BY MAEDER OSLER
When a Toverview researcher presented me with beautifully handwritten notes about the accuracy of the word PROJECT, I instinctively knew my time had come, or I had better clear out fast – not too easy for a someone going on 85, even in these revivalist days.
To wit, Toverview claims to be a ‘Project’ for models of rural communication. The upshot of the research is that, having reached its 52nd newsletter, the time had come for Toverview to revisit the weakest link in this chain, namely ‘project’. Having asked for an accuracy check, this is what the beautifully scripted research notes had to say:
Hello dear Mr MD (does this stand for Maeder, or have I been promoted to managing director?)
This has been a little hurried as the loadshedding is on at 4pm.
PROJECT
A piece of individual and collaborative enterprise /work, carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.
• A piece of research work, bold or complex.
• Verb: forecast on the basis of recent trends.
• Forward and Outward.
• Projecting an Image.
• A task requiring considerable and concerted effort.
• An endeavour with a definitive beginning, working towards an end.
Origin: Latin … projectum. Something prominent and projecting an image.
So where do we go from here? It might be helpful to evaluate Toverview against features of the media and associated standards as set out by my friend Dr Ivor Shapiro.
In his preface to his recent book The Disputed Freedoms of a Disrupted Press (Routledge 2024), he writes: ‘I learned to pay speech its due – when talking, to respect its power, when listening, to shut up and ready myself to be moved by the combined force of facts and perspectives … justified by a distinct social responsibility to gather and provide accurate information about current affairs …’
Toverview has obviously turned out to be much more than a ‘project’. Indeed, as an individual and collaborative enterprise, it has not been ‘carefully planned to achieve a particular aim’.
Nor is it a ‘piece of research work, bold or complex’, or ‘forecast on the basis of recent trends’ even though it has indeed grown ‘Forward and Outward’. What is more, it projects multiple images, not ‘an image’.
Although Toverview could be imagined as a ‘task requiring considerable and concerted effort’, it is more fun than that. And, above all, it has become much more than an ‘endeavour with a definitive beginning working towards an end’.
What is more, although I was summarily thrown out of a Standard 6 Latin class (by the late Jack Reece, at Kearsney College in rural Natal), the Latin origins of projectum (something prominent and projecting an image’) is, does more to reflect the problem rather than any opportunity.
Toverview has sprung from a long tradition of stoep talks. One of our imaginary stoep talking visitors, Camilla Paglia (‘In the beginning was nature’) warned us about images and projections, and what we now understand now to be a Trumpian, ‘Appollian’ masculinity. Are we in need of a more ‘Dionysian femininity? (This is just another way of pleading for greater gender diversity among our contributors.)
The point here is that facts and perspectives have all the leakages and creepages and seepages that project consultants sternly warn about. And that makes us feel proud, not so calvinistically evangelically politically correct, speakers in tongues.
As for being tied to a single place, we need to recall that, at the very outset, we joined an excursion along part of the Forgotten Highway in a Jetstream teardrop caravan, camping in the Roggeveld, near Sutherland and near Fraserburg.
Later, we attended Forgotten Highway deliberations at a Victoria West guest farm, arranged by the Karoo Development Foundation – where I was pursued by an amorous Emu mini-ostrich also intent om sharing my small tent. This venue at Melton Wold hosted three of us and many more representatives of route settlements from Kuruman to Tulbagh/Ceres.
Thereafter, we continued to pay attention to other regional, district, urban, metropolitan, provincial, subcontinental, continental and even cosmological aspects of life in our global village (according to Google, the term ‘global village’ was coined by Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian media theorist who popularized the idea that modern communication technologies would effectively shrink the world, making people across the globe feel interconnected like a small village; he first discussed this concept in the 1960s. Just as Marshall McEwan factored and predicted?)
In the event, Phakamisa Mayaba has come to write about everything and everybody from Colesberg residents to President Trump; Mbulelo Kafi is now plying his pop-up tourism trade well beyond Kuyasa township; Destine Nde is providing growing coverage of the Klein Karoo; Riaan de Villiers has written about politicians ranging from Dr Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert to Mmusi Maimane; and Maeder Osler has written about a wealth of topics, ranging from grazing in the Hantam Karoo to jazz concerts in Cape Town and a promising arts and culture hub in Kleinmond.
We used to start our items with: ‘Once upon a time and place …’ But ‘place’ clashes with our growing mobility, and ‘time’ sits uneasily with our explorations and adventures, as well as our chains of imagination, facts and perspectives.
Evidently, I am working up to suggesting that, rather than PROJECT, Toverview’s mission should be described as EXPLORATIONS or ADVENTURES.
What say our readers and free subscribers? Now that we have grown like Topsy, and also have some regular voluntary and potentially paid writers, I have learnt to be more careful, and to ask everybody what they think …
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