The M&G and the ‘ANC hegemony’: a response to Bill Johnson

By Riaan de Villiers

A while ago, Toverview ran an article by R.W. (Bill) Johnson (‘Farewell to the progressives’) in which he commented on the reasons for the Mail & Guardian’s recent decline — and what he seemed to regard as its inevitable closure.

It’s an interesting and provocative piece, which touches on significant aspects of our political and intellectual history. As is often the case, it’s also a broad-stroke one, with Bill’s brush only touching the canvas here and there, and it’s not always easy to fill in the blank spaces.

If I understand Bill correctly, he argues that the M&G is the product of a long-standing social formation he refers to as the ‘progressive left’, essentially incubated at English-language universities (and largely made up of white and Indian socialists); that it and its feeder group have long formed part of an ‘ANC hegemony’; and that the paper is in terminal decline because this hegemony is falling apart.

It’s an ambitious argument. In the course of making it, though, Bill skates rather majestically over some major features of our intellectual and media landscape, including significant aspects of the M&G’s own history.

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First, as in many countries with established tertiary institutions and intellectual traditions, I do think it makes sense to talk about a ‘progressive left’. However, I think ours is more diverse and more dynamic than Bill is prepared to acknowledge, both in racial and ideological terms.

Many of our best and most vigorous public intellectuals are African, and this has been the case for many years. I’m not sure on which grounds (other than racial ones) one could argue for their mass exclusion from the ‘progressive left’.

While this is a matter of definition, and Bill is entitled to his, many people who would regard themselves as members of the ‘progressive left’ are social democrats, and plain old liberals too.

This loose formation has also changed over time, in line with developments in social theory as well as the twists and turns in our national life. To put this rather irreverently, quite a lot has happened since the days when Bill was upbraided by a bunch of (white) Stalinist hardliners at the University of Natal.

Flowing from this, I also think Bill overvalues the extent to which the ‘progressive left’ has been held captive by an ‘ANC hegemony’. Indeed, many of its members were underwhelmed by the transition to democracy precisely because it was a political rather than an economic transformation. Whether one agrees with them or not, this illustrates at least a degree of doctrinal independence from the ANC.

The same goes for younger black militants (Fanonists rather than old-style Leninists), who invariably – almost by definition – reject the negotiated settlement entered into by the ANC.

At the other end of the spectrum, many ‘progressives’ with a dominant belief in non-racial democracy have turned away from the ANC because it has proven to be neither non-racial nor democratic. But this is true across the ‘progressive’ spectrum – disillusioned ‘struggle’ veterans witih socialist roots have become some of the harshest had most credible critics of the ANC’s drift into corruption and the abuse of power.

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Most or all of this goes for the Weekly Mail/Mail & Guardian as well. Not all its founders and subsequent staff are or were white or Indian socialists, and some of them never went to university. (In fact, some of the best reporters I’ve known in my time never went to university, whether English-language or otherwise.)

Added to this, some of our best African journalists and editors who have risen to editorships and other senior positions elsewhere in the media were incubated at the M&G. Invariably, they are among the ANC government’s harshest and most eloquent critics.

Third, Bill overplays the extent to which the Weekly Mail/M&G has remained a captive of an ‘ANC hegemony’. Put differently, he fails to recognise important shifts in the M&G’s role and approach over time. This is an interesting issue that deserves to be unpacked a bit more thoroughly.

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It’s broadly true to say that the Weekly Mail was founded by younger, more militant (and mostly white) journalists who had emerged from (largely white) English-language universities. It’s also true to say that it was relatively uncritical towards the ‘mass democratic movement’ and its constituent organisations, and then towards the new government, with implications for conceptions of the role of the media as well as freedom of expression (Bill indirectly alludes to this in his anecdote about the Weekly Mail’s founding co-editor, Anton Harber.)

In essence, as I understood it at the time, its founders saw their role as broadly supporting the anti-apartheid campaign – or ‘liberation struggle’ — prior to the transition, and the post-transition government thereafter.

This was encapsulated in a doctrine of ‘committed journalism’ which was incubated at the Rhodes University School of Journalism and carried into the newsrooms of the Rand Daily Mail (and some sister papers) in the the late seventies and early eighties (where I also worked at the time). This did collide (if largely implicitly) with established, more conventional, conceptions of ‘balanced’ or ‘objective’ reportage in a broadly ‘liberal’ framework, requiring a degree of critical distance from all political and other institutions and movements. (At the same time, I need to note that both Harber and his founding co-editor. Irwin Manoim, studied at Wits University.)

However, it’s a matter of record that, soon after the transition, the paper reoriented itself, opened up a critical distance between it and the new government, and played a key role in re-establishing (and reimagining) investigative journalism in a new and very different political landscape.

This is particularly true of the M&G under the editorship of my friend Phillip van Niekerk, who succeeded Anton Harber as editor in 1996 and remained in this position until 2001. In fact, Phillip was heavily criticised in some quarters for alienating the ANC government, and losing patronage (and potential funding) in the process. Bizarrely, it even — as he reminds us in his comment below – led to him facing charges of racism in front of the Human Rights Commission.

To put this in Bill’s terms, while it could be argued that the Weekly Mail / M&G formed part of an ‘ANC hegemony’ for some time, it broke free from this far sooner and more decisively than he is prepared to recognise.

In building his argument, Bill even contrives to mislay the fact that, as early as 2011, the M&G helped to establish the multiple prize-winning Amabhungwane Centre for Investigative Journalism, which went on to play a vital role in uncovering government corruption and exposing state capture. To my mind, this has to mean that, rather than bolstering the ‘ANC hegemony’, the M&G has played a significant role in hastening its demise.

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This is not to criticise Anton – whether or not one agrees with his approach to journalism, his courageous 11-year stint as founding co-editor of the Weekly Mail in one of the most gruelling periods in our political history remains a high water mark in South African journalism, and I’m sure the process of reorientation began under him in any case. It would be interesting to hear his own comments on this aspect of the story of the M&G.)

An iconic photograph, taken by Eric Miller, of the police siege of COSATU’s headquarters in Johannesburg on 22 April 1987, which was splashed across the Weekly Mail’s front page. It exemplifies the paper’s role in one of the most brutal periods in our political history. Source: SAHA archive.

Since leaving the M&G, he has (besides designing and heading a school of journalism at Wits University) played leading roles in the African Investigative Journalism Conference; the Campaign for Free Expression, a non-profit dedicated to defending and enabling free expression for all in southern Africa; the Henry Nxumalo Foundation NPC, which provides support to investigative journalists; the Freedom of Expression Institute; the Global Investigative Journalism Network, and the Centre for Collaborative Investigative Journalism, which hardly speaks to a doctrinaire view of journalism as subservient to political interests or any political formation.

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In my view, the real flaw in Bill’s argument lies in the fact that he seeks to define the ‘progressive left’ (and the M&G) in terms of its support for a particular political movement rather than its adherence to a certain set of values, instead of the other way around.

One of the advantages of the latter approach – which I believed to be more appropriate – is that it allows both for a critical distance between the ‘progressive left’ and the ‘ANC hegemony’, as well as its survival beyond it.

Defining these values is obviously a risky and even perilous undertaking, but I would venture to say that they include an enduring concern for social and economic justice, inclusive of a non-racial democracy – in other words, the core values in the good old Freedom Charter. (Of course, precisely how these ideals should be achieved in the SA context remains a matter for debate, spanning various doctrines and ideologies).

By the same token, I believe that more and more members of the ‘intellectual left’ have turned away from the ANC precisely because it has failed for achieve these foundational ideals (much of which have been built into our constitution, and the ANC-in-power has therefore been obliged to implement).

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Again, all of this goes for the M&G as well. In fact, this was the precise point made by Phillip when I saw him a few weeks ago, shortly after Bill’s article had appeared. (He was visiting South Africa from Washington, where he has been based for a number of years.)

As he explained it, the Weekly Mail did not support the MDM or any of its constituent organisations as such, but because they were committed to certain values and ideals – notably the achievement of a united, non-racial and democratic society, with equal rights and opportunities for all.

Following the transition, the paper supported the new government to the extent that it sought to implement those goals and values (which had, by and large, been built into the constitution), and criticised it increasingly as it began to drift away from them.

Even in the early years, the Weekly Mail wasn’t entirely uncritical of the MDM — in fact, Phil reminded me that it broke the Stompie Seipei story as early as 1989, which exploded like a nuclear bomb at the hallowed centre of the liberation ‘establishment’, and whose fallout was felt for many years thereafter. And shortly after the transition, it led probes into the shady side of the Arms Deal, aptly labelled the ANC-in-government’s ‘original sin’, which set the scene for the corruption and the drift away from good and accountable government to follow.

In later years, under Phil’s editorship and those of his successors, the M&G became a leading investigative newspaper, notching up a string of exposes about state capture, among others, which is too long to mention. But all of this doesn’t fit into Bill’s picture, and is therefore simply ignored.

My greatest unease with his rather determinist model is that it reduces both the ‘progressive left’ and the M&G to static, essentially passive formations, held captive by an oppressive political construct in the form of the ‘ANC hegemony’, and incapable of independent thought or action, to the point of being unable to survive beyond the ANC.

By contrast, if one begins to recognise their long-term commitment to a certain set of values, this allows for them not only to maintain a critical distance from the ‘ANC hegemony’, but also to survive beyond the ANC.

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To be sure, the M&G is in trouble – it does seem to have been partially mismanaged in recent years (see this article by Rebecca Davis in Daily Maverick), and half its remaining staff of 25 journalists have received retrenchment notices. But this has little or nothing to do with the extent of its support for the ANC, and more or everything to do with the general crisis of survival facing newspapers everywhere, due to the transition from print to digital publishing and the advent of social media.

Surprisingly, for a professed libertarian (and presumably a supporter of free expression), Bill does not express any concern about the M&G’s possible demise — in fact, while he does not spell this out, he seems to regard its closure not only as inevitable but also as desirable. It’s almost as if, in his zeal to write the ANC out of power, he is trying to pull down a whole tent city around it as well.

Make no mistake – I agree with him that the ‘ANC hegemony’ is disintegrating, and that this is a good thing. However, there is no reason why this should spell the end of the M&G – on the contrary, both it and the ‘progressive left’ have vital roles to play in imagining a new South Africa beyond the ANC, in which political interests and forces would need to be fundamentally reshaped and realigned.

Fortunately, this view is shared by a highly respected African academic and political consultant who, I understand, is trying to assemble a syndicate to rescue the M&G. This raises hopes of the M&G’s survival and its revitalisation as an independent and critical newspaper, reflecting the views and values of a truly non-racial ‘progressive left’ in a post-ANC era. I sincerely hope it succeeds — in an already fragmented and weakened media landscape, it’s a voice we can’t afford to lose.

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Comment by Phillip van Niekerk

Prior to publication, I sent this article to Phillip van Niekerk, who responded as follows:

Thank you for your riposte: this perspective is badly needed. My first response on reading Bill’s column was that it belonged in the fiction section of Toverview. Just the tiniest bit of research would have alerted him to the political and legal struggles we fought at the M&G during the nineties and early 2000s. In fact, it was the so-called ‘progressives’, starting with my predecessor, Anton Harber, who were most intent on holding the ANC to account while much of the media basked in the glow of the rainbow nation.

I became editor in 1996 and exited in 2001, by which time we had substantially recast the Mail & Guardian and pushed up circulation at a time when all the other ‘alternative’ newspapers (Vrye Weekblad, South, Saamstan, New Nation, etc went out of business.  Most of our new readers were black, and they constituted more than half of our readership when I left.

Apart from the arms deal saga, we put our meagre resources into a number of big investigative stories: the Motheo housing scandal, Mpumalanga Parks, the Central Energy Fund (Emmanuel Shaw), Virodene, and many more.  For my sins I got hauled up before the Human Rights Commission to answer charges of racism for reporting on ‘black corruption’. Herewith a link to my submission to the HRC, which summarises the philosophy of the paper that we developed in the 1990s.

As you will see, our defence of the role of press freedom and journalism in a free society bears no resemblance to Bill Johnson’s straw man ‘progressivism’.