We could really do with more journalists like Rian Malan
Society owes a tremendous debt to real journalists like Rian Malan who are, sadly, a dying breed.
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'My name is Rian Malan and I called it as I saw it.'
This is the final sentence of the introduction to the South African writer's 2012 book of collected journalism. From his 1990 memoir, This Traitor's Heart, which examines the Apartheid-era via a series of murder cases, to his more recent essays, I have long admired this controversial Afrikaner's writing. I've admired him as much for his bravery and honesty as for the quality of his prose. His speciality is cutting iconoclasm – the sort of truth-telling which jumps out of the page at you and which would harm or even end many a journalistic career.
An early and consistent opponent of Apartheid, Mr Malan was, nevertheless, unprepared to peddle fashionable lies about what followed this dying and morally unsustainable regime. In slaying a series of progressive sacred cows, he frequently got himself into hot water.
Due to his early criticism of the African National Congress (ANC), Malan, who now lives in the remote part of the Cape, at times wondered how he managed to keep any friends at all. In Western eyes, the ANC's 'struggle for democracy' tended to airbrush away the fondness of many of its leaders for Communism or for direct political violence. Where wishful thinkers in the West turned a blind eye, Malan could not resist pointing out the facts.
In fact, he blasted them: 'They were red fascists who wanted to put us into the gulag. Someone at the table would inevitably challenge my analysis, usually citing one of the stellar foreign liberals (often Joseph Lelyveld et al) who portrayed the ANC as a band of innocuous black liberals who just wanted to establish a democracy like Thomas Jefferson's. At this point I'd go apoplectic.'
This was, of course, bound to upset those writing from ivory towers in London and Washington and who, divorced from the realities of South Africa, were free to hold on to a rose-tinted and slightly selective view of those engaged in the liberation struggle.
'By any means necessary' is the phrase that's used. In reality, it revealed hints of yet another species of racism – that of low expectations, because there is no reason why atrocities by black revolutionaries should, then or now, be excused over others elsewhere. Are the deaths of whites murdered on lonely farms unworthy of being reported? Is this form of ethnic cleansing not as repugnant as any other? It seems not.
The contrast between myth and reality is perhaps at its sharpest in this context in Western progressives' deification of the hero of the anti-Apartheid struggle, Nelson Mandela. Mr Malan often complained that American liberals would prefer to pull out their eyes than to see the real Mandela in all his dimensions. He was right.
In such circumstances perhaps only Malan could ask the bitterest question – 'Did Mandela really ask the Zambian Government to jail a troublesome witness against his wife Winne, on trial for kidnapping and murdering a child?' To most journalists this was something that was simply too impolite to ask.
Likewise, as the Rainbow Nation’s post-1990 prospects have been gradually shredded by incompetent and corrupt ANC governance – the highways, schools, sewerage system and power generation have all gone to seed, not to mention the partial loss of law and order – Malan has campaigned ceaselessly in urging his fellow country men to expect and to demand better of those who govern them.
One of the finest qualities offered by Mr Malan is his pessimistic prescience which, reading from today's perspective, is often quite uncanny.
Time after time in describing South Africa, he predicts social contagion years before it reaches our shores. This is a particularly fine example from 2012: 'In South Africa, it's like a law of nature: there's no such thing as a true story here. The facts may be correct, but the truth they embody is always a lie to someone else. Every inch of our soil is contested, every word in our histories likewise; our languages are mutually incomprehensible, our philosophies irreconcilable.'
If that doesn't describe the US culture wars recently imported across the Anglosphere, I'm not sure what does.
And yet again, in a review of the Hollywood film Invictus about South Africa's miracle 1994 Rugby World Cup win, Malan provided stark warnings of the dangers of importing American political pathologies: 'It was a great syrupy myth conjured up by American liberals, which insisted on seeing the South African struggle as a rerun of their own civil rights movement. There were no Communists in this sweet tableau, no bloody revolutionary excesses.'
Despite the starkly political nature much of his writing, I've always found Malan's political outlook rather hard to categorise.
A lover of freedom, certainly, but a libertarian, manifestly not. Malan is scathing about his country's appalling crime wave which has cost thousands of lives and resulted in rampant and vigilantism and arbitrary non-judicial citizen retribution.
What's the point, he asks, of having a state if it's too weak and disorganised to protect anyone? Quite.
Over the years, I have always enjoyed debating these questions with libertarians of various stripes. My tactic is straightforward. I ask one simple question – give me an example of a successful libertarian state. One will do...
Society owes a tremendous debt to real journalists like Rian Malan who are, sadly, a dying breed. From his controversial questioning of HIV prevalence throughout Africa – which, he argued, enriched 'health bwanas', distorted health priorities and mis-allocated resources – to his refusal to sugar-coat the state of his nation, Malan's voice has been a brave, if isolated, cut against the grain.
In an age where speech codes predominate and where private truth diverges so markedly with public truth, we need writers courageous enough to say…
'My name is Rian Malan and I called it as I saw it.'
