‘Africa’s best read” (the one you’re holding in your hands right now [sic]) takes a long time to actually penetrate into Africa. I understand it takes a week or so for it to reach the news-hungry dissidents of Harare and Bulawayo. It reaches Lusaka about the same time, too late for Zambia’s citizens to learn that their currency has fallen through the floor yet again: they will already be wearily living that reality by the time the Mail & Guardian brings the news to them, and will have purchased even larger suitcases to carry around the further millions of kwacha that will now be required for the making of
the most basic purchases.
Beyond that, the good old tree-shaking M&G is not accessible in its familiar newsprint version up here in the North at all. It’s the Internet or nothing.
Usually it’s nothing. After all, surfing the Net, for all the incredibly prying access it gives to the universe and beyond, is basically a solitary affair, largely the domain of the young, anti-social, strictly upwardly mobile type (the yassum for short). Africa’s collectivist social structures, and the general lack of a significant level of hi-tech infrastructure north of the Limpopo, militate against the yassum becoming a significant species, and thus passing on the best reading available on their own continent to the less-connected African.
Let’s face it: there is nothing like settling down over a healthy sundowner on a favourite cafe terrace overlooking the sea, or engulfed in the fumes and noises of the passing traffic of a vibrant African city, and slowly cracking open the pages of a good old-fashioned newspaper – especially one that brings you news from home. It gives you time to socialise, share comments, skip to the soccer when the rest of the world’s agony becomes too boring, while all the time keeping a gentle eye on the world around you.
I do not say all this just to sound like a sentimental expatriate feeling far away from home – on the contrary; I love being where I am and doing what I am doing here. But I was struck with a feeling akin to that sentimental thing when a dusty traveller arrived on Goree Island one Saturday afternoon, and, after some preliminary “getting to know you” conversation, pulled out a copy of the M&G that he had purchased at Johannesburg airport just the day before, and proudly handed it to me. He thought I might like to catch up on what I had been writing about that week.
It may seem strange, but a writer does need the reassurance of seeing that painful and secretive collaboration between himself, a keyboard and a computer screen, trustingly sent off through the mysterious waves of that indispensable Internet to the desk of a faceless, voiceless editor 8 000km away, turned into something tangible.
There is no substitute, I say again, for reading the hard version of one’s own thoughts, however strange those thoughts may seem in the cold light of day.
There is also no substitute, if you know the territory, for reading those grisly, blow-by-blow accounts of life and death on the southern tip of Africa. It makes you feel glad to be alive, and living somewhere else.
South Africa’s internal dialogue (or rather, series of disconnected monologues) looks somewhat odd from the vantage point of the north-western tip of Africa.
South Africans are obsessed with the issue of race as no other Africans are. This is not surprising, since we were all brought up on a diet of nothing else. But it is nevertheless bizarre to be confronted with page after page of this obsession when you are living in another African civilisation where the issue almost never surfaces in the press.
It is not as if the Senegalese and the Cameroonians are unaware of, or unaffected by, the legacy of racial division, or the continuing fact of racial domination even as we move into the 21st century. (You just have to switch on your television to see that this world is not yet an egalitarian operation.)
But these are societies that are able to see themselves in a positive light in spite of the past.
The kind of racial murders that still explode across South Africa would be unheard of in West Africa. The level of murders of all kinds, racial and otherwise, that South Africans inflict on themselves, reckoned at 65 a day, would itself strike other Africans dumb with disbelief.
And yet the Africans of this part of the world continue to be awed by the example of South Africa. I cannot argue them out of it.
Of course, what they are most in awe of is what is still known as the Mandela Miracle – the emergence from chains of a black man who was able to hold out the hand of reconciliation to his former white persecutors, and secure the success of an unlikely transition.
But what those Africans are impressed by next is the displayed wealth and apparently luxuriant infrastructure of South Africa – especially when compared to that of their own countries.
I sometimes suspect that, if they were able to have access, as I occasionally do, to the more complex picture painted by “Africa’s best read”, they might be better able to judge the true nature of this new Eldorado. If they were able to understand the bitterness and extent of the poverty that continues to reside in the shadow of this abundance to which they aspire, they might be inclined to think more charitably of their own powerful infrastructures of social contact and self-respect.
But like they say, if you don’t get the news, the news don’t get to you.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza