Not the Mail & Guardian is Robert Kirby’s startling and savagely satirical parody of the Mail & Guardian newspaper. Any similarity between real people and characters portrayed here is anything but coincidental
In one of his most spectacular poetic moments, President Thabo Mbeki made a memorable observation.
At his second inauguration speech in 1998 he uttered words that are now burned into the national subconscious: ‘Let me not to the democratic marriage of true minds admit parameters,” said the president and, using the line as a kick-off point, went on to intellectually and ethically justify his controversial handling of the HIV/Aids pandemic, which, at that stage, was only killing 1 500 people a day.
Apart from the haunting beauty of Mbeki’s poetic language, there is much else to be found nestling between the lines. As a presidential spokesconfidant whispered: ‘We just don’t know where he finds the time to write these incredible lines. They just leak out of him. They contain so much of his natural sense of verbal rhythm, sensitivity and wisdom.”
With the phrase ‘the democratic marriage of true minds”, Mbeki was clearly referring to the controversial Aids advisory panel he set up to give voice to global Aids dissidents.
What he was saying by setting up the panel was clear: while the greater global scientific community regard these dissidents as a set of looney tunes delusionists who’d be better off preserved in prussic acid in some postmodern medical freak show, the South African government offers them both succour and a forum for the expression of their crackpot theories.
In so saying, and in setting up the panel, Mbeki once again proved himself to be right on the button. In defending his ideas against a veritable tsunami of international criticism, he has shown beyond any doubt how fully he deserves the encomia so many offer him.
But why, we can hear our readers cry, are we now called upon to admire what we once so easily denounced? Why do we now have to emerge from the camouflage of our political prejudices, why do we now have to eat humble pie and acknowledge that all along the tragic road of the HIV/Aids horror our leader has guided us with unerring precision and humility?
The answer lies in what Not the Mail & Guardian investigative reporters have uncovered, which is that next month the government will announce what at first will appear to be to be little more than an apparently commonplace occasion.
Some previously cruelly disadvantaged hospital staff in Mpumalanga will be found to have been stealing anti-retroviral drugs meant for the temporary medical treatment of people with the virus. The staff have then been selling these drugs back to the hospital at vastly increased prices.
The facts of this story have a truly tragic dimension. Why are medical staff so badly paid that they have to resort to thievery in order to survive? The answer to that austere conundrum is obvious.
The sins of apartheid are still with us and, after only 10 years of democracy, there simply hasn’t been enough time for the new health administration to ‘roll out” salaries and benefits commensurate with the talent and experience of these dedicated people.
In a typically bold and realistic response, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang will next month drop the only logical axe available on the problem.
She will withdraw the supply of anti-retrovirals to all state hospitals, leaving, as she usually does, a commendable moral alternative. When one day in the future, all medical staff start to receive decent salaries, the health ministry will give consideration to the reinstitution of anti-retrovirals at state hospitals.
Alas, we predict the minister’s decision will once again bring down hostile criticism on her head. As on many occasions before, this diatribe will be racist in origin. We hope she will be able to summon the vision and courage to demonstrate yet again the level of forbearance and mature understanding she has always brought to her ministry — in spite of the bigotry and malevolence.
Hidden affections of satire
It is not without a sense of irony that Not the M&G must offer its cautious approval of the proposed amendments to the Film and Publications Act, No 65 of 1996.
Vastly liberalised after democracy took hold in 1994, the legislation is recognised as a benchmark for the onerous but necessary administrative duty of containing the excesses of pornography and violence that are sweeping the world today. All but the most grossly offensive is allowed without let or hindrance from our censors.
But it must be remembered that when the legislation was sharpened, a new euphoria was upon our blessed land. After the awful apartheid years there was a sense of suddenly walking into the sun.
But the trouble with suddenly walking into the sun is that you tend to be blinded for a while. The legislation was conceived in the bright reverie that still persisted in 1996. It has become apparent that the censors need to be given a bit more to work with.
One of the amendments to the Act is based on a definition forwarded in the early 1970s by that genius of satire and transgender spooftery, Dr Pieter-Dirk Uys.
Faced with mild political criticism of their policies in Uys’s revues, apartheid censors attacked him mercilessly. Uys’s response was nothing short of brilliant. He explained to the National Party censors that what he was doing was an entirely new form of the genre, which he labelled ‘compassionate satire”.
It was not intended to hurt, rather to make mild fun of, to give gentle pokes in the ribs. True satire should always contain an element of love, of affection for its targets, said Uys. This explanation and the material he then produced to prove his point were received with approval by the Bothas, the Koornhofs and Vorsters and their companion intellectuals in the Naspers press empire.
It is Uys’s ‘compassionate” caveat that now, thank heavens, is to be applied forcibly to future South African political satire, parody, caricature, burlesque and buffoonery.
As any visitor to the pitiless terrain of local ‘underground” theatre, the crude political parodies of stand-up comics and rogue columnists today will affirm, such amendments to the Act are long overdue.
Thank you, Pieter-Dirk, and we say more power to our censors’ blue pencils. —