There has been much speculation in the press about the exciting prospect of a new Sunday newspaper, aimed mainly at a South African readership. The brainchild of neighbouring presidents, Robert Mugabe and Sam Nujoma, the New Sunday Times will offer up news and comment designed to counter the slurry of racist/colonialist/imperialist/ counter-revolutionary diatribe currently on offer from papers such as the ”old” Sunday Times.
I have been lucky enough to get my hands on a so-called ”dummy” of the new paper, a try-out edition that was put together last week. A copy was sneaked to me by a contact in the printing works. I was pleasantly surprised to see how excellent a media product awaits us.
The first thing that strikes you when looking at the New Sunday Times is that it has virtually no white space. Copy starts a millimetre from the top of the page, runs off the bottom and spills across the centrefold. In this way it’s a lot like the Cape Times. Other design features are ground-breaking, such as the portraits of presidents Mugabe and Nujoma that have been incorporated into the paper’s title. This gives a sense of dignity and restraint, a feeling that this is a newspaper to be trusted.
As always with the ”old” Sunday Times, one of my first visits was to the back page, recently condemned by chainsaw feminists as sexist exploitation. Unfortunately the New Sunday Times is keeping to this tradition though with an interesting twist. Their Back Page Pet is captioned ”She’s-funny-that-way” and is none other than a photo of our glamorous Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, dressed in a slinky tiger-stripe bikini and gazing seductively at a huge portrait of President Mugabe. This will set many a heart athrob.
The front page lead is headlined: ”Zimbabwe’s treasured president closely related to God”. Written by the paper’s editor, Jonathan Moyo, the piece reports that Mugabe insists that he has no relationship to any disgusting European version of God. Instead, he is a first generation descendant of the senior Zanu-PF deity, AmaTozzpothi, a wrathful, deeply homophobic divinity who lives in the clouds and shows displeasure by not allowing any rain to fall. Only when every last white person has been ejected from Zimbabwe will AmaTozzpothi relent and let the drought be broken.
Below the fold on the front page is a story headlined: ”Getting them where it hurts” and details how yet another Zimbabwean newspaper has been closed down summarily by Mugabe, its journalists arrested and savagely beaten for publishing so-called truths about the president’s ownership of several Congolese diamond mines. The report, by chief reporter Jonathan Moyo, ends with the news that a warrant of arrest-and-torture has been issued for the supreme court judge who declared the closure of the newspaper illegal.
The editorial in this ”dummy” edition is dedicated to explaining why the New Sunday Times was being launched. ”It has become urgently necessary to provide a platform for voices opposed to the fascist neo-colonialist, anti-black racist bigotry expressed in newspapers, such as the existing Sunday Times. Its editor, Mondli Makhanya, is known to despise anything African in origin, a stance he made very obvious when he edited the white-owned apartheid-supporting Mail & Guardian. He and many others like him have all but taken over the South African media and have, as one man, shown how they disapprove of our President’s visionary policies of stolen white land re-acquisition.”
Although it plays second fiddle to Zimbabwean coverage, Namibia does get a look-in. Page three has a photograph of a grinning Nujoma standing in front of his brand new executive jet, a N$3,3-billion ultra-range Airbus 340-600. This is the seventh aircraft to join the president’s private fleet, which already includes a short-range Lear Jet for domestic travel, a mid-range Hawker Siddeley for travel to neighbouring countries, a long-range luxuriously appointed Boeing 737-800 plus, of course, the standard three helicopters. The accompanying article by chief aviation correspondent, Jonathan Moyo, boasts that Nujoma’s private airline is now the largest in Africa. His new N$250-million presidential palace, currently under construction, is expected to take the laurels in that category, too.
Much else in the paper is dedicated to explaining how fortunate Africa as a whole, and Zimbabwe in particular, has been in having Mugabe as a leading political giant. ”Even Mandela can’t compare with our home-grown Titan,” says Jonathan Moyo in his enervating column Turd’s-Eye View. He goes on, once and for all, to put to rest the nasty rumour that Mugabe does not have a penis. ”He did once contract a pernicious STD [settler transmitted disease], which nearly rotted it off, but it grew back to sturdy life on its own.”
Not much advertising, though a whole page has been taken by the London department store Harrods. It offers a ”Summertime Special”, a 20% discount on any purchase more than £10-thousand (Z$8,3-trillion) made during June and July by registered members of the Mugabe household.
By and large the New Sunday Times will provide some welcome alternative Sunday morning ”bacon-and-eggs” reading.