A few months ago I got rather hot under the collar on this Blog about the firing of Rapport columnist, Deon Maas, for writing a column in which he wrote that Satanism was a religion like any other and that it was therefore constitutionally entitled to the same kind of protection as any other religion.
Why then do I feel no need to come to the defense of Sunday Times columnist David Bullard who was fired last week after writing a racist column in which he ridiculed black South Africans? After all, in my previous Blog post about Maas I wrote:
It is also sad and a bit frightening that the newspaper [Rapport] caved in so easily while piously claiming it supported the notion of freedom of speech…. Can freedom of the press be undermined so easily by citizen activism?
What would happen if ANC activists started a similar campaign against Mondli Makanya from the Sunday Times? Will they have the same clout to convince its owners to fire him for “commercial reasons”? Or will the proprietors of the Sunday Times have a bit more of a backbone than those at Rapport? Troubling thought indeed.
Some relatively thoughtful people have defended Bullard and have criticised the Sunday Times for firing the crusty old columnist, arguing that while his column was obnoxious or even racist, a big newspaper like the Sunday Times has a duty to publish a wide variety of opinions which do exist out there. After all, what Bullard wrote in his rather tedious piece is nothing that many whining whites do not say in private at dinner parties and around the braaivleis fire.
Should human rights lawyers therefore also defend Bullard on the basis that his freedom of speech has been infringed – regardless of whether we agree with his opinion or think it is entertaining or not?
I think not.
But how do I get myself out of the potential contradiction of having criticised Rapport while I support the Sunday Times? Am I just an sycophantic whitey fart trying to ingratiate myself with the black elite?
Well, that is for the readers of this Blog to decide, but I personally do think there is a fundamental difference between the two columnists and what they had to say and I do not think that there was anything wrong with firing Bullard.
This is because – like the Constitutional Court – I adhere to a contextual and not an absolutist notion of freedom of expression. I do not think the guarantee of freedom of expression requires us always to allow all voices in any kind of publication, merely for the sake of having a diversity of views available to us. We should look at the context and ask whether we as a society would be impoverished if a specific publication bans a specific point of view.
Freedom of expression is guaranteed, said the Constitutional Court, because it is required for us to make decisions about how we want to be ruled and as such it is a cornerstone of democracy. It is however also protected because without a free flow of information we will not be exposed to the wide spectrum of views that will allow us to decide for ourselves who we are and how we want to live, and thus our human dignity will potentially be infringed if unpopular or even bizarre views are suppressed.
It is true that David Bullard’s freedom of expression was curtailed because he was denied the platform given by the Sunday Times, and to that extent his views are being repressed. But his views are unfortunately not surprising, very thought provoking or bizarre. What he did in his column was merely to repeat and therefore to reinforce the prejudices and stereotypes of a certain kind of rich white South African.
Being deprived of his views in the Sunday Times will not affect our human dignity and will not deny us the opportunity to decide for ourselves who we are and how we want to live. If we are white and upper-middle class, we can easily accept any dinner party invitation to hear the same drivel spoken – although it will not be as fluently expressed. And most black South Africans are well acquainted with the reactionary views of people like Bullard, so they themselves will not really be any the poorer for not hearing him rant and rave.
Maas, on the other hand, told the readers of Rapport things they did not know or did not want to hear and was fired for that very reason.
Of course, Maas was also writing in support of the values of tolerance and diversity contained in the Constitution, while Bullard was taking a stance in which he often challenged the values on which our constitutional democracy is supposedly built.
I would be vehemently opposed to any move to ban speech like that uttered by Bullard. People should be free to say almost anything – even racists things – because if they are not allowed to speak their minds they will still think these thoughts and it would be more difficult to challenge and confront such thoughts and words.
But for the Sunday Times to fire a columnist that merely regurgitate the reactionary and well known prejudices of some of the newspaper’s readers, seem like a move that should be congratulated – not condemned.
To say that someone’s freedom of expression depends partly on whether his opinion is challenging/surprising seems ridiculous.
I think if we see freedom of expression more in terms of ‘the state should not be able to silence anyone” we would not need to do any such mental gymnastics.
That is – a newspaper has a right to decide what its values are – and to use columnists that reflect that. The firing of a columnists by a newspaper should not be seen as a freedom of expression issue unless the state or possibly some other powerful entity external to the newspaper caused him to be fired.
I would have fired Bullard, even though The Times’s subbing systems was at fault for not checking the article before it was published.
Not because of the sentiment that colonialism aided Africa. As Xolela Mangcu pointed out this week there are even African scholars arguing in this vain. But because of its highly insulting tone.
As Alleman pointed out elsewhere there is a difference between Mkhaya’s mistake and Du Plessis’s. Mkhaya was not aware of the article until it was published. Du Plessis was. Du Plessis reacted to the pressure of his audience after sanctioning the publication of an article. Du Plessis should have stood firm or resigned.
We should never forget that words of a white man being said by a black man still belong to the white man.
The Sunday Times is a colonialist newspaper, period. I do not care how black the editor and owners are, that paper caters for people(black/white) who look down on native Africans. I see no reason why Pierre would defend a newspaper that systematicaly is programmed to produce thoughts like those of David Bullard. Bullard has been dispensing his colonialist views for years and Mondli Makhanya published him. The only difference now, is the blatancy of his insults. Mondli Makhanya himself is at best, a mask for the colonial masters that run that newspaper.
I have not spend one cent of my money on that piece of toilet paper since early last year. I must admit that I do read it if a copy happens to be in front of me, but then I also read stuff from the Faceless One. But spend my money on counter-revolutionaries, I refuse!
Personally, I do not buy the lie that David Bullard was fired for that column. David Bullard recently wrote on Empire magazine complaining about the ‘mediocrity’ that has taken over at the Sunday Times. So much for the vote of confidence on the managers of the toilet paper.
That article was just an excuse.
Alleman, perhaps you have not read Naom Chomsky’s book, “Manufacturing Consent” in which he argues that even in a country like the US where the Constitution prohibits the state from interfering with free expression in quite a vigorous way, there is no free flow of information because big news companies decide what is acceptable to show or publish and what not. Censorship by private companies like newspapers or by the TV news stations are therefore very much part of the freedom of expression debate. Our Constitution acknowledges that the infringement of our rights often occur not because the state interfere, but because private individuals – often with power and money – trample on our rights and therefore provides for the Bill of Rights to apply horizontally between individuals and private companies.
Prof, what is your opinion (if any) on Jon Qwelane’s recent article published on news24 titled “Poor Mugabe is now the villian” in light of the above discussions.
As someone recently said: Everyone has a right to speak; but not everyone has a right to a column. If Bullard wants his views distributed, let him buy his own printing press. Or write a blog. He has no “right” to one inch of column space in any newspaper. The notion that the ST has offended Bullard’s free speech is an instance of the muddled thinking that constitutional horizontalism encourages.
That being said, the dismissal of Bullard’s rant as “racist” is another example of the trivializing of the charge by its over-use. Bullard may well be subjectively racist. And certainly, his tone is over the top and provocative. But I am not sure why his claim that pre-colonial Africa was under-developed is a racist one.
Certainly, I would not be in the least offended if Bullard told the world that my ancestors, filthy, unlettered mud-grovellors, in what is now southern England, benefited greatly both from the Roman invasion, and from the Norman conquest a millennium
As per usual Michael Osborn talks sense.
Pierre how do you square these two sentences of yours made in two consecutive posts?
‘Censorship by private companies like newspapers or by the TV news stations are therefore very much part of the freedom of expression debate. Our Constitution acknowledges that the infringement of our rights often occur not because the state interfere, but because private individuals – often with power and money – trample on our rights and therefore provides for the Bill of Rights to apply horizontally between individuals and private companies.’
and
‘I for one would not choose to focus on farm murders in South Africa as I do not see it as a pressing human rights issue. This is because the farmers are NOT being persecuted or murdered by the state or agents of the state, but by fellow citizens completely independent of the state…’
I have known David Bullard for years and he is not a racist. But as Rhoda Kadalie wrote to me recently, it’s actually a badge of honour to be called one these days. Under the Nats the dreaded label was communist. Now it’s racist. David Bullards piece was not his best and it’s a pity that he had to end his relationship with the ST on that note. But the column should be read as satire, poking fun, but it fell flat. I can already hear the thought police groaning. But maybe it was time for Bullard to move on. A column like that has a life of its own. A birth, a life and then a death. Time for David to move on. He’s a talented writer and he’ll find another space. It’s alos quite tedious to come up with new angles for a column every week. For 14 years, nogal. After all that time, it had to end in tears. Pity.
MIchael, I profoundly disagree about you on on this one. Bullard did not merely claim that pre-colonial Africa was underdeveloped but joked that black people do not care about their children because “if a crocodile eats one they will just have another”, that they are lazy and stupid, and then also claimed that black people are childish and prone to complain about something they should not complain about – namely colonialism. These kinds of statements are made in a specific context and that context is one of colonialism, oppression and racism suffered by Africans at the hand of the so called superior white Western “civilization”. You would of course not worry about being told your forebears were filthy and unlettered because the people who control the world do not think and repeat over and over (directly and often indirectly) that you and the race you belong to are STILL filthy and unlettered. BUllard’s views are deeply offensive and racist because they perpetuate deeply ingrained stereotypes that dehumanise people on the basis of their race and entrenches prejudices widely held amongst white people in South Africa and elsewhere. This is about power, so its easy for the powerful group to claim the disempowered group is hyper sensitive because they are not themselves disempowered. By doing this one is trying to erase the lived reality of people’s oppression and their experience of racism and, in effect, to maintain one’s own superiority. That is the very essence of racism for me.
Pierre, you make some powerful, impassioned arguments, I must consider carefully about what you suggest about imperatives of empathy. But before I take that further – and I may end up agreeing with some of your observations – I must say that you undermine your position with a certain slippage in your rendition of Bullard’s piece.
You say that Bullard “joked that black people _do_ not care about their children because if a crocodile eats one they will just have another”, etc.
Your ascription of present tense is important. If Bullard is indeed purporting to describe how Africans are today, there would of course be no doubt at all that his statements was despicably racist. There is then no interesting argument to be had.
But to the extent he was using the past tense, which as I recall he was, he is making the anthropologically respectable (though by no means uncontroversial), point that people in pre-modern societies, because they have not conquered nature, tend of necessarily to be more stoic than “modern” people. A related point: the most effective way to induce people to reduce their family size is to raise their standard of living, and to reduce the incidence of child mortality in particular. Where the statistical odds of children surviving are low, rationally adaptive behavior is to produce bigger families. How is it racist to offer that rather banal observation?
If my interpretation is correct, the crocodile reference was just a colorful, and rather tasteless, way of stating the obvious: that before colonization, African was not modernized, and that this had implications for the value attached to individual lives.
As I say, Pierre, I think you have raised compelling arguments regarding the need for empathic sensitivity in the way one articulates even statements that are not per se racist. But we cannot seriously engage in that discussion if you insist that, properly interpreted, Bullard was purporting to describe the contemporary situation in Africa.
Call me old-fashioned, but contra Derrida/Levinas, I think one needs to address the antecedent hermeneutic question before reaching the ethical level.
Prof I don’t deny that censorship by private companies is a problem. But it is not a problem that (should) have a legal solution. People who perceive bias can, and do, create alternatives outlets for their points of view.
What I find amusing is your stereotyping of white braaivleis chat. That’s just bollocks ! Perhaps around your circle of friends it’s true. Otherwise how would you know ? Many blacks hold this particular racist view that they are privy to white chit-chat.
I challenge you to provide some proof or quantitative analysis of these chats. Otherwise you are just an asslicker white apologist.
OK John, You asked for the braai chat – check out this white chit chat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq2SOmwzjUU&NR
Wessel, I do not see any contradiction between the two statements quoted. This is because I did not say that farm murders are not a human rights issue at all – merely that it is not the most pressing issue for me. The murder of even one South African is a human rights issue because the Constitution places a positive duty on the State to safeguard our security, but those who commit these murders are not part of a powerful force that controls society.
Michael, you are correct that Bullard spoke about an imaginary place and was purporting to make an anthropological point. My argument is that such a point is never made or understood in the abstract, but in the context of our lived reality in which the kind of “anthropological” assumptions neatly dovetail with the prejudices of present day South Africa about race. It is therefore not possible to distinguish these two things – especially not in the context of a newspaper column. The one becomes the other. That he could not see this, seems to demonstrate to me that he has no clue of how black people experience racism and how it must feel to be on the receiving end of this powerful, voracious, arrogant culture that is ready to assume that because of the colour of your skin you are little more than a lazy savage freshly come down from the trees. If white South Africans had been subjected to this kin of thing, we would have been grabbing for our guns.
Pierre, I understand your point a little more clearly now. Yes, you are right, there is a considerable overlap between the “anthropological” point that Bullard was making (in his silly way), and what claims that are implicit in the vicious, stupid, racism that pervades our society. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that even if Bullard is not subjectively a racist (as Lategan claims he is not), he should have known that his words would give comfort to those who are.
But there are enormous damagers attached to thus damning ideas by association. I offer two example.
Suppose I pen a passionate and damning article, showing that drug companies are amoral monsters, whose R&D programs are shaped entirely by the profits motive, have a sordid history of subjecting the poor and helpless to involuntary clinical trials, and which routinely bribe the FDA to approve toxic products. Yet I know this kind of talk lends credibility to the quacks and denialist, both aboard and in SA, who are guilty of what some call a genocide (the vast majority of the victims of which are black.)
Take another example: A writer criticize Britain’s colonial legacy in Zimbabwe, and highlights the fact that Britain reneges on some of its Lancaster House commitments. But he knows exactly who speaks very much the same language, albeit with different and darker motives …
You are correct that the “meaning” of discourse is shaped by its context, and that the responsible speaker should always be aware that the context of speech determines its consequences. But does that mean that critics of drug companies, and of Britain, must shut up, because what they say will be quoted, or give comfort to, monsters in our midst?
Should Marx have kept his argument that British colonialism was a progressive force in India to himself, because he knew that his words could be picked up by avaricious capitalists whose only motive was to bleed India dry. (Or indeed that his words will one day be quoted by myself to defend Bullard’s drivel?)
‘Or indeed that his words will one day be quoted by myself to defend Bullard’s drivel?’
Michael, that made me laugh. Seriously though, who are you, what do you do?
I have to commend you on your comments which are consistently articulate and often offer fresh and deeper perspectives.
joey – I clicked on that Youtube link expecting the worst, but glad it was just the good old wors.
And good – an orderly changeover of tong master to boot.
Re: Dlamini contra Bullard
Take a look at Jacob Dlamini’s swipe at Bullard in the Sunday Independent today (“White SA’s Pride is Misplaced,” p. 7.)
Dlamini is a very thoughtful columnist. His sophistication sometimes puts Bullard to shame. Yet today, Dlamini responds to Bullard by spinning a tall tale about a pre-colonial “transportation network.” He rhetorically asks: “[H]ow do you think Africans transported ivory and gold mined in the lowveld and
today’s Zimbabwe to the Mozambican coast for trade with east India, Omanis, the Chinese and Indians in pre-colonial times?”
But it is just absurd to compare the system of roads, bridges and rail constructed in the 19th Century with a pre-colonial “transportation network” — one that operated without the benefit of the wheel. Yet anyone who dares point that out runs the risk of being dismissed as another Bullard.
To indulge Dlamini’s flights of fancy is itself a patronising racism. Bullard depicts “tribal” Africans as simple-minded children. Yet, when liberals panders to Africanist mythology, they too treat blacks as infants. (Don’t tell the kids Santa does not exist, lest we damage their fragile dreams and hopes.) If the white chattering class does not challenge people like Dlamini and Mangu when they are plainly talking rubbish, they are in effect refusing to black writers seriously. That is liberal racism more insidious than anything Bullard is guilty of.
For there is nothing racist in noticing that, on any index of science, technology and economic development, sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind Europe. No more does it insults whites to point out that Europe was stone age backwater for 4000 years, while civilizations flourished in North Africa, Sumeria, Persia and China. Anyone who thinks that Europe’s subsequent ascendancy reflects white racial superiority, or that Africa’s having falling behind demonstrates blacks’ inherent inferiority, is indeed a racist, and an abject idiot to boot.
The Nazis felt the need to need to invent stories about an ancient Aryan civilization, fearing that to admit that their ancestors huddled in caves while non-European civilization flowered would be a grievous attack upon the dignity of the white “race.” Is it inevitable that Africa’s renaissance be bolstered by equally ahistoric inventions?
M
I think he might have deserved to get fired. It was a somewhat racist statement.
Yes, we know we are of different race – and why should we be reminded of that – especially by people of the other race, white?
We don’t need that.
Who hired him by the way?
Or maybe we should have ignored what he said in the first place and not have given it much attention as it had received over the past 2 or 3 weeks.
I, however, accept his apology although I think his whole article was not meant for me, but for somebody I do not know!
Pierre, I laways find your writing very fascinating. You are one of the people that inspired me to keep on writing on my blog. WELL DONE!
joey // Apr 18, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Just because something occurs once does not make it a universal truth.
A sample of one, statostically is woth squat.