The recent furore over Kuli Roberts’s column, clumsily headlined Jou ma se kinders, reminds me of the start of a classic joke — “So a black racist, a white racist and a satirist walk into a colour bar —” In South Africa, alas, it’s a joke with a punchline that’s not very funny.
Roberts’s off-colour Sunday World column has sparked debate about the limits of satire, the depths of racism and whether it’s really a good idea to give someone a columnist’s gig just because she looks good on television. It has also allowed white and coloured South Africans the luxury of what Freud called Schwartzenfreude, that feeling of pleasure derived from the discovery that black people can be as racist as other races. And, boy, are we lapping it up.
On the face of it, Roberts’s column appears to be just blatant racism without any appreciable satirical aim. But when you unpack it, you find the bare bones of satire. The only thing missing is the flesh of an editorial intervention, which is why we’re left with what Antjie Krog almost called the racist country of our skull.
Simply put, this is as much a failure of editorship as an excrudescence of racism. Many satirists have said much riskier things, but have framed with a greater purpose — confronting the absurdities of stereotyping and racism and highlighting the inconsistencies of liberalism. You need a good writer and editor working in tandem and we certainly had neither in this instance.
A case in point: I’ve titled this column “Kuligate”, a pun on coolie, a derogatory term for a coloured person, and on Kuli, the derogatory term for a columnist. I can get away with it only because it’s a mechanism to emphasise the irony of Roberts’s racism and to negate the force of the term by juxtaposing it with the example of the idiocy of what Roberts has written.
That is, if I do get away with it. As my editor reminds me, it’s only satire if someone understands it. Otherwise it’s just insulting.
Roberts had moments in her column where, with an editor tweaking them, her stereotypes might have been marginally defensible.
The fiction of “the friend”, of course, is untenable, although Roberts makes a misguided stab of casting her as irrational by describing her as “applying skin lightener” while spouting her anti-coloured racism. “My friend [says] Coloureds — have no front teeth and eat fish like they are trying to deplete the ocean. They love making love and leave even the randiest negro exhausted.”
It’s a weak attempt to construct a racist and then read stereotypes off her. It doesn’t work because the editor didn’t set up the binary dynamic with enough force.
But there are other moments when Roberts tries the “Kuligate” device, attempting to rob a negative stereotype of its force with an ironic juxtaposition with overt racism. The reference to Jimmy Manyi, for example: “Shouting is also sometimes necessary, especially when you speak to folk like Jimmy Manyi, who might not have a clue what he is talking about.”
Here Roberts seeks to turn around the stereotype of coloureds as loud by referencing Manyi’s idiotic statement that there was an “oversupply” of coloureds in the Western Cape.
There are a few other unsuccessful attempts, such as the one to read coloured stereotypes off African stereotypes. Unfortunately, we’re ultimately left in the position of the reader who can’t see the satirist’s new clothes. Satire stripped naked is just racism without willing readers and, indeed, without complicit subjects. When you walk into that colour bar as a satirist, you need to realise you’re drinking from the same trough as the black and the white racists. You just hope that you’re excreting a better quality piss-take.
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