Another South African journalist is in hot water over allegations of plagiarism, this time the editor of the South African edition of glamour magazine Elle, Cynthia Vongai.
Vongai is alleged to have cribbed a substantial chunk of the regular column she wrote for the Sowetan newspaper on Friday virtually word for word from an article that appeared weeks earlier on the website Askmen.com.
Her column — and the original — dealt with stylish dressing; though the original author, Chris Rovny, talked about Hollywood, Vongai changed the reference to ”Johannesburg”.
City Press newspaper, which reported the ”copycat plagiarism” on Sunday, quoted Vongai as saying in response to the charge that ”there was a source credit to the article”.
Vongai was appointed to the Elle post in January. She previously held the position of writer and stylist at Cosmopolitan magazine.
Sunday also saw the final appearance in the Sunday Independent of Darrel Bristow-Bovey, who earlier this year faced accusations of plagiarising the work of author Bill Bryson in his book The Naked Bachelor.
Bristow-Bovey used his valedictory Independent column to poke fun at the plagiarism claims, quoting the author Scott Fitzgerald as saying writing was ”like swimming underwater and holding your breath until it is done”.
”At least I think it was Scott Fitzgerald,” Bristow-Bovey said. ”I don’t know where he said it, or whether he said it first, but I am fairly sure it was him …”
Bristow-Bovey last week resigned his Business Day sports column, after it was found that he had lifted text from British TV personality Jeremy Paxman’s book The English, and terminated a similar arrangement with the Cape Times.
He said then that he did not consider himself a plagiarist or unoriginal writer, but that circumstances ”have meant it’s impossible for me to continue writing columns in South Africa”. — Sapa