Why does Ronald Suresh Roberts keep scrabbling long-buried controversies to the surface? Recently, he recycled President Thabo Mbeki’s 2002 Briefing Notes by arguing that the Congress of South African Trade Unions is the counter-revolutionary stooge of the right. His new book, Fit to Govern, peels back the ”stiff dishonoured shroud” of Barney Pityana’s 2000 media racism inquiry.
One suspects Roberts’s frenzied attacks on mainstream newspapers are not unconnected with his defeat in the Cape High Court, where the Sunday Times made him cut a sad figure. Large parts of his book — notably the chapter ”Massa day done”, where he vomits bile on black journalists — come across as score-settling. But the formal thesis is that all media criticism of Mbeki flows from a racist/colonial conception of black leaders.
This was one of Pityana’s pet themes — but Roberts has a harder task. White editors are soft targets; seven years later, many more mainstream papers are run by black editors who remain unimpressed by the president’s performance on Aids, Zimbabwe and other issues. His solution is to claim, using the venomous personal abuse that is central to his method, that black media critics of Mbeki are the ”native assistants” and ”hand puppets” of white neocolonial masters.
The exact identity of the puppet masters is never entirely clear, but there are dark hints that behind this ”conspiracy” stands the shadowy ogre of mining capital. At one point, Roberts says the Sunday Times follows a tradition established a century ago, when the Reef press was the Randlords’ propaganda arm.
The trouble is that the Sunday Times is not owned by Cecil Rhodes, nor even Harry Oppenheimer. Johncom, which appointed editor Mondli Makhanya, is a black-controlled company in which the mining-house interest has been unbundled.
Hence Roberts’s coyness about naming names. To be consistent, he must also accuse Johncom chairperson Cyril Ramaphosa of being neocolonialist. In fact, he must attack black economic empowerment, one of Mbeki’s most cherished policies.
But wait, there’s more dishonesty. Makhanya is an outspoken opponent of racism and colonialism. As a young activist in the 1980s, he fought running battles with the apartheid police and their Inkatha shock troops. Who is Roberts, a well heeled scribbler who was safely elsewhere during the emergency years, to defame him as ”the colonial creature”?
Like Humpty Dumpty, Roberts makes words mean what he chooses them to mean. In a notably muddled passage, he attacks the ”colonial” Makhanya for deploring Mbeki’s eulogy of PW Botha, the internationally reviled apartheid mass murderer.
This implicitly revives another theme of the media inquiry: that racism is not about what one actually says or does, but a matter to be determined by duly authorised persons with privileged insight, in a kind of ”sniffing out”. Makhanya may sound like an anti-colonialist. He may even imagine he is one. But Roberts’s X-ray vision discerns his secret vice.
Both Mbeki and Roberts make extensive and insidious use of history to libel their opponents. Without any causal explanation, Mbeki once linked the 200-year-old racist writings of French naturalist Georges Cuvier to criticism of his government’s crime policies. Because Tony Leon quotes Lord Acton’s celebrated dictum on the corrupting influence of power, Fit to Govern slide-smears him with Acton’s support of slavery and hatred of free thinkers.
Indeed, Roberts even suggests that racism and colonialism run in families, like a genetic disorder. Why else point out that Leon’s father was an apartheid-era hanging judge, or that the Marxist Alex Callinicos is Acton’s great-grandson?
Such low barrack-room advocacy pervades Fit to Govern. Immunologist Malegapuru Makgoba is insultingly termed a semi-liberated ”native technician” on the sole strength of calling Mbeki ”emotional and irrational” on Aids. Judge Edwin Cameron is accused of using Aids to promote gay rights, without evidence or any explanation of how this would wash in a country where it is an overwhelmingly heterosexual disease.
Roberts baldly declares Mbeki’s Aids orthodoxy while staring past a large body of counter-evidence, including the president’s repeated protestation that a virus cannot cause a syndrome.
He has the jaw-dropping temerity to suggest that Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai applauds Mbeki’s general conduct on Zimbabwe. Has he ever spoken to the MDC? Just weeks ago it complained of ”knocking repeatedly on Mbeki’s door” over human rights abuses.
He accuses various ”illiberals” of contempt for black life while defending Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on grounds that he has only killed a few people and, anyway, things are worse elsewhere in Africa.
He herds every detractor of the president, of every hue and from across the ideological spectrum, from Helen Suzman to Zwelinzima Vavi, into one impossibly disparate neocolonial camp.
In Fit to Govern‘s 290-odd pages, there is not one unflattering reference to the president, not one concession to the army of his critics, many of them in his own party.
Roberts is sadly misled if he thinks that by proclaiming the doctrine of presidential infallibility he does his adopted country a service. Instead, he merely fuels the cult of leadership and stigmatises the pluralism that is the lifeblood of democratic politics.
The question is: Given that all the president’s detractors, of left and right, are servants of neoÂÂcolonialism, what kind of opposition would he and his principal consider acceptable?
Drew Forrest is deputy editor