A few months ago, a friend and fellow writer recalled to me something that was said by someone whom I cannot recall at the moment. It went something like this: “When a writer is born, the family dies…”.

In the days following the cruel and merciless attack on Salman Rushdie, and the savage criticism of “the liberal” press I have thought hard and long about that reference to “when a writer is born, the family dies.” The same, I guess, can be said about everyone with whom we share a multiplicity of affiliations.

Of course, nobody is born a writer. Once you start out on the road to writing — the privilege of becoming a full-time writer, especially — and if done well, remaining loyal to sound principles that include critical thinking is difficult, but to the writer, it can be fulfilling.

It can also be thankless, and as we have known from years of persecution of journalists and thinkers, and more recently with the attack on Rushdie, it can also be dangerous and life-threatening. I have lost count of the number of times members or followers of the Economic Freedom Fighters have sent me blood-curdling messages, and more recently faced almost complete rejection by family and friends because of what I have written.

These are, of course, small potatoes compared to the cruelty, and I want to say zealous populist moralism passing itself off as righteousness or self-endowed “superior logic”, that is at the base of the persecution of writers and thinkers who dare to confront orthodoxy or things that have slipped into “common sense” — like the convention that certain religious texts are beyond question or satire.

The attack on Rushdie is, therefore, part of a tradition that reaches back to the vicious persecution of thinkers, and notably of scientists, by religious zealots for publishing anything that runs against the grain of religious doctrine.

The most notable of these was, of course, Galileo Galilei who was convicted in 1633 for publishing evidence that supported the fact that the Earth revolved around the Sun whereas the Catholic Church (at the time) placed the Earth and not the Sun at the centre of the universe.

More recently, one of my favourite thinkers, Alan Turing, was chemically castrated in the 1950s for “homosexual acts” — and was removed from his research position for what was described at the time as abnormal and uncontrollable behaviour. A couple of years ago I was told that my interest in quantum physics would be significantly enhanced if only I read the Quran…

As for writers, we do so at our own peril, especially if you stay behind principles — like getting as close to the truth as possible and defending it — and brace for the worst coordinated forces that batter you from all sides.

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This is besides the fact that writing is a lonely existence marked by skin hunger, a thirst for touch, and your body goes through physical changes that you were ill-prepared for, when muscles become soft and turn to flab, and after a few months, your bones start to creak each time you get up from your desk.

Yet, nothing quite prepares you for the death of the family; “the family” now writ large to include community, society and especially those with whom you share, or you thought you shared ideological solidarities or any among multiple affiliations.

This is the best way I can describe the intellectually embarrassing set of interventions that sought to cast media outlets as part of some kind of elaborate (liberal) capitalist plot. The freedom of expression, and Steve Biko’s pithy statement, “I write what I like”, has now been suppressed, and in its place, there has emerged a kind of compulsion to write from a sanitised and coordinated script.

Karl Marx is often thought of as a scholar, philosopher and thinker. It is often overlooked that he spent some of the prime years of his life as a journalist (1842 – 1865) and wrote ground-breaking articles on colonial rule in India. For his work as a journalist, which is considered to have been important to his formative intellectual career, he was persecuted and punished by the power elite and forced to flee over and again and lived in exile for many years. He stood by his maxim on a free press:

‘‘The free Press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul, the embodiment of a people’s faith in itself, the eloquent link that connects the individual with the State and the world, the embodied culture that transforms material struggles into intellectual struggles and idealises their crude material form. It is a people’s frank confession to itself… It is the spiritual mirror in which a people can see itself… It is the spirit of the State, which can be delivered into every cottage, cheaper than coal gas. It is all-sided, ubiquitous, omniscient.”

And so, there is a long history of persecution that journalists and thinkers have had to endure. This second (or is it third) decade of the 21st century comes with unique challenges that make it increasingly difficult for any writer of independent thought to publish their work without getting into trouble.

It becomes necessary, at least in my own case, to start writing more esoterically — without resorting to wilful obscurantism — and conceal ideas between the lines, write columns that are best understood when read inter-textually as a body of work, and layer ideas (is the social world then not socially layered and complex?) so as not to offend gratuitously.

With all that as “underlabourer”, the truth, ethics, criticism, and uncovering surface forms of equality and justice to reveal iniquities and structural (somatic and psychological) violence against women and children, the vulnerable, the poor and the overall wellbeing of society, have to remain the prime desideratum of journalism.

As a writer, and remaining faithful to all of this you stand to lose friends and family, ideological solidarities can be broken — or exposed as insincere to begin with — with fatuous criticisms and grand conspiracies.

Writers are not perfect people. Speaking for myself, I live in constant anguish and misery because life is, for the most part, quite meaningless. I don’t slaughter cats or dogs in my basement, and the skeletons in my cupboard are not titillating nor terribly incriminating, but I have failures in abundance.

None of this means that I, or any writer for that matter, should give in to censorship, conformity, orthodoxy or what the great Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci described as the common sense forged under conditions of hegemony.

We have to do so, and let the chips fall where they will. Write, we will. DM