/ 24 June 2004

RIP Aggrey Klaaste

Sowetan editor Aggrey Klaaste, who died last week, arrived in Sophiatown as a teenager from Kimberley. But his love for, and link with, his Johannesburg stamping-ground were never lost.

In keeping with the ethos of the unique urban melting-pot nicknamed “Kofifi”, Klaaste was well known for his love of wine and song, dancing to jazz tunes and imbibing whatever was available — until he climbed on to the wagon.

And like Kofifi, he was to rise from his own ashes and champion the spirit of a new nation inspired by its proud past.

Born to teacher parents, and christened Aggrey Robeson Zola, Klaaste was destined to take a much broader outlook on life than many of his contemporaries. He drew his first name from West African intellectual and freedom fighter Dr James Emmanuel Aggrey, and his second from African-American actor and singer Paul Robeson.

The hard drinking and brawling of Klaaste’s youth were legendary.

But he stabilised into a wise and far-sighted elder statesman whose contribution to shaping South Africa went beyond the purely journalistic. For his fellow journalists, Klaaste’s embrace of a greater, more generous society was an extension of what he did for colleagues. “He used to have the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the office. He would round up all the known drunks to attend,” recalls long-time friend and colleague Sidney Matlhaku.

His greatest achievement was probably the Sowetan newspaper’s Nation Building project, which he and his deputy, the late Sam Mabe, created. The point has been made many times: the project illustrated Klaaste’s ability to look beyond the present. While most other South Africans were nailing their colours to different political masts, he was preaching the improbable — that we are really one nation.

Through Nation Building, Klaaste also championed a unique form of committed journalism, where newspapers are one with the community of readers they serve.

But he was no blind idealist. When newspapers were falling all over themselves in praise of stage production Sarafina in the mid-1980s, Klaaste was a lone voice saying that its song and dance routines “ignored the very heart of the matter” — the brutality of apartheid. In the first 10 years of South Africa’s democracy, he showed no inclination to give up his independence and forthright spirit.

To honour this “gentleman and scholar”, as Matlhaku describes him, the new generation of South African journalists could do worse than follow in his footsteps. Like him, they should document the country — but also seek to change it for the better.

ANC comes out of the closet

After 10 years of dodging political self-definition to placate domestic and foreign markets still jittery about its socialist policies, the African National Congress has said it. In Parliament this week to deliver the Presidency’s budget vote, Thabo Mbeki put his party on the political spectrum.

“There can be no doubt about where we stand with regard to this great divide [between left and right]. It is to pursue the goals contained in what [theorist and former editor Will] Hutton calls the ‘broad family of ideas that might be called left’ that we seek to build the system of governance …,” Mbeki told Parliament.

Wait for the clatter from the capital. In the weeks that follow there will no doubt be threats of investor boycotts and reams of copy to warn against left-wing dabbling, to extol the virtues of privatisation and of flexible labour markets. An International Monetary Fund report on South Africa, still with the National Treasury, reportedly makes a call for labour deregulation. It takes little account of the fact that with our levels of casualisation, the labour market has arguably the same elasticity as China’s.

The cacophony will be loud — Mbeki should not cave in. This week the Mail & Guardian publishes research by the Human Sciences Research Council’s (HSRC) David Hemson pointing out that it will take the doubling of budgets for water and electricity for government to reach its own goal of halving poverty over the next six years.

Ripping into the “conservative creed”, Mbeki approvingly quoted Hutton who has argued that “welfare is portrayed as disabling the poor from taking proper responsibility for themselves. The poor and disadvantaged should expect no more than minimal, time-limited and means-tested assistance.” Yet it is the president who has made similar arguments in the past opposing a basic income grant. His statement should be an opening for the government to give serious consideration to a universal income grant and to extend the child grant from its current ceiling of 14 years. This will go a long way to ensuring that the delivery of a better standard of living to South Africans becomes a reality in the second decade of freedom.