A few weeks back the Mail & Guardian carried a Krisjan Lemmer piece on This Day, the crowded newspaper market’s Nigerian entrant. In his inimitable way, Oom Krisjan muttered into his beard about the ‘deep pockets’ of the paper’s furtive funders. These funds, coupled with the start-up operation’s aggressive recruitment drive, led the old codger to the conclusion that editors in newsrooms around the country were busy identifying staff they couldn’t afford to lose.
Now I may not be in the newspaper business, but I know something. I know that Mondli Makhanya knows I’m not earning agency commission from This Day. Still, the M&G’s editor was standing guard at Thebe Mabanga’s desk when I arrived. He was standing directly between me and his award-winning virtuoso. With his arms folded.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” he said.
It was intimidating.
On reflection it could’ve been nothing, just a harmless dig at a magazine life form. But it could also be that’s where Makhanya stands nowadays protecting his man and intimidating people.
If confirmed to be true, the latter is eminently understandable. For a newspaper editor, Thebe Mabanga is hot shit. In fact, two years ago, when Mabanga had finished compiling the M&G’s year-end ‘Hot Shit 100 List,’ his editor at the time made the following adjustment: “We round off our top 10 with the editor’s choice. After lengthy deliberations, Phillip van Niekerk has chosen Thebe Mabanga, a young and versatile reporter with the Mail & Guardian.”
That was when Mabanga was 22 years old. At 24, his latest editor’s choice award is worth more than a mention in newsprint. The prize set aside for wunderkind at 2002’s Vodacom Journalist of the Year is worth about R300,000 Mabanga is off on a three-month all-expenses-paid trip to the Thompson Foundation in Wales, where he’ll study at the Editorial Centre.
“What do you think of all these awards?” asks Makhanya, no doubt annoyed that the latest Vodacom variant means his charge will be out the country for an extended period.
I feel for him, but I’m non-committal on the answer. The editor wanders off into his newsroom and leaves me alone with Mabanga.
Barely out the gates, I have a winner. “Tim Woods is a rabid right-winger,” volunteers Mabanga. It’s a response to my opening (innocent?) remark about the November 1 to 7 column of ‘Black & Bourgeois’, where Mabanga has a go at the Miningweb columnist for having a go at the mining charter.
Woods had written that although South African mines rewarded shareholders through two world wars, American sanctions and erratic commodity prices, they “now must do it once more under the second historic menace of nationalisation driven by ethnic politics.” Citing these words in his own column in the M&G, Mabanga had written back that another way of looking at it is to say that although the mines rewarded shareholders through exploitation, exclusion of the majority and a disregard for the communities from which they draw their labour, they “now have to do it in a manner that is humane and equitable and include the majority on merit.”
The M&G’s editor was standing guard at Thebe Mabanga’s desk when I arrived. He was standing directly between me and his award-winning virtuoso. With his arms folded.
My supposedly innocent opening remark was simply that Mabanga had a point.
So the interview promised to be a whole lotta fun. Here’s a journalist who instinctively gets the value of a contentious quote. The next gem isn’t long in coming. “The pity about This Day,” says Mabanga, “is that in the 18 months it takes them to fold, they will have hurt us in adspend.”
I’m thinking Makhanya should hear this. He should also hear in case he hasn’t already why Mabanga isn’t about to transfer to an established paper either. “I get attention to detail at the M&G that I wouldn’t get at a big organisation. My voice here is a platform and is consistently being refined and worked on.”
Mabanga discovered that ‘voice’ as a student at Wits. While covering arts subjects for the campus radio station (“I can still kick butt in radio,” gets thrown in as an aside), he’d use a lull in activity to check in at the university’s newspaper offices. On a whim he began submitting written pieces on the subjects he was following in sound, and they all got published without any edits.
The story of how he broadened his range from arts to politics seems equally accidental. “One day I picked up this profile of Charles van Onselen by Mark Gevisser,” he says. “It was the way Gevisser wrote it. There I was, a student at Wits, not too well versed in student politics. I saw this piece that took time off and looked at the man at the centre of it all. It gave a perspective. The way Gevisser wrote it got me.”
Mabanga’s first stab at a political story was consequently a profile. He wanted to do what Gevisser did, so he wrote an article about Prishani Naidoo, the outgoing deputy vice-president of the SRC.
It must have been a successful stab, because in 1998 he dropped out of his B.Com at Wits (now being completed at UNISA) and was soon hanging around the M&G’s offices as a freelancer. By July 2000 he had secured a place on the full-time staff.
Although he’s currently on the politics desk (where he covers economic policy, empowerment, labour policy and the privatisation debate), his range still extends into the arts and sports.
“I don’t want to be an editor, I want to write,” says Mabanga.
His long-tem plans? “I intend to stay at the M&G at least until the 2004 elections. I want to develop the politics beat. Or maybe I’ll stay until July 2005, when I’ll have completed five years here.” After that he speculates about being a financial analyst. “But only to help me become a better writer,” he adds.
Before I leave Mabanga asks to show me something he’s pinned above his desk. I follow him and see profiles of Martin Wolf and John Kay, two senior columnists at the Financial Times. Underneath each, scrawled in blue ink, are three words. “Aspiring to greatness.”