I was a member of the Forum of Black Journalists (FBJ) at its inception at the turn of the century, until I took my friend Ann Eveleth along to an all-black function. My abiding belief is that journalists occupy an open, easy-going society so thought it would be no hassle.
Nobody turned her away, but an executive member told me not to bring whites along and laughed at my suggestion that Ann had a colour-blind soul and that we live in a liberated zone. I won’t go to the forum’s gatherings because journalists are not so easily boxed, and as editor it would feel wrong to go where some of my colleagues cannot tread.
But 10 years later my colleague Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya certainly does not agree with the theory of the liberated zone. This week he catalysed a newsroom discussion on race with the question: ”Can we as a newsroom honestly say that the black staff in our newsroom does not have issues they feel particularly unhappy about … can we assuredly say that we have created a newsroom that makes black journalists not need an FBJ?”
It’s a painful thing to hear, but there is too much history and too much geography to make even a romantic Piscean like me believe that we have reached a non-racial idyll — equity and empowerment are imperatives I support and believe in, but in practice it goes far beyond signing contracts and meeting targets.
The Mail & Guardian newsroom meets and exceeds most targets set by the equity laws, but to what end if a senior colleague feels this way? Are we an Irish coffee, white on top and black at the bottom? The way race is lived goes to the insidious ways in which it is practised. These media debates are not about racists pissing in workers’ soup or mad youth crazed by a cocktail of crime and guns who kill black people in places called Skielik.
Yet race in journalism makes the biggest waves as the media hearings of the South African Human Rights Commission and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have shown and this week’s debate again displays. The medium is very public and a microcosm of the society in which we live. The investigation of race in journalism is at once introspection and exhumation through words. In those words we reveal ourselves either in how we write or what we choose not to write about. Do we write white? Who sets the agenda and chooses the tone? At issue this week are those questions.
So Matuma Letsoalo asks whether the lead story is chosen by the byline. I guess he is referring to the fact that our investigations team tends to dominate the spotlight. Stefaans Brümmer’s instinctive response is: ”Who says I’m white?” But it’s a reality we must confront, says Letsoalo, pointing to what it says about who is trusted to deliver the front-page goods.
Journalists such as Drew Forrest who have always shared and fought for the constitutional rights we enjoy today baulk at such conversation. He asks Letsoalo: ”Can you be serious? Do you honestly think we look at the race of the reporters? It’s the story that’s strongest. That’s all.”
A significant number of journalists schooled at the M&G, with its history and its flat, non-hierarchical structure, feel deep unhappiness with the FBJ for what it practises and what it might portend: an era of racial access to news and newsmakers and a return to a past many have spent their adult years fighting.
But perception is often reality and while I am not about to go and count the race of bylines, it is a shared mission to cultivate a cadre of senior black journalists who are co-architects of this newspaper.
I point out that ”white journalists are more confident” because they fight for their stories. This draws shocked gasps for the crassness of the comment, but we should not underestimate the value of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth. It comes with a good education and life skills like confidence, with networks that empower and with what might seem like mundane resources like cars and driving licences, but which can propel success or failure.
Of course more and more young black people now have these resources, but for the generation in newsrooms, it is often the exception rather than the rule.
Most newsrooms (barring perhaps those of City Press, Sowetan and the South African Broadcasting Corporation) induce a culture shock of practices that might be alien to young blacks. This spans the gamut of everything from the culture of swearing and to the ability to differ and argue with people who are older to pitching stories forthrightly and fighting about their placement. Culture clash chimes with many reporters.
Newsrooms, as I know them, are ribald and rough places where sensitive egos are trashed daily, though not nearly as much as they were in the old days, says Forrest.
Look at the words we use every day: cut, edit, spike, rewrite, drop, replace — All of this hacking is done at lightning pace, where the niceties of transformational leadership go right out of the door when competition and the clock are our gods. Quick cutting and editing skills are de rigueur, but what do you do when training and skills transfer (the cornerstone of empowerment) demand longer time frames?
Pigeonholing came up as a major theme. ”Sometimes,” says Milo Ndlovu, ”I wonder if I’m assigned black stories.” Which immediately made us wonder if we pigeonhole Yolandi Groenewald who is sent on every possible story with an Afrikaner link. Her beat is land. Sometimes, point out many colleagues, it is easier to penetrate familiar worlds where the tongue is the same and the values understood, if not shared. Monako Dibetle, our resident grass-roots champion, points out that he got the residents of Skielik to talk to him in ways that white colleagues might not have.
Moya throws another killer punch: ”This is a black-owned and edited paper, but when you go to the planning meetings — and find that the decision-makers about what is news are mostly white, you know that the blackness of the ownership does not mean much.” I could go on at him about the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) audit, which revealed a shortage of specialist editing skills among all races, but it sounds too empty, 14 years after liberation.
Now we’ve opened our decision-making meetings to all who want to attend so that the news choices are even more open to the democratic process, making the best newspapers. The bigger challenge though is for us, as an industry, to train a cadre of black editors (section editors, sub-editors, news editors). Pay scales must go up to keep our skills from the deeper pockets of the public relations sector.
But black journalists in positions of authority must assert themselves to own space and influence outcomes, as Moya and Rapule Tabane did at the M&G last week. I wonder, for example, why Abbey Makoe, who is political editor of the SABC, should preach a gospel of marginalisation when he is in a position to bring young reporters to the centre. Ditto many others.
The profession needs a strong forum of journalists where black and white have these debates about their own work lives but, more importantly, also the bigger debates about democracy and the role of journalism. The political atmosphere is tough with a media tribunal on the horizon and a body politic that will see the crack as one to use to divide and rule what it perceives as a hostile media corps.
As Nic Dawes says: ”My concern would be that one possible approach the FBJ could take would involve essentially setting out a template for black journalism — and if you indulge in journalism of a different type then you are a race traitor, or a water carrier for whites, or a coconut —”
My lodestar is Sanef, the amalgam of formerly white and black bodies, where we have tough debates but ultimately benefit from the value of unity of purpose for a profession we love.
Complaints to the South African Human Rights Commission
Yusuf Abramjee and Kieno Kammies
702/567 talk show host Kieno Kammies and I, Yusuf Abramjee, group head of news and talk programming at Primedia Broadcasting, attended the ”blacks only” meeting of the Forum of Black Journalists on Friday February 22. We raised our objections to the fact that the meeting with Jacob Zuma, president of the ANC, excluded white journalists and that this was discriminatory and went against the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.
After we walked out in solidarity with our white colleagues, who were ordered out, and those who were excluded, we were referred to as ”coconuts” — ”black on the outside and white on the inside”. A report by Chris Bathembu in the Citizen newspaper confirms this. He was in the meeting. This was also reported in Rapport. We are told that Jon Qwelane was one of the people who used this term.
We are of the view that the term ”coconut” is not only insulting — but discriminatory. It was clearly used in a racial context and this is totally unacceptable and is meant to demean. We will appreciate it if the commission can investigate this matter and make a finding as part of its investigation into the FBJ meeting and the complaint lodged by our colleague, Katy Katopodis.
Katy Katopodis
I would like to lay a formal complaint with the Human Rights Commission following a refusal by the Forum of Black Journalists to allow white journalists to attend a lunch with ANC president Jacob Zuma. After several queries about whether a senior reporter in the Talk Radio 702 newsroom — who’s been covering Zuma for several years — was allowed to attend, it became evident that he could not go, simply because he is white.
In a democratic South Africa, where racial prejudice is not tolerated, I find this totally unacceptable.
I believe that this goes against the spirit of the Constitution.
While I have absolutely no objection to the existence of such an organisation the organisers appear to have chosen this high-profile event to make a political statement on racial grounds.
Surely this forum was founded on the premise of promotion and not exclusion? Surely South Africa is beyond such blatant displays of racism? I lay this complaint in my capacity as editor of Talk Radio 702 and 94.7 Highveld Stereo.
A forum from the past
The Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) welcomed the resuscitation of the Forum for Black Journalists (FBJ) — which was dormant for about a decade — as a positive development for journalists to ”defend their space”, reports Percy Zvomuya.
Jane Duncan, the FXI’s executive director, hoped it would ”precipitate the formation” of an all-embracing body.
The FBJ stepped into the void of the now-defunct South African Union of Journalists (SAUJ) and the moribund Media Workers’ Association of South Africa, affiliated to the National Council of Trade Unions. Media-freedom activist and veteran journalist Raymond Louw recalled that the SAUJ folded because of financial mismanagement and Mwasa ”just faded away”.
He said Sanef believes the industry is ”deficient because there is no body that represents not only black journalists, but the industry as a whole”.
The FXI said Mwasa continues to limp on, but the SAUJ collapsed because it was not well managed.