Linn’s Year Ablog

(written early-February 2009 — Johannesburg, South Africa) (PDF copy available upon request)

Ho hum, I’m back in Johannesburg. At least that’s what I thought to myself when I returned two weeks ago. Oh boy, I’m back in Johannesburg. Ho hum.

I returned to Joburg in late January with a laundry list of things to do. I needed to write this summary, of course, but I also had two articles I’d been meaning to put together for the Mail & Guardian. My old landlord–the gun-toting Turkish lingerie salesman with the leaky room–kindly let me leave most of my stuff at his house while I was away, heaped in a big refrigerator box in the living room. So that needed to be cleaned out and repacked for Cape Town and India. I had to make arrangements for those two destinations as well–email contacts, get a visa and plane tickets, figure out where the heck I’m going. I had also promised to revise the report I wrote in the spring for a Joburg NGO and get coffee with a few friends. Ho hum, I thought.

But I should really start from the beginning.

* * *

In mid-November I was recovering from several robberies, but I also felt I was hitting a stride with the newspaper where I was working. What I didn’t fully realize at the time, however, is how much I was truly burnt out with living in Joburg. Usually, the friendliness of people here feels more suited to a small town than a giant metropolis, but no amount of Minnesota niceness or Southern hospitality can make up for the city’s size and brashness. The drivers are bullies; the bars are tough; and most folks keep one steady eye over their shoulders and the other on their bank accounts. In the old days, people swooped in on this dry land for a strike at gold flakes and greenbacks; today the urban area is Africa’s wealthiest, and people still don’t move here for the view.

Lesotho, meanwhile, has no gold and never got rich, but it offers an abundance of charm and natural greenery. More importantly for me, it offered the inviting home of two college friends for Thanksgiving, and their company and laid-back lifestyle was just the respite I needed.

* * *

In summer, the steep hills of the Maloti Mountains are covered in new grass, and the fields tucked snugly between them are budding with corn, potatoes and moroho (leafy veggies). The yellow seed stalks of spiky aloes burst ten feet upward in silhouette against the cloud wisps and blue sky. Cattle and sheep graze lazily, and blanket-clad boys herd them with rocks and sticks. With JRR Tolkien’s birthplace just across the border in South Africa, one wonders why the Lord of the Rings movies were shot way out in New Zealand.*

On one picturesque green hillock, about four hours by rickety bus from the capital of Maseru, sits the St. Rodrigue Mission. As part of a Grinnell-funded program, my friends teach English and literature at the mission’s all-girls high school. Their cozy three-bedroom house is a hundred-yard walk from work. They don’t have electricity, clean water, warm water, regular phone access or a working toilet, and their life seemed absolutely blissful to me at the time. I caught up on some reading down by the donga (stream gully), and we went on a couple of hikes. We fried up a grasshopper one morning and made tacos one evening. For Thanksgiving, we took a live chicken out of its home in the bathtub and cut off its head in the front yard. I didn’t bathe for a week, and I felt nothing but lovely.

* * *

In your response to my last quarterly report, the whole thing essentially leads up to two strong sentences. “Take it easy a bit and get out of the office,” you said. “You have my permission!” In the original, the first three words are in all-caps, and the last four are in bold.

I knew well that I needed to get out of the office–and out of the city–and this quarter was all about making that happen.

After the week in Lesotho, I went back to Joburg for three weeks to finish up some work at the Mail & Guardian, but it wasn’t the same old same old. I made minor progress on the shrimp farming investigation, and I took a highly educational, spur-of-the-moment trip with some colleagues up to the Zimbabwe border town of Musina.** I finished up a draft of my NGO report about media coverage of “service delivery” protests. I didn’t get much closer to writing what will someday be a long article on race and racism in the US and South Africa, but I did feel a new motivation to collect reference material.

I stopped renting a room, and I got a bed in a hostel just down the street from the office so I could give up my rental car. I lived on yogurt, granola and carrots, and felt pretty good about things. Four months in and I was finally feeling fully adventurous. (“Well it’s about damn time,” I said to myself.) And then the adventure actually started.

* * *

The father of another Grinnell friend of mine had earlier put me in touch with a friend of his who lives for part of the year in South Africa, and I had arranged to spend Christmas with him. His name is Stan. He’s retired, and his hobbies include playing a lot of golf and writing mystery novels with a friend. The first of these novels, however, got picked up by HarperCollins and made it onto the LA Times‘ annual top-ten list. So much for a retirement hobby.

Anyhow, just before the holiday, I got on a third-class train to Port Elizabeth, and I was happy to be on the road again, though not as desperate to be away from Joburg as before. From PE, I took a bus to the touristy beach town of Knysna, where Stan lives. The bus broke down, naturally, and the bus company lost my backpack. Stan loaned me an airline toothbrush kit, a cell phone and an XXL t-shirt. I hit the phones in search of my bag, but to no avail.

For Christmas dinner we went over to Stan’s friend’s house, whose long deck overlooks the bay, its rocky inlet and lots of other fancy bay-side houses. The hosting couple included an American woman and her husband, a one-time manager for Sonny and Cher, so they were great for conversation. Ditto the man’s friends: two other South Africans who’d worked abroad in the music business, a Barbie-and-Ken South African couple and a balding Hollywood producer in a black turtleneck who was filming a made-for-TV movie in Cape Town. I kept a particular eye on the producer, who, between fiddling with his goatee and fiddling with his Blackberry, twice explained how producing movies can be as mundane as stuffing envelopes. I didn’t buy it–envelope stuffers don’t hang out with Jenna Jameson–but I didn’t say so. Wine flowed like the waves over the rocks, and we all had a good time.

The day before I left Knysna I retrieved my backpack from the bus company, after it had traveled at least seven times the distance I had. The following night, I missed my departing bus, slept in a city park out under the stars and figured I had had a pretty good holiday, notwithstanding missing an Xmas call with my folks.

* * *

Next I was on to Cape Town for a few days, where I again did little of relevance to my project. But I made friends; I explored the city; and I saw a great News Year’s parade. Then I headed back to Joburg on a lovely train ride (second-class this time), where I spent just one night. This was long enough only to do some laundry and rent a car for the road trip I had planned with friends.

I’ll spare you the details of our two-week trip, but a few highlights included: visiting a near-empty former asbestos mining town, up a long dirt road in Swaziland; touring a Swazi prison (“Hello, I’m a journalist from Johannesburg. I’m researching prisons. Could we perhaps speak to the warden?”); seeing lots of big animals; getting directions to a tire repair shop, by way of a tour of USAID’s South African headquarters; being picked on by a bunch of rednecks, in the only bar open late in a super-segregated small farming town; cooking a can of baked beans over a candle; driving on more dirt roads through the sheer river valleys of south-Lesotho; and communicating entirely in hand gestures and grunts with the flustered old night watchman of a hillside hut-camp as the sun went down on our final day (thanks Lonely Planet, but your language suggestions were worthless).

* * *

So after all that, I hope Joburg will forgive me if I felt a little ho-hum in home-coming. As it turned out, however, the past few weeks haven’t been all work and no play. For one thing, I decided that I should try to see a few of the many tourist sites that I missed in my four months of actually living in the city. I’ve been to the theme park, the military museum, the Constitutional Court, the Old Fort and the famous Soweto church where student protestors escaped police bullets in 1976. I also became interested enough in my NGO report again to essentially rewrite the whole thing so that it is more cohesive and includes more background info.

For the rest of February, I’ll be in Cape Town to meet up with several journalist contacts. On my way back toward Joburg to catch my flight to India, I’ll stop in Grahamstown, where I’ll visit the journalism school at Rhodes University and interview a couple of professors.

* * *

But before I leave South Africa–and lest my five-or-so weeks of travel during this period make it seem as if I’ve forgotten my purpose here–I would like to offer some general comments on the state of investigative journalism in the South African press. By the end of my time in India, I hope, I’ll have more to add and more comparisons to make.

South African media is about as free as it gets. Journalists aren’t often intimidated, harassed or killed by the government or organized crime. If your job title is “investigative journalist,” you have virtually free reign over what you publish and when. At the papers where I worked, in fact, almost all journalists have a great deal of individual control over what they write.

Although difficult to determine, the direct persuasion of editors by corporate management and advertisers appears to be minimal. Editors themselves are minor celebrities, and they wield significant clout in the companies where they work. Readers often know their names, and it is not unheard-of for a “letter to the editor,” for example, to be personally addressed.

When I was occasionally allowed a glimpse at editors’ decision-making, I noticed that space is the most common non-content factor in consideration, although other factors were also mentioned on occasion. Readers’ concerns are occasional considered as well. In talking about a strike at a grocery store chain, for instance, an editor mentioned that the paper’s target demographic are more likely to be shoppers at the store than protestors outside. She suggested that the reporter should consider this when deciding on the angle of her story, but I suspect it had little impact. And so what if it had?

At another meeting, by contrast, it was not a concern over space or readership that came up, but one over money. The independence of journalists from their sources of funding was a major element of my original Watson proposal, so my ears perked up. In this case, the editor expressed concern over whether an advertiser would be willing to sponsor a particular collection of articles. But several others at the meeting quickly said that they should be concerned with content, not sponsorship. The editor agreed, and the articles went ahead. Particularly in tough economic times, however, balancing editorial independence and keeping a paper afloat is a tricky act to balance.

At the state broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), meanwhile, allegations that it has been too favorable toward ruling party politicians have not abated, and this is now a more contentious issue that ever, given upcoming elections in April. Complaints of high-level corruption and incompetence persist as well, and many South Africans claim that quality has declined since the start of this decade. The national legislature also recently changed the method by which the SABC’s board of directors is chosen, allowing direct hiring and firing by the legislature itself–and therefore putting the ruling party in more direct control of the airwaves.

As in the US, personnel issues are probably the primary way that monetary concerns affect content. South African newspapers have not, as far as I can tell, suffered the same degree of layoffs as US papers, although big conglomerates do control most media. At some companies, this has meant that content is “shared” between publications, and the independence of each publication has subsequently suffered. Most large companies also cut their internal training programs in the 1990s, and there is no doubt that many newsrooms in South Africa include too many younger staff lacking experience and education. Cost-cutting measures from management–as well as, perhaps, deteriorating writing quality and generally low journalist pay–may account for the loss of experienced reporters to public relations firms.

While financial concerns, whether justified or not, have led to a gradual juniorization of some newsrooms, they probably have also led to the tabloidization of some publications. For instance: Although The Star, the traditionally staid paper where I first worked, still carries sound political analysis and lengthy feature articles on its inner broadsheets, its front page is consistently covered in gory photos and trivial gossip.

* * *

Aside from individual journalists’ independence and publications’ financial concerns, it was another overarching issue that became most important to me.

In the introduction of my original project proposal, I claimed that “investigative stories are everywhere,” in high places (“the law courts of Pretoria”) and low (“the streets of New Delhi”). There is a balance to be negotiated there, between big-time political muckraking and localized investigations in people’s daily lives.

If a South African newspaper hasn’t chopped its investigative department in budget cuts, its reporters are likely to have sufficient time and resources to do their jobs. And they usually do their jobs well. The trouble is, “investigative journalism” usually only means “political investigative journalism” here, rather than including narrative reporting or stories with salt-of-the-earth popular appeal. The top-notch five-person investigative team at the Mail & Guardian makes and breaks the careers of SA’s high and mighty, but I found it disappointing that educated professionals make up the bulk of their readers. Whether that is due to the subject matter and style of the reporting, the cost of the newspaper or another factor, I do not know, but I suspect there is a way to make quality reporting accessible and interesting to a broader readership.

When the tabloids do features on shack-dwelling flood victims or people unable to get health care, they seemingly make up the other half of the high/low investigative journalism balance–except that their stories lack fairness and accuracy, not to mention depth and investigation. Like SA’s vast income divide, it seems there is a divide in press coverage as well.

My project proposal’s statement about investigative stories got one thing wrong–South Africa’s main courts aren’t in Pretoria–but it unexpectedly identified an important balance between two types of media coverage. There’s the wheeling and dealing of those in business and politics, and then there’s the day-to-day life of the rest of us. Both are important, but in SA, I think, the scale is tipped too far one way.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* One wonders, that is, until one notices that wedged amid the tended fields and hilltop aloe plants are thousands of thatched rondavels and cinderblock cottages, grouped in small villages or family complexes. From the top of one hill, one may see more than half a dozen clusters of houses in the immediate vicinity, and almost every rocky ledge, eroded gully and precious tillable plot in Lesotho, says my guidebook, is privately owned by someone living nearby. Simply put, Lesotho is very overpopulated, and herdboys and hamlets would trip up sweeping battle scenes. Basotho trees don’t walk much either.

** There’s a verbose post about this trip on my blog, if you’re interested.

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