By Ed Herbst*
“(Mandela) said to me, just before he got ill, ‘Iqbal, are you still the same?’ I said to him, ‘Tata, I am still the same.’ He said, ‘Now I can go.”
Dr Iqbal Survé, quoted in the Daily Maverick of 30/6/2016
“It is apposite to remind the respondents of the sentiments expressed by the late State President, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela on 20 April 1964 in his opening address in the dock:
…I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony with equal opportunities …”
Judge Roshini Allie in the Cape High Court on 12/5/2016 in granting an interdict sought by the University of Cape Town against RMF leader Chumani Maxwele and 15 other respondents who had attempted to burn down the UCT campus.
Shortly after he was released from prison, Nelson Mandela accepted an invitation from the Jewish community in Cape Town to speak at the Marais Road Shul in Sea Point. I was sent to cover the event as an SABC television news reporter.
During his speech he referred to an incident which occurred during his incarceration on Robben Island. The prisoners had asked for the opportunity to worship and a minister from the Dutch Reformed Church was sent to conduct Sunday services.
After one of these services the cleric had asked the prison warders to give Mandela the only gift he could offer, a guava. This was duly confiscated. “How cruel were my jailers”, Mandela said.
His deeply-moved audience was humbled by his capacity for forgiveness and his extraordinary generosity of spirit.
Resignation with immediate effect
Dr Iqbal Survé and the newspapers now under his control, the Cape Times in particular, constantly evoke the name of Nelson Mandela and I was reminded of what Mandela said in the Sea Point synagogue when the following Twitter post appeared under the name of Karima Brown, one of his senior news executives who, last week, showed her faith in him and in the long term future of newspapers like the Cape Times by resigning with what amounted to immediate effect.
Long gone are the days where we explain ourselves to White politicians. Especially ones (sic) that try (sic) to undermine and underplay the disastrous impact of racism, whiteness and its attendant entitlement. You stand on the shoulders of giants and you inspire so many young and old to live authentically and with purpose. Helen Zille is a bully who has an overdeveloped Madam complex. She has yet to answer to the substantive issues raised by the widest range of people on her crude attempt to use political power to determine the reading choices of the Western Cape government. As you said elsewhere whiteness and its hegemony stops right here and right now. We ain’t taking this shit no more!
This was a response to a series of Twitter attacks on Helen Zille and David Bullard by Eusebius McKaiser.
At first I was disbelieving. Given that junior reporters look to senior news executives for ethical guidance on what constitutes neutral and objective reporting, I felt that the post could not have come from her and had surely been posted by someone else with malicious intent. Her attitude towards white people is however highly regarded by Eusebius Mckaiser who, with approval, proved its veracity by including the above-mentioned words at the end of this article. It goes without saying that if any white journalist were to generalise about black people in that way there would be a firestorm of criticism.
In a recent article posted on Politicsweb, Ernst Roets of Afriforum quotes a South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) survey which found that only 4.7% of all South Africans perceive racism and xenophobia as the country’s greatest unresolved issue and that 79.4% of the black South Africans polled in the study had indicated that they did not experience ethnic animosity.
‘White madam’
Roets defines those who work frenetically to create the opposite impression as “Race Merchants” and I wonder what he made of another Twitter post by Brown on 20 July:
Brown’s statement related to a dispute about an apology which the Press Ombudsman ordered the Cape Times to make. Her Twitter statement like the previous one, was devoid of dignity, courtesy and restraint. In my subjective perception, it echoed the sort of statement about Zille previously made by Julius Malema in his fiery, polemical youth, something for which he subsequently apologised.
Do such tweets, infused with racial hatred and ethnic condescension, not accurately reflect the Sekunjalo ethos?
This ethnic nationalism and pervasive sense of racially-tinged victimhood seems to be an essential component in what Brown calls “media transformation”. In an interview with Michael Bratt of Media Online she says:
“The normative dominant narrative in South Africa is captured in neo-liberal, white privilege and that is perceived as normal. I’ve always argued that my job as a journalist is to challenge that dominant narrative.”
In this regard the Cape Times has certainly been “transformed”. It relentlessly accuses white South Africans of racism and constantly seeks to ratchet up animosity against them, an approach that is the antithesis of the Nelson Mandela dream – nation building through reconciliation. I am told that the last white news reporter, one of the country’s best environmental reporters, Melanie Gosling left the Cape Times at the end of last year having endured extraordinary unpleasantness from the editor Aneez Salie – who delights in telling the white readers of his newspaper to “Piss Off”.
Sordid first
Gosling and reporters like her were targeted virtually from the moment that Brown and Mde were appointed after they wrote a favourable article about President Jacob Zuma in which they attacked one of his critics, Prince Mashele. Gosling was among those threatened by Survé’s lawyers – a sordid first in South African media history.
Salie’s predecessor as Cape Times editor, Gasant Abarder, played a singular and successful role in driving one of Cape Town’s leading Struggle journalists, Tony Weaver out of Newspaper House and getting rid of one of his predecessors, the beloved, long-term columnist John Scott – in a two line email!
For a further understanding of Brown’s “transformation” mindset, read her colleague Vukani Mde’s article about the “white internet”:
‘Like I said, I don’t think the white internet (or the white media establishment in its entirety) will ever forgive that picture, ever.’
I never knew that the internet was ethnically Balkanised and neither, it seems did Ferial Haffajee.
Her response was succinct.
Cosmic coincidence
By cosmic coincidence Brown and Mde authored an article “Media freedom cannot be divorced from transformation” which appeared in the Cape Times on the same day that their boss, Dr Iqbal Survé chose to settle, literally on the steps of the Labour Court, with the dismissed Cape Times editor, Alide Dasnois. This conveniently obviated the need to for him to testify under oath about his definition of media transformation and the strong element of Ubuntu in the way in which he treats his staff.
We are thus fortunate to have access to the words of the great man, expounding with his usual gravitas and grace, on how he saw the transformation of the University of Cape Town.
At a meeting of the UCT Association of Black Alumni (UCTABA) hosted in the Kramer Building at the university on 7 April last year, Dr Survé made the following statements as reflected in this YouTube clip:
At 50 minutes and 11 seconds he says that UCT ‘… does not respect me as a black man.’
At 52:37 he says: ‘Frankly speaking it is a racist institution.’
At 56:40 he says: ‘If you want real change, I suggest you change the leadership of this institution, change it in its entirety.’
Swinging retrenchments?
Thus encouraged Chumani Maxwele and the RMF started a relentless war of attrition which culminated on the assault on its vice chancellor Dr Max Price and arson attacks which then spread to other campuses (half a billion rand and counting) – all this after Dr Survé was given a PIC “loan” of a billion rand under conditions that your bank would never dream of offering you and with the alleged goal of “creating a black Naspers”.
Essentially Survé seems to see the “transformation” of UCT as a more profound enunciation of what has been achieved in the Cape Times newsroom – get rid of every white news reporter and editor regardless of merit or years of dedication and loyalty to the institution in much the same way that more than a hundred senior white managers were driven out of the Cape Town municipality when the ANC took political control in 2003. The consequences of the “transformation” of the Cape Town municipality have been as disastrous as the RMF “transformation” of UCT.
A recent Intellidex research study indicates that the four biggest South African media companies have more than 50% black ownership but I gather that Survé, Brown, Mde and Gasant Abarder see it more in terms of the National Democratic Revolution i.e. that every private and government institution must rigidly reflect the demographic breakdown of the country.
‘Verwoerdian quotas’
This was best articulated by Enoch “Canyon Springs” Godongwana an honest and honourable man, who said that South Africa must apply “Verwoerdian quotas” – and the ANC has not disavowed this interpretation despite a recent Constitutional Court judgment and the subsequent agreement between Solidarity and the SAPS.
James Myburgh, in a Politicsweb article, calls this a ‘…morally abhorrent principle, which drags behind it an odious history.’
We thus need clarity in practical terms on what Dr Survé means by “media transformation” because, according to futurist Clem Suntner:
‘We can thus estimate that by 2030 – based on current growth – for the age group 0-24 there will be 91 Blacks, 7 Coloureds, 1 Asian and 1 White in every group of 100 youngsters.’
Does this mean, Dr Survé, that in 14 years’ time a cum laude, white journalism honours graduate and aspirant news reporter will have a 1 in a 100 chance of being employed by you or, as things currently stand in the Cape Times newsroom under Aneez Salie, no chance at all?
How can this be reconciled with the extraordinary generosity of spirit of Nelson Mandela whose memory you so often evoke and, above all, with his memorable statement from the dock during the Rivonia trial in 1964?
“… I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony with equal opportunities …”
Retrenchment process
In the meantime, “Dr Dan” Matjila’s dream of creating a “Black Naspers” while deliberately not generating the maximum safe return for civil service pensioners is turning into a nightmare for editorial staff at Independent News Media (Pty) Ltd – they have been served with Section 189 notices, the opening salvo in a retrenchment process.
They have been told that they might lose their jobs and that those who remain will have to agree to work for a lower wage and they are wondering what Karima Brown – who literally disappeared overnight – knows that they don’t.
T
he Cape Times has been ordered to apologise to Alide Dasnois for once again misleading its readers and the questions keep piling up.
In May “Dr Dan” told parliament that: “The strategy is working now and the numbers look good.”
Actually, they don’t.
Also in May, Herman Manson of Mark Lives revealed the Audit Bureau of Circulation newspaper sales figures for the first three months of 2016 compared to the figures for the equivalent period last year. These figures showed that the Cape Times daily sales have dropped from 32 371 to 31 767.
Perhaps “Dr Dan” can update parliament on the extent to which his project is succeeding and whether the claim that Dr Iqbal Survé is drawing a monthly salary of half a million rand for this brilliant business plan is true.
- Ed Herbst is a pensioner and former reporter who writes in his own capacity.
