The first book I remember reading on my own, cover to cover, without my mum lip-synching through the difficult bits, was a collection of Indigenous fables about African animals. The Long Grass Whispers, compiled by Geraldine Elliot. It’s a slim volume, hard-covered and not much bigger than a passport. The front has a whimsical illustration of a cavorting elephant calf. The brown tea mug stain on the lower corner looks like a passport stamp marking the passage from one life chapter to another in the many that have unfolded since then.
My mother’s ballooning cursive sings cheerily from the title page: “Christmas 1982. All our love. Dad and Mum.”
The book was as un-put-downable to the nine-year-old me as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was when, at 17, I found myself home from boarding school, bored and lonely as only a teenager can be stuck out in the countryside. With nothing better to do, I pulled the trilogy from my parents’ bookshelf and began reading.
I didn’t lift my eyes from the pages until I’d devoured every word. There’s no better way to pass a holiday or escape the festering anxiety of approaching matric than in Tolkien’s fantasy world. Which, I might add, I was reading while in Hogsback in the Eastern Cape, a place that local lore would have us believe was Tolkien’s inspiration. (It wasn’t, sorry folks.)
This was the family I was born into. Reading was what we did to pass the time, for fun, because there was no television, because it was transporting.
Reading was effortless because everything I could possibly want was in my mother tongue and home language: English.
Not so for most South African kids of the same age. How many novels or children’s books do you remember from back then that were in isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sepedi, Siswati, or any of the other languages that would later become the 12 official ones recognised in our Constitution? How many novels or children’s books today are in anything other than English or Afrikaans?
Journalism 101: if it bleeds, it leads
This was the era of Die Groot Krokodil, PW Botha, a man who surely could inspire a fable as noir as anything from the Brothers Grimm. Coddled in my whiteness, I had no idea when I tore off the Yuletide gift wrapping that kids not much older than me had recently been slaughtered on the streets of Soweto while protesting against the state’s plans to force them to learn in Afrikaans.
It would be more than a decade before I saw the iconic photograph by Sam Nzima, which captures the moments when the young Hector Pieterson was dying in the arms of Mbuyisa Makhubu, or learn that it was Pieterson’s sister, Antoinette Sithole, wailing alongside them during the Soweto Riots in 1976.
This photograph epitomises a central tenet of journalism: if it bleeds, it leads. Fast, lens-catching moments like this determine the news value of an event, and whether it goes above the fold.
But what if an event doesn’t explode in an instant? What if it unfolds over years, or decades, or centuries. What if the blast radius spans an entire region, or continent, or planet?
This is how journalism professor Rob Nixon argues for “an expanded view of violence” in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.
Behind the history-defining moment for our schooling system in 1976, other insidious forms of violence were unfolding that were equally impactful for these children’s educational outcomes: in-utero and early childhood malnutrition that, for many, would permanently compromise their brains’ chances of reaching their full cognitive potential once they eventually reached the classroom; an education system that was rigged against them, its curriculum intended to keep people of colour barely literate and little more than cheap units of blunt-force labour on the mines and pushing mops in a madam’s home; an entire political and economic system that closed doors of opportunity to them even if they were lucky enough to finish their secondary schooling.
I presented this idea at the recent African Investigative Journalism Conference, held at Wits University last November. It goes without saying that investigative journalism, in its various forms and across different beats, needs to draw attention to the structural architecture that props up injustices in our society, just as much as it needs to report on the explosive shorter-term events that corrupt our democracies.
It takes time, though, to understand and report on the slow violence of today’s system. At a time when newsrooms are running on fumes, because they’re losing revenues to the tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley – #socialmedia; #AI – and the 24/7 news cycle drives shallow “churnalism” over in-depth, critical journalism, it was a relief to have many journalism veterans remind us of the need to slow down, and go deep in our reporting.
As a recipient of grant funding from the Henry Nxumalo Foundation, I’ve been given a rare opportunity to do just that. Story Ark: tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points is a multiyear mobile journalism project that’s allowing me to travel the country in search of otherwise invisible stories that show how the climate crisis is unfolding on our doorstep, in our lifetime.
I’ve been on the road for 15 months so far, and covered more than 22,000km. It’s been the toughest assignment of my 20-year career – turns out it’s a lot harder reporting from a tent during a heatwave or hailstorm than I anticipated – but also one of the most rewarding. It’s slowness of thought has allowed a fresh view on the structural violence of the social and environmental injustices that I’ve been reporting on for years, but where my thinking had become stale.
Dangerous ideas
Something else happened around the time of the magical book encounter.
I remember it clearly, all these decades later: waking, but not with a start. The engine of the Datsun 120Y screaming as my mum, Elena, flogged it up the incline, stuck in second. Her foot was flat on the floor, but she couldn’t change gear. One hand gripped the wheel; the other hauled me through the gap between the front seats, pressing my bleeding head into her side.
It was 1981, four years since Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko died in police custody. We weren’t far from the place where he was arrested at a roadblock near Port Elizabeth, where he was beaten until his brain bled, where he was thrown in cuffs into the back of a police van and shipped off to a jail cell in Pretoria. The medical examiner’s report later found nothing untoward in his death.
Elena and I had made a brief trip to Fort Beaufort to see the family doctor, I was down with a fever. By the time we were heading home I was already lights-out on the back seat. That’s when we hit the stretch of road that pulls out of town and winds briefly past Kwatinidubu township and into the countryside.
Elena noticed a crowd gathered on the gravel shoulder. A man stepped out of the throng – must have been in his thirties? – but it was the hate that stuck with her afterwards. Elena says she’ll never forget the rage in his face.
His arm swung. A projectile the size of a cricket ball flew from his hand. A passenger-side window shattered. She reached back through the blood and glass shrapnel to grab me, shoving my gushing head against her side, the engine wailing as we helter-skeltered towards some kind of safety.
When we stopped a few kays down the country road, she popped me matter-of-factly on the car bonnet and rifled in the boot for the first aid kit – there was always one in the car in those days – and found a pressure bandage, which she wrapped around my head just above my ears.
Memory is a tricky thing. I remember these events like a movie, but without a soundtrack. The visuals are there, but there’s no emotional content. The only niggle was when we pulled up at the Whites-only state hospital in the university town of Alice later and made our way across the parking lot. It must have been past noon, maybe heading towards mid-afternoon, because the sun cast enough of a shadow to give me the first glimpse of my injured self: my silhouette was wearing a chef’s hat. The bandage was taut around my ears, and pushed my hair into a bulge. I was strangely self-conscious about this.
The other niggle was the bee stings when the anaesthetic’s needle speared sideways into the scalp somewhere above my right ear. In and out it went, again and again, until the v-shaped gash fogged over and all I felt was a curious tug-tug-tug as the doctor did his needlework. When we left, I had a shaved patch, eight or so sutures, and no sense of drama whatsoever.
It wasn’t so for Elena. It took her two years to burn through the fury. This immigrant from Liverpool – who’d grown up on the banks of the Mersey and cut her pub-crawling teeth as a student nurse in the same taverns where The Beatles played their first gigs before they went global – was not yet 10 years in the country. She was culturally cloistered and politically naive, but here she was, thrown into a strange country’s immolation, the roots of which she barely understood.
Later, when I recounted this day like the earnest child storyteller I imagine I was back then, I couldn’t understand why people giggled when I said: “I got stoned once.”
Now that I’m in on the joke, I tell it slightly differently: “The first time I got stoned…”
Although I don’t tell this story anymore, because the laughter quickly splutters out. What comes next in the telling? A grim reminder of what lies in our collective rear-view mirror, and what we haven’t freed ourselves from yet, in spite of there being so much distance between then and the relative stability of now, in a country where we are all emancipated but few are equal?
It’s not so much that our family was on the wrong side of history. What does that even mean, other than that we were riding the wave of a system that kept the best for people like us? Our ID books classified us as White and therefore placed us at the top of the pile. That we were slipstreaming behind a racist, undemocratic, minority-rule government that was clinging violently to power as the country’s majority raged against their second-class citizenry. These were the children of generations of imperial, colonial and now apartheid exploitation and brutality, leveraging themselves free with stones and burning tyres and toyi-toying.
Why did Elena’s and my story matter when so many others suffered much greater traumas as the country tore itself apart?
Whose stories were being told at the time?
Mine made it into the news, apparently, although the newspaper clippings of this, if they still exist, haven’t surfaced after some digging. By Elena’s account, the phone rang off the hook, with journalists wanting to report on a White child violated by an angry Black mob. But what of the isiXhosa high school principal who was gunned down outside his school in the same township, most likely on the same day? Where is his story in the historical records? Some brief rummaging through the newspaper archives hasn’t turned up anything on his death, either, or any similar incidents.
Reading is breathing
The slow violence of that system, back then, was the inheritance of generations of conquest and subjugation that came before. The same inequality remains with us today and is the subject of the very stories I’m writing about in Story Ark.
It barely needs mentioning: reading is the in-breath; writing is the out-breath. Back in 1982, I was starting to build the kind of brain power that only grows in competence through years of breathing in, so that one day I could sit at a keyboard and breathe out, as I am now.
As much as the fables in The Long Grass Whispers or Tolkien’s conjured world gave oxygen to those breaths, so did the dangerous ideas of people like Biko, whose collection of essays I Write What I Like was published posthumously in 1978.
Remembering how meaningful those childhood fables were to me isn’t some sentimental reflection on a quaint artefact of a bygone era. It’s a reminder that if we want to understand how we, as a society and species, got to where we are today – surrounded by so many forms of slow violence, on a planet in crisis – we need to breathe in informed, evidence-based ideas. And then we need to breathe out solutions.
We also need the time to do it. DM
