Channel vision
Last week I was harping on about how television delivers up its little shock tactics. Some crafty incubus waits until the audience is deep in mindless acceptance mode, then slips in a dart so sharp as to horrify. Last Saturday this happened in the middle of an SABC3 news bulletin. The effect was easily as shocking as the BBC news item about the Muslim boys’ soccer team in Grozny maimed by one of Mr Yeltsin’s ethnic tank shells.
Some 700 farm schools in the Eastern Province have closed down due to the non- payment of government subsidies – have been closed down since June last year. A hostel in Middleburg can no longer afford to feed its children.
As a result of yet another administrative fiasco in South Africa’s education system, literally thousands of dispossessed children are, in the words of the reporter, Karlien Viljoen, “having a perpetual holiday they do not want”. It would seem that where Mr Yeltsin maims children’s limbs, our leaders would only cripple their minds.
A meeting with Eastern Province education officials had been arranged, but the officials pulled out with an hour to go. One of the banners in a small protest demonstration, wielded by a young boy, stated the unanswerable: “President Mbeki, you had an education. I want one too.”
This bitter irony belied composition by a child, more especially a child denied even the crude beginnings of an education. This was an adult hand. Even so, the two simple lines somehow exposed a brand new duplication of old sins. Be it as consequence of bureaucratic ineptitude or simply good old corruption, what is happening in these farm schools is as faithful a reproduction of apartheid’s meanest deprivations as anything Verwoerd ever dreamed of. In fact it’s several degrees more selfish than even that. Verwoerd spoke of education “suitable for the Bantu”. In the Eastern Cape this is being replaced by no education at all.
The SABC television news department earns great kudos when it airs this sort of item, a lot of which kudos it squandered when Sunday’s Newshour hastily glossed over the matter of the composition of the vaunted new Aids Council – as patent and fumbling a political balls-up as anything that’s gone before. There is a begging need for a television special on this subject, not a few hasty nibbles.
I know I tend to come back to Denis Beckett more than I otherwise might, but this is only because Denis Beckett keeps coming back to me. Week after week I find myself drawn, as by a giant magnet, towards his programme, Beckett’s Trek. I am never disappointed.
Back from Tanzania, Denis has set off on a pensive cross-country dawdle where, with great skill, he plays the double roles of social consultant and prophet. He reminds me very much of Johnny Appleseed, an American folk hero of the early 1800s who used to travel around planting apple trees. Johnny Appleseed was seen as symbolic of westward- moving civilisation. Denis Beckett, on the other hand, tends to symbolise in all directions at once. And instead of apple seeds, Denis scatters homily grits, mostly to any indigenous persons who cross his speculative path. Moist-eyed paternalism of such specific gravity is a rarity. Whereas Johnny Appleseed left behind orchards, in Denis Beckett’s wake are hundreds of faintly bemused peasant farmers, newly advantaged roadside stall owners, minor civil servants and community leaders.
Mention should be made of the great strides Denis has made in his Fanagalo (Higher Grade) and which now he deploys at the drop of a sanibonani. He still has to use a lot of expressive mime to get his finer points across and his elegantly windmilling arms and hands are the most entertaining thing on local telly these days. In closing this brief panegyric I might congratulate Denis Becket on being the only person I’ve heard on the SABC who knows how to pronounce the word “pristine” correctly.
Carte Blanche returned last week. An item in the first programme dealt with the growing instances of brutal physical and mental abuse of the elderly and frail – both by their relatives and in some old-age homes. Hidden cameras revealed open physical assault of these defenceless by their nurses.
It will be interesting to see whether this piece inspires as much public indignation as those Carte Blanche exposs of elephants being beaten; more especially indignation in regard to the blathering idiocies of the flylike representative of the Human Rights Commission. As buzzy a self-righteous pomposity as you’d wish you could swat.