It’s enough to have one sweating bullets: nearly half of the Mail & 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 tumultuous media landscape, it edges ever closer to the swathe of venerable broadsheets that have been forced to cut staff, migrate to digital, or pack it in for good.
The M&G situation is particularly grating. If they go down, do much of the rest of the media even stand a chance? Imagine a world without the New York Times, Time Magazine, or Rolling Stone. Wouldn’t that spell utter disaster, a crisis for the world and its conscience? A catastrophe likely signalling the death of proper, reliable, remarkably enjoyable journalism, and a world that is failing to recognise this 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 journalism we’ve 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. Solid reportage combined with creativity; factual, in-depth, and never in dour prose. The story might have been workaday, something to do with, 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 some of the bylines that have graced the paper over the years – 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 headlined ‘The Spy Who Knew Nothing’. Or the one about Bheki Cele, soon after his appointment as police chief, something along the lines that Zuma who was known to rub shoulders with gangsters had appointed a minister who dressed like one. Unforgettable!
Mark Gevisser’s profiles remain memorable, and worth returning to again and again. I found one on the musician and playwright Mbongeni Ngema particularly outstanding.
No list of the finest media writers in South Africa today would be complete without the proud Afrikaner Rian Malan. When the American musician Sixto ‘Sugarman’ Rodrigues famously toured this country, he became a media sensation. Although his album Cold Fact had barely caused a ripple in the US, but for his local fans — mostly white liberals — the ‘Mexican Bob Dylan’ (as Malan described him) was on par with the Beatles.
At some point the actor John Matshikiza turned 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 against the Taliban. Always a fresh take, never dull or reminiscent of anything else on the local scene. Niren Tolsi’s cricket pieces and profiles on the likes of Papa Penny still ‘slap hard,’ as the TikTokers say.
In recent years, it was always the late Paddy Harper, the realest, most hilarious cat I’ve read, who had me logging on to the paper’s digital offering week in and week out. He was a ‘seasoned journalist who saw through the bullshit and got to the point’, with his ‘wry wit lampooning many a politician’. 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.
The late Paddy Harper. Image: Facebook.
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 became ‘the wanker.’
Harper wrote beautifully about The Ancestors – full name Shabaka and the Ancestors – a modern avant-jazz band, and advocated the release of Clinton Loyd ‘Booze’ Houston, a former Mandrax addict convicted of a triple homicide when a robbery went bad.
In almost all his feature articles there was 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, to visit the dope fields of Pondoland — or 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 Durban Poison, but death intervened before either one of us had had the opportunity to make good on our respective words. 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 Sipho Masondo, his colleague at City Press, 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 is 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 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 an insane 2 094 articles deep, still just 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 about Jacob Zuma’s palatial state-sponsored 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. Herman Lategan, the sometimes beautifully emotive writer with a naughty streak and author of the book Hoerkind, 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 paid off at the hallowed but doomed Rand Daily Mail, the Weekly Mail would continue the troublesome anti-establishment brief.
With reporters who were gatvol of apartheid’s censorship and mayhem, it never flinched at tacking the system head-on. And now it seems as if, in the not too distant future. Saffers mmight have to bid farewell to yet another tried and tested behemoth in the journalism industry. Indeed, as the Daily Maverick article says, ‘it’s painful to witness.’