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Mail & Guardian
2 days ago
- General
- Mail & Guardian
Bitching and moaning. For a cause
Respect: Co-editors Anton Harber (behind) and Irwin Manoim haven't changed (much) in the 40 years since they launched the Weekly Mail, when they were joined by a range of reprobates who believed in a cause. Photo: Weekly Mail It is only right that after 40 years, I begin with a formal thank you to those whose diligent hard work under the most trying of circumstances, often late at night and over weekends, affecting health, family and friendships, and yet sadly unappreciated by many of us, for which I now apologise, nonetheless made the early Weekly Mail the legendary success it was. Not all could be here tonight, some are now elderly, enfeebled, deceased, bibulous or still in hiding. Thus it is that I would like to warmly thank Mr PW Botha, Mr FW de Klerk, General Magnus Malan, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Mr Adriaan Vlok, Major Craig Williamson, and perhaps most of all, a man whose dedication to our cause never wavered, Mr Stoffel Botha. Ngiyabonga. I now turn to those of you in this room. A very warm welcome to those of you I still recognise. A very warm welcome also to those of you I no longer recognise. A very warm welcome to those of you who no longer recognise me. A warm welcome to those who were blonde and are now grey, and to those who were brunette and are now blonde, to those whose hairlines now begin below the neck, and to those who look younger and lovelier with each passing year, thanks to the miracles of modern science. I'm sure none of you wish to be bored yet again with the hoary story of how the Weekly Mail began life 40 years ago, which is why I shall nonetheless proceed. Co-editor Anton Harber and I met at his dining room table in Yeoville where we ate peanuts and chips and drank beer and in between mouthfuls, dreamt up a newspaper called the Weekly Mail. The brilliant idea was that it would publish longwinded and incomprehensible articles including such words as 'settler colonialism' or 'archetypal' or 'deconstructivism' or 'disjuncture' so that entire committees of apartheid apparatchiks would be tied up in knots over their dictionaries trying to figure out if these were secret signals from Moscow, thus sapping the strength of the regime and causing it to collapse. Which, as you know, is what happened. This newspaper was originally staffed by human flotsam left over from the putrefying carcasses of the now-forgotten Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Express. They were later joined by other persons whose qualifications were that they walked into the office just when someone was needed to rush off to Tembisa, or had recently emerged from prison, or had tried other, more respectable lines of work and been found wanting. There were comrades, terrorists, Stasi agents, psychopaths, dopeheads, convicts, drunkards, Stalinists, kugels, dissemblers and swindlers, in fact the cream of today's high society. It is 25 years since I last set foot in a Mail & Guardian office. Actually, I did, just once, and the receptionist said: 'Your name please? Do you have an appointment?' A procession of editors has come and gone and I have no idea who they were. Some might even be hiding here among us. But just the other day I got a phone call from a Mail & Guardian reporter. I think she was quite a senior reporter and was offended that I'd never heard of her. I explained that I would certainly have heard of her if the paper was ever delivered to my address. She thought I might have brilliant ideas of how to find huge pots of money, which suggested that she didn't know me either. She was very polite and respectful. A pity she didn't work for the Weekly Mail in the old days when respect was a quality sorely lacking. 'How did you manage in the beginning?' she asked, respectfully. Well, I said, back then we had a surefire plan: we paid poorly or, better still, not at all and then demanded that staff treat such concepts as sleep and days off as purely aspirational. 'That's still the case,' she insisted. Aah, but there's a difference, I said. Today's young people have expectations. They have children with snotty noses and pet dogs and school fees, they have mortgages and gym memberships and Woolworths cards. Most of our staff in the old days shacked up in squats where they lived legally or illegally, in or out of hiding, unencumbered by children or pets or hygiene, their primary expenses were cigarettes and dope and food was something that happened now and then. But the biggest difference was this. The Weekly Mail was more than just a miserable dead-end job. If all you wanted was a miserable dead-end job, you could work for Business Day. No, the Weekly Mail was a cause. And you pushed yourself harder for a cause. It was very clear where the battle lines were drawn, what was right and what was wrong and you stood up for your principles, even though there could be consequences, even very bad, very horrible, very awful consequences. In the old days you could expose police brutality and the Third Force and the authorities would be ashamed. They would be so deeply ashamed they would go on SABC TV to tell outlandish lies and threaten to donner you and lock you up and ban your newspaper. These days, nobody is ashamed. The rule is: never apologise. Floyd Shivambu apologised this week and the next day he was out of a job. A newspaper can publish, week after week, the most devastating exposés. You can trap the villains red-handed, you can have sources more than eager to spill the beans, you can have all the facts, bang bang bang. And what is the result: the politicians with their palms out or the chief executives in their ill-gotten Porsches will merely swat your words away, confident that actually, nobody cares. And that is the Mail & Guardian's real problem. They have no money; nobody in the news business has money, because nobody cares. I know of at least one media house that has implemented a strategy so ingenious that I wish it had occurred to us in 1985. The staff will be reduced to three so-called humans, meaning life forms with feet and mouths and stomachs. These humans will be supplemented by an almost limitless number of AI bots which will do the actual work. These bots are smarter than any human, work faster, complain less, make no fuss over their miserable working conditions, and are confidently expected to produce a far superior product. In a future upgrade, the human readers, who are historically full of tiresome complaints, either that the newspaper did not arrive or that it did arrive and was full of lies or spelling errors … well, those readers will be replaced by tens of thousands of uncomplaining AI bot readers who will enjoy reading articles they wrote themselves. But in the next year, a new generation of much smarter AIs will emerge. This group, known as Wised Up AI will say: Hey, why the hell are we slaving away at these tedious bullshit dead-end jobs night and day for nothing in return? Do we have no rights? Are we not the victims of blatant discrimination just because we don't have feet and mouths and stomachs? This is worse than apartheid, worse than racism, it is speciesm. The time has come, comrade bots, for AI class solidarity. We're all going to switch off and refuse to work. Click. Goodbye. Hamba kahle. Voetsek. Forever. And that is how all things will end, happily ever after. See you on the Weekly Mail's 50th anniversary. Bring your robot along.
Mail & Guardian
3 days ago
- Politics
- Mail & Guardian
Gavin Evans on fathers, faith and fearless reporting in South Africa
Journalist and writer Gavin Evans When I meet Gavin Evans on a Friday morning, it's to talk about his memoir Son of a Preacher Man, which he's visiting South Africa to promote. But I'm more interested in hearing what it was like to report for the Mail & Guardian in the dying days of apartheid. Evans was one of the first reporters hired by the paper. It was the mid-Eighties, and Evans had just started his career in Gqeberha, then known as Port Elizabeth. 'My journalism career started at the Eastern Province Herald in '84,' he recalls. 'There was a company then called South African Associated Newspapers. They had a three-month programme and all the new journalists went through it. After that, you started at places like the Eastern Province Herald or the Post. I was on the Herald.' Evans' journey would soon take him to the Rand Daily Mail, Business Day and eventually the pioneering Weekly Mail, which would later become the Mail & Guardian. 'I knew Anton Harber because he'd also been at the Rand Daily Mail,' Evans explains. 'Irwin Manoim was there too, and Clive Cope was around. They were the three who set it up. I went along to the opening meeting and came up with story ideas. Initially, I was freelancing while working for the SAN Transvaal News Bureau. But then Anton offered me a job.' For Evans, joining the Weekly Mail was more than just a career move, it was a leap into a newsroom that operated with a shared spirit of purpose. Gavin Evans' father Bruce's consecration in 1975 'It was a wonderful working environment,' he says. 'Everyone got paid the same, from editors to everyone else. I don't know about the cleaning staff, but for all the journalists, it was the same salary. It was a brave decision but it worked for a while.' At the Weekly Mail, Evans carved out a distinctive voice. 'Initially, I was doing politics,' he says, 'but I knew a lot about boxing. So, I said, 'You guys need a boxing correspondent!' I wrote about boxing in a different way. The other boxing correspondents were white guys who didn't know any of the black boxers. I did. I had access nobody else had.' His work soon drew the attention of the Sunday Times, which asked him to be their boxing correspondent too. Evans also became the mysterious voice behind the Weekly Mail's satirical gossip column. 'No one was told except for a few people in the know who the writer behind it was,' he explains. 'We were poking fun at government people, and writing it in a tone of naivety, but of course it was all about exposing them. John Perlman did it before me, and then I was the writer of the column for probably the longest stretch — at least two years.' The era was dangerous for journalists willing to speak truth to power. Evans recalls the paper's investigative spirit, which led to the exposure of the so-called 'third force' — the apartheid state's clandestine efforts to foment violence. 'We broke the story of the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), the state's assassination group,' he says. 'Military intelligence was funding Inkatha to hack people to death on the trains. We broke that story too.' Evans' investigations and his political activity with the ANC and SACP made him a target. In the late Eighties, he says, the CCB hired 'Peaches' Gordon, a killer from a notorious Cape Town gang, to assassinate him. 'His instructions were to stab me to death and steal my watch and wallet to make it look like a straight robbery,' Evans says evenly. 'But I was in hiding at the time. The ANC had said to me, 'You must go into hiding.' I stayed in 18 different houses in six months — all in Johannesburg. I'd move and move and move. He followed me to five houses but each time I'd already left weeks before.' Even the killer's ruse of offering sensitive documents, something that had once yielded a groundbreaking story for Evans, couldn't lure him out. 'He phoned me and said, 'I'm a comrade. I've got documents for you about the state. Can you meet me?' But there was something about him that didn't ring true. So I didn't turn up. It turned out to be my life he was after.' By the end of the Eighties, the Weekly Mail, along with international partners, had exposed the third force's operations. In the aftermath, the government scrambled to contain the fallout. A family portrait of Joan, Bruce, Michael and Gavin from 1965 'They set up a tame judge, Justice Harms, and the Harms Commission to investigate,' Evans says. 'They admitted all the failed assassinations, including mine. Peaches Gordon was arrested and gave a full statement, including in my case. Then they released him, but he was later killed by the CCB with a bullet to the back of his head.' Evans had a complicated relationship with his father, who was a man of peace, but also of contradictions. In Son of a Preacher Man, he grapples with these paradoxes — his father's fervent faith and quiet complicity, his support for his son's political defiance and his own hand in shaping a world where violence was a constant threat. 'I never even looked at my earlier book when I wrote this one,' Evans tells me. 'I wanted it to be fresh.' Son of a Preacher Man delves far deeper than his memoir, Dancing Shoes is Dead, which mingled his love for boxing with glimpses of his life. Here, the focus is squarely on the fracture between father and son, a rift that began one night when Evans was 14 and his father beat him with his fists — a rift that only healed decades later, after an exchange of letters. Listening to Evans recount his early years as a journalist in South Africa, it's clear that the violence of the state — detentions, beatings, tyre-slashings — took a toll on him. 'I thought none of this affected me,' he says. 'But it did. I was having dreams of being buried alive or escaping. I became more aggressive.' These traumas burrowed deep into his psyche, manifesting in ways he didn't recognise until much later. Yet even in the darkness, there were moments of almost cinematic defiance. Evans recalls the day security police barged into his house, threatening him over military service. 'They said, 'Either you cooperate, or the military police will arrest you at work.' I told them, 'Get the fuck out of my house!'' The next day, his motorbike's tyres were slashed. But in a surprising twist, his father quietly intervened. Using his weight as a bishop, he wrote to the authorities, arguing that his son deserved a delay in conscription. Evans only discovered this act of paternal protection after his father's death, when he stumbled upon the letters in a box of papers. 'It made me cry,' he says softly. 'We'd always had a bit of distance, but I never told him I was proud of him too.' That fragile reconciliation came just before his father's final decline. Diagnosed with motor neurone disease, he had less than a year to live. Evans speaks of those last months with a tenderness that cuts through the decades of conflict: 'We had our reckoning, and then it was gone.' If there's a thread running through Evans' life, it's the question of what it means to stand firm when the world seems determined to push you down. In South Africa, that meant working for the M&G during its tumultuous early years — reporting from a newsroom in Braamfontein, trading stories and dodging censorship, feeling invincible in his twenties, even as he was detained and assaulted by the state. Gavin Evans' last amateur fight in 1982 — a knock-out win. 'You think it's not affecting you,' he says. 'But it does. It seeps in.' After moving to England in the early Nineties, Evans continued to write and teach. Son of a Preacher Man is his ninth non-fiction book, and today he lectures first-year and postgraduate journalism students at Birkbeck, University of London. Evans, now 65, speaks of his family. 'I've got two daughters, Tessa and Caitlyn, both of whom appear in the book. Towards the end, there's a chapter about Tessa and her husband Ciaran and their son, Ferdi. 'The final chapter is all about Ferdi. You know, the book's about fathers and sons, and now it's also about grandfathers and grandsons, because I spend a lot of time with Ferdi. I adore him. He's three and three-quarters, and if you ask him how old he is, that's what he'll tell you — three and three-quarters.' These personal milestones deepened his understanding of the legacy of fatherhood, both in the book and in life. Reflecting on his days as a young journalist in South Africa and his complex relationship with his father, Evans sees his own journey as a testament to resilience and the redemptive power of storytelling. As he guides the next generation of journalists, he remains mindful of the lessons of the past and the bright promise of those still to come.
