South African-born author Christopher Hope, now resident in France, may find himself embroiled in a literary scandal over allegations that his novel My Mother’s Lovers contains characters and situations that are startlingly similar to those in Liz McGregor’s biography Khabzela: The Life and Times of a South African.
McGregor’s book is the carefully researched story of DJ Khabzela, who announced his HIV/Aids status on air and did much to enlarge the Aids debate. The nub of allegations against My Mother’s Lovers is that it embodies significant elements of Khabzela’s life story.
Hope’s character, the politician Koosie, seems to shadow the real-life Khabzela with remarkable coincidence. This is not only a coincidence of character, but also a borrowing of narrative sequence. McGregor notes the following key similarities:
- After refusing to take ARVs, both Khabzela and Koosie visit sangomas. Thereafter both consult a white woman from Brakpan who, when not healing, helps her family run a home-improvement business. Both women become healers after close relatives succumb to cancer. Both women use religion. Irene’s pills (McGregor) are called Amazing Grace, while Millie Loubser (Hope) calls her pills Celestial Solution. The dose in each case is three pills.
- Khabzela is nursed full-time by a Dutch woman sent by the health minister. Koosie is ministered to by a nurse dispatched by the Ministry of Health.
- Tine van der Maas (McGregor) is an Aids dissident who believes Khabzela’s symptoms are caused by malnutrition. She prescribes a tonic called Africa’s Solution. Angela Toodt (Hope) does not believe HIV exists. She tries to cure Koosie with ”the African Antidote”.
Responding to the Mail & Guardian‘s queries about these and other points, Hope denied that he had borrowed in any way from McGregor’s work. ”I think her claims that her book provided the base of the Aids pages in my book are her authorial exaggeration,” starts his 655-word email response.
”In describing the end of my character, Koosie (he is not a politician for nothing), I draw on much material from the ongoing, public Aids saga which is available in the public record; and I refute her suggestion that my novel draws on her book. The foolishness of the denialists is well documented and that is what I wished to expose. She does not have any claim on symptoms, quack cures, pills, or their quantities and colours, or the fatuous public pronouncements of various Aids dissidents, whose remarks I have used and parodied in the sections she refers to.”
Hope does not deal with the nexus of coincidence around Irene, Millie, Tine and Angela. However, he discusses the last in some detail.
”Liz McGregor seems to think only she had heard of strange foreign nurses who don’t believe in Aids. My Angela Toodt (the name is actually meant to be a play on the Dutch/German word ‘death’ — she is in effect the Angel of Death) who treats Koosie, is meant to remind everyone who reads it of strange foreign counsellors who profess to believe that ‘there is no virus’ and that taking ARVs will kill the patient.”
Letter to publisher
The matter is unlikely to end with Hope’s denialism. Maggie Davey, publishing director at Jacana Media, McGregor’s publisher, has written to Hope’s publisher Toby Mundy, the MD of Atlantic Books.
”While Mr Hope’s text is not a direct copy of the text in Khabzela,” she writes, ”it is evident that he used our author’s book as a source, and chose not to acknowledge her work. We would ask that your author consider acknowledging Ms McGregor’s book as such in future editions.”
After pointing out McGregor’s ethical dilemmas in writing the book, including the publishing of Khabzela’s medical records and the author’s decision to pay a portion of the royalties to Khabzela’s mother, Davey continues: ”As McGregor’s publishers, we wish to protect the integrity of her work, and in the paragraphs above I hope that you are persuaded that were Mr Hope to acknowledge his use of McGregor’s book as a source for part of his novel, he would be acknowledging much more than McGregor’s efforts.”
Hope’s publisher is standing by him. He told the M&G: ”We don’t accept the suggestion that borrowing has taken place. We’ve been assessing the situation and talking to the publishers in South Africa and my view is that it’s smaller than a storm in a tea cup. Chris and Liz take the same view on HIV in South Africa — that more education is needed. No unethical action has taken place on Chris’s part. If anything, we encourage people to read both books.”
Jacana’s request for acknowledgement avoids the dangers of directly addressing more serious issues that could be at play here. Borrowing — consciously or unconsciously — and publication without acknowledgement can, in certain instances, be construed as plagiarism, and infringement of both copyright and the author’s moral rights, as defined in the box on this page.
McGregor declined to comment to the M&G, preferring that her publishers handle the matter.
Hope’s book has been short-listed for two South African literary awards: the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the M-Net Literary Awards, to be awarded at the Cape Town Book Fair on June 16 and 17 respectively.
DECIDE FOR YOURSELF
Khabzela: The Life and Times of a South African: Extracts
Page 3
”— he was refusing to take anti-retrovirals …”
Page 151
”It was in his mind that ARVs would kill him,” said Sibongile. ”He took them for a week and then he started taking sangoma’s medicine.”
Pages 177 to 196
”The woman from Boksburg mentioned by Greg seemed — to have made more of an impression on Fana than any other individual healer. Also referred to as ‘Dr Irene’ and, in fact, from Brakpan —”
”—there is a knock on the door. It’s this woman. She heard about Fana’s story on the radio and she said: ‘I have to help him.’
”The doctor said: ‘Your son has developed brain cancer’ — The death of her son on May 1, 1970, she said, propelled her into the business of saving lives.”
—
”Some of the things that happened, I can’t explain,” said Sibongile. ”That’s why I feel Irene was sent by God somehow …”
”When we got in there, she [Irene] said: ‘Let’s pray.’ We prayed. She said: ‘I am going to help you. You’re going to be fine … But you cannot do it if you do not believe.’
”… Irene gave him the three pills. He drank them and we went home. That night he drank the pills again because Irene said he should … He was totally paralysed then. He couldn’t walk. The following morning, … he said: ‘Sweetie, I can walk.’ … I said: ‘It’s a miracle. You know it’s a miracle.”’
—
[Irene described her first encounter with Khabzela thus]: ”I looked him in the face. I said: ”Do you need a miracle?”
He said: ”Yes.”
—
”The pills [Amazing Grace] cost R100 a month”.
Pages 5 to 21
”Tine van der Maas, it transpired, had been sent personally by the Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala Msimang, to take over the care of Fana … she had a strong Dutch accent.”
”… he was much thinner than when I had last seen him —”
”… the sheet was removed to reveal Fana’s skinny body, naked except for a nappy with the catheter tube protruding from the side …”
Pages 15 to 21
”Tine says: ‘He doesn’t want ARVs. I say to him it’s not necessary.”’
”Tine was confident she could get him back on his feet with her diet and a tonic called Africa’s Solution. The latter … contained African potato extract enriched with plant steroids, vitamins, grapefruit seed extract and olive green leaf extract … Tine had just received the results of a battery of blood and urine tests she had conducted on Fana …”
—
”Tine fed him a pinkish liquid. She said it contained liquidised beetroot, ginger, three carrots, tomatoes, spinach, lemon juice, olive oil, pawpaw, watermelon, banana, yoghurt and pronutro.”
My Mother’s Lovers: Extracts
Page 364
”When he was diagnosed he was with a private doctor who prescribed ARVs. Antiretrovirals. He was lucky. Most people don’t get them. He started taking the ARVs, but then he stopped.”
Page 367
”He’s seeing a traditional healer. A sangoma.”
Page 372
”One morning we found him sitting at his kitchen table drinking tea with a visitor, a sturdy, quiet, pale woman called Millie Loubser. She came from Brakpan, on the outskirts of town, and ran a garden-care business with her sons when she wasn’t helping people with Koosie’s symptoms. It was hard to believe that a man like Koosie would be content to swallow large pink capsules from a bottle marked ‘Celestial Solution’ but swallow them he did.”
Koosie says of Loubser: ”She’s a miracle worker.”
”Koosie looked good; he seemed stronger, he was almost his old self again, and he owed it all to her and her treatment.”
”She turned up like a gift from God. I opened the door and there she was. She looked at me, deeply, oh, so deeply, like she saw into my soul, and she said: ‘Do you want to live?’ And I said yes.”
”He religiously took the capsules three times a day.”
”Cindy challenged Loubser: ‘What qualifications do you have for treating someone like Koosie?’ Millie Loubser gave her a sweet smile. ‘I had a favourite sister and she died of cancer, and the pain I felt was terrible. I am treating over a hundred people a day, they come to me because I help them.’
”’At how much a throw?’
”Millie Loubser was unperturbed. ‘One hundred rand for a week’s supply of Celestial Solution.”’
Pages 376 to 378
”In the following month, Koosie was in hospital twice: he had a bout of meningitis, and he also developed pneumonia … he came home from hospital, his bones poking up against his skin. He stared at us with hot eyes. They had given him a catheter; he was wearing nappies and he had full-time nursing care.”
”Dr Toodt was Dutch … Dr Toodt said: ‘ … I plan to treat this patient with micro-nutrients. I am here at the request of the Ministry of Health. They sent me and they trust me; and they know I can help Comrade Nkosi …”
—
”Angela Toodt had developed a dietary supplement called the African Antidote; it was composed of carrot, garlic, beetroot, lemon juice, yoghurt, banana, and mielie meal, bolstered by various anti-oxidants, as well as grape seeds, lychee flesh and extracts of the African potato.”
—
”Cindy confronted her one morning.
”’Why don’t you put him on anti-retrovirals?’
”Angela Toodt: ‘He doesn’t need them. He doesn’t want them, he would not take them if I gave them to him.”’
—
”She sent off regular blood samples for testing …”
—
”Cindy again challenged Angela Toodt. ‘If you had what he has, would you take anti-retrovirals?’
”’I would not. They are toxic and they do not work.’
”’The virus is killing him!’
”’There is no virus,’ said Angela Toodt.”
Rights and wrongs
To put the McGregor-Hope case in fuller context, here is a glossary of relevant terms, drawn from The Pasa Directory 2006, the annual produced by the Publishers’ Association of South Africa. More information is available on the Pasa website
Copyright: The positive right of an author or publisher to exploit his or her creation in certain ways and, at the same time, the negative right to prevent others from doing so. Copyright includes the right to protect one’s intellectual property from unauthorised usage.
Moral rights: The author has the right to claim authorship and so object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of the work where such action is or would be prejudicial to his or her honour or reputation.
Plagiarism: If someone passes off your work as his or her own (for example, publishes it without acknowledgement) this is plagiarism.