Putting together 25 Years of the Mail & Guardian gave me many a nostalgic moment — if nostalgia can include the memory of times one wouldn’t necessarily want to relive at all.
Perhaps it’s better to speak of flashbacks: an instant in which an old front page, a headline or an image sparks an almost visceral recollection of another time. The quarter-century commemorated in the book is both the lifetime of this newspaper and the past two and a half decades of South Africa’s history.
The relative calm of retrospect may give to that history more shape than could be discerned at the time, but there’s some kind of thrill in seeing how a weekly newspaper, inevitably stuck in its historical moment, week by week registered what was going on in the world around it, tried to make sense of it, even tried to push history in the direction our hopes and ideals wanted it to go.
Looking over 25 years of history and how it was registered in newsprint gives one a strong feeling that the progress of history is by no means smooth. It proceeds in fits and starts — two steps forward, one step back, a couple of sideways lurches. And perhaps that’s why it was impossible to organise 25 Years of the Mail & Guardian in a purely linear fashion.
Yes, there’s the weekly march of front pages — they form the basic timeline in the construction of the book. But the essays by the paper’s different editors in 25 Years of the Mail & Guardian only partly fit into that linear structure, for they cast forward and back, beyond the particular dates of that editor’s tenure, as do the shorter pieces by other staffers and contributors that provide accounts of particular experiences related to working for the paper. In that, this history of the Mail & Guardian is as much about the people who helped put the news paper together (and get it out there) as it is about historical and political events.
The paper’s story also includes much that was not just about front-page news, areas of activity that gave the paper a complex social existence: the film festivals that often outraged the authorities or specific interest groups, the marketing campaigns that added colour and depth, even the semi-private highjinks of staffers taking an ironic view of the paper’s history itself.There is much that would ordinarily be hidden from the view of the reader, even one who has been buying the paper regularly for this quarter of a century.
Irwin Manoim’s essay in the book, for instance, tells of the technological innovations that enabled the early existence of the paper — and later brought it into the age of the internet. That ancient computer machinery now seems rather quaint, as outdated as the horse and carriage, but it’s part of the DNA of the instant connectivity and plethora of media forms we now take for granted.
Ferial Haffajee, by contrast, recounts her feelings while working as a reporter on the paper and later as its editor, touching on the complex internal racial politics of the Mail & Guardian. Embedded as it is in South African history, the paper would hardly be able to transcend those politics any more than, say, a new South African state, even if it was and is more self-reflective. There are lessons here.
So 25 Years of the Mail & Guardian tries to account for the paper’s existence as a reflection of that national history, told in weekly instalments, but it also chronicles the stuff that, one might say, lies athwart that linear movement.
Just as a newspaper combines words and images, so the book tells its stories through an interaction of the two, from front pages and posters to pictures of staff members partying or at work, from cartoons and columns to writing that pulls together personal experience and political sweep.
I hope that, for the reader, 25 Years of the Mail & Guardian provides not only a set of snapshots of that quarter-century but also, as the process of editing the book did for me, moments of flashback that bring the past into the present, that remind us who we were then, how that is part of who we are now, and what might take us forward into the future.
25 Years of the Mail & Guardian is published by Tafelberg and is now available in bookshops