The Bloody Horse

You praise the firm restraint with which they write —

I’m with you there, of course:

They use the snaffle and the curb all right,

But where’s the bloody horse?

Roy Campbell

Graeme Addison tackles the central problematic of the black magazine press: where are the menacing truths of modern South Africa?

Aids is a slow puncture. The Johannesburg sheriff’s red-overalled demolition crews are red ants. A 44-gallon drum left all day with the tap running to rinse dirty clothes is a Soweto washing machine.

Oh for a journalistic poet to capture the life and the tragedy of modern, liberated, South Africa! A poet of the calibre of Can Themba, author of the Will to Die, his 1972 anthology of articles and stories mainly written for Drum magazine in the fifties.

It’s not that the writers with a savage fidelity to life on the streets don’t exist in 2003, it’s just that mainstream magazines aren’t giving them an airing. And it’s not that editors don’t want to reflect life on the streets – they just don’t know how to.

Here’s Themba on the mood of a crowd on the train, staring at a platform full of heavily armed white policemen occupying Langlaagte station: The situation was ‘under control’, but everyone knew that in the soul of almost every being in this area raved a seething madness, wild and passionate, with the causes lying deep (‘Mob Passion”, April 1953).

A mob does run amuck inflamed by intergroup jealousy, its spree of bloodlust ending only when the girlfriend of a murdered man sinks an axe into his killer. Whether or not events actually happened this way – a measure that would be applied by most editors today – is beside the point. What’s probable is far more important than what’s possible, said Aristotle, making the case for fiction.

Fiction, or faction, that novelist’s blend of verifiable information and original spin, has a place in our magazine culture that writers have yet to reclaim. Can Themba, Casey Motsisi, Bloke Modisane and other Drum writers perfected a style of social realism that was perfectly compatible with a commercial format. This was several years before Truman Capote turned a story about a couple of Kansas killers into a runaway bestseller, In Cold Blood.

The Americans made a tradition of it, calling it the New Journalism; we trashed it and now we’ve forgotten how to do it. Drum was pillaged in the sixties, seventies and eighties, censored by government, exploited for its name, and but for some sparks of bright and defiant editorship, would have guttered out entirely. There’s a theory to fit this, which has little to do with the politics of political censorship in the past and a great deal to do with what has been termed market censorship now and in the future.

The business of the rag trade today has gone from bad to better, from dull periodicals to bright ones, but the improvement has come at a price. Freedom allows publishers to follow the money into the black market, promoting 21st century lifestyles within the tried and tested framework of the me-myself-I consumer magazine. It works in other markets everywhere in the world, and it has worked wonders for local publications, black and white.

So what’s the problem?

Well, let’s take the recent example of Drum itself. Here the consumer formula has worked to a degree but maybe not as well as its publishers, Media24, had hoped. Agencies are aware that some sort of strategy review is under way, but the publishers themselves declined comment for this article. Drum was saved from a downward slide some years ago by aligning it with Huisgenoot and You, making a triad of family-orientated weeklies divided along ethnic lines.

The notion of separate and parallel development for the triad paid off in the Afrikaans/English arena but it has never sat comfortably with the black magazine, especially one with the historical credentials of Drum. A doctor friend tells me that the medical profession dubs You magazine ‘The South African Medical Journal”, because patients who read it know better than the quack. The home journal formula is a friendly, mildly scandalous anodyne for trapped housewives.

Putting the doctor in his place and sorting out SARS is probably not high on the agenda of the average Sowetan, housewife or no. In an environment where schools battle to keep flush toilets clean and working because everybody uses them, and where school roofs are ripped off to make shacks, community-driven demands overwhelm family aspirations.

The figures [see chart] show four-year trendlines for the triad, with Drum clearly slipping after a surge in the late nineties. Huisegenoot too is down for reasons that were touched on in the series on Afrikaans media – the disaffection of youth and the rise of more sophisticated Afrikaans magazines. Drum’s problems, too, are likely to be those of disaffection amongst both youth and middle-aged middle class blacks, combined with a challenge from the new sassy black magazines.

Black magazines? Since when were Style, GQ, Fair Lady and several others in the fashion, men’s and women’s markets, black magazines? Glance along the supermarket shelves and the trend to coffee-coloured cover models, no creamy whites, is startling. And inside, both the advertising and the editorial show racial boundaries being breached big-time. The great media transformation is under way, sort of. Profiles feature people with negritude as much as attitude, on the social pages they dance to mbaqanga, and fitness photos show black abs and busts are just as sexy as white ones.

Sure, there are the classically black magazines like Pace, Bona, Tribute, True Love, Enterprise, but even here, convergence is under way. It’s in the weave of the journalism, some of which is syndicated or rewritten from abroad, and in the warp of the bylines of writers from all racial groups. Let’s not forget, too, that recently launched magazines like O (for Oprah) and the Laduma soccer magazine, FullTime, have sought cross-racial audiences from the start.

‘In the past, publishers would compare the income levels of their black readers against the income levels of the Black population as a whole. Today, with disposable income growing in the Black sector, Soccer-Laduma compares the income level of it’s readers (predominantly black) to that of the total population and scores favourable in most of the crucial categories,” says Zizi Hollander, general manager at Soccer-Laduma.

‘I can’t stress enough the importance of staying close to your market and moving with them. The two most senior people in our company read every reader’s letter that comes to our office. It’s time consuming but it is worth it – because it enables us to pick up all the nuances in our market and reflect them in our paper,” Hollander continues.

Right, that’s true of any business: to sell efficiently you have to know the customer.

‘Black magazine content is constantly changing and evolving to reflect the needs of its dynamic market,” says Khanyi Dhlomo-Mkhize, the most successful local black editor who has helped to double the readership of True Love to 2 million in four years. The Sunday Times has romantically linked glamour girl Dhlomo-Mkhize and billionaire Afronaut Mark Shuttleworth, a match made somewhere between outer space, cyberspace, and downtown Johannesburg.

‘The most successful black content providers will be the ones who can simultaneously follow and stimulate trends in this market through reader research and reader engagement beyond the print brand,” Dhlomo-Mkhize goes on. True again: brand extension is important for market growth. More to the point editorially, she adds: ‘Various themes appeal, with the most important ones being self-enhancement, entrepreneurship, emotional well-being and relationships.”

That’s the me-myself-I formula, however you cut it. A marketing strategy that has success written all over it is not one that is easily self-critical. It’s all greatly to the good that magazines seem to be converging on a broad South Africanism in a media environment where, until a few years ago, apartheid seemed alive and well and living in editorial offices. At the same time, let’s talk about structured silences, conformity by unconscious omission, red ants and slow punctures.

Black journalists and their editors are acutely aware that, as Dhlomo-Mkhize puts it, ‘the most important challenge for black magazine content moving forward, is to meet the needs of its market in a manner that does not marginalise black society.” That more or less sums up the problem of the unresolved – but I don’t believe unresolvable – gap between the business prescription to go out and win souls for commerce, and the spiritual mission of healing the past and really, truly, realising an African identity.

The Drum journalists, impressionists that they were, managed to present an authentic portrait of an agonised society without becoming overtly political. They entertained their readers and gave a true account – in the Aristotelian sense that they mirrored the most essential truths – selling magazines like hotcakes to keep millionaire publisher Jim Bailey (almost) entirely happy. This was at a time that the ANC’s Defiance Campaign was in full swing, and Drum kept it swinging.

Consider the distance, today, between the pert journalism of our consumer press and the issues on South Africa’s social and political agenda. Liberation has come, and with it, deep frustration at joblessness, crime in the townships, suffering and death from AIDS, and official denialism of these things.

The rambling chaos of Drum’s expose cum-picture periodical format was able to deal with the apartheid state. It pilloried the policy and the officials, exposing the brutality and idiocy of the whole system. Today, across the whole span of mainstream magazine media, there is no comparison with the investigative articles of Mr Drum, Henry Nxumalo. His riveting first-person articles on virtual slavery on Bethal farms and appalling jail conditions in the Johannesburg fort brought readers bolt-upright, and sold many more copies.

The Drum line-up included investigative journalism, inspirational portraits of African leaders, wrenching photo-essays, and lots of gossip about socialites, especially the journalists themselves. It wasn’t the same balance we see today – nothing very calculated – and I suspect the only focus groups they held were in the shebeens, between sips of contraband brandy and bouts of intellectual pugilism.

A romantic picture no doubt, but that’s what makes it especially appealing. Today’s mags are departmentalised into slots that make up a human individual’s key concerns from birth, to copulation, and death, yet somehow never reflect the whole person or the whole society. The marketplace has become the message – suggesting that if you don’t buy into the lifestyle you can’t be the person you want to be. There is good reading in these magazines but at the end of the day the recipe for personal problem solving applies: find out about it, fix it, forget about it.

And that’s just the problem. African society is not amenable to Ten Quick Tips. As a whole tradition of black scholarship in literature, politics and sociology has seen the issue, the African psyche seeks community liberation, not personal development for its own sake. A leading proponent of this viewpoint in South Africa has been Es’kia Mphahlele, once the Mr Serious of Drum (as a fiction editor he worried over the ill discipline of the drunken writers who tossed their copy in his tray).

Mphahlele says in his book The African Image that writers cannot be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration, in fact they should march right in front. We know that journalism is by nature spasmodic, error-prone, opportunistic, sketchy as to the complete picture, and maddeningly illogical in its week-by-week coverage of issues.

These are strengths, not weaknesses. They open the way for creative editing and reflect the search for social answers, not the delivery of ready-made solutions.