It’s no fluke that the Nelson Mandela Foundation received more than 10 000 messages wishing Madiba well during his two-day hospital stay last week. It is testament to his status as a much loved and revered global icon. When, at the age of 92, such an icon is ill, it is bound to make headline news and garner interest around the world. People were anxious and concerned. With little by way of clear and regular updates about what was ailing him and no indication of the seriousness of his illness, it caused panic in some quarters.
The relevant role players have since admitted that keeping South Africans in the dark about the elder statesman’s health was a mistake.
It was the leadership shown by Acting President Kgalema Motlanthe and his communication team that finally put the world at ease by speaking frankly to us about what was going on.
Journalists are conduits of news and information. It is our duty to keep people informed about the relevant and topical news events that matter to them and make a difference in their lives. How Mandela is doing is one such subject. It is because he is adored and respected that he remains a figure of such keen public interest.
It is therefore disturbing to hear presidential spokesperson Zizi Kodwa suggest that querying about someone’s health is “alien to African culture”. When someone is sick and people are concerned about them, they will voice their concern. They need to be reassured and that can be done only by making honest information available.
To obfuscate and defend what was obviously a communications error by blaming the media is unfortunate and errant.
But it is the substance of the accusation that is curious. What is un-African about trying to establish the accurate details about a topical subject, in this case, Mandela’s hospitalisation, which had been confirmed in a written statement from the foundation? There was nothing speculative about it. It was a fact.
By and large, from what I can ascertain, most media houses reported what was contained in the statement, which was that Madiba was not well and was being treated at Milpark hospital. We also reported what we saw, which was that several family members and close friends visited Madiba while he was in hospital. None of this appears to be alien to African culture. It is also ethical in terms of journalistic practice, as ours is to report the facts as we see them.
In African culture as in any other, when someone is ill, it is commonplace for them to be visited by those near and dear. It is natural that when people are concerned, they want to be informed about how the person is doing. In this particular instance, the individual happens to be very well known. The entire country was worried and, understandably, wanted to be kept abreast of developments about a person its citizens care deeply for, while at the same time not being intrusive or disrespectful.
What was despicable were the rumours circulating on social networking sites earlier in the month that Mandela had died. Such rumour-mongering is disgusting in anyone’s culture and downright inhumane. It has been roundly and rightly condemned.
There are many issues, rightly or wrongly, which we know to be taboo in our culture. One of these, for example, is adults talking to children about sex, a subject to be discussed only among adults. But shrouding sex in secrecy has left many children uninformed, curious and more prone to experiment, leading them into all sorts of trouble, hence our high teenage pregnancy rate.
So, though there are many behaviours that are considered alien, inquiring after someone’s wellbeing is not one of them.
Let us not use our culture as a scapegoat to excuse obvious shortcomings, in this particular case a public-relations bungle as a result of what some press reports suggest was a turf war.
Kodwa wants to detract from the fiasco, leading us to fulsome and unnecessary rumination on African culture when the issue doesn’t arise in this particular case.
It is designed to make black journalists question whether we are in some way betraying our roots in how we handle our reportage, and our white colleagues query how and if they fit into this mystical African cultural paradigm.
This is not about culture. It’s always easier to cast labels and fight pitched battles with the media.
In this case, in our role as conveyors and seekers of the truth, we were made to take the blame for an information vacuum that was not of our own doing.