By Zingisa Mkhuma
The words by Katijah Khoza-Shangase, the first and only black African woman to earn a PhD in speech pathology and audiology at the time, are inspiring, indeed.
Khoza-Shangase penned a chapter in Black Academic Voices: The South African Experience (2019), in which she makes a cogently potent appraisal of “Intellectual and emotional toxicity”.
She reveals how a white professor tried to discourage and thus dissuade her determined pursuit of a PhD. This professor snarled that “not everyone is cut out for research” which she interpreted as his way of telling her to stay in her lane, as no black person had ever enrolled for a PhD in that profession at the time.
Khoza-Shangase talks about being labelled an angry black woman as a way to silence her, a label that she, however, embraced because it demonstrated that she is “disruptive” and would not let the status quo dictate matters to her.
Khoza-Shangase’s experience mirrors precisely how I am viewed as a black African woman editor at the Sunday Independent.
As our newspaper, every weekend, churns out cutting edge investigative reports that now appear to cause much discomfort among the predominant racist, patriarchal, sexist and misogynist South African media landscape and its followers, who have begun to wriggle and shimmy uncomfortably in their privileged seats.
White privilege hates disruptions to its perched position. Hence, its protagonists have always resisted transformation and affirmative action with a vengeance. White privilege hates nothing more than a “disruptive” black African woman in any leading position. They despise the reality of “their maid” calling the shots in the house, which is how they secretly view even black African leading women in positions of authority.
A case in point is the manner in which mainstream and social media reacted to the government’s ban on cigarettes during the hard lockdown period. Co-operative Governance Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma was turned into this ogre, who was now running down the country and all sorts of profanities were hurled at her by the very same people who apparently regard themselves as the leading voices against gender-based violence.
To their minds, ethics and gender sensitivities can be parked aside for a while, as long as their target is a disruptive black African woman who comes between them and their right to smoke cigarettes. How dare she!
This is the mentality of these chauvinistic bigots who have dominated the South African media landscape and controlled the national narrative for centuries by ensuring that those appointed to senior positions in the media, are oftentimes, those aligned with their values and the narrative that portrays black people as inherently corrupt, inept, lazy and unable to lead any organisation, much less a democratic country.
Sadly, it is a narrative that many of us are beginning to believe, that nothing good can come out of black leadership. That blacks hate other Africans, hence the tag “xenophobia” is affixed onto poor black South Africans when they protest and demand their government protects local jobs, which is essentially their livelihood, from unfair foreign competition as any advanced economy in Europe or North America would do for their citizens, hence Brexit.
The bigots benefit from the two worlds in one country, which former president Thabo Mbeki termed, The First Economy, that comprises mainly rich white folks and their black elite neighbours on the one hand, and The Second Economy, that consists of the largely black working class and the unskilled underclass on the other.
Any disruptive force which seeks to change this polarity, is anathema to white privilege.
It is the people at the top, including the fatcat university professors who earn huge salaries while the majority of the black children cannot pay their way through varsity, who want to tell everyone what to think and how to think it.
The white status quo doesn’t tolerate disruptive black African women.
That the Sunday Independent can cause so much disruption, with impactful and credible breaking news driven by irrefutably excellent journalism, is a hard pill for them to swallow because surely, it can’t be “that woman” who is an editor.
It must be the publisher or the twomost reviled journalists – Piet Rampedi and Mzilikazi Wa Afrika. What does she know? She is clearly out of her depth and being told what to do. The rest can be left to your imagination.
Yet, all the same, this week everyone came out in remembrance of that fateful October 19, 1977, Black Wednesday, when media houses were closed down and scores of journalists were detained, and now, in a new era of democratic dispensation, I can only look in wonder at the hypocrisy of all the misogynistic and probably racist, bigots.
The very champions of free speech have no tolerance for those who speak a different language to theirs and doesn’t see eye-to-eye with their point of view on matters of national interest, even though this is at the heart of not only a democratic country but more importantly, at the core of a healthy free media.
I believe black journalists have for far too long been walking a tightrope, to try and prove that they are not biased and are ,therefore objective, by being the first ones to scream at corruption when it is perpetrated by those in government who are mainly black. But, there seems to be a lack of enthusiasm to scream as promptly or loudly, let alone pursue corruption when it is perpetrated by other races, especially whites South Africans in the private sector.
Freedom of speech is entrenched in our Constitution.
This means we have to tolerate even the views of those we may not necessarily agree with.
Otherwise, we are no better than the apartheid regime which chose to silence the voices of dissent rather than allow their full expression.
Zingisa Mkhuma is Editor of the Sunday Independent.
Sunday Independent