If there is one thing that is enjoying boom times it is the so-called Dedicated Interest Group. Adorned with inspiring names, new DIGs spring up every day. You only have to pick up a paper or watch a television news broadcast to read or hear statements from organisations like APDADGD (the Association for the Prevention of Discrimination against Diabetic Guide Dogs) or the CCAAF (Concerned Citizens against Anything Forum) or the almost numberless rape crisis lobbies like the FCF (Faction of Chainsaw Feminists). The list grows by the day.
One of the newer and, I dare say, very overdue DIGs is the recently announced Association of South African Letter-Writers and Phoners-In (ASALWAPI), which is dedicated to the protection of the intellectual rights of the well-meaning and highly informed people who regularly write letters to the news-papers, together with their recently evolved collaborators, those who spend most of their waking hours phoning-in to talk-radio shows.
Anyone who reads a newspaper will have noticed that, whatever the topic, the readers’ letters section invariably includes comment and analysis from a small gallery of long-established correspondents. These are the regulars, some of them almost household names. Judging by their letters, they are all experts, their intelligence forms great orbits of fact and perception. Be it the failure of the British Beagle II Mars probe or the dubious legality allowing Monsanto to grow genetically modified parsnips, one of these regulars will be up in print within a day or so with clarification or contradiction. Some of them are frustrated critics. Few films escape the beady evaluations of Leon Gillworth of East London. Norman Princeton of Fish Hoek specialises in explaining why prisons are overcrowded. Bill Wenter of Somerset West regularly exposes medical aid fraud. When it comes to the more impassioned of public debate, like the unconscionable delay in the erection of informal settlement-proof security fencing around Constantia, there will be bellicose letters from these well-known hands.
Why these altruistic polymaths are content with writing letters to newspapers for no other reward than seeing their names in print is hard to understand. They could be making piles of dough as consultants.
I tried to imagine what would be discussed at an ASALWAPI annual general meeting (AGM). Keith McVinnie of Sydenham Road, Durban, a veteran letter-writer to the Daily News, would be in the chair. Keith gets a minimum of five letters a month published. He is particularly assertive on the subject of municipal by-laws and how these are being corrupted by Durban corporation employees. His canon of letters on this subject is formidable. It’s believed that the lesser bureaucrats of the corporation store their pins in little juju dolls of Keith.
Keith will call the ASALWAPI AGM to order and welcome a new committee member known only as Joseph of Sir Lowry’s Pass Twilight Village. Anonymity is vitally important to talk radio phone-inners and Joseph is a leader in this field. He can be heard several times a day on Radio 702, SAfm or Cape Talk. Capable of dilating vacantly on any subject at hand, Joe often gets quite carried away on the matter of falling standards in post-transformation South Africa. Be this atrophy detectable in poor road signage, toxins in envelope glue or ATM queue etiquette, Joe can whinge with the best of them. He and those like him are highly valued, linchpins of triviality to the radio shows of Vuyo Mbuli, Will Bernard, John Robbie and many others. When in any doubt, bring in Joseph who has been patiently waiting on hold for the past two hours.
Other matters on the ASALWAPI AGM agenda will include the reading of a short monograph on the vexed ethical question of letters-to-the-editor writers who, thanks to the facilities of e-mail, are now able to circulate their contemplations to literally dozens of newspapers at once. Before the advent of e-mail and the fax, the cost of postage kept multiple submissions of letters to newspapers inside reasonable limits, but nowadays you can read exactly the same hysterical letter scarifying Mangosuthu Buthelezi in The Star, ThisDay, the Cape Times, the Sunday Times, The Citizen, the Sandton Chronicle, the Orange Farm Squatter Camp Bugle, the Brotherhood of Marxist Rubber Workers Bulletin, the Sanitary Warehouse Weekend Special Offer on Matching Combination Toilet and Washbasin leaflet you find under one of your windscreen-wiper blades and The Sunday Independent. This practice of saturation submission is unpopular among older members of ASALWAPI who feel it is greedy. Valuable letters-to-the-editor space is being gobbled up, which could be better used for the dissemination of a wider purview of civilian opinion.
The ASALWAPI AGM will wind up with awards given to members in categories like Most Letters Published or the prestigious Letters Actually Responded to by Spokespersons of Mayors and Cabinet Ministers.
ASALWAPI has asked me to state that without proof of at least 25 different letters published by reputable journals and newspapers within the past 18 months, applications for membership cannot be considered.