What is clear to me, however, is that the headline and the story do not quite match up. Obviously, headlines have certain constraints and one is not able to be as subtle or as nuanced in a headline as in a story.

So what are the salient points of the story?

• Cape Town is seen as hostile to black people, while white people still benefit from being appointed to top posts in the city.
• African people are under-represented in management positions “in comparison to their overall contribution to the South African workforce”.
• The mainly African people interviewed for this survey thought that coloured people were their competitors for positions and that there was “marked antagonism towards coloured people” among the people interviewed.

According to the Cape Times report, in the five retail companies surveyed, 65 percent of top and senior management appointments or promotions went to whites in 2008, but only 10 percent went to black people. At junior management level, the paper reported, 27 percent of the opportunities went to whites and 36 percent to blacks.

I did not read anywhere in the story that the authors of the report called Cape Town racist, but I suppose that is what the sub-editor who wrote the headline read.

After reading this article, I am again convinced that we remain a country pre-occupied with race. It seems that every time we cannot find a reason for anything, we blame it on race.

It is clear that the problems in the Western Cape have its roots in apartheid, when the province was declared a coloured labour preference area and Africans had to have permits to work and live there.

Thankfully, we no longer have a situation like that and we can all live and work wherever we want to in South Africa. However, I found myself thinking after reading this report: why is it such a crime for the Western Cape demographic to be different to the national demographic? And why must businesses be compelled to meet the national demographic targets in the Western Cape?

Surely, it makes sense to have different targets for the Western Cape? This pre-occupation with reaching national demographic targets is probably part of the reason why coloureds in the Western Cape, who make up the majority of the population, feel that they have no future in South Africa and continuously appear to be turning their backs on the ruling ANC in support of opposition parties.

I also realise why the researchers did this particular report but surely, if you speak mainly to African people, you are going to get a particular perspective only. Why did they not speak to quite a few coloured and white people also? By excluding them from the research, it seems to send the message that they are part of the problem and could not necessarily contribute to the solution.

Newspapers, and the journalists who work there, have an important duty to realise the seriousness of their influence on society. By using inflammatory headlines like “Cape Town is a racist city”, they are effectively saying that people of Cape Town are racist and that does not serve anyone’s purpose, except maybe selling more newspapers, but even that is debatable.

A headline like that probably only has the effect of making sure that people who feel uncomfortable with reading or discussing the issue of race, will not buy the paper.

I am a strong proponent of a continuous discussion on the effects of race and racism on our society today, but it depends on how we conduct that conversation. It definitely does not help to accuse an entire city of being racist. That is the quickest way to end the conversation.

This article originally appeared on ThoughtLeader

It was going to be an editorial project for which I was going to hire some of the best writers and photographers in the country. I therefore needed the best possible coordinators. I found them in Jennifer Crocker, who was then an assistant editor at the Cape Times (who would coordinate the writers) and Garth Stead, who would coordinate the photographers.

My choice of Garth as the photographic coordinator raised some eyebrows because he was still, at about 26 or 27, considered to be very young to take responsibility for such a huge project.

But Garth turned out to be an inspired choice and the photography in “One City, Many Cultures” was among the best I have seen published in any South African newspaper, even up until today.

“One City, Many Cultures” was aimed at creating a more tolerant, more diverse and integrated city of Cape Town, at a time when intolerance was rife in the city. Every day, we delved into the different religions and cultures that existed in the city, explaining how they related to the important things in life, such as birth, growing up, coming of age, weddings, growing old and death and remembrance.

Garth did the job with professionalism but also great enthusiasm. But he also brought another dimension to this job. He included a developmental angle, which was his passion. He got established professional photographers to work with up-and-coming young photographers and initiated an award for both professionals and younger photographers.

One of the young photographers was a security guard at Newspaper House, the building which housed the Cape Times, who later became a reporter/photographer at the Cape Argus.

Garth left the Cape Times at about the same time as me but not for the same reasons and over the years, we kept in touch. I was very pleased when, after he had freelanced for a few years, he landed the job as pictures editor at Die Burger. At the time of his death, he was Cape Town picture editor of Foto24.

Over the years, he won several awards, including the prestigious Fuji Press Award, and remained committed to developing young photographers, especially from historically disadvantaged areas.

I saw him for the last time last week when we both attended a function of the Cape Town Community Housing Company, on whose board I serve. I was the programme director at the function and Garth was taking pictures for Die Burger.

I remember thinking that he was very reserved and not his bubbly self. Whenever I had seen him in the past, he was always bouncy and full of life. This time, he seemed down and not himself.

A week later, on Monday 19 October, ironically as we celebrated Media Freedom Day in South Africa, I got the news that Garth had passed away. Indications are that he took his own life.

I, like many others, was completely shattered. I could not believe how this young man, aged 37, the father of two young boys, aged 10 and five, could have decided to end his life.

I refuse to speculate on why he did what he did but I know that it was not an easy decision. I know that he loved his boys more than anything else in the world and would not have wanted them to grow up without a father.

All I know is that Garth’s life was one that ended too soon. Rest in peace, my friend.

This article originally appeared in ThoughtLeader

The theme of the summit was “Meeting of Cultures: Creating Meaning Through the Arts”. For three days, we talked about intercultural dialogue and cultural diversity and everyone was agreed, roughly, on the need for both.

However, this message did not seem to reach everyone and two incidents made me realise just how ingrained racism is in our society.

The first incident happened after the second day of the summit when African delegates (as in delegates from African countries) met to discuss the formation of an African chapter of the International Federation of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies (IFACCA), which hosted the summit.

There was huge support from the international agency and other African countries for a South African who had been instrumental in putting the summit together to be appointed as the interim coordinator of this chapter, but, of course, there were objections from some South African delegates: because this person was not considered black by them.

This person happens to be classified as “coloured” in South African racial terms and I have always thought that such people were considered black in terms of our Constitution.

Not that that should have mattered. The only thing that should have mattered was whether this person was capable of doing the job.

The second incident was maybe not as significant but it was certainly more crass.

On the second evening of the summit, we were driven to Maropeng, close to the Sterkfontein caves, for a dinner and an introduction to what South Africans like to believe is the “cradle of humankind”.

After an hour’s drive, we arrived at Maropeng and, once we got inside, we realised that our driver did not quite know where he was supposed to take us. In fact, he dropped us off at a completely wrong venue.

Once we got back on the bus, one of the employees of the National Arts Council (NAC) of South Africa, who were co-sponsoring the event, asked the driver whether he had GPS in the bus, because that would indicate to us where we had to go.

The driver responded curtly that he had been to Maropeng more than a hundred times. When the NAC employee tried to suggest that he should check his GPS, he responded even more abruptly. The NAC employee then said: “I need to take your name because you are being very rude” to which the driver responded loudly: “No, you are being damned fucking rude.”

Those of us in the bus, including people from all over the world, were completely shocked at the response of the bus driver.

As we got off the bus, I heard the driver telling a security guard: “He thinks we can go back to the days when they used to call us kaffirs.”

The driver, as you might have guessed, was what we in South Africa call African or black or African black (I can’t keep up anymore). The NAC employee was a fair-skinned “coloured”.

The driver was young and probably never experienced apartheid, while the NAC employee was much older and lived through apartheid. In fact, I spoke to him later and he recalled how his family had suffered under the Group Areas Act and other apartheid legislation.

I thought that, just because he is black or African or African black, the driver thought that gave him the right to accuse a “coloured” man, who knows more about apartheid than him, of racism.

At the summit, I had shared a panel with author and journalist Max du Preez and poet Lebo Mashile. I was much more positive than both of them about the situation in South Africa today. After these two incidents, I found myself thinking that maybe I was wrong to be so positive. Maybe we are so deep in the racial morass that we can’t get out of it again. I hope I am wrong and can still remain positive.

This post first appeared on ThoughtLeader

Studs Terkel was one of the writers who influenced me, because of his ability to tell the stories of ordinary people. Terkel died last Friday at the age of 96. He had become legendary for his interviews with ordinary people throughout the United States on all kinds of issues, including race, which was of course where I drew my inspiration from for my book, Race.

Dr Robert Coles, a Harvard professor of psychiatry who was also a friend of Terkel, was quoted in the LA Times as saying that Terkel was “the most extraordinary social observer this country has produced”.

His modus operandi was to walk around with a tape-recorder on which he recorded hundreds, if not thousands of interviews, many of them with ordinary people.

Terkel’s books were often quite long but they were always interesting, giving an insight into the American psyche.

I learnt a lot from his writing and it inspired me in doing the research and interviews for my book. Like Terkel, I set out with a tape-recorder and while I only did 15 major interviews for my book, I had the opportunity to do what Terkel probably did best, and that was to speak to people and get them to open up on an issue that still makes many people feel uncomfortable.

One of the people I interviewed said to me after reading my book that he could not believe that he had told me all the things I quoted him as saying. I am sure that that was often the feeling of Terkel’s subjects.

He would make them feel at ease and get them to open up completely. Unfortunately there are not many people who can do that today.

For more information, you can read:

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-terkel1-2008nov01,0,7453979.story

This, of course, implies an unwritten assumption that black people are not capable of being racist and that all criticism of black people by white people is based on racism.

Well, I think it is time to debunk that myth. Black people can be as racist, or even more racist, than some of the worst white racists.

I see it every day on the Cape Flats where racism between so-called coloureds and Africans are considered the norm. It is not uncommon for coloureds to call Africans derogatory names and it is not unusual for Africans to call coloureds derogatory names.

And it is not uncommon for coloureds and Africans to speak disparagingly about whites or Indians.

I sincerely believe that black people use the race card when they are unable to come up with convincing arguments against white people. This is not to say that sometimes the criticism by white people of black people is not based on racism, but this is not always the case.

I believe that, by calling somebody a racist, it probably says more about you than about the other person.

If, for instance, one looks at the history of someone like Jonathan Shapiro, one would find it strange to consider him a racist. I think he is merely a person who is concerned about the things that are going wrong in our society today and he is reflecting the views of many others, black and white.

The ANC, if it is serious about addressing the concerns of the majority of people, would do well to listen to what Zapiro has to say, to hear what his concerns are, rather than condemning him outright as a racist.

I have known Zapiro since the 1980s — in fact, we gave him first real break in newspapers at the alternative weekly South newspaper — and he has never been anywhere near racist.

In any case, how in heaven’s name are we going to be able to have decent debates in this country if all white people are going to be scared to criticise black people? No one likes to be called a racist, and it is inevitable in South Africa for whites who criticise blacks to be tarnished with that label.

In my book, I try to deal with this issue by confessing that I am a racist. I then go on to say that everyone who lived under apartheid is racist. Once I have done this, I believe that it levels the playing ground for us to have a conversation about race and racism.

And it is important for us to have this conversation. I believe that in our haste to become a “rainbow nation”, we did not deal with the issues that caused us so much pain in the past, and racism is one of those.

Unless we deal with the issues of race and racism, unless we talk about them, they will always come back to haunt us.

Now let’s say this together: I am a racist. You are a racist. Let’s talk.

*

The response to my last blog on black racists proves what I have known for a long time: South Africans are still heavily divided along racial grounds and they find it difficult to have a discussion on the issue without losing their tempers.

I have never had so many white people agreeing with what I wrote. And I have never had so many black people disagreeing.

I suppose I could have chosen any headline for the blog, but I chose to focus on black racists because of the disturbing trend where blacks hide behind accusations of “racist” when their arguments fail against white people.

This was in no way a defence of white racists. I abhor white racists and black racists with equal measure and I understand the hurt caused by apartheid and other inhuman practices mainly perpetrated by whites.

In fact, it is clear to me that many white people in South Africa, still to this day, remain racist. But that is not the point.

What I am trying to do is to facilitate some kind of a discussion, through this blog and through my book, on what is still a hugely important issue for South Africans.

We cannot just pretend that more than 300 years of colonialism and more than 50 years of legalised apartheid did not exist. We cannot pretend to suddenly be the “rainbow nation” without dealing with the issues that caused us so much hurt in the past.

And one way of dealing with it, to get the conversation going, is to prevent anyone from being able to call anyone a racist – even if the person deserves to be called that.

One day I was on Radio Sonder Grense, taking calls from listeners on the issue of race, when a gentleman called in to complain about “blacks stealing our farms, robbing my neighbours and raping our women”.

On the surface, it was a racist statement but I decided to engage with him and interrogate his statement. I pointed out to him that, surely, in a country where the vast majority of people are black, one would expect the majority of criminals to also be black. But that does not mean that all black people are criminals. In fact, I said to him, the majority of black people despise crime as much as he does.

Afterwards he said to me that I had a point. I wondered about this a lot. Was he saying that I had a point because he wanted to get rid of me? But what I realised was that this was probably the first time in his life when he was being engaged on this topic by someone who had a view that was different to his.

This was probably also the first time that he engaged a black person who spoke to him from a position of authority. Maybe the only black people he normally engages are workers and others considered to be “lower” than him in society.

So while the gentlemen no doubt had racist views, his entire life he had probably been groomed to become a racist. But if he is prepared to listen to different views, then he would probably be able to deal with his racism at some point in his life.

The issues of race and racism are hugely complicated and cannot be dealt with in a blog where one is constrained by how much one can write. Inevitably, one will tend to reduce a complex argument into one that is very simple, which is not always helpful.

But if this blog can assist in getting some kind of a discussion going – without anyone feeling threatened – then it would have served its purpose.

• Originally published on ThoughtLeader

These attacks have again shown to us the importace of the work done by the Cape town Festival and the One City, Many Cultures project, which aim to bring the people of Cape Town together, despite their differences.

Now more than ever, we believe, there is a need for projects that strive to create a more tolerant, more integrated and more united city of Cape Town.

We believe that, while there are many factors behind the xenophobic attacks, at the heart of the intolerance lies ignorance. We hope that we iwll see, in our lifetime, a city where everyone will feel welcome, irrespective of nationality, race, culture or religion. Our hearts go out to teh victims of the latest violence.

Ryland Fisher
Chairperson
Cape Town Festival Board

Cape Town Festival invites you to our free public guest lectures, starting today, World Book Day.

Philip Krawitz, CEO of Cape Union Mart, speaks on Why I am staying in South Africa. Shaun Johnson, novelist and CEO of the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation, speaks on Madiba’s Legacy.

Both events will be chaired by myself.

• Dates: WEDNESDAY, 23 APRIL 2008 and THURSDAY, 24 APRIL 2008
• Time: 17h30 until 19h00
• Venue: Centre for the Book, Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town
• RSVP: pr@capetownfestival.co.za or 021 465 9042/43
• Read more

Please do RSVP – we will see you there.

However, I have my memories of him that I feel I want to share.

Ronnie was a legend in the newspaper industry and was hugely respected by just about every body in the legal fraternity for his work as a high court reporter over many years for the Cape Times.

He was, in my opinion, easily the best high court reporter in the country. I remember walking with him through the high court (or supreme court, as it was then called) in Cape Town and how he greeted everyone, from judges to cleaners and court orderlies.

This was probably one of the reasons why he was able to get so many good court stories and quite often exclusively.

Our nickname for Ronnie was “Judge” because of his extensive knowledge of the law. In fact, we used to believe that judges consulted him before delivering their verdicts in certain key cases. Of course, we will never know whether this was true, but this was an indication of the esteem in which he was held.

I seem to recall that Kanthan Pillay, who was then managing editor of the Cape Times, came up with this nickname.

Ronnie later became Cape editor of Business Report, a position he held at the time of his death. While I was pleased with his promotion, I felt that we were losing a major asset in court reporting, something that is not given enough seriousness in South Africa.

I met Ronnie for the first time in about 1980, or even earlier, and our paths crossed several times over almost 30 years, culminating in my editorship of the Cape Times when he was the high court reporter.

Ronnie covered most of the big legal stories and it is testimony to his abilities that, even today, there are judges who felt comfortable if he covered their cases. These same judges sometimes felt nervous when other, less experienced journalists covered their cases.

On Sunday I bumped into a respected Cape High Court judge who told me he had wanted to speak to Ronnie about a case that was coming up in his court. He said Ronnie was the only journalist who would have understood the significance of the case.

But Ronnie was more than a journalist. Because of his immense legal knowledge, he also became a tireless trade unionist in Newspaper House, where he worked. Over the years, he was often the leading light in the South African Society of Journalists, which later became the South African Union of Journalists.

I remember being one of the founders and leaders of the Association of Democratic Journalists in the mid-1980s. The ADJ was going to be a rival to the SASJ, which we saw as a mainly white organisation while the Media Workers’ Association of South Africa was an exclusively black organisation. I was one of the journalists who felt uncomfortable in both organisations.

Ronnie remained committed to the SASJ but helped us tremendously with establishing the ADJ.

About a week ago, I bumped into Ronnie and a Newspaper House colleague at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival and they told me how Ronnie was assisting his colleague in a case against his employers. Ronnie was confident that he was going to win the case.

Since the demise of the journalists’ unions, Ronnie had effectively been working as an unpaid consultant to journalists in trouble with their bosses.

Ronnie was by far the smartest dressed journalist I knew. He was of the old school in this regard, always wearing a suit. He belied the myth that journalists could not be smartly dressed.

His big weaknesses, apart from his passion for the poor (which was, in fact, a strength) were wine and women (and not necessarily in that order). He always used to joke that he was the chairperson of the “Celibate Society”, a claim that not many believed.

One of the big stories Ronnie covered under my editorship was corruption in the Western Cape department of labour. His stories tremendously upset the then director general of labour, Sipho Pityana, who got a very senior government official to call me. The government official told me that he was calling on behalf of Pityana who was upset at the stuff that Ronnie had been writing.

I called Ronnie to my office and asked his whether he was absolutely certain of his sources. He told me he was and that he had more revelations for the next day’s paper. I told him to go ahead and write the new allegations.

I then called the senior government official and told him that I stood by my reporter and warned him that we were publishing more serious allegations the following day.

I had enough confidence in Ronnie not to doubt his word.

Hamba kahle, my friend and comrade. Journalism, indeed the world, is poorer without you around.

This article originally ran on my ThoughtLeader blog.

In the same way, it is probably impossible to try to have a debate about something as complex as “coloured identity” in five minutes on television. This debate is probably best suited to a documentary, a radio programme, a newspaper or magazine article, or a book.

Yet last Sunday, I tried to have this debate with two other studio guests on Weekend Live on SABC2. Apart from a host of mess-ups, like us not being able to link to the guest in Tshwane and my connection from Cape Town being lost when I was trying to make a crucial point about why I call myself black as opposed to coloured, it was also difficult to have this debate in the limited time available.

As it was, we were not treated to any of the views of the representative of a website called Bruin-ou.com and I would have loved to have debated his views. Maybe somebody involved in another media form will take up the challenge and get us together to debate this issue once again.

I have never considered myself to be a coloured and prefer to describe myself as black, in line with the definitions explained by Steve Biko in the 1970s. At the time, the apartheid regime called us non-whites and Biko questioned why “white” had to be the standard against which everything was judged. He asked why “black” could not be this standard. He argued that we should all call ourselves black (Africans, coloureds and Indians), and whites should be called non-blacks.

These definitions have, of course, been entrenched in our law and our Constitution, so I can legally call myself black.

The issue of whether there is a coloured identity is not new, but it surfaces every now and then. It seems to surface more every time we are heading for another election.

At first I used to reject the notion of coloured identity out of hand; recently I have become much more sensitive towards it, but I still cannot see myself adopting this identity. However, I understand completely why some people say they are coloured and proud of it, like I believe the singer Vicky Sampson said on the same programme on Sunday.

Now, Vicky is my home girl. We grew up together in Hanover Park on the Cape Flats and belonged to political youth organisations in the early 1980s, so she has a consciousness of non-racialism and how important this was to our struggle.

At some point she, like me, called herself “black”. But she would not be the only one who now suddenly seeks solace in being a “coloured”.

Like I said, I have no problem with people identifying themselves as “coloured”, but then they must afford me the right to assert my human identity, my South African identity or my black identity.

I think the resurgence in people identifying themselves as coloureds could be laid at the door of short-sighted politicians who failed to make people who could potentially identify themselves as coloureds feel welcome in the new South Africa.

But it also has to do with economics, where people who identify themselves as coloureds have to fight for a small piece of the economic pie along with Africans.

If you speak to Africans, especially in the Western Cape, they will tell you that coloureds are favoured. If you speak to coloureds in the Western Cape, they will tell you that Africans are being favoured. The truth is probably that neither of the two is being favoured.

I try to deal with the issue of coloured identity in my book and I ask how one identifies a coloured. There are certain markers to identity and, of all the markers that I could think of, it is difficult to find any great commonality among the group roughly called “coloureds”.

I still believe that the only definition of “coloureds” is people who could not be fitted into any of the other apartheid-era definitions.

And isn’t it amazing how our democratic government has just adopted all the apartheid-era terminology? But that is probably the subject of another blog.

This post originally appeared on ThoughtLeader.

I hope you can tune in -

Ryland