Feeding the Blind Squirrel
John Carlin, former South Africa correspondent for the London Independent attended the ANC’s Polokwane conference for South Africa’s Independent Newspapers. In a column in that capacity, Carlin brings up a recent article on Zuma in London’s Daily Mail. Carlin properly castigates the Daily Mail’s predictably retrograde tone:
The Daily Mail is a vibrantly successful London newspaper that makes its money from nourishing the vulgar appetites and narrow prejudices of Middle England.
This week it published an article about Jacob Zuma that began with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink redramatisation of the before, during and after of the famous shower scene; went on to make some jokes about all the wives and all the children, and generally portrayed the new ANC president as a machinegun-wielding, communist, Zulu warrior who would expropriate white farms and - horrors - set a-tremble the 220 000 British citizens who have bought second homes in South Africa.
Simplistic though well-enough-written crap, the story (headline: “Machinegun man takes over ANC God help the Rainbow Nation̶
does Mail readers the service of confirming their dumb conviction that Africa is an irredeemably barbaric place and gives them a jolly good chuckle into the bargain.
And yet, Carlin notes:
Such tomfoolery could be brushed aside easily enough were it not for the fact that it offers an insight however caricaturishly extreme into a real and very serious problem that South Africa is going to have to confront, and soon, in terms of the way it is perceived in the rest of the world in these outrageously globalised, interdependent times.
Even a bind squirrel is lucky enough to stumble on an acorn now and then, and in the midst of perpetuating his newspaper’s blinkered views of Africa, Andrew Malone appears to have so stumbled. But it is alarming, though hardly surprising, that such views prevail even in London to the point where depicting Africa in such Dark Continent terms continues to have currency.
Carlin’s article, which starts with so much promise, somewhat sputters to an end. His ultimate conclusion is that Thabo Mbeki, in order to firm up South Africa’s standing in the world, “should take advantage of these turbulent political times finally to fire the health minister [Manto Tshabalala-Msimang] and the commissioner of police [Jackie Selebi].” Execrable as the performances of these two have been, and as salutary as firing them might be, as a climax for the column, his proposed solution doesn’t quite jibe. Yes, firing Tshabalala-Msimang and Jackie Selebi is overdue. But one would think that Carlin would have a larger vision for South Africa to present to counter the vacuous puffery of the Andrew malones of the world. As it stands, Carlin’s solutions fall into the category of necessary but not sufficient proposals.