I always thought there was something funny about people in Cape Town. This week, in that respected daily organ called The Citizen, comes the story of a man who had been arrested after several incidents where he dressed himself up as a woman and then jumped into cars that had stopped at red robots and then proceeded to rob the unsuspecting drivers before jumping out at the next red robot.
According to the paper, the magistrate told the gender-bending defendant, “You are a nuisance and need to be removed from society to think about your life.” The silly, cross-dressing nuisance was then sentenced to four years in the nick.
God help him/her/it. Apparently gender confusion is quite prevalent in the South African prison system, and you are not always given the choice of what gender you wish to be associated with when the hard nuts decide to find a useful role for you. Such as in the sack.
But I guess that’s his/her/its lookout after living a life of crime.
Then there’s the Sizzlers Massage Parlour gay scragging saga that took place in January this year. Nine perfectly respectable gents (some of whom might also have been victims of the lady-who-is-not-a-lady at the red robot) had their throats slit and then had their brains blown out, just to make sure, in some kind of bizarre vendetta played out in the fun-loving suburb of Sea Point. Two fun-loving local guys have apparently confessed to the crime, and are currently on trial.
All this would confirm the popularly held prejudice that Johannesburgers should think twice, or even more than twice, before venturing to Cape Town, however tempting the mountains and beaches might look in the tourist brochures that Comrade Cheryl Carolus is currently waving under our noses. From where I’m sitting, Cape Town sounds like a gay, murderous hell. I certainly wouldn’t encourage my children to go there.
And then of course Cape Town is also the seat of our democratic Parliament. All sorts of nonsense goes on in Parliament, which is why I would also not encourage my children to try to become parliamentarians when they reach maturity.
Part of the nonsense that has been going on in Parliament recently is “African renaissance” guru Thami Mazwai’s ongoing commentary on “objectivity” and its place in the “African renaissance”, particularly as regards the SABC.
Dr Mazwai, as you already know, is the hand-picked personification of the concept of “African renaissance”. So when Dr Mazwai speaks, we listen carefully.
Dr Mazwai said to Parliament recently (and Parliament sits in the festering air of Cape Town, don’t forget) that “objectivity” is a Western notion. “Objectivity”, according to him, is alien to the African way of seeing things.
In his capacity as chairman of the SABC’s news programming committee (that sounds scary by itself, doesn’t it?), reporting to the National Assembly’s communications committee, he put it this way: “As Thami Mazwai [note the Napoleonic complex at play here] I feel that objectivity is a delusion — the notion known as objectivity does not exist—”
And he went on to elaborate: “What I will fight against is the view that liberal values must always be imposed on us —We must allow South Africans to determine what is right or wrong for them.”
Objectivity, according to Chairman Thami, is wrong for us.
Given that Chairman Thami’s mandate apparently comes from high above, we must take his comments with no little measure of seriousness. But what does he (or we) mean by objectivity?
According to the dictionaries that I have at my disposal, objectivity means seeing things as they are, without bias. Or at least trying to do so.
The recent imperialist blitz on Iraq would seem to be one case in point. Whatever happened to objectivity in the reporting of that fiasco? The one international network (Al-Jazeera) that attempted to give objective coverage got its Baghdad correspondent blown to bits by an American tank for its pains. CNN, meanwhile, was riding comfortably in the baggage wagon of the same tank, and sending out supposedly “objective” day-by-day reports to the rest of the world of what was going on.
So which kind of objectivity is Chairman Thami objecting to? The “objectivity” of the rich, or the “objectivity” of the wretched of the Earth?
There is a lot riding on this. And there are a lot of people wondering what the good chairman is really thinking. Not least because many of those who spend their lives attempting to articulate what is going on in the new South Africa are groping their way towards an objectivity that will allow them to show us, and the rest of the world, what we are, what we have been, and what we could possibly be about in the future.
But if, in the chairman’s view, there is no such thing as objectivity, what do we construct as our view of the world? Do we abandon the search for the true nature of things? Was the truth commission itself, indeed, a sham?
As I say, I always thought there was something funny about people in Cape Town. It’s hard to be objective about them. In fact it’s hard to be objective about anything. Maybe that’s why our unelected leaders are advising us against this foreign concept of objectivity.
See things as you are told, sisters and brothers. That way you can’t go wrong. At least not until things start going wrong. (Ask Uncle Bob.)
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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