Publication: Sunday Independent Issued: Date: 2005-11-20 Reporter: Jeremy Gordin

Olympian Cavity's Shining Rays of Pure Enlightenment Shame Our Mortal Portals

 

Publication 

Sunday Independent
Date

2005-11-20

Reporter

 Karen Bliksem aka Jeremy Gordin

Web Link

www.sundayindependent.co.za

 

Of course everybody and his auntie have tried to grab their two minutes of fame this week by hanging on to the coat-tails of poor Jacob "who? moi?" Zuma, his manifold tribulations, and last Sunday's divergent reports about these in the newspapers.

One of the two most interesting reactions to this vexed saga came from the ANC Women's League, whose media statement begins with the usual guff - "We believe that the [sexual assault] allegation is serious in nature and requires proper investigation ..." blah and blah - but concludes with a startling final paragraph. This reads as follows: "We take this opportunity to call upon all South Africans to continue to seek justice and peace for women and children, and to maximally highlight the plight of women who have been violated in one way or the other *1."

Good heavens! And I am not expostulating about the split infinitive. What, I want to know, is the "other" way?

Is it related perhaps to PD Ouspensky's fourth way? To the Greek way? To the ubiquitous third force of South African political life? To Lobsang Rama's third eye? Does it relate to the "second way", a subject once dealt with by one EB Bolles in a book titled A Second Way of Knowing. Or is the "other way" related to what is known as the "fifth way of love", as explained by Boris Mouravieff in his book, Gnosis: Study and Commentaries on the Esoteric Tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy?

I am from an older generation and therefore, though I have been around the block a time or three, I just can't understand to what the league was referring. As I understand it, the "other way" must relate to entry of the other portal, the act that dares not speak its name, and is shunned by all except the deeply sinful and those those who have done time in Sodom, Pretoria Central prison or the Zimbabwean non-executive presidency. And I simply cannot believe that the women's league ladies would be referring to this.

Then there was the column that appeared on Wednesday in Business Day, an opinion-rich Johannesburg newspaper. The column was written by Anton Harber, who is billed as the Caxton Professor of Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand.

It comes as news to me that there is a connection between the products of the Caxton company and journalism. But let's not be diverted by trivia, except to observe that, just as Zuma is alleged to have required someone to take care of the fishmonger, wine merchant, and tailor at the end of every month, so it would appear does Wits *2.

Let me not pretend, however, that I am unacquainted with young Harber. I consider him to be a capital fellow, with the second-most beautiful wife and children in the world, and to have been in his time a fine and courageous editor.

The difficulty is that, once you become a guru, you perforce leave the lowly vale of tears inhabited by working journalists - where tough decisions must be made on the proverbial knife-edge, all the while that the large sword of the law is nudging one sharply in the other portal. Not for nothing are working journalists also known as blade runners, killers of replicants.

But to his column. The main criticism made by Harber of both The Sunday Independent and Sunday Times was that "it is almost certain that the allegation [that a complaint was laid by someone that Zuma had raped her] ... was spread as part of the propaganda war between the ANC factions... This is the real angle all the papers missed. Where do these allegations come from?"

So it seems Harber was suggesting that both newspapers should have avoided the yucky news story (that a woman allegedly made a complaint against Zuma and that it was being investigated by the burly commissioner and his merry people) and instead have led their front pages with mind-numbing speculation that there are two factions in the ANC, both crouched in underground bunkers where they brainstorm (isn't that the word?) incredible plots. Sounds to me like Harber really wanted to say: "To hell with the allegation, find the alligators (sic) *3."

It seems Harber was also suggesting that the esteemed editors of all the involved publications have, unlike him, no idea whatsoever that there is a so-called dirty information war going on.

What does Harber think that working journalists in this country do all day (besides boozing, bitching, struggling with fourth-rate technology, pushing their personal politically correct agenda, being sexist, and so on)? Since he obviously has no notion, I had better tell him: they spend their days trying to find those non-existent bunkers and sift the wheat from the chaff (geddit?) in the mounds of poppycock.

Of course gurus must be gurus. But it does seem to me that salivating over the corpse of a story several days after it was published, and howling that it failed to amount, in terms of depth, to Das Kapital, is not really adding to the journalistic capital of the country.

Still, all is forgiven, Anton.

Come on down from Mount Olympus to join us here in Hades where the real hard copy has to be written; where real people have to be dealt with; and tough decisions must be taken.

All of this, by the way, on a tight deadline - the last word being one you may perhaps recall from the distant past.

With acknowledgements to Jeremy Gordin and the Sunday Independent.


*1  It's all very well to joke about, but apart from complaints made resulting from activities in Forest Town in the first week of November, two young women have been both sexually assaulted in this way and murdered in the Southern Cape during the last month.

*2  Allegators ?

*3  Take it on the chin.