Publications
Partners
I WAS alone in the newsroom one night in 1995, preparing the top of the hour bulletin well after midnight, when the Reuters newsfeed sprang to life and out poured page after page of densely typed text, thousands of words.
It came from a journalist who had been first on the scene at a massacre in a refugee camp; to be honest, I have forgotten which camp, what happened, what the roleplayers said. I remember that it was occupied by displaced people, many of them Hutu, following the genocidal events of the year before.
However the killing began, it became an orgy of revenge.
The journalist drove into an eerily quiet scene, I remember, to see bodies lying everywhere. “We had to stop the vehicle when we realised we were driving over the bodies of dead children,” I read. Alone in the wee hours, my skin turned to gooseflesh and my eyes burned with sudden hot tears.
I have never, ever been able to forget that image. It leapt back to life years later when I met a young man, a wonderful survivor and success story, who had lived those years in the flesh as a young boy, and eventually fled Rwanda to make his way (often on foot and with very little money), to South Africa. What he told me of his experiences made my flesh crawl once again.
I recounted the story of the massacre to a group of journalist interns (and their media hosts) at a workshop I ran this week in Pretoria, using it to demonstrate what it is about stories that grabs people. As I spoke, I noticed eyes blurring and turning red: the idea of those little, vulnerable bodies is intensely moving.
After two concentrated days of focus on the workshop, I drove away from Tshwane in peaceful silence for about 20 minutes, not wanting to rejoin this world of turmoil, until my hand did its automatic button-press, and the radio came on. President Zuma, oh lord, what is this? His reply to the SONA debate. I listened for as long as I could bear it and then switched off.
Several conversations over tea and lunch were fresh in my mind: anger over black exclusion from higher education and opportunity through structural racism; an anguish of confusion – do we condemn the young people who are torching art and buses, and wearing T-shirts with the message ‘Kill All Whites’, or do we sympathise with the frustration that led them to such actions? And finally, a growling wail that came straight from the gut: “These people in government are not leaders! We need leadership!”
We don't need safe, stodgy reponses, Mr Zuma
Zuma’s stodgy reply to the debate, with its carefully couched, anodyne nod to the families of the trapped miners, displayed nothing like the leadership we need now. We don’t need safe. We don’t need careful. We need inspired.
Not populist – it was rousing, populist, emotionally laden demagoguery that led to the morass in Rwanda, and to the horror of Nazi Germany. And make no mistake, populist speechmaking could lead to disaster here. It’s easy to gather a following on hate (one side or the other, it matters not who’s doing it); but hate is not a sustainable foundation for the future, hate cannot lead people to work, to volunteer, to sacrifice, to give of their hearts and souls for the betterment of others.
No, we need the leadership of a Martin Luther King, the speeches of Frederick Douglass and William Wilberforce, the undaunted principled leadership of a Desmond Tutu, the spirit of Mandela standing firm after Boipatong… We need leadership that combines inspiring speeches with eyes that see truth and a heart that hews closely to principles, that is prepared to risk being unpopular, saying things that are not going to result in mass adulation and easy popularity, but that are necessary for the health of our country and that keep the long term in view.
Where are our leaders? Where are the heirs of Tutu, Tambo and the rest? Not in parliament, nowhere on the benches in the Assembly, not in any party.
Even those in government who are quietly committed to the national interest (and I believe there are a few) do not have the gravitas and in many cases are compromised by what’s happened in the last 15 years or so. They’re not in business, either. And I’ve yet to see a successor to Tutu in any religion.
Where are the remnants of the struggle? The church leaders, those who inspired and powered the United Democratic Front? The committed activists in politics, in welfare, in spiritual life? Please step forward now. I beg of you, I am afraid for my country.
This drought and rising food prices, lack of water in the small towns, economic uncertainty, bad or delayed delivery to an increasingly despairing and impatient population of urbanising poor, huddled together in swarming shanties around major cities, the well-founded anger of black youth at ongoing structural racism that puts them miles back in the starting blocks, corruption… it all swirls together into a recipe for disaster, and the ghost of Rwanda looms large in my mind.
We need heroes who can put the interests of all the people and the whole country ahead of their own and those of their economic interest, their religious organisations, their political party. Do you know anyone who fits the bill?
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
