John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
Politics is funny. Innuendo is even funnier. Innuendo brought into the service of politics is funny as hell. A lot of people who didn’t know they were in the middle of a game of political innuendo were brought to their knees and died, not realising that it was all supposed to be funny. So innuendo in the service of politics is fun for some, and hell for others. It’s fun for those at the giving end, and hell for the ones who have no choice but to receive it.
We all know what politics is. But what is innuendo?
Innuendo is insinuation – an indirect reference or intimation about something or someone that is intended to give a particular perception of that person, group of persons, or thing, for a particular end.
Innuendo can be used to spread a rumour that might or might not be based on truth, to have an effect in the general mind.
Politics, as I have said, we all know backwards. Politics is what we learned at our mother’s knee when our mother wasn’t looking. Politics is getting the dumb doll out of the other kid’s hands, with the support of your mother, and getting your mother to commit to beat up the other kid’s mother before you will ever agree to hand that kid’s dumb doll back.
Politics (derived from the ancient Greeks, if we accept them as being as human as we are) used to be about “the art or science of government”, but has developed into being “the management of a political party; political affairs, or opinions; manoeuvering and intriguing”. That’s from the dictionary.
Politics is also what we learned at the knee of our current leadership.
Why, then, is this thing of innuendo and politics bothering me this week?
On April 5, the African National Congress (my mother’s knee) submitted its statement on racism in the media to the Human Rights Commission. It is unnecessary to repeat the widely reported story of how, as part of this submission, the ruling party made the outrageous claim that a black journalist, Lizeka Mda, allowed herself to be used as a smokescreen for the racist rantings of a white editor, Phillip van Niekerk. The matter is, in any case, in the hands of lawyers as we speak.
What has not been dwelt on are statements uttered later in the submission. In paragraphs 71.0 to 74.0 of its statement, the ANC, referring to a “need to refer to the role of the ‘black media’ in the propagation of the white stereotype of the African”, turns its attention to the legendary black writers of Drum magazine and other publications of the 1950s.
“Throughout the Fifties,” says our movement on our behalf, “these publications consciously cultivated the notion that African news was necessarily about alcohol abuse, sex, crime, rape and corruption. The model African reporter was he/she who reported best on these subjects …
“The fact of the matter,” it continues, “is that many contemporary African journalists have not broken with this tradition. They believe that the fact that they are African, with easier access to the African communities, gives them a good possibility [sic] to feed the media with a rich diet of salacious stories which are believed to sell newspapers among African readers. Whatever they gain from their work, they also help to sustain the racist images that white South Africa has of both themselves and the people from whom they are drawn. Accordingly, they too become part of the media establishment which necessarily must portray the ‘new South Africa’ in as negative a light as possible because they too have absorbed into their consciousness the white stereotype of the black savage.”
Now, you might say that this is not an example of innuendo, but a statement of the facts, which is how the ANC (the whole ANC, historical and contemporary, or Jeff Radebe, or whoever else was responsible for writing this stuff, nobody really knows) wishes these statements to be received.
Drum magazine certainly turned out salacious stories about life in Sophiatown, Alex and the other black townships. But the best commentaries in Drum dealt in a sober, wry, mocking, self-mocking, angry, outraged and irrepressible way about the multifarious implications of being black in an African country run by Tarzan and Jane.
Among all those writers, some ordinary, some extraordinary, the one who stands out as “the model African reporter” is the legendary Henry Nxumalo. “Mr Drum”, as Nxumalo came to be known, was a fearless investigative journalist who stopped at nothing to get a story that would expose the detailed degradation of the abominable conditions he and his compatriots were forced to endure. He was the man who exposed the Bethal farm scandal, smuggling himself into a labour gang to experience at first hand how white farmers benefited from the free labour supplied by the prisons department. His expos led to the potato boycott, an early form of rolling mass action that was happily exploited by the political movements of the time.
He got himself arrested (conveniently getting caught without his “night pass”) so that he could expose conditions in Johannesburg Central prison. His riveting, deeply serious exploits went on and on, until he was slaughtered late one night by knife-wielding gangsters in Western Native Township. He was on yet another dangerous investigation.
I could cite Can Themba’s experience of being thrown out of a white church so that he could expose the hypocrisy of white Christians. I could go on and on, defending the names of black people who are no longer around to defend themselves.
The point is, by coyly refusing to give names to the Drum writers it is accusing, the ANC smears all of them with the brush of its innuendo. By failing to name the “contemporary African journalists” and give examples of the kind of racist images they help to perpetuate, it smears all of us with that innuendo as well.
I am baffled. I don’t know what political advantage can be gained by these extraordinary statements. I can only say I am appalled at the implications of rewriting some of our history, and of denigrating a substantial part of our present reality.