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Jani Allan memoir: the psychology of sex, power, betrayal and ‘slut shaming’

I was a hard-news reporter on the now defunct Rand Daily Mail in 1980 when Jani Allan, a glorious, goddess-like creature swept into the Sunday Times, changing the media and other landscapes forever. Her beauty, brains, bitchy pen, political incorrectness and superficiality that had an oddball substance collided to create the most celebrated columnist and media celebrity South Africa had ever seen.

I watched with horrified fascination as Allan got caught up in a ridiculous sex scandal in 1988 that toppled her from her pedestal, reverberated across the planet, had former ‘friends’ hurtling out of the woodwork to accept money to betray her, and effectively destroyed her life of glamour, affluence and privilege. Here is my review of Jani Confidential, Allan’s memoir of surviving against all odds and learning a whole new way of being in the world. – MS

By Marika Sboros

Jani Allan’s memoir is a revelation, a riveting read not so much about the canard of her “affair” with the South African white supremacist leader Eugene Terre’Blanche. Instead, Jani Confidential is a textbook case of the psychology of sex, betrayal, hate, power, politics, and public shaming.

It reveals in graphic, gory detail the horrific toll “slut-shaming” takes on body and mind; how quickly and easily jealousy, envy, and the “righteous power of collective fury” can destroy a life.

The book goes to the heart and hurt of a beautiful young girl overly endowed with intellect, talent and potential, and chronically lacking in confidence and self-esteem. It frames a poignant portrait of a woman who just wanted to be loved, affirmed, made to feel safe, who sought that love, affirmation and safety from the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, and who paid an unbelievably high price for doing so.

The only other pathology I could pick up on lies buried in the question of what drove such a smart woman to make such foolish choices over and over and over again. What made her trust so many people – not just men, but women – who used, abused, manipulated and betrayed her with the utmost and obscene venality?

Jani Allan with one of her Pomeranians, China, on the Delaware Canal in the US. Picture: Anneli Martin

To find an answer, you don’t have to scratch far below the surface of Allan’s amazing life story – I use the word amazing deliberately. It reminds me life really is stranger than fiction. It recalls the power behind the quote wrongly attributed to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief: “Tell a lie big enough, often enough, and people will believe it’s the truth.”

Still, there are many who won’t see things through Allan’s exacting prism in this book. They will continue to believe she had a sexual relationship with Terre’Blanche, who was murdered by his black farmworkers in 2010. They may even believe she deserved all the awful things that happened to her as a consequence of that “relationship”; and that she is once again being “economical with the truth”.

There is an overwhelming unadorned, painful honesty and openness in her version of events and minutiae of the detail, a compelling coherence throughout that proves otherwise.

Book available on Kalahari.com

As expected, Allan’s memoir is well written, punctuated with her characteristic style: the surgical journalistic precision, creativity, biting wit, bitchiness, and black humour aimed as much at herself as others. All these combined to make her “a major opinion-maker in her role as one of the country’s premier newspaper columnists, and one of its very first media celebrities”, as the Mail and Guardian’s Rowan Philp wrote in The return of Jani Allan in 2013.

Allan presents her story in a fast-paced, chronological format, which makes it reader friendly. It begins with her privileged upbringing in a Johannesburg suburb, cared for by a black nanny called Dennis and later a succession of “house boys”.

She was adopted as a baby by Janet Allan, an austere, remote, domineering, short-tempered woman, the daughter of a Rhodesian cabinet minister.

Allan’s mother was clearly fond of picking up strays, always rescuing creatures, animals or children. Allan was one of those strays. Her mother fostered other children, including a boy of about 16 who took Allan into a garage, and did “inappropriate sexual things” to her.

When he let her go, she burrowed into one of her mother’s cupboards, and stayed there “sobbing into the expensive coats” until her mother returned.

Puritanical views

Allan writes that she never told her mother what happened, fearing it was somehow her fault. She makes light of the incident, as she does with other dark incidents, saying only that she managed to “blank it out”, until she started writing about her childhood for this book.

Her mother’s puritanical views of sex exacerbated that early, ugly experience of sex. She told Allan that sex was “the result of a man getting the better of you”, and “if you have to sit on a man’s lap, put a telephone directory on his legs before you sit”.

It should come as no surprise that as an adult, Allan showed a distinct lack of any interest in sex, an attitude that was to punctuate and mar her relationships with men. It makes her later status as sex goddess, and the focus of the biggest sex scandal ever to rock South Africa that much more ironic.

Allan recalls always feeling like an outsider, though her mother only told her she was adopted when she turned 18. Her mother also told her she never wanted to adopt a girl. She wanted a boy. Those kinds of put-downs were common and they devastated Allan.

Allan’s mother was a haughty and harsh disciplinarian: when Allan fell off her pony, her mother told her to “cease that detestable boo-hooing”, and get straight back on.

What Janet Allen lacked in empathy, she more than made up for with vaulting ambition for her newly acquired daughter. She also went far beyond her maternal duty in caring for Allan’s physical needs and education.

An early picture of Jani Allan in her trademark hats.

At school, Allan’s academic achievement set her apart from her peers. When told she could skip a grade in primary school, she felt “gutted at the good news”.

She was gifted artistically and musically. When she showed an interest in the piano at age four, her mother immediately paid for lessons. It soon became clear she was a prodigy. Allan debuted at 10 with the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, and at 11, jointly won the Trinity Cup of South Africa with a 21-year-old pianist.

Her mother was thrilled. Allan was “embarrassed”.

In her teens, when other girls started developing breasts and curves, Allan’s chest stayed resolutely flat, her legs racehorse long and skinny. The boys called them “Wednesday” – when’s-dey-gonna-break – legs

Allan’s mother dreamed her daughter would become a concert pianist and marry a prince. Allan had other ideas. She studied Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, excelled academically, and met art dealer Gordon Schachat, a millionaire member of the property development family.

They married in 1982. They divorced amicably in 1984, in part because of her lack of interest in sex, but also because of the pressures of her new-found fame as a celebrity columnist.

‘Smiling Death’

Allan describes how she fell into journalism by chance in 1980 when she applied for a job as a columnist for the Sunday Times. Then editor Tertius Myburgh asked if she had any formal journalistic training. She said no. To her amazement, Myburgh gave her the job.

Allan knew Myburgh’s nickname at the time:  “Smiling Death” for his tendency to “smile as he fired people”. She didn’t know Myburgh’s murkier side: widely held suspicions that he was an agent of the ruling Nationalist Party government.

It never occurred to her that Death would smile on her, and stick the knife into her front before she even had time to turn her back. Myburgh died from cancer in 1990.

Allan “adored” Myburgh, and especially needed to hear from him the three words she lived for in those days: “Nice story, Jani.” To that end, she “would parachute out of airplanes, deep-sea dive, go down a mine”, and generally do all manner of things that terrified her.

She chronicles how in 1988 Myburgh instructed Allan to arrange to “have tea” with Terre’Blanche,  a name with which she recalls being “vaguely familiar”. He made her accept an invitation from the racist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB)  leader  to attend a training session of Aquila, his movement’s armed wing. Myburgh told her to accept. He also told her to accept Terre’Blanche’s invitation to the Paardekraal Monument, an event that backfired spectacularly on Allan.

Given the political climate of the day, and the suspicions around Myburgh, the only inference to be drawn from his interventions  is that he deliberately dangled her as bait to discredit and effectively neutralise Terre’Blanche and the AWB.

If he was not acting on orders from minders in the racist ruling National Party, Myburgh’s actions would certainly have furthered its cause.

And when his task was done, Myburgh got rid of Allan – probably with a smile, and without so much as a backward glance. He banished her to London, told her she could write her column from there, and fired her once she arrived.

One problem, as Allan writes, is that she religiously followed what she thought was – and usually is – helpful advice from a fellow journalist: “Always remember to write your impression of your subject. Don’t allow yourself to be coloured by other people’s experiences of them.”

Poisoned chalice

That advice turned out to be a “poisoned chalice”.

Terre’Blanche, like many wannabe demagogues, was charismatic, and known to have an “unusual” effect on women, as one female reporter described it to me. Allan was not the first woman – or man – to be initially attracted to that charisma, and just as quickly revolted by it.

The words Allan used to describe her first meeting with him, that fateful day on January 25, 1988, of feeling “impaled on the flame of his blowtorch-blue eyes”, were meant to be overwritten and provocative. She checked them with Myburgh who smiled as he passed them as “vintage Jani”.

Those words proved to be bullets in a cocked gun, waiting for Paardekraal to pull the trigger, setting off a deadly chain of events for Allen that has ricocheted down the decades. It included death threats from the right and the left, physical and mental breakdown, hospitalisation, traction for incapacitating back pain, a bleeding ulcer that came within two hours of killing her, the bombing of her apartment.

Myburgh’s response: he banished Allen to London, telling her she could write her column from, and then he fired her once she arrived.

In London in 1992, “friends” persuaded Allan to sue the BBC Channel 4 for libel for airing The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, a documentary hinting strongly that she had sex with Terre’Blanche.

A large part of the book is devoted to that case which on its own makes amazing, almost apocalyptic reading. It reads as if Mother Nature herself were mustering natural forces and a cast of dubious characters against Allan, in some kind of revisionist Shakespearean tragedy worthy of King Lear.

It is difficult to comprehend the vicious and deadly mix that was Allan’s ultimate undoing: her lawyers’ incompetence and greed, a judge in awe of the BBC’s brilliant but sleazy barrister, George Carman, described by Alan Rusbridger editor of The Guardian at the time, as “the legendary defamation silk”.

Carman died in 2002. And since you can’t defame the dead, Rusbridger noted that son Dominic sensibly waited for his father to pass before publishing a blistering tell-all biography, No Ordinary Man, and portraying Carman as a bisexual bully, wife abuser, gambler, habitual drunk, and who prevented all sorts of criminals from paying for their crimes.

The odds were always against Allan in this case, facing the BBC’s might and limitless funds to fly out witnesses from South Africa all expenses paid. Yet the ease with Channel 4 persuaded so many former female friends to take up that offer, and the unseemly haste, greed and glee with which they probably perjured themselves in court, defy belief.

Among those were Allan’s former flatmate and best friend Linda Shaw, a former journalist turned astrologer. It was Shaw who claimed to have peeped through a keyhole and seen Terre’Blanche’s big white bottom between Allan’s legs, with two of his bodyguards were in the same room. That scene that struck me as laughably improbable at the time, and still does.

It’s an understatement to say Allan’s portrait of Shaw in the book is unflattering. It builds a convincing case that Shaw made up the story because she was eaten up with jealousy and envy of Allan, and the many men who were attracted to her. Shaw of course, denies all that.

Yet even if Shaw believes her own story, it raises the question of why she would give evidence against a friend, former or otherwise, if she didn’t have to. The same could be asked of Marlene Burger, a Sunday Times reporter enlisted by Myburgh to help Allan write a hard news account of the Paardekraal incident, and others who so readily gave damning – and clearly made-up – evidence against Allan.

Allan’s friends did what they could to help. Allan’s therapist, clinical psychologist Dr Dorianne Weil flew at her own expense to London give evidence. Schachat submitted an affidavit.

It isn’t in the book, but billionaire shipping tycoon Taki Theodoracopolous gave Allan £5 000 during the case to buy the court records because he said she had “been mugged”.

Abused wife

Losing that court case left Allan penniless, and facing a £300 000 legal bill for costs, offset in part by her mother cashing in all her life savings.

The horror didn’t stop there. Allan moved to the US in 2001. She soon fell into the arms of a doctor, supposedly a “leading light in ‘alternative healing therapies”, who persuaded her to marry him, abused and beat her up so badly at times, she was hospitalised. She sought refuge in a home for battered women, and divorced him.

Yet Allan didn’t always get things wrong with people. Apart from Schachat, who remains a close ally, there was fellow journalist and investigative reporter at the Sunday Times, Geoff Allen, who tried hard to help Allan negotiate all the landmines, and warned her that she was being used. Many other men and women have stayed true to her.

One of the quirks and strengths of Allan’s memoir is its apolitical, often superficial nature, a lack of guile and political correctness with which she writes about the milieu in which she was raised – a privileged white kid in the heyday of Nationalist Party rule of South Africa, with a black male nanny called Dennis, and a later succession of “house boys”.

She tells her story simply as it was and is, with an unadorned innocence, unburdened with the story and politics of apartheid. She comes across just as what she was at the time: not just a babe, but a foetus in the woods of South African apartheid politics.

Her memoir’s lack of context at times is form that supports content. However, it can be a weakness that makes it more difficult for readers who are not South Africans, who aren’t in the media, or who did not grow up during apartheid, to understand more fully the context in which Allan lived and worked.

Like other memoir’s, Allan’s is essentially a catharsis, a way to for her have her say, set the record straight, and balance all the fiction written about her that has passed into the collective consciousness as fact.

Whether that will happen is anyone’s guess. She’s probably lucky, if that’s the right word in this context, that social media weren’t around when her world imploded, toppling her from her pedestal as the beautiful, unattainable, glacial goddess, the ice maiden of South African society.

As Jon Ronson wrote in an article on the public shaming on Twitter of Justine Sacco in the New York Times recently: “Sometimes, things need to reach a brutal nadir before people see sense.”

Allan would probably agree. Her mother has died, and while their relationship was prickly and fraught, Allan credits her mother with teaching her courage, forbearance and perseverance, and without knowing it, preparing her for the hell to come.

She has been living quietly for more than 10 years, shielded in relative obscurity by her avatar, “Juliette”, a waitress in New Jersey, driving a beat-up yellow Volksie Beetle, and three Pomeranians as constant companions.

She ends her book with a short quote that says it all:

“I am learning how to rock with the waves.

“I have invented a new way of being in the world.”

* Jani Confidential (Jacana) is available in bookstores

 * Follow me on Twitter @MarikaSboros

  * Subscribe to my weekly Health Newsletter

   * Like my Facebook page

* For more in-depth business news, visit biznews.com or simply sign up for the daily newsletter.

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