Es’kia Mphahlele a second look I endorse everything that Arthur Maimane wrote in the Mail & Guardian (“A masterpiece in bronze”, July 14 to 20) concerning the relative merits of some of the former Drum writers. There was no reason for naming an award after Nat Nakasa for outstanding service to journalism above the greater, seasoned professionals such as Henry Nxumalo, Arthur Maimane and Aggrey Klaaste. Maimane is himself a deserving journalist of international standing and has been on the beat for half a century. He worked with Nxumalo for almost 10 years. Maimane has given us a brief but sharply etched profile of Nxumalo’s investigative reporting: a journalist par excellence, way above the mere hack reporter. This kind of in-depth reporting has unfortunately fallen upon evil days. It has been relegated to television of late, for we are stuck on visual entertainment. By the same token we have become allergic to the printed word. “If you don’t want people to know what you’re thinking so they can debate the content, write it down,” I hear the cynical half of me saying. From tertiary education through postgraduate research, for which criti-cal reading is indispensable, sloth has set in. For this reason we are all too ready to pick up a buzz here, there, everywhere about events and personalities and blow them up in the public imagination. We respond with the enthusiasm already set to the pitch of our screaming, collective hero-hungry selves. We wait for opinion- makers or high-ranking politicians to invent heroes for us. It used to be the white man who foisted homeland- style headmen on us. Today we blacks do it to ourselves, little realising that we are playing a cruel joke on one another.
See how, for instance, Hector Petersen shot up into the limelight on the strength of a single dramatic news photograph. I’m not minimising the sorrow those children portray in the picture. But in my own inner search for symbols and meanings, history tells me that the brutal 1976 events and their aftermath have dimensions far too awesome to be contained by a single click of a camera. Even granting that there is a handy symbol here. Have you realised, a friend of mine remarked to me recently, that every time there is mention of Drum writers, the only names that crop up are Can Themba, Nat Nakasa and Bloke Modisane? And so other careers throw up success stories – in a major or minor key – and the junketing continues. To have continued to sideline Nxumalo (Maimane’s senior in years), as Maimane’s article should suggest, shows the depressingly uncritical trend this society has come to embrace. And this, in many other areas of cultural expression beside journalism.
Let us think through the appropriate ways in which we can interpret the symbol personi-fied by Nxumalo’s heroic career, an idea we can own as a people. It can be a chastening educational experience for us focusing on the pioneering days when African journalists brought little more to their job than drive, will, a sense of adventure, zest for life, a writing tradition that dated back to the Lovedale Press of 1826 (Cape) and the Morija Press of 1841 (Lesotho). Traditions that culminated in the writings of figures such as Thomas Mofolo, AC Jordan, Sol Plaatje, HIE Dhlomo. But the younger breed were skittish, kicking the prose medium around, giving it blood and bones. Their ghetto environment was as depressing as it sharpened their vigilance and inspired a language that might lift them out of the morass. In a perverse way, the ghetto gave them a purpose to live, tame it and hug it. The pay was goat’s droppings, really: average 40. There were no workshops and one had to educate oneself. The white media were – well – very white. That world generally knew nothing of what the new “black” journalism was minting over there across the tracks. The 1950s, as we know, were riddled through with racism, a long repertoire of anti-black laws to legalise state violence; the architects and drivers of apartheid and their minions up at dawn, flexing their muscles, ready for blood to test their newfound power. This was Nxumalo’s environment. He died in the trenches, you could say. For we have learned since then from the men who have been filing through the gates of amnesty that they saw themselves as soldiers at war.