Charlene Smith
crossfire
The list of conspirators against President Thabo Mbeki grows ever longer. On Monday I returned home from lending support to a young rape survivor, took out a thick wad of letters from people with HIV in my letter box, and downloaded e-mails to discover that I was leading a right-wing media conspiracy against the president.
I don’t know where I get the time. Friends alerted me to a radio interview with presidential representative Smuts Ngonyama on Monday. He said I had an agenda against the president and was leading a right-wing media conspiracy.
Do I have an agenda against the president? Not that I was aware of, but I am as a long-time political journalist interested in governments that don’t respect human rights.
I didn’t keep quiet under apartheid and I won’t be silent now not only about the failings of this government but the course President George W Bush is following in the United States, that of President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and the disgraceful conduct of Russia toward Chechnya, as but three examples.
I scratched in my desk drawer and found an African National Congress membership card, number 2879554, dated July 1996 for Johannesburg north-west in the name of Charlene Smith. It was not my first ANC membership card, it was my last.
No journalist should ever belong to a political party. It is one of the most important tenets of journalism. But I began journalism as a 17-year-old in 1976 and the genocidal atrocities of apartheid horrified this white child brought up in a conservative home.
I reported on the June 1976 Soweto uprising and saw the first dead bodies and experienced the first deep sorrow of my life. It instilled in me an anger so acute against apartheid that I never stopped going into townships and writing about injustice.
My political views split my family and saw me rejected by my father who called me a traitor and a communist. I vowed never to vote until black people could vote in a non-racial democratic state. I voted for the first time in 1994.
I am an African bleached by the sun, I owe everything to this country, I love it beyond measure. When my ex-husband, an American, left South Africa in 1986 to work first in Japan then Argentina, I at first did not follow. I had given up journalism and was immersed in apartheid resistance work. I later joined him and travelled to Japan assisting the anti-apartheid organisation in that country. I did the same in Argentina.
In 1999 I was raped that act opened my eyes to the fact that I was so enamoured of our new democracy that I was putting a political party above my work as a journalist. I was writing about our wonderful Bill of Rights, our great Constitution and not getting out of the office enough to see whether positive change was coming to all of our people. I had become a propagandist and not a social commentator.
Being raped reopened my eyes to the world of suffering experienced by South African women and children. I had been writing about HIV/Aids but it was only when I was at direct risk from the virus that I understood the terror that accompanies HIV in a country where treatment is for the rich.
I recently spent six weeks travelling South Africa researching HIV in villages, small towns and rural areas. Dire predictions are immobilising us; I wanted to see how people were coping. Can we find cutting-edge solutions to combat the greatest disaster humankind has ever confronted? What I saw was devastating poverty most of this country goes to bed at night hungry, most people have no access to clean water, or the most basic medication.
Among those people were the angels of Southern Africa, unpaid Aids workers who trudge kilometres to help the most marginalised and stigmatised in society they don’t complain, they act. They shame us all.
What of the present conspiracy charges? They would be easy to dismiss, but perhaps we need to look closer: an important discourse has begun about the nature of democracy, the levels of respect that should be shown to the presidency, the role of the media, our responsibilities as citizens. In many nations such discussions have seen people scuttle in fear and clam up.
This democracy was hard-won many people died for the right to be heard we dare not keep silent. But perhaps we need to enter into debate in more constructive ways.
I, for one, have been very barbed in June last year, writing about Aids, I referred to the president as “chief undertaker Mbeki”. In reference to Ngonyama I have queried what was being smoked in the presidency now that tobacco was outlawed in public places. My pen is rarely sheathed.
In an advertisement taken out on Sunday, some of the major industrial and creative leaders of South Africa hammered the media and called on whites to pledge loyalty to the country and the government.
I will always be loyal to South Africa, but to a government, never unless I see that it kneels before the poorest of the poor and treats them with compassion and listens with a tolerant, if not oft-frustrated ear to the pleas and criticisms of its people. Such a government will have no need for us to pledge loyalty, it will be evident in every word we speak, every action we take. We will vote it into office again and again.