Though I am a geographer and urban planner by profession, I regard journalism as the most important profession in the world. I grew up in a household where journalism was valued. In my memoir, I detail how the very first piece of literature that I ever read was a pamphlet about Iqbal Masih and the plight of other child slaves in Nepal.
Though I wasn’t even a teenager when my late mother made me read that pamphlet, the work of the journalists who produced it shaped my politics. I have immeasurable respect for journalists and I believe, wholeheartedly, that journalism is a critical force for social change. However, this belief has been shaken a lot over the past few years.
The proliferation of fake news in publications once deemed credible has been devastating to witness. Not too long ago, I shed a tear when a publication that I used to write for a few years ago orchestrated a blatantly dishonest story about the birth of decuplets.
This happened not long after a renowned investigative journalist was exposed for lying about having been a victim of police brutality. But while these are the more obvious instances of how journalism is under siege, there are less notable examples which, although not identical in orientation, are equally devastating to me. One of them occurs annually following the release of matric results. It has been happening since last week.
The release of matric results is an occasion of celebration and reflection in SA. While many matriculants and their parents celebrate the end of a difficult road, especially now in the context of the Covid-19 global pandemic that decimated our national economy and interrupted schooling, some analysts use the moment to reflect on the true state of basic education in SA and to sound an alarm on the deterioration of the quality of matric passes.
But something else happens and is often orchestrated by the media: the romanticisation of black poverty and suffering.
Open any newspaper after matric results are released and you will come across stories about black pupils who passed against all odds. And in this context, all odds does not refer to disruptions caused by the pandemic or the difficulty of matric subjects. Rather, it refers to pupils who had to endure unthinkable suffering to obtain that National Senior Certificate.
These are pupils who had to walk tens of kilometres to school barefoot, crossing rivers, hungry. These are pupils who had to raise households after parents died of HIV/Aids or some other dread disease. These are pupils who endured poverty, neglect and hunger but managed to make it.
My concern is not that journalists cover these stories – it is important that they do. My concern is how so many have fallen into the trap of writing about such stories, using the problematic angle that they are “motivational” or “inspiring” and demonstrate the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.
There is nothing motivational about a student who gets straight As after studying under a candle and walking 15km to school. It is an indictment on a democratic dispensation that has elements reminiscent of our apartheid past when poverty had a black face.
Our country should rage at this reality because deeming it motivational romanticises the brutality. Journalists should be the moral conscience of society and use such stories to highlight the plight of black people in a democracy that is failing them.
They should not normalise this reality by treating it as something of an anthropological curiosity. Journalists have a duty to disturb the comfortable, to use their platform to problematise narratives that dehumanise black people. Anything less is complicity in a status quo that de-civilises us.
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