Ah, come on, guys, let’s have a bit of fun out there for a change. Television can’t just be soapies, game shows and chat shows. We could have had Die Groot Krokodil show, a rare television interview with PW Botha on the eve of his 90th birthday. But every single station manager in the country was too alarmed at the thought to let it go ahead.
Leni Lombard from M-Net spoke for all of them, I suppose, when she said: ”It [the infamous programme made by a local production company] does not meet our criteria for broadcasting and the interview is not at this stage suitable for our audience.”
The words could have come out of the mouth of the big old crocodile himself. Talking about ”not meeting our criteria for broadcasting” is merely sidestepping the issue. But when is the South African television audience going to be grown up enough to decide for themselves what is and what is not ”suitable” to watch? And her use of the phrase ”at this stage” had sinister connotations of both Mary Poppins and Joseph Goebbels — not to mention the interviewee himself in his heyday.
What makes former apartheid apologist Cliff Saunders’s admittedly grainy interview compulsive is: (a) its brevity, which means you don’t have to sit and listen to the old geezer going on for too long about why he has no regrets; and (b) precisely the way he articulates the reasons for his having none — let alone remorse.
This, of course, is the man who called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ”a circus”, and while former enemies were breaking down in tears and hugging each other, refused to even leave his lair in George to tell them that to their faces. Why should he show remorse now?
One of the things I regret not being able to show my children, since the interview has been banned, is how Botha and his partners in some of the most serious crimes against humanity seen in recent times were able to face off protests from across the world with cold indifference and just enough of a hint of a threat below the surface as they looked you in the eye to make you understand they were deadly serious.
The old crocodile, at four score years and ten, has not lost his touch. Not a bit of it.
So why do I say that this would make entertaining television? Because the way Botha sticks doggedly to his convoluted, but unwavering, sense of his own logic has an element of Mony Python about it.
Asked what he thought about treating black people as inferior, he didn’t turn a hair (not that he’s got many to turn).
”I never regarded these people as being inferior,” he says, ”because many black people, and coloured people, cooperated with government policies.” At this point he leans forward to clinch his argument: ”We wouldn’t have taken them into the industrial area if they were inferior.”
Pressed (however weakly) to explain how this could be argued, since the very black people he is talking about were denied basic civil and political rights under apartheid, he answers with unblinking poise, and a slight, triumphant smile: ”You must remember, we did not originate that part of apartheid politics. That originated in Lord Milner’s time, in Cecil Rhodes’s time, in the time of the British governors. They were very old policies.”
And in spite of yourself, you have to agree that he has a point. Afrikaner nationalism merely turned the screws up a few notches and perfected the system.
”Yes, but wouldn’t you agree that we, white people, were racists?” asks Saunders, sensing that he is losing the battle to crack Botha’s unruffled gaze.
”Some people were racists. Some people are still racists.”
And that was about it.
So this is what the television stations of the land decided was unsuitable viewing for adults and children alike. Some of them might have thought that allowing it to be aired would inflame sensibilities across the racial spectrum, but I hardly think hordes of people would have taken to the streets. On the contrary, if the interview had been exposed for what it was, with a careful introduction, some intercutting of images of the implications of what the old man was shrugging off so calmly and a serious and healthy debate at the end, it might have opened some eyes and informed some minds.
I don’t think we have enough serious television around here. Some channels are daring enough to give late-night exposure (hoping no one is still awake), to remarkable and difficult aspects of many parts of the world’s recent history — the destruction of native American nations, the American Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, the boxing war between ”Brown Bomber” Joe Louis and the German Max Schmelling during the time that Hitler, Goebbels and others were preparing to launch a holocaust of racial hatred on the world.
It’s about information. It’s about history that has been buried, if not entirely forgotten by all but the well-informed few. In South Africa we already have more than one generation of young adults who scratch their heads in bafflement at the thought that there could possibly have been an apartheid world.
PW Botha was a prime exponent of that world and now sits calmly in his armchair in retirement from all of that down in George, at peace with himself.
Not that we should demand vengeance. We’ve agreed to get past all that. But, as survivors of the European holocaust never stop reminding us: We shouldn’t forget.