Reporter’s head is in the clouds
Niren Tolsi’s article “Ex-IFP leader draws real support” (January 28) would have been more accurately titled “Ex-IFP leader draws imaginary support”. Throughout the article, Tolsi displays an emotional attachment to Zanele KaMagwaza-Msibi’s project instead of analysing the reality on the ground.
The reality is that this new project, the National Freedom Party (NFP), has no ideological base or policy platform. It is bizarre for Tolsi to claim that there is a “strong Christian sensibility that underpins the nascent NFP”.
He then goes on to weave a tale of deception by claiming that “Magwaza-Msibi was the beneficiary of mass defection” in Nongoma and Ulundi. In Nongoma only two councillors out of 35 openly identified themselves with the new party.
Tolsi’s revelation that “at Nongoma 25 out of the Inkatha Freedom Party’s 35 sitting councillors announced their intention to move to the NFP” is yet another example of emotional attachment clouding the facts.
Tolsi’s suggestion that in Ulundi “18 of the 24 constituency chairpersons and 15 councillors followed suit” is spurious. Surely these hallucinations deserve a nomination for the comedy awards? There is not a single branch chairperson or councillor in Ulundi who has defected from the IFP. Neither is there a person by the name of Mandla Zondi who is a constituency chairperson in Ulundi.
It is a disservice to your readers to publish such sensationalism and fiction. In one aspect Tolsi is correct: “lately Zanele Magwaza-Msibi has been singing”. Magwaza-Msibi will in a few months’ time learn the difficult political lesson that singing may be a necessary condition to win votes, but it is not a sufficient condition. She will also learn that a political party formed on a whim without any policies or principles will soon dissipate.
It is tragic that the song drawn from St Paul’s epistle to the Galatians and sung by Magwaza-Msibi: “Umvuni uzovuna akutshalile/azophela amaqhinga” (for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap), will come back to haunt her. Magwaza-Msibi has sown treachery and duplicity in the ranks of the IFP and she will reap the bitter taste that comes from losing elections.
To crown his article, Tolsi proclaims that central to Magwaza-Msibi’s campaign are “disgruntled former IFP youth leaders who, since 2000, have been unable to put a youthful stamp on the party”.
Magwaza-Msibi herself was a youth leader in 2000 and her contemporaries are Mntomuhle Khawula, MPL, Bonginkosi Dhlamini, MPL, Zululand deputy mayor Sbu Nkwanyana, Nkandla mayor Zwelabo Zulu and many others. They certainly are not part of Magwaza-Msibi’s doomed campaign, which is run by a motley crew of students with no political experience whatsoever.
The IFP will survive this defection and will lead the majority of KZN municipalities, because voters have faith in the IFP’s track record of service delivery and rural development. Furthermore, the electorate is attracted to the IFP’s policies of political and economic pluralism, devolution of power and federalism, which ensure that local communities are given greater autonomy. — Thulasizwe Buthelezi, MPL and IFP deputy national spokesperson
Harping on about racial prejudice undermines us
Milisuthando Bongela (“Injustice cuts both ways“, Friday, February 4) says she finds it exhausting to write about race in contemporary South Africa. I, too, find this subject exhausting, but I cannot help but respond: “How right you are, Milisuthando injustice does indeed cut both ways.”
I would like to give a white person’s view. A colleague and I have the same job title and both receive the same salary (R10 000 a month). She is black and has a BA and I am white and have a PhD. When I suggest that we work together on a project to achieve our set key results, I am met with “Hayi suga” (yes, being a white person, I do not know the spelling of black swear words).
I continue to do the work because I care about our clients and the future of this country. My co-worker spends most of her day applying for higher-paying jobs (I don’t blame her) and speaking to her friends and family on the company-sponsored cellphone. She also insists on calling me “girl” even though I am old enough to be her mother. I do not respond to any of these (to my white mind) insults because I truly believe that South Africa can be a great country.
What my colleague does not know, and what I will never share with her, is that I have suffered considerably for my belief in a just South Africa. I was gang-raped by three members (white, obviously) of the security police in the late 1980s for being a “k-lover” and they sodomised me because they would not put their penises where they believed black penises had been.
So, yes, Milisuthando, you are so right when you say that injustice cuts both ways. Milisuthando, can I join you for lunch at George’s on Fourth next Friday? Or am I too white for your taste? — “Still believe in a just South Africa“
If nations are a product of the imagination and the stories we choose to tell ourselves of our past and present, as the historian Benedict Anderson suggests, then I’d like to venture that Bongela’s stories about the past and present are (re)creating a negative sense of South African “nationhood”.
Two weeks ago, she imagined, not unlike fellow pessimist Thabo Mbeki, that there were two South Africas in her growing-up years. One was inhabited by black people who walked to school, scraped together a meagre lunch and suffered with their single mothers to survive.
The other was populated by spoiled white children who were ferried to school in sparkling 4X4s, ate scrummy packed lunches and flew for skiing holidays annually. From my own working-class white background, this seems like a fantasy, far, sadly, from the reality I inhabited — a reality that suggests there have always been more than two South Africas.
Last week, in another essay on how white and black people snarl at each other’s entrenched prejudices in upmarket eateries in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, she noted that “at the helm of black people’s regression, there is still a white face”.
In fairness to her, Bongela suggests that we are all damaged by apartheid and that we are all aiming to reach a place where skin colour will have “no bearing on the humanity that connects us all”.
But I wonder if this constant retelling and rewriting of our national narrative in the language of hurt, pain, humiliation and crude difference, while true (in part) to actual events in the past and present, hinders or helps our attempts to build a South Africa based on what is possible, not only on what is problematic.
I don’t mean to rewrite the past or to deny the structural and other inequalities which persist today. I would rather suggest that some nuance — and a focus on the many exceptions to the grim litany of racism told and retold to us on a daily basis — could help us to imagine a “new” South Africa through more complex, compelling and inspiring stories. — Pierre Brouard, Pretoria
Good and bad news should run together
Behind the tongue-in-cheek, intelligent approach shown in the letter from Chris Mann, the “RAPS-afflicted professor of poetry, Rhodes” (RAPS — repetitive afro-pessimist syndrome) lies a very important message for all forms of media regarding its reach and influence on the psyche of the nation as a whole, arguably as important, if not more important, than the psyche of the business community here and abroad.
The adage “good news doesn’t sell” is frankly outdated and inaccurate in our context — or any context, actually. The good news of the Fifa World Cup and related positive stories “sold” all forms of media and lifted the spirit and mood of the nation exponentially. A mixture of good and undesirable news is vital in keeping the nation properly informed regarding all aspects of government performance and achievement — whether positive or negative, corrupt or honest — and the general state of the nation.
A national psyche mired in hopelessness, fear and depression, generated by an undiluted diet of negativity and bad news, cannot possibly serve the interests of South Africa. That is not to say the media creates the bad news, but neither does it need to create good news — it’s out there.
Simply report on it frequently, alongside the bad stuff. We need to be a balanced, motivated nation to move forward to greater things and the media has a responsible role to play in this regard. Honest, realistic reporting cannot and must not exclude the positive stories. — Rose Morrow, Durban
Telling ‘smaller’ stories
There are so many pressing things to redress today that Paul Wessels’s letter (“Doherty whitewashes the bush-war experience“, February 4) seems relatively unimportant. But it represents a general problem: an obsession with one-sidedness, with taking the obviously politically correct side, without exploring other angles. Perhaps my own involvement in the “bush war”, the confusion still with me 31 years later, and my irritation with verbose “academic” analyses are among the reasons for my response.
I have no knowledge of the exhibition, but it seems Doherty did explain the works’ terms of reference (as Paul Wessels’s letter states): it was about young white men and what the war did to them. What is wrong with that? It is a story to be told (and I suppose has been told in other forms).
What tripe to suggest that it “transmogrifies” (miserable word) the victims of apartheid from “butchered black bodies” to “spectral white ghosts” (what a dreadfully sensational vision). There is no logic in that statement.
I had the relatively good fortune to work in a zoo and to teach when I was on the “border” and hence was spared being involved in physical fighting. With regard to specific atrocities — the killing of civilians or torturing of Plan (People’s Liberation Army of Namibia) fighters — a very small minority of soldiers was involved. During my few months of basic training in Bloemfontein, more than one soldier returning from the “border” committed suicide in the barracks.
Yes, the war was unjust; yes, the chief victims of the war were the citizens of northern Namibia (and this story is told regularly in Namibia), but smaller stories should also be told.
It is really silly to expect all the soldiers who were involved in skirmishes or involved in the war in general to make use of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Those who killed civilians and those who tortured Plan fighters should have. But is it even realistic to expect that these unsung villains expose themselves to a process they probably were very wary of? — Dave Joubert, Cape Town
CHE: Launch a case
All those academics outraged by the Council for Higher Education’s (CHE) censorship of the peer review of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (“Education council’s credibility zero”, Letters, February 4) should organise to launch an access-to-information application.
This could force the CHE to release the report against its cowardly will and deter other vice-chancellors from future attempts at university censorship. Any VC is free to issue any media release arguing against any report. — Keith Gottschalk, Cape Town
What about Mugabe?
South Africa has joined the international chorus calling for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down. Amazing. There is an international chorus condemning our immediate neighbour, who disregarded election results, does not seem to care about his people’s human rights and has also been around for more than 30 years, and I haven’t heard government asking for him to step down. — Ann Carl, Ferndale