Dear Capetonians,
I am sorry it has taken me so long to write. I left in April without so much as a toothbrush and a change of clothes to take up a truly fantastic job in Johannesburg and I barely had a chance to reflect on what I was leaving behind, other than a staggering view.
Slowly a sense of what I have lost, and gained, has begun to settle over me, but that is not what this letter is about.
Instead it is about why you read the Mail & Guardian, or rather why you sometimes — perhaps often — don’t.
This is a question that until this week I’ve struggled to ask, let alone to answer, but I have recently crossed a threshold broader than the vast Karoo and higher than the Witwatersrand, and I think I am now better placed to canvass the issues robustly. I have acquired a GP licence plate, on a new and improved car.
It is perhaps the most significant admission I’ve yet made of the finality of my move to this strange and remarkable town, where cars matter a good deal. And I haven’t quite got over the embarrassment yet.
In the Cape, especially during the summer holidays, GP is a kind of automotive scarlet letter and it earns its bearers a shunning more absolute than anything visited on Hester Prynne. People from Gauteng think Capetonians are bad drivers. Not true, they just boil with hate at the sight of GP plates and drive accordingly in their presence. It’s a kind of vehicular Heisenberg principle.
So you will understand, perhaps, when I say that now that I drive a GP-badged car I can never come home again. Of course, I can literally go back to Cape Town — I often do — but I return as a stranger, and worse, an apostate who has willingly left paradise for Mammon’s smoke-darkened hearth.
“It is part of morality,” said that great and miserable German Theodor Adorno, “not to be at home in one’s home.”
In the interests of morality, then, let me be honest with you. For some time now, the M&G has been doing less well in Cape Town than in other regions. In fact, our Cape sales have been stagnant or declining in the past three years, while our Gauteng (and indeed overall) sales have been growing.
I take this personally, for obvious reasons, and I have been trying to understand it. Any number of explanations suggest themselves and, believe me, we agonise about them in a conference room where the roar of the traffic on Jan Smuts Avenue rises and falls like the surf off Mouille Point.
After all, our Cape Town office is perched above the city like a command post and some of our most senior people work there. The editor (that’s me) has lived on the slopes of the mountain almost all his life. We should understand the place. What is more, when we hold one of our regular Critical Thinking Forum events in the Cape it is invariably packed to the rafters. Some people at least, seem to like us.
But clearly we are getting something wrong. It might be something simple, like distribution (in fact there is nothing simple about distribution, but you know what I mean — either you can find the paper when you want it or you can’t, either it thrusts itself in front of you or it doesn’t).
Maybe we aren’t doing enough marketing in a town, which to be fair earns a big chunk of its daily crust from the business of bedazzlement.
Or maybe the problem is more serious and closer to my own area of responsibility. Perhaps we simply aren’t giving you what you want.
The M&G is a national newspaper. Maybe we don’t quite know how to address the Cape within that context?
Perhaps the reality of the province politically, demographically, economically and environmentally is now so starkly divergent from that of Gauteng — South Africa’s centre of gravity — that we simply feel less relevant to you. If so, we need to figure out how to account for the difference.
Maybe there are other failures in our editorial mix that are more visible on a south easter-blasted afternoon than amid the smog and humidity of the highveld.
I suspect that a combination of factors is at play, but instead of imagining them on your behalf at a remove of 1 454km, I would like you to tell me what you think.
Even though my new car could blast me down the N1 with trivial ease, I won’t be home for Christmas: not for the thick smell of milkwoods and salt, not for the dog days of the city bowl — Table Mountain pulsing with warmth — not for the shock of the blue, blown ocean at Bakoven, or the tornadoes of litter in Buitenkant Street, or a lunchtime sandwich at Jardine. I’m told Jo’burg is lovely at year-end and deserted. I’m sceptical. So compound the misery by telling it to me straight: [email protected]
Your exile,
Nic