It’s enough to have one sweating bullets: nearly half of the Mail and Guardian’s news staff face retrenchment. With its legendary investigative journalism record as well as faithfully living up to the moniker, ‘Africa’ s best read,’ the M&G seems to be slowly going under. On what is a raging, tumultuous media landscape, it tithers ever nearer to the swathe of venerable broadsheets who’ve been rapidly forced to cut staff, migrate to digital or haul it in for good.
The M&G situation is particularly grating. For everybody in the profession, if they go down, do the rest even stand a chance? Imagine a world without the New York Times or Time Magazine? Without the iconic Rolling Stone out on the news stands. Wouldn’t that spell utter disaster, a severe crisis for the world and its very conscience? A catastrophe likely signaling the death of proper, reliable, remarkably enjoyable journalism and a world that is failing to recognise it by rushing to its rescue.
That’s exactly what the case of the M&G signifies for South Africa – the end of an era, a farewell to some of the best we had. Wordsmiths who had readers immersed, or taking out annual subscriptions without thinking too hard about it. From its inception as the Weekly Mail, the paper was an expression of what first-class reportage is meant to look like. Straightforward news pieces came in a carefully-crafted creativity; factual, in-depth, and never with dour prose. The story may have been workaday, something to do with, let’s say, yet another incident of gender-based violence, but the hacks at the paper wrote it like a submission in a post-grad English module.
One need only look at the names who’ve graced the paper’s bylines to appreciate the quality that was churned out by those who’d walked through the publication’s doors. The creme de la creme. Nearly two decades on, one can still recall an article by then editor Nick Dawes on a former spy boss entitled The Spy Who Knew Nothing. Or the one on Bheki Cele, recently appointed as police chief which expressed something along the lines of Zuma who is known to rub shoulders with gangsters has appointed a commissioner who dresses like one. Unforgettable!
Mark Gevisser’s profiles remain best sellers, and one finds oneself revisiting them but realising just how in some men, the words course through the veins. I found one on the musician and playwright Mbongeni Ngema particularly outstanding.
No SA list of the finest writers living in South Africa today would be complete without the proudly-Afrikaner Rian Malan. When the American musician Sixto ‘Sugarman’ Rodrigues came on his famous tour of the country, he became a media sensation. Although his album Cold Fact had barely caused a ripple in the States, amongst his fan base of mostly white liberals in SA, the ‘Mexican Bob Dylan,’ writes Malan was on par with the Beatles. At some point the actor John Matshikiza used to turn in a witty, weekly column. Even the sports pages made a cricketer practicing his bowling in the nets read like he was some sort of mercenary going to war with the Taliban. Always a fresh take, never dull or reminiscent of anything else available out on the local scene. Niren Tolsi’s cricket pieces and profiles on the likes of Papa Penny still ‘slap hard,’ as the TikTokers say.
But in recent years, it was always the late Paddy Harper, the realest, most hilarious cat I read, who had me logging on to the paper’s digital offering week in and out. He was a ‘seasoned journalist who saw through the bullshit, got to the point – and his wry wit in his weekly column lampooned many a politician’ and so was naturally the first name I’d search for. He danced rings around the rest and when the OG was on leave, you counted down the boring days until his next banger. Witty, infectious, ‘gobsmackingly’ funny, his stories had you hopping into an iNyala taxi to downtown Durban, documenting shoddy tenders, charging a lift for a comment from an embattled official and body surfing in honour of a dead colleague.
In Harper’s bonkers way with words, Mmusi Maimane became ‘Byemane’ when he was unceremoniously sacked from the DA. Following that infamous leaked video, Malusi Gigaba was a ‘wanker.’ Harper wrote so beautifully about The Ancestors – full name Shabaka and the Ancestors – a modern avant-jazz band; advocated for the release of Clinton Loyd ‘Booze’ Houston, a former Mandrax addict convicted for a triple homicide when a robbery went bad. In almost all his feature articles was always a spliff burning somewhere, his favourite word ‘perhaps’ or people who needed saving. Whether from government neglect or grinding poverty. Harper never forgot to mention them or to visit the dope fields of Pondoland or, for that matter, to pass on a good word about a nondescript writer from a platteland dustbowl called Colesberg.
I promised him that if he ever passed through here, I’d await him along the N1 with a bag of the lettuce that was standing shoulder-high in my garden. He promised to return the favour with the famous poison, Durban Poison, but death intervened before either one of us had had the opportunity to make good on our respective word. Over the phone, I once asked him how he did it – churning them out so wonderfully, so offhandedly every week. He didn’t really know but he did know he could do it in his sleep.
When he and his colleague at City Press Sipho Masondo took home the 2014 Taco Kuiper award for investigative journalism, the OG quipped: ‘I’m particularly stoked, it’s my fourth year of entering and I made the top ten for the first three years and left with lunch only, so this wicked.’ Off-the-cuff gems like these made him a madala who had no troubles blending in, even dating those who were younger. An article on him considering celibacy in the City Press in the twenty tens is worth digging up on Google. Check out its opening paragraphs:
‘For the first time in my life I’m considering celibacy. Giving up sex. Hanging up my boots.
It’s a tough decision. Not one to be taken lightly. It’s not because I don’t like sex. I do. As much of it as I can get, that is. Sex is pretty much essential, like breathing, eating and football.
The problem is the relationship stuff. I’m shit at it. I always have been, and probably always will be.
I guess I’m the problem.
Women my age don’t seem to dig me very much. They look at me like I fell from a tree. I don’t blame them.
Being a junkie made me grow up late. Very late. The result is a bit of a man-child with some weird ideas. I’m also not very conventional, or big on stuff that people my age generally care about. No house. No suit. No nine-to-five. No desk gig. No retirement plan. No stability. Too much hard living. Too much football. Too many all-nighters with the Ghenginator. An inability to rein in my wandering tendencies.
Add in Big James and Small James, my live-in adult offspring, lurking on the couch, and I’m not much of a catch.
My track record with younger women isn’t much better. They tend to buy my bullshit. Dig the contradictions. Enjoy the madness. Rock the mayhem and disorder. Then drop the hammer.’
Now you see why he’s right up there with my favourites. His profile on Muckrack is at an insane 2 094 articles deep, just but the tip of the iceberg for a career that stretches back to long before the internet had taken over.
This is the paper that brought us Nkandla, the expose on Jacob Zuma’s state-sponsored palatial homestead. Despite government attempts to kill the story, these are the journalists who ignored the threats and published it anyway. More than anything, there was a culture within the publication to unearth the finest writers SA had to offer. If you had the chops, they wanted you. The paper’s online Thought Leader segment was a priceless trove of undiscovered literary talent. Before joining the Sunday Times Magazine, the satirist Ndumiso Ngcobo had a stint there. So too the celebrated Tom Eaton. The sometimes beautifully emotive writer with a naughty streak and author of the book Hoerkind Herman Lategan has also paid his dues at the M&G.
This is where you went if you wanted the very finest writing South Africa had to offer. From its rebellious founding, ironically by reporters who’d been sacked at various anti-apartheid publications such as the Rand Daily Mail. The Weekly Mail would continue with the troublesome anti-establishment brief. With reporters who were gatvol of apartheid’s censorship and mayhem, it never flinched at taking the system head on. And now it seems like SAffers might in the not too distant future find themselves bidding farewell to yet another tried and tested behemoth in the journalism industry. Indeed, as the Daily Maverick article says, ‘it’s painful to witness.’