Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
It needs a particular sort of arrogance to treat any language with contempt. Perhaps it’s just plain stupidity – some are just so plain dumb they will never know the difference?
I know this is a favourite soapbox of mine, but then I happen to enjoy the English language when it is used efficiently and when at least an occasional respectful nod is made in the direction of its structures. I also have a preference for listening to music performed by artists who take the trouble to obey the ground rules of musicianship, who have practised their instruments, who don’t play long lines of wrong notes to wrong time signatures.
This is why I continue to react in anger to the crude mockery of English which has all but overtaken our radio and television services. Never mind local accents and idioms, these are to be expected and, in their way, eventually enrich language. No one could rightly expect our local stations to adopt old- style approved BBC delivery of English. What we have every right to expect, though, is some doormat respect for the language – wipe your feet before you soil it.
Take just one example, a Good Friday e.tv news bulletin in which that spluttering paragon of slipshod enunciation, Mr San Reddy, referred to the “crucification” of Christ. What sort of sub-literate prick in the newsroom wrote that? What level of news editor let that through? What sort of “professional” newsreader in Reddy actually said it out loud? Clearly they are all just as backward as each other in the e.tv newsroom.
I wonder whether the current batch of radio and television newsroom workers – no one could confidently call them journalists – are at all aware of what a laughing stock they have become. Their stumbling versions of English are a continual source of embarrassed laughter, what with their “confistications” and their “orpinions” and their “eetchellins” and all the rest of what could charitably be called a sort of idiot’s patois.
Could someone in the SABC’s upper “eetchellins” stretch down and impose some sort of flow control on the runaway sluice that its newsroom so often is? In a recent television report on an Easter weekend road accident, the reporter gloated about the “blobs of human flesh, bits of intestine and human brains” that were scattered around the wreckage. We were given close-up shots of the said human shreds. Again, what brand of news editor chooses this sort of brute’s delight? What is the SABC becoming when its television news so often looks like a butcher’s block? Come on, Vincent Maphai, make a difference.
Joe Louw’s disturbing documentary about slave trading in Southern Sudan was a fine and ultimately very honest piece of work, especially in that it acknowledged its own inability to get to the bottom of the human outrage it revealed.
Louw’s piece took up most of SABC3’s Newshour last Sunday evening. What he reported was a blatantly corrupt trade in human cargo. The Swiss organisation, Christian Solidarity International (CSI), “redeems” Sudanese women and children, ostensibly abducted into slavery by government militia. The “redemption” is bought with bundles of hard cash, the recipients so-called “Arabs” – heavily masked men who have “rescued” the slaves from their bondage.
Having doled out hard cash for the children and women, what CSI also does is immediately lose grip of its Samaritan instincts. Its representative offers a few welcoming sentences to the “redeemed” slaves and then walks away leaving them to find their own way back to their homes and families. He then sits back and waits for the next batch.
That the whole business is racked with corruption is easy to see. What Louw seemed unable to find was anyone who would testify first-hand to the privations and cruelty visited on the slaves during their slavery – or, for that matter, anyone who was willing to speak openly about what was truly happening – certainly not with rebel soldiers in earshot. In any event all interpreters were in the paid service of CSI. As Louw commented, this unholy trade demands investigation by an independent international body.
A recent SABC3 broadcast of Pride and Prejudice was accompanied by a yellow warning triangle inscribed PG/L – Parental Guidance Advised/Offensive Language. In Jane Austen? As my perceptive friend Lionel Abrahams observed in an e-mail: “Perhaps what’s being betrayed is a new level of paranoia about Eurocentrism and elitism.”