Listening to the silent majority

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I met in his office at The Sowetan, Sam Mabe (38), editorial writer and columnist.^35. I duly taped our conversation and sent him a few days later

35. The Sowetan has an estimated daily readership of 1,2 million

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the script, which he was going to read and approve and send back to me enclosing his picture. Two weeks later, he told me he had not opened the envelope and I never received the approved text, nor the picture. When I ran into him a month later, he said he had understood our conversation to be meant for a newspaper article and he certainly did not want to be in my forthcoming book as having participated by way of an on-the-record interview.^36.

I do understand that South Africa finds itself in a semi-guerilla situation with blacks fighting blacks, blacks fighting whites and whites fighting blacks, plus, if you want, whites fighting whites. After all, the judge who was to sentence Barend Hendrik Strijdom, the mass-killer, received as a warning a package with a dead cat wrapped in it. But, to me, as a journalist for 35 years, it remains quite incomprehensible, when I consent to be interviewed with a tape-recorder, and am given the opportunity to approve and correct the text - which Mabe didn't bother to do - to then come with an excuse, that the interview is okay for a newspaper, any newspaper, but not for a book. When a South African columnist of a prominent black paper questions the motives of comrades and street committees, whether they are being formed to terrorize people, or whether street committees perhaps should be used to train young people and prepare them for the post-apartheid era, I think these views should be appearing in print. When a prominent black journalist questions comrades and street committees as to whether they ever asked themselves what power they were looking for, and what they planned to do with that power once they have achieved their revolutionary goal, I view such a statement as important and newsworthy.

Sam Mabe spends much time with young people and goes out of his way to make them use their intellectual abilities. He is writing about youths needing to inform themselves about the rights, interests and needs of the community. He feels young people should not merely be revolutionaries, but acquaint themselves with the rules and regulations of townships. In an article, ‘Youth Clubs Mushrooming’^37. he argued that members of these organisations should be taught to make decisions, to engage in constructive criticism and to evaluate their performance in

36. It crossed my mind for a moment that Sam was practising apartheid in reverse: didn't he want to appear in a white journalist's book?

37. The Sowetan, April 26, 1989

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all they do in their club.’ Mabe told the young, ‘You need to be fully knowledgeable about all forces that are at play in your day-to-day lives.’ At another moment, Sam Mabe recalled how club members had asked for his opinion about street committees in the townships. ‘I am fully supportive of the concept, though I am totally opposed to some of the things street committees in some parts of the country were reported to be doing.’ He even wrote, ‘Children have no reason whatsoever to involve themselves in family disputes or to conduct kangeroo courts.’

In our fully-recorded but not-to-be-published talk, Sam Mabe made the same points as he wrote on April 26, 1989 in his paper, but he asked me not to incorporate them with the dozens of other conversations in this book as the result of a personal interview with me. Why? The request made no sense. ‘Let's be honest with ourselves’ was the caption above another interesting column he published in The Sowetan.^38. Sam wrote: ‘A few years back, when I started preaching what we now call nation-building,^39. I was motivated by a desire to see us becoming honest with ourselves. I wanted us journalists in particular to tell the truth about ourselves as blacks and to give an honest view of things we do and believe in.’ He continued, ‘That, I thought, would pave the way to freedom. But I knew this would be a lonely path, and that in following it, one would lose a few old friends while gaining a few new ones. This is the price, I feel, one should be prepared to pay.’

Lofty words indeed, but then, if Sam Mabe was honest with himself when talking to me, while I was interviewing him on the record, why did he withdraw the text for this report? Mabe advocates that he does want people, and journalists in particular, to be honest with themselves. It was publicly professed principles like these that made me go to colleague Sam Mabe in the first place. But then, in practice, I discovered that he was ready to have an honest view of what he believed transmitted through the readers of my Dutch magazine, but not via the readers of my book. The logic just failed me. I regretted having to take his valuable contribution out. Perhaps it does take a God's-eye view to understand the measure in which a person is in command of the truth, or can

38. Ibid, May 17, 1989

39. The paper issued in 1988 a Nation-Building Manifesto, a copy of which hangs above Sam Mabe's desk.

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be called an honest man, meaning that he is in full control and has established a reasonable balance between his observations and reality.