The theme of this year’s Mail & Guardian essays is ”survival” and, on a personal front, I would have thought the fact that I’m still here after all these years of being charming, helpful and encouraging to so many people would be proof enough.
The trouble with the word ”survival” is that its meaning is being subverted to other ends — like the meanings of so many words. Soon ”survival” will become more a reference to the rather tacky ”reality television” shows than it will to its original sense.
I am going to abuse it even further and use this occasion to remember a little of how I ”survived” the five and something years I once worked for the SABC — the last steady job I had.
These are years I remember with more affection and gratitude than animosity. To be what was known as an announcer/producer in the old ”English Service” was to enjoy contact with an extraordinary array of imaginative people, men and women of gift, all of them surviving in a world that even then seemed to be mutating into new and ominous forms.
Radio has always had an extraordinary influence on the way people speak and think. As today viewers earnestly discuss the Big Brother phenomenon, so did our parents discuss the topic of what until the 1950s was known as the ”A Programme”.
The radio was a central reference point in homes: a compendium of stories and dramas, of music and discussion, of quiz shows and commentary. The local news was read in reserved tones by one O J Horrocks and nearly all broadcasting was regional. The main news bulletins were relayed live from London and the BBC’s General Overseas Service.
I joined the SABC’s English Service in Johannesburg, which was modelled on the BBC’s Home Service.
First and foremost in the English Service I joined was respect for the language. The announcer’s audition script was formidable. It toppled many a would-be broadcaster at the first gate. Correct pronunciation, intelligent phrasing and vocabulary, were monitored carefully. Announcers had training sessions; they were expected to keep themselves up to date on foreign names that might pop up in the news bulletins. They were expected to know a great deal about serious music.
There was never any doubt among the SABC English Service announcers that this careful husbandry of the language was some sort of social responsibility. As stuffy as it sounds, it was accepted that broadcast English was an exemplar. A good proportion of letters from listeners were about matters of English.
And the service was always trying to do better. My first task at the SABC was as one of many assistants helping with a nationwide competition to find ”The Voice of South Africa”.
In those days it was assumed the voice would be male and the question of the ideal ”voice” being other than a white one was not even raised.
Applicants were invited to come in to the SABC studios for brief auditions. And come they did, in their thousands — to include doctors, lawyers, businessmen, architects, rabbis, priests, representatives of just about every corner of society, even one or two judges. Clearly radio announcing was a desirable ”high-glamour” pursuit. After many weeks a short list was compiled and a ”read-off” was run with listeners’ votes making the final decision.
The winner was Paddy O’Byrne — now departed our shores for retirement to his native Ireland — and who across an extraordinary career became something of a South African broadcasting icon, what with his encyclopaedic knowledge of music and literature, his vocabulary and his fluency. As he was to comment wryly: ”Everyone likes to sound ‘posh’, you know. That’s what we’re here for really. Show the peasants how to speak proper.”
In late 1961 O’Byrne joined an English Service already embattled. Senior machine minders of the National Party political factory were well ensconced on the SABC board and their decrees dripped steadily down into news bulletins and political commentaries, some of which we announcers were expected to read in our ”posh” voices.
At one stage we were forbidden in news broadcasts to refer to a black man as ”Mister”. It had to be ”a Bantu man, called James Mhlangu …”. There were daily reminders of our political prescriptions. In drama productions we were forbidden to include the word ”bomb”. I was once hauled before the bosses for having said in a programme that a black man was ”a human being like all the rest of us”.
Despite the political onslaught, attention to spoken English was not only tolerated but, in some cases, encouraged. Perhaps it was the presence in the higher echelons of the SABC of figures like the late Carl Douglas Fuchs — with his deep admiration of English language and literature, an anomaly in those all-Afrikaans ranks — that assured a continuity of deference to the language; or it was simply that the Nats saw the English lobby — poshly spoken or not — as natural allies in apartheid.
And so, as if to spite the politics, the old English Service cranked out a steady stream of imaginative radio programmes. It was a goodly basketful from the Cecil Jubbers and the Jack Dunlops, the young Michael Mayers, the Percy Baneshiks, the Hugh Rouses, the Charles Fortunes and any number of others. There was much that came from the BBC’s transcription service, all those wonderful World Theatre series, the serialised English classics, the My Words and the Hancocks and the Take it From Heres, the Goon Shows. They laid a foundation, they set a standard.
Those of our generation were lucky because our radio gave us glimpses, tastes of a wider and fuller world. Today’s SABC radio does not have the same ambitions. It has narrowed its scope, set the parochial as supersedent to all else — save perhaps in pop music and the adoration of film stars. In the latest television news bulletins they say, ”Give us a minute and we’ll give you the world.” That’s apparently all we deserve in this new democracy. ”Keep ’em looking inwards and they’ll never see what they’re missing.”
If the SABC English Service of the 1960s was politically stained, that of SAfm is as grimy. It is actually quite hard to get away from politics when you listen to today’s SABC steam radio; there are literally hours and hours of it. Any respect for — never mind preservation of — the grace and subtlety of English has long since been drowned in the sullen howling of democratic throats.
Phrase and syntax, vocabulary and expression have been abandoned. Instead of English, people talk in collocations of political catchphrases and words that add bogus profundity to what is being said. It is an enraptured cant-dialect of ”empowerments” and ”paradigms” and ”synergies” and ”in terms ofs” and ”challenges” and ”hopefullys” and ”interfaces”; there are thousands upon thousands of these verbal spitballs, a ready glossary from which to assemble the near meaningless discourse that has taken the place of language.
The spiritless mode of spoken English — or ”communication” as it is nowadays called — is a version akin to George Orwell’s ”newspeak”, an official language that progressively limits the range of ideas and independent thought.
I wonder how English will survive the inroads of the political screechers of today. Of course it will — English always has — but it will be in a somewhat shop-soiled state. And most certainly it won’t be because of any help from a latter-day SABC, which seems to be set in its task of reducing the language to a sort of idiot’s tongue. SAfm sedulously violates English throughout the week and then mounts a coy little Correct English programme on Sunday mornings as a nod to its responsibilities.
Before someone employs the well-known Thabo Mbeki gambit and leaps up and cries ”racism”, let me pacify. What I say has nothing to do with accent or racial origin. Those are factors that rather tend to enrich spoken English and, anyway, the average ”African” accent is far preferable to the distorted phonetics of the ”white” South African English accent. Clive James once said that listening to white South Africans speak was like being assaulted. And he’s an effing Australian.
Why the SABC has this casual approach to language is hard to understand. Perhaps it believes its greater audience is simply incapable of grasping more than the simplified and badly constructed English the SABC offers. Perhaps today’s SABC mandarins have yet to realise that when their organisation insults a language, the greater slight is to the users of that language. A public is held in contempt.
The great edifice of the English language will survive, but the huge compass that it offers by way of its extravagant canon of literature and thought, of human experience and achievement, will be denied those who are not being shown the way into its treasure house.