Xolela Mangcu Takes Fellow Columnists To the Brink

January 30th, 2008 by Adele

Democracy gracefully took up a seat in the crowded Tapestry Room of the Origins Centre at Wits University on Monday night, when five opinion-makers addressed a full house for a book launch billed as the “Night of the Columnists”.

Pregs Govender, Justice Malala, David Bullard and Sipho Seepe were questioned on their public stances by one of their kind, Xolela Mangcu, whose book of essays, To the Brink, received its ship’s christening at the end of the evening, and was sent into the choppy waters of national politics in South Africa.

The event was part of a conference co-hosted by Mangcu’s organisation, the Platform for Public Deliberation, called “Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Public Sphere: South African Democracy at the Crossroads”, which addressed aspects of public participation in our society – from talk radio to outdoor worship – as well as the concept of “global citizenship” in an increasingly fractious world. (The conference ends Thursday 31 Jan.)

At the close of the event, Mangcu – a columnist for Business Day and The Weekender – expanded on the subject of his book, which has to do with his deep concern at a shift he has detected in South African public life, away from the non-racialism that informed the many different campaigns against apartheid – from Black Consciousness to the Black Sash – and toward a pernicious nativism that is ultimately harmful to the country’s prospects.

“Looking at the great history of the struggle, it’s clear that all had as the goal the establishment of a non-racial nation,” he said.

He decries the shift toward what he calls “racial nationalism”, and holds President Thabo Mbeki responsible for it. He was joined on the panel by several other critics of the government, there to address the question of what it means, fundamentally, to interrogate the status quo.

After the session chair Carolyn Hamilton gave opening remarks, Mangcu rose and addressed the panellists, starting with Pregs Govender, author of Love and Courage: A story of insubordination. “Why is insubordination necessary?” she was asked. “Doesn’t it turn one into a cultural rebel?” Mangcu observed that some people in positions of leadership are referred to as “Ubhuti” or “Tata” out of respect. How does one, as a critic, say what has to be said, questioning the elders, without being disrespectful? If one has proved one’s struggle credentials, does that permit one greater liberties, wider scope for opinion?

Govender received a cheer when she responded that insubordination doesn’t deny respect, because it’s an attitude taken while “not just standing against something, but also standing for something”.

Telling of her recent visit to Zimbabwe, she said she met women there who were being displaced into poverty; thence into prostitution; thence into suffering from HIV/AIDS; and thence, finally, into death, at the hands of a pitiless system of patronage enforced by Robert Mugabe. Above all, she said, we must be insubordinate to systems of power, not merely individuals.

On the topic of writing, Mangcu noted that it takes courage to leave the protection and security offered by received wisdom. To columnist-atlarge Sipho Seepe he asked, “Writing a column is a lonely exercise. Where do you muster resources for courage?” He also wanted to know whether Seepe felt vindicated in his criticisms of Thabo Mbeki: “When did the penny drop for you? And how do we avoid a similar scenario [of "totalitarianism"] with an even more belligerent group of leaders?”

For Seepe, the penny dropped in 1997, when, he said, the ANC was guilty of ignoring the famous dictum about absolute power, and more or less handed it over, to his mind, to Mbeki. On the topic of his own writing, he quoted from Ngugi: “The questioning mind has become suspect”. But he’s prepared to occupy the position of a suspect. “I criticise and I critique because I believe we can correct” – and that belief is what gives him, if not courage, then the will to do what he believes is necessary.

Seepe also praised To the Brink in no uncertain terms, lauding Mangcu for his own courage in adopting a stance against the racialism he sees being propagated as a result of the Mbeki ethos.

To Sunday Times anchor columnist David Bullard, Mangcu asked the question on many a newspaper reader’s mind. Noting Bullard’s nonchalant, churlish, swaggering obnoxiousness in print, he wondered, “How seriously should we take you?”

Bullard first warned the audience that the high-flying language of socio-political discourse would go temporarily on hiatus: “My contribution represents the evening’s intellectual loadshedding”. He then mentioned that he found it fascinating that he – a self-confessed economic mercenary who moved to South Africa during apartheid to take advantage of its volatile markets, and who has nary a jot of struggle credibility to his name – often wrote the same thing in his column, regarding local politics, as the other panellists did in theirs (albeit with more swaggering obnoxiousness). So in that sense, readers could take him quite seriously.

“I really do enjoy wrecking someone’s Sunday morning,” he continued, seguing into a caution about press freedom. He had noticed that cartoonist Zapiro hadn’t been seen in a while: perhaps he had disappeared into a Government Sponsored Institution for reprogramming, so that Jacob Zuma would no longer be caricatured with a shower rose protruding from his pate?

Mangcu then called Justice Malala, a well-known writer and editor, and a columnist at The Times, to account for the basis of his optimism about South Africa, and asked whether the new ANC leadership should be afforded a honeymoon period by the opinion-makers. How should columnists operate during a transitional period?

Malala responded that he found “the new guys” a refreshing change from the Mbeki crowd, particularly because of their openness, their willingness to engage with the media and thrash issues out rather than give orders from on high. He also found it signally important that the cult of the leader-for-life, so common elsewhere in Africa, had not set in in the ANC.

That said, there would be no honeymoon period. The ANC being what it was, its leaders still tended to value struggle credentials above all else, a fact that hindered what Malala referred to as “freedom of opinion”, as distinct from freedom of speech. Opinions still needed to be rendered, even the unpalatable ones – such as, he continued, the fact that Tony Yengeni is wholly unfit to sit on his party’s National Working Committee.

Hearkening back to one of David Bullard’s comments, Malala then chided his fellow panellists – “One of our failures as columnists is we write too often about the same things” – and turned the podium back over to Mangcu and To the Brink.

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Book launch photo gallery: