This is probably the first article ever written for Prospect by a racist. That is apparently what I have become. I am a white male, and editor of an influential publication in South Africa; as a result, I am regularly lumped into that band of cut-throats who stand in the way of the African National Congress's efforts to transform the country. It is difficult to know quite who regards me in this light. Could it be our normally laid-back finance minister, Trevor Manuel? He laid into the "media" (by which, until he is more specific, I take to include me) a few months ago after the appointment of the labour minister, Tito Mboweni, as Governor of the SA Reserve Bank from next August. He said something to the effect that "we" had instinctively reacted negatively to this news.
In fact, only one serious publication I know of opposed the appointment, on the not uncontroversial grounds that Mboweni has no financial market experience and is an ANC stalwart. The paper wondered about his ability to act independently of the government of which he had been a militant member since 1994, an argument which would have been quite normal in a developed market economy. My own magazine, the Financial Mail, was actually quite enthusiastic about the nomination, arguing that, as monetary policy is a tough business, the political legitimacy of the person making such policy in a country of such raw emotions as South Africa was arguably more important than his or her experience, provided the top team at the bank was good. It didn't seem to satisfy the minister.
But that is not an isolated example. The ANC has a thing about the media, especially the print media. This is because the leadership of the party grew up in exile and regards the role of foreign newspapers as critical to the success of its efforts to isolate the former masters of apartheid. It thus lends succour to unhappy black South Africans who see in perfectly responsible criticism of the government, the hand of an old, discredited and self-interested order. It can be very tiring.
Last year, the "media," like all the other "estates," got hauled up before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The hearings were fairly boring, with the segregation of toilet facilities in once-lauded "liberal" publications duly recorded and the poor pay and prospects of black journalists rightly denounced. But the most memorable testimony, for me, came from a prominent black publisher and columnist who complained that despite the advent of democracy in South Africa, the "media" was still in the hands of racists. As evidence he cited the fact that he had recently written a letter to the Star in Johannesburg and the paper had edited it, thus trampling on his dignity. The Star quickly republished the letter with the editing highlighted. Although I personally hold the writer in some esteem, it was clear he needed it. Who doesn't?
I recently received a letter to the editor which I didn't publish because I simply did not want the man concerned to make a fool of himself in public. The letter went something like this: I am heartened to see that Makhaya Ntini has been included in the South African cricket team to tour England. But that does not mean the end of racism in cricket. No. Although Ntini is in the team for the first time, he has been placed at the bottom of the list, while a white man, Gerhardus Liebenberg, also new, has been put at the top. For the benefit of Prospect readers, Ntini made it as a fast bowler and Liebenberg as an opening bat-hence their respective positions on the team list.
More recently, in a very short note in a column I write, we carried a cartoon of president-to-be, Thabo Mbeki, wearing an Elizabethan collar, and teased him for his weakness for quoting Shakespeare to large but often bemused gatherings of the new SA elite. I quickly received a letter from an African reader scolding me for dressing Mbeki up like a "court jester." "There is a racist subtext to magazines like the Financial Mail..." the letter began. I'll print it, but would it be racist to point out the writer's ignorance of Elizabethan dress?
Mbeki is himself one of the masters of attack on the so-called "white" media ("so-called" because, in fact, more than 70 per cent of the print and broadcast media in this country is now owned, controlled or edited by blacks. My publisher is half owned by Pearson of Britain, half by Times Media, a subsidiary of Johnnic, a black empowerment company).
Last December, at an ANC conference, Nelson Mandela delivered a very long oration, part of which contained some harsh words about, again, "the media." Mbeki later picked up on the theme, accusing the media of reporting (I am not kidding) "only 17 per cent of the president's speech." Instead, he said, what the people wanted was "information, information, information."
For the first time it became clear to me what Mbeki wants from us (me): the media-no, the press-should be part of the government's nation-building efforts. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what turns journalists on. But until we do his bidding, he will ignore the obvious changes in ownership and control and hold the racist thing over us as the ultimate insult and the most insidious of warnings.
Some of the traditionally black newspapers and some of Tony O'Reilly's publications do run supplements on development or education, but they attract no advertising and either run at a loss or have to be sponsored. In my view, they are little more than a way of currying favour with the government.
But, thanks to the power of even our insignificant market economy, black South African society is developing much faster than the government can keep up with. As Mbeki approaches the presidency (Mandela will step down after elections probably held in the second half of next year) his greatest dilemma is how to keep the burgeoning black middle class sweet, while holding on to the mass of poor blacks who provide the ANC with most of its votes. For it is with the middle class that Mbeki's heart lies.
And, if my antennae are properly attuned, the rapid growth in the circulation of the Financial Mail in the past 18 months has been mainly because more and more black managers, businessmen and political leaders are reading it. Cries of media racism carry much less weight with people who want well-written information and carefully argued opinion. I am not trying to plug the magazine, but it is a good one and it is making black friends.
mbeki is anxious lest this new black middle class drift away from the ANC and its communist and union allies in government. He thus invented an African rallying point. He began speaking a few years ago of an African renaissance and he has been trying hard since then to put some meat on its bones.
His efforts culminated in a recent conference held just outside Johannesburg. As far as "the media" was concerned, all the familiar old dross was rolled out; to read the reports of the gathering, it might have taken place in Tanzania in the 1960s. Colonialism took a hit. African mismanagement of African affairs seemed to slip by largely (although not completely) unscathed.
Of course there is nothing wrong with Mbeki looking for a middle class cause. Anything which might contribute to the regeneration of this blighted but beloved continent has to be tried. But Mbeki's is an idea in search of a philosophy or a philosopher. He is an eloquent man but, rather like Tony Blair, he needs people cleverer than he is to explain him to himself.
Intellectuals, unfortunately, are thin on the ground in South Africa. Frustrated by having to run a university and report to a chaotic education ministry, the country's most original thinker, Njabulo Ndebele, recently emigrated to the US. If South Africa cannot hold on to its intellects, where does Mbeki find the voices that lift his crusade into something greater than a mere political manoeuvre?
Well, the press. The African renaissance is putting more pressure on the print media to become part of the transformation. The only way for an editor-perhaps especially a white one-to deal with this is to find and hire great black journalists. I have been able to make some very senior appointments on the FM and our new black colleagues have changed the way we think.
When I first became editor at the beginning of 1997, editorial meetings were dominated by ideas about crime and degeneration in the country. We approached the make-up of the "book" almost entirely through white eyes. Thus a conversation about, say, union opposition to the government's medium-term (and fairly orthodox) economic strategy would have quickly turned into a confrontational editorial and a lecture to readers on how blind the unions were to criticise market mechanisms which might create jobs. Then the blacks arrived. That same conversation would now include knowledge that we whites simply did not have. For example, it is almost impossible to explain the strategy (called Gear for Growth, Employment and Redistribution) in anything other than English. Not even African cabinet ministers dare use their vernacular when on the stump.
Thus we know that union leaders, when they claim Gear has no support among the masses, themselves have no way of fully explaining it to those masses and, obviously, no way of properly gauging their reaction.
Black journalists just know stuff that whites don't. With a black (or, more accurately, an African) political leadership in place and black economic power growing at breakneck speed, black journalistic currency is growing in value. As it grows, so does confidence and independence. Some of the most biting criticism of the government in FM editorials in the past year has been written by my black colleagues.
Of course, editorials are not signed, so I take the rap; black columnists and writers still hold back a little when they are signing their own copy. But it is only a matter of time before that gap closes. The ANC will come to rue the day when it began banging the drum for more black editors, because they will come to these top jobs with their professionalism intact and without the caution-inducing guilt that we whites have.
The press here will come to have all the vigour of, say, Nigeria, and all the professionalism of the west. I try not to see these things through rose-tinted spectacles. I recently learned that one of the FM's senior black writers had resisted a request to cover and explain the sudden departure of the white chief executive of the Post Office midway through a contract he had been given by the new government.
"He says," I was told by a frustrated news editor, "that he does not write about white people."
That, of course, is just plain silly-and severely career-limiting. I wasn't put out or surprised though. His reaction was also a measure of how black journalists, perhaps particularly those with business or financial experience, have begun to feel their importance in the new country.
Trying to drive a magazine like the FM down the middle of the road in what remains a deeply divided and tense country is hard, but I cannot see any other way to go. I have seen the Star in Johannesburg print poems on its front pages to wish Mandela a happy birthday, and then, a few days later, allow a columnist to call him "senile." The result of this mixture of praise-singing and name-calling is that the poems are quickly forgotten and the name-calling forever remembered. The publication, one from the O'Reilly stable, has made almost no headway in terms of its circulation or its credibility in the past three years.
Not that it is easy to grow. The Star is caught, perhaps more cruelly than any other newspaper, in the trap that the new South Africa sets the media. At the beginning of the 1990s it was the country's biggest daily, with a circulation of some 250,000. It now sells close to 150,000. Part of the problem was a politically correct decision to drop its "Africa" edition, the one aimed at blacks, from which the business pages were removed and the front and back pages reworked to provide more "black" content. It was decided that producing a special black edition-a tradition among many white publications-was demeaning to blacks. But without the black interest stories readers drifted away, making the paper more and more dependent on a relatively rich white readership in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
After the 1994 democratic elections, the Star began to try to reflect the New South Africa, mixing black and white stories throughout its pages. This didn't help much: it satisfied no one; and exclusively black and mainly white newspapers began to pick away more readers.
The Star's editors are in an impossible bind. If South Africa beats England at cricket on the same day that the country's two premier soccer clubs play, what leads the sports page? Until it resolves this, the Star will stay in trouble. At the country's biggest newspaper, the Sunday Times, the problem does not exist-it has kept its "black" or township edition.
part of the problem we all have is the way apartheid cheapened journalism itself. I worked for nearly 20 years on the Financial Times in London; it seemed so easy there to attract bright young things from Britain's best universities. Here, journalism has a reputation for paying badly and for not being very intellectually stimulating.
Apartheid was easy to report. The misery it caused was visible on every street corner and it bred more than one generation of political writers who, if they were white, are fast running out of contacts, and who, if they were black, are left now only with their anger. Their journalism harks back to the past.
But one of the most fatal viruses to enter the industry under apartheid started on my magazine-surveys and special supplements. At first, these were modelled on the FT, intended to be authoritative and independent generic reports on key industries and companies. And they were. But as South Africa became more isolated and as the economy began to battle to survive, other publishers began to pile into the survey market. Managements quickly realised that they could sell advertising to almost anyone if they promised to write exclusively about them. Worse still, you did not have to pay a reporter much to sit down with the managing director of a company and write down what he was told. That messed up pay structures and today every publication from the FM to free newspapers carries these dreadful things. O'Reilly's Independent group could not survive without them. Neither could we.
A big part of my job is to try to raise the levels of pay in order to get the best people into the trade. This demands a two-pronged approach. First, publications must raise their quality in order to attract clever people. Second, by beginning to poach at much higher salaries, we have begun to make other editors and managers understand how important human capital is when it comes to producing anything of quality. Gradually, South African editors are beginning to get what they pay for and readers are beginning to go where quality is.
This approach is flushing out a lot of black talent. I have recently hired three graduates who would have little trouble, had they been British, in walking into the FT's training programme. The trouble will be keeping them. Stockbrokers will offer them jobs. So will banks and PR firms.
Meanwhile, I try to reassure my white colleagues that these junior and senior appointments don't threaten them; that, in fact, the marketplace is well and truly at work and that black South African journalists can take the magazine to places (and readers) we would never have been able to reach before.
Some, perhaps many, are sceptical. Affirmative action and employment equity are government policy and young white talent sees itself as victim. I hope that I never make an appointment based on colour alone, although the kind of experience I am often looking for as an editor will often lie uniquely with a black person.
Regardless, I do feel strengthened by my black colleagues. Professionally, they have made returning to South Africa complete for me. I also know that they will take no shit from critics who fall back on accusations of racism in place of considered argument. We don't have chips on our shoulders at the FM anymore. And we are probably the one private sector business in the country which has been able to provide the evidence that Thabo Mbeki is desperately seeking-that the more we "transform," the more money we make.
