If being a journalist is a species of voyeurism, then reading books about the exploits of journalists isn’t much different. But in the coincidence of two recent books by different South African journalists, you feel relieved that yours is only a second-hand taste of what they’ve seen.
This is because Jacques Pauw and Chris Steyn-Barlow each report on people at their most awful. On our behalf, they delved into society’s scum and brought back stories that let others safely learn just how low humans can go.
Of course, the pair also did their jobs for their own edification: their motives included adrenalin, exploration, winning awards and lapping up public praise.
For Pauw, the experience has been an exhilarating ”dance with devils” — the title of his book. He got close to subjects as appalling as apartheid hit-squad commander Dirk Coetzee, late Sierra Leonean terror-monger Foday Sankoh, a Rwandan genocidal bishop and countless other killers and criminals.
For her part, Steyn-Barlow worked a dance floor populated by gangsters, psychopaths, spies and paedophiles.
In the process, the two journalists sometimes seemed to miss just how bad their partners were. Pauw bought roast chicken for imprisoned mass political killer Eugene de Kock; Steyn-Barlow evidently revelled in her chats with apartheid spy boss Hendrik van den Bergh.
Of course it’s easy, as an outsider, to be sanctimonious: probably in the underworlds these journalists encountered, there are some degrees amidst the dregs.
The value of these books is in reviving important stories they uncovered, and in telling the stories behind these stories.
Pauw got his information by proactive travel to nightmare places, many litres of alcohol and lots of bribes. Often, in his words, the journalism was a ”feast on outcasts who had scores to settle”. In Steyn-Barlow’s case, success came from following threads despite accusations of being a security-police agent and/or dancing to the tune of secret sources.
Ducking death threats, each journalist often resorted to trading information and subterfuge in order to secure their stories. Sometimes they blew their sources’ confidences. Pauw writes about this as a ”murkier” side of journalism, where the engagement was about ”winning someone’s trust just to betray him in the end”.
The investigative methods used by the two reporters are sometimes troubling, but the results incontrovertibly qualify as public service. Indeed, without their achievements, much wrong-doing would have stayed under wraps.
While Steyn-Barlow presents an often over-personalised chronological narrative, Pauw is by far the better journalist and polished story-teller. He is also the more reflective about the ethical challenges of journalism.
Investigating a case of entrapment of women into prostitution, he writes: ”Do you remain a mere reporter, recorder and onlooker in the face of death, suffering and human tribulation? Or do you intervene, save, shelter and shield? What was I supposed to do?”
Pauw describes his professional evolution from being an insulated Pretoria teenager to real awareness of the violence of apartheid. Reporting later on Rwanda’s genocide would ”to a certain extent” strip him of remaining incredulity and even put him off meat for more than a year.
But the same journalist also lets slip an incongruous racial remark about colonial Mozambique having created a ”mixed-blood and olive-skinned” generation so that ”the result was some of the most vivacious and buxom women on the African continent”.
Steyn-Barlow writes unconvincingly as if she was always unassailably neutral, but gives few direct clues into her personal politics. Having left journalism in 1997, she has a tone of bitterness about the ”arrogance of journalism”, and admits that her job sometimes felt like a ”life sentence” as much as it was also an ”addiction”.
Her eventual change of career came, she says, from having seen ”too much of people at their worst” — and not only those she had written about. Pauw, in contrast, continues at the helm of the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Special Assignment and he ends his book impatient to hit the next hell-hole. The two books show how different reporters tackled the topic of evil people and later took up differing trajectories.
As documentary records, these works stand as testimonies of our times and, perhaps even more broadly, of the sordid potential of humanity. They help us understand the nature of damaged, vile and villainous people, and they give a rare insight into how the writers came to gain that knowledge.
Through their books, Pauw and Steyn-Barlow share a view that is longer and deeper than available in daily media fare. Not all journalists have similar stories to tell, but most will have fascinating insider accounts of their experiences. Can we look forward to one from John Perlman?
Publish and Be Damned, by Chris Steyn-Barlow, 2006 (Galago Books); Dances with Devils, by Jacques Pauw, 2006 (Zebra Press)