John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
‘Who steals my purse steals trash,” says Iago to Othello: “’tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands: but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.”
Theft takes all sorts of forms in this fine South Africa of ours. Mostly it is theft of physical property. Earlier this year I told the tale of the doors that had been looted from my house and later showed up in a so-called antique shop in the Jo’burg suburb of Kensington, waiting to be sold on to northern suburbs yuppies who didn’t care whether they were hot or not, as long as they looked nice. It is not a new story, and every South African now seems to accept that this is the way of things around here, with no prospect of improvement.
But to return to the Iago point of view, there is another sort of theft that is equally rampant, and is seemingly even more difficult to get redress for, even in the unlikely event that you should catch the thief red-handed. This is the question of theft of intellectual property.
What I write belongs to me -or to whatever journal publishes it. It is my construct, my angle, the product of whatever knowledge and skills I have acquired over the years. Because it has my name attached to it, it represents part of what I am. It is me – a facet of my “good name”. Parts of it might be informed by or adapted from other sources, but in the making of it, and in particular because of an identifiable way of writing and choice of words, it is mine.
In September last year a major story I wrote in these pages on that schizophrenic Afro- German Riviera city called Cape Town was substantially recycled, word for word, in a certain well-known Sunday newspaper belonging to the Independent group. After a meeting with the editor of that paper, my editor, the thieving scribe and myself, the matter was finally recognised as being a serious one, the scribe was admonished, and an apology was printed in the offending publication.
However, the scribe continued to protest her innocence. She was merely quoting another source, she insisted, and had a tape to prove it. When we listened to the tape, sure enough, there was a strange voice laboriously reciting my words. It was a farce. But it was still blatant theft of my intellectual property.
Two weeks ago, it happened again, and strangely enough, in another rag out of the Independent Newspapers stable. A journalist on the Pretoria News, this time, copied substantial chunks word for word from this very column and peddled them as his own. He was purporting to describe an interview with Jonathan Morgan, co-ordinator of the project that turned into a book called Finding Mr Madini, but instead of doing his own thorough interview, he took my published words and put them into Morgan’s mouth. It was the appalled Morgan himself who drew my attention to this travesty when he chanced upon a copy of the issue that contained the offending piece.
Thus far there has been no reaction to a lawyer’s letter sent to the editor of the Pretoria News, and as far as I can tell Craig Canavan, the thieving hack in question, is probably still going gaily about his business.
Should these little thefts be taken as a compliment to my writing? They would be if I was credited, which is not the case. They are a cause of severe annoyance.
Plagiarism is a grey area of public thieving that has little legal protection in this country: in Europe and the United States this kind of larceny is punished with hefty fines. Here, the general attitude seems to be, “That’s how it goes, just grin and bear it. The Freedom Charter says: The People Shall Help Themselves.”
In the US of A some years ago, Eddie Murphy had to pay substantial damages to that witty columnist Art Buchwald for stealing his original screenplay and putting it out as the movie Coming to America, claiming for himself the credit for the storyline and characters.
In England, Beatle George Harrison was embarrassed to find that My Sweet Lord, a song he thought he’d written, was actually someone else’s composition that he had wittingly or unwittingly copied. The latter case is where things go a bit grey, since it’s hard stop a tune or an idea you heard somewhere lodging itself in your brain, and coming out years later as your own.
But these cases of blatant theft from one newspaper to another are different, because the appropriation is done completely without sophistication. Unlike Antjie Krog’s tale of that fellow in the Boer War who stole another fellow’s horse and thought he could get away with it by dyeing it a different colour with shoe polish, these untalented individuals don’t even try to make the pilfered material look as if it’s their own. They see someone else’s phrase, sentence or even a whole paragraph, decide they like it, and drop it wholesale (and out of rhythm) into what they have been struggling to write.
I think it’s time that a precedent was set in this lawless country, and that someone was made to truly compensate for this kind of behaviour, in the same way that Murphy was obliged to give restitution to Buchwald, even though it was long after the fact. I’m checking out my options, but this time round I’m not prepared to take it lying down.