I once spent the better part of a day keeping a beady eye on the comings and goings at Mark Thatcher’s home in Constantia, such as they were.
The son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher lived here, then, and was at the time (circa 2004) the focus of unforgiving news attention for his role in a failed coup plot in Equatorial Guinea – Thatcher junior having confessed to paying for a military helicopter to be used by the mercenaries.
When I left the newsroom for Constantia that morning, Thatcher was due to appear in the Wynberg magistrates’ court, and a big media presence was expected at his home at 10 Dawn Avenue. ‘Go and have a look,’ my editor had suggested. ‘Do a colour piece.’ By the time I reached the salubrious address, the court appearance had been postponed, and the street was deserted but for a lone photographer, obscured – because of light rain –by a bright-red waterproof poncho.
(He was, in fact, the late Leon Muller, a long-time colleague who, incidentally, rose from being an editorial messenger, aged 17, on the Cape Argus in 1972 to chief photographer in 1995 – a first for a ‘person of colour’, considered notable in those days – and deputy illustrations editor for all Independent titles in Cape Town in 2010. He was one of the most insightful and dependable news photographers I ever had the pleasure to work with.)
On that day in Dawn Avenue, it was some minutes before I realised it was Leon under the poncho; I was put off breaking the silence by his posture of knife-edge alertness – not unlike a gunman’s – and the occasional fluttery bursts of his camera’s motorised winder, triggered at the slightest sign of movement at the pair of glass-panelled doors on which he’d trained his bazooka-like telephoto lens.
The two of us – mostly in silence – remained for the rest of the day. I knew I would not return with the piece the editor had had in mind, but I knew he’d trust me to decide if there was anything worth writing, or worth reading.
‘News gaze’
The result was a piece of slightly more than 700 words, which – as the elusive homeowner never showed his face – involved, chiefly, a cat, a cook, and a gardener. That, and the nature of what I called the ‘news gaze’, the not uncomplicated concentration of attention on a person or event, which, for all the doubtful morality of its intrusiveness and the implication of guilt or notoriety it often cruelly or undeservedly confers, is nevertheless dispassionate in its interests, and revealing in its particulars.
Not that my day in Dawn Avenue yielded a great deal that could possibly qualify as a demonstration of the Fourth Estate’s noble pursuit of truth, or its hapless injustices. For example:
‘Not long after the rain lifted, the gardener appeared, neatly kitted out in khaki uniform, replete with peak cap and red gloves. It’s a garden notable for its topiary, and the gardener made for the column of spherical eugenias bordering the bricked forecourt. He was soon absorbed in a process akin to hairdressing, I thought. He evidently had trouble with his shoe-laces: twice he had to stop, de-glove, and tie them again. Acting perhaps on an urge to somehow humanise this closed and uncommunicative setting, I waved impulsively to the gardener as he cast a brief, careless look in my direction. He hesitated. I imagine the staff are under strict instructions to have nothing to do with the Press. But he nodded. We had a connection. I made a note of this in my notebook. I filled pages with inconsequentialities.’
Paltry pickings indeed – and perhaps nothing that is remotely meaningful in 2020.
Glaring flaw
Except that I was reminded of that piece recently while trying to make sense of a glaring omission in the coverage of a much more recent event, a brushed-over element that ought to have been indispensable to our understanding of what happened.
The second protest by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in Brackenfell was all over the news – in words, in pictures and in videos. Of course, it’s stale now. We’ve moved on. The sheer blizzard of news is unremitting, and there is so much demanding our attention that it might simply be asking too much to expect anyone to pause and mull over the details.
But there is a detail that has been nagging me about that Brackenfell event of 20 November: the ‘white man in lycra’. Who was he, and what was that all about?
All this time later, the man still has no name. More than that, he has no identity in the fuller sense of being capable of being understood as an individual who took an ill-defined risk in apparently seeking to play a meaningful (yet wholly unexamined) role in the events on that day.
The man was videoed approaching the stage from which EFF secretary general Marshall Dlamini had begun addressing supporters. Dlamini can be made out asking him, ‘What is your problem? What is your f****** problem?’. One report said; ‘(Then) one demonstrator pushed the man in the back before a group set on him.’ As the man was making his escape (reportedly, EFF marshals tried to protect him), police fired tear gas into the crowd, which then broke up.
That there was something interesting going on seems evident from the words on the man’s shirt and pants – ‘Create no hate’ – and the fact that his conduct seemed to indicate that his intentions were not belligerent but somehow intercessory. It’s not wholly clear, but it looked as if he made no effort to confront or fight off his attackers, with images suggesting his anguish seemed to arise more from a desire for divine intervention than from anger or political hostility.
‘Raising his hands’
One report described this scene thus: ‘The man ended up on his knees, raising his hands to the sky and shouting, “God! God! God! I don’t want to fight any more”. He was then escorted into a police van and appeared to have been taken into safe custody.’
Yet, this interesting figure remains just ‘a white man’, or the ‘white man in lycra’, who ‘was beaten in the brawl’. And, for its part, the EFF remains simply the protagonist, an agency of protest on behalf of an indeterminate welling of black resentment at continuing racism, with everything – and everyone – else being assumed to be the antagonists.
But imagine what the answers to the following unasked questions might mean for our understanding of what we thought we saw with our own eyes in all those tweeted video clips and in other news footage.
Of the ‘white man in lycra’, I would be interested to know, among other things:
- What was his name?
- What did he intend to say to Marshall Dlamini?
- How does he feel about what he did?
- Does he think he was mistaken?
- What impelled him, and was his a solitary gesture?
- Why was he wearing an outfit bearing the words ‘Create no hate’?
- What does the slogan – if that’s what it is – mean to him?
- What does he think of the EFF?
- Was he injured?
- Does he have a son or relative at Brackenfell High?
- Does he live in Brackenfell?
- What does he think about the controversy over the matric event said to be the trigger of the EFF’s action?
- What are his views on race and racism?
- What does he think about South Africa and its future?
- Did his experience on 20 November change his outlook, and, if so, how and why?
I wonder about the Dlamini’s thoughts, too.
- What does the EFF secretary general think about what happened?
- What did he make of ‘the white man in lycra’?
- What does he make of the EFF supporters’ attacking the man (and reports that EFF marshals tried to protect him)?
- Does he think the EFF crowd’s reaction was justified?
- What does he think the incident says about the EFF as a political organisation?
- Did silencing the man achieve any objective, and, if so, what was it?
- Does he think the man had any right to try and say his say on that occasion?
- Does he know the man’s name?
- Did he consider arranging a meeting with the man subsequent to the incident?
And so on.
There’s a chance that I am quite wrong to imagine that this incident was, in the greater scheme, significant, or that, had it been explored or fleshed out with facts and opinions, would have emerged as having some special explanatory power. My hunch is that it was significant, and was revealing (not necessarily in predictable ways), but counts as a lost opportunity for not having been examined properly. Instead, it recedes into the shadows cast by the bolder stereotypes that are all that remain in the record.
What don’t I know?
I think there’s a difference between being satisfied that you have witnessed something and being certain that you have pinned down what is meaningful about it. To achieve the former, all you have to do is turn up. To achieve the latter, you need to ask yourself: what don’t I know about what I have just seen, and what can I reasonably do to find the answers?
If this all looks like a criticism of journalism – history in a hurry – that is only half true, because I sense that the atmosphere and the habits of incuriosity are not limited to the media.
In one of the reports of 20 November, the line that leapt out at me read: ‘A block away from the school, ducks waddled across the road and a woman watered her garden, in contrast to the angry scenes nearby earlier.’
Life goes on, after all. And that can be a blessing.
But I think our collective incuriosity does risk coming at the cost of misperceiving our society, and miscalculating the history we are part of making.
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