan.
Joost van der Westhuizen’s not too bad, of course. Trouble is he’s so … well, frankly … white!
Which brings me back to Dolny and Independent newspapers. The M&G has long made a habit of criticising newspapers in the Independent group and I believe justifiably so. There are strong arguments why newspapers should not attack one another – the general reader tends to be totally uninterested in such squabbles and it is anyway a cannibalistic trend in an industry which can ill afford self- destructive tendencies.
On the other hand, it can be a healthy sign of diversity which is the great strength, for example, of the United Kingdom media and is the antithesis of the homogenisation which has been the trend of the South African press under the dominance of Tony O’Reilly’s Independent newspapers. His group is over-ripe for attack as a near- monopoly, arguably a dead hand on the industry.
I must admit I nursed a grudging respect for the lofty disdain shown by The Star’s editor, Peter Sullivan, to the brickbats thrown in his direction by the M&G. The touch of an old newspaperman was to be recognised in his apparent assessment that there was no advantage to be gained for his newspaper by retaliating in kind. It would only give the upstart M&G recognition, acknowledging its right to be dealt with on equal terms by the “big boys” in town.
Which made it even more difficult to understand how such an experienced newspaperman could have missed the wealth of warning signs where the Dolny “scandal” was concerned.
Certainly they seemed obvious enough for me to start looking for explanations other than her guilt. An explanation which would account for the staid old Star lending herself to such an attack on Du Preez, to the smear on Judge Ezra Goldstein’s court and now this full-scale assault on Slovo’s widow.
On the face of it, it appeared that the newspaper – which had shown itself anxious in the past to cozy up to the government with exercises in sunshine journalism as well as an unexpectedly aggressive (which is not to say unjustified, or for that matter less than admirable) affirmative action programme – was now pandering to anti-white sentiment.
Was it? I might have overlooked it in the storm, but so far I have not seen an alternative explanation.