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- Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
An outrageous miscellany of serious and light-hearted lies, myths, untruths, fibs and fabrications that tells the tall tale of South Africa.The fibs come thick and fast, like a burst sewerage pipe:• Why everything we've learnt about Shaka Zulu, 'Africa's Napoleon', is a pack of lies.• Back in the darkest of ages (the 1970s!), citizens were told that there were satanic messages if you played some of The Beatles songs backwards.• National icon Hansie Cronje was a paragon of virtue, and integrity … until he wasn't.• President Nelson Mandela told us that we, as a nation, were 'special'. Turns out we aren't.Whether a fabulous fib, an artful con, a doctor's spin, or simply a bald-faced lie, there's something for everyone.
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Jonathan Ball PublishersJohannesburg • Cape Town
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID ABOUT BULLSH!T
I love it. Actually, I hate it. Although I adore it, I also despise it. Bloody agent. – Julius Malema
Of all the books I haven’t read, this is the best. – Herschelle Gibbs
I thought the Rugby World Cup final was exciting, but then I read Bullsh!t. – Rassie Erasmus
I recommend it. Bullsh!t is 100% carb-free. – Tim Noakes
Shut up! – Dali Mpofu
I bought 10 copies to give to the decuplets on their second birthday. – Piet Rampedi
Make Bullsh!t Great Again! – Donald Trump
I want to buy a copy for my mother. I just need some petrol money to get to the bookstore. Can you lend me R450 000? – Carl Niehaus
I threw my copy into the Jukskei River. – Steve Hofmeyr
Ancer is a wit. A halfwit. – Helen Zille
When I was discussing this book with Madiba, he said to me, ‘Iqbal, you are so modest, you should have won the Nobel prize instead of me’. – Dr Iqbal Survé, entrepreneur, billionaire, medical doctor, philanthropist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace
Ancer’s blend of research, personal anecdotes and cultural analysis makes for a compelling and enlightening read. Whether you’re interested in psychology, social dynamics or simply enjoy a well-written exploration of a controversial topic, Bullsh!t could be an intriguing addition to your reading list. – ChatGPT
After months of pounding away on a computer, not being able to take us for walks, you’ve come up with Bullsh!t. – Zoom and Pickles
It’s all lies. I bet even this quote is made up. – Trevor Noah
For Mom: clever, brave, gentle, kind and true.
And for Dad, the most remarkable person I know – and that’s no lie.
Contents
Billsh!t
Phil Graham, the late American newspaperman and publisher of The Washington Post, is credited with the snappy observation that in ‘a world we can never really understand’, news journalism is ‘the first rough draft of history’. If you think that’s bullsh!t, this enticing smorgasbord of a book may encourage you to think again. After all, isn’t all history present history? Or, as William Faulkner wrote in his 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past.’
When it comes to South Africa, here’s a book to remind you of that most remote of times, the day before yesterday. Or, for that matter, even the day before tomorrow. Penned by the distinguished journalist and writer Jonathan Ancer, this is a tasty meal for those who have lived through – and survived – a contemporary South Africa of jaw-droppingly dodgy financial pyramid schemes, the repulsive Immorality Act and other personally invasive apartheid lunacies, cocktail sausage rolls, apricot jam and coconut tarts, spasms of apartheid nostalgia, breathtakingly cretinous, clueless and corrupt nationalist politicians of varying hue, a satanically influenced cricket captain, a president fond of leopard-skin accessories and another with a novel use for lounge furniture, a Springbok rugby team that generates more sparks than the national electricity grid, excruciating levels of barefaced lying by a packed rogues’ gallery, interminable quicksands of conspiracies, scandals, paranoia and persecution complexes, comical policing, a boundless national appetite for illusions and delusions, shamefully subliterate newspapers and shady press ownership, and so on and so forth. Well, there’s no need to continue with a laundry list – you get the idea of what’s in store.
To anyone who may have decided South Africa has come to resemble a version of the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! entertainment franchise or a 21st-century rendering of a Victorian-era circus freak show (‘And a special treat for June 2021! Marvel at the Nation’s Maternity Miracle!! Gosiama Sithole’s 10 babies – the Tembisa Ten!!!’), one question is inescapable: why would anyone wish to revisit such a dog’s breakfast of goings-on? The answer is provided by Bullsh!t – stop the clock and turn the spotlight on entertaining and painful moments in times forgotten, times remembered or times still staring you in the face.
This book rests on an inescapable incongruity. On one hand, as Ancer points out quite rightly now that the shine of the early post-apartheid era has worn off, it’s a land of lost pretension, no longer with any serious claim to being special. Readers are reminded that ‘the world doesn’t care about us. Our opinions don’t matter and we are very ordinary.’ On the other hand, read on and digest what he’s fished out of South Africa’s overflowing sewers, hosed down and presented with a flourish. You will surely end up concluding that the place continues to be not so ordinary after all.
There can’t be too many other places in the world – apart from the obvious champion in national idiocy, the US – in which incredible fact eclipses inventive fantasy and where truth proves stranger than the most bizarre fiction. When you’re blessed with such a fertile national imagination, why even bother to make things up? Credulousness and incredulity are so interwoven that the ludicrous and the grotesque have come to seem commonplace. It’s what makes Bullsh!t such enjoyably effortless reading. No need to gasp your way through it. Just savour this sorry chronicle with a permanently raised eyebrow.
Combining journalistic raciness with a magpie mind and an alligator’s nose for a swamp, Ancer is a shrewd recorder and interpreter of South Africa’s steaming pile of follies, crimes, misfortunes and absurdities. Written with zest, this is an episodic feast – by turn irreverent, opinionated, angrily polemical, wryly amusing, mordant and mocking.
Bill Nasson
Truth be told
How do you start gathering a collection of lies that shaped, shook and sometimes shattered South Africa?I decided to begin with the lies I’d been told and the lies I told (and sometimes still tell).
My memories took me back to primary school and the onesided history I was taught about our country, mainly the triumphant ‘Great Trek’. I then remembered bitterly cold nights standing guard duty at veld school after rooi gevaar lectures by the ooms.
Journeying back to the present, I stumbled over distortions, deceptions and decuplets. I asked friends and family about the lies they were told, consulted historians and academics, scoured archives and trawled Twitter trolls in tinfoil hats to mine trumped-up conspiracies. Lies led to more lies and, like Pinocchio’s nose during a fib fest, my list kept growing. My mission soon changed from what lies to include to which ones to scratch off.
My hope is that this eclectic mix of falsehoods gives readers a peek into South Africa’s past from a new angle; looking through the prism of lies to see how untruths made – and sometimes unmade – the country.
The truth shall set us free but in a multitude of instances down the years double-dealing, subterfuge and chicanery have held sway and altered our history. As former ambassador to Bapetikosweti Evita Bezuidenhout put it: ‘The future is certain, it’s just the past that’s unpredictable.’
One of the things I’ve learnt on my journey into fibdom is that retelling history can turn fiction into ‘fact’. I also learnt that South Africa is bursting at the seams with falsehoods and that lies have consequences, even if the liars often get off scot-free. Myths created, fed and fuelled a racist ideology that led to a crime against humanity and citizens being deprived of their country, their children’s future and sometimes their lives.
I learnt that South Africa is awash with charlatans swindling people out of their livelihoods, with one rotten con leaving the stench of vrot milk wafting over the country for months.
I learnt that some liars have suffered for their deception. Investigative reporters in the late 1970s pulled a thread in a web of lies that brought down a cabinet minister and a president.
I learnt that there are big lies, little lies and all sorts of lies in between; that there’s deceit through embellishment, euphemism, omission and manipulation. I learnt that while a trio of politically connected brothers may have been able to capture a president, in the end they could not capture the truth. I learnt that people are gullible even when the ‘facts’ they’re being fed are so obviously lies – and I learnt that the bigger the lie, the more it is believed.
I learnt that if we identify the lies and pick at them, we can take the first cautious steps towards the truth. I learnt that lies have warped our politics and that history is as much about the present as it is about the past because we interpret it subjectively and see it through the lens of who we are and what we believe.
I learnt that you always have to check your sources.
I learnt that finding the truth requires a dollop of courage, a sprinkle of wisdom, a dash of common sense, a pinch of curiosity and, most of all, the humility to accept that our truth is not necessarily the truth and that truth can exist beyond our truth (and that’s the truth).
Finally, I learnt that the truth is to be treasured.
1994: an agreed fiction
On 27 April 1994, South Africans of all shapes, sizes and complexions gathered in long, snaking queues in cities, towns, nooks and crannies to vote in the country’s first non-racial elections. The miracle marked the death of apartheid and the birth of freedom.
Most of the people who had been denied the vote made one small cross for Mandela and one giant cross for humankind (many people who hadn’t been denied the vote previously were just cross). However, the miracle was based on a falsehood – or, at least, a ‘negotiated truth’. And it was indeed miraculous that after refusing to accept that black people were equals (and often not acknowledging that black people were people), white South Africans agreed to compromise and share power.
The ANC won with 62.6% of the vote – large enough for it to be declared a ‘landslide victory’ and giving the liberation party a conclusive mandate to govern but falling short of the two-thirds majority required to unilaterally change the Constitution.
The new National Assembly’s first act was to elect Nelson Mandela as its first citizen, making him South Africa’s first black leader and completing the prisoner-to-president fairy tale. In the glow of democracy and rainbow nationhood, the ANC shelved its more radical goals (such as nationalisation and land expropriation), preached reconciliation and unity and courted international investment.
The National Party (NP) won a respectable 20.4% of the vote, making it eligible for a post of deputy president in the government of national unity. This went to the outgoing president, FW de Klerk. The NP also won the Western Cape and these victories were enough to save face and give the party a future in the new order.
Perhaps more importantly, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) also emerged with some dignity. To put the miracle into context, it’s important to remember that in the early 1990s a civil war was brewing in KwaZulu-Natal between the IFP and the ANC. IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi threatened to boycott the poll and as 27 April drew nearer the province seemed to be on the brink of exploding into catastrophic violence.
Buthelezi threw the IFP’s hat into the election ring at the last minute. In fact, voting papers had already been printed, forcing officials to add IFP stickers to 18-million ballots. The party’s participation meant the dream of democracy could be realised. It won in KwaZulu-Natal and Buthelezi was appointed Minister of Home Affairs in Mandela’s cabinet.
Everyone got a slice of the electoral pie: the result was perfect. A little too perfect, says Professor Steven Friedman, a leading political scientist who at the time headed the information analysis department of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). ‘Do I have a smoking gun? No. But do I have loads of pretty incontrovertible circumstantial evidence? Yes,’ says Friedman.
A few days after the election, the adjudication department asked Friedman’s team to analyse about 130 complaints by parties against each other. ‘The National Party, ANC and IFP were accusing each other of all sorts of problems and then two or three days later all these accusations – which go into pages and pages – are withdrawn. Suddenly their outrage has been appeased without their complaints ever being looked at.’
Friedman says a lot of the results were absurd, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal. ‘For example, by any credible population estimate, in some voting stations you had 800% of the adult population voting. The whole thing was dodgy.’
The information analysis department presented its findings to senior IEC officials and pointed out huge discrepancies that didn’t add up. Friedman recalls a commissioner saying high voter numbers at a particular polling station were due to population movements. ‘Someone responded, “Are you telling me that there were more population movements on this one day than in Europe in three centuries? Come on, someone would have noticed 800,000 people on the march.”’
Senior people in the IEC nodded and appeared to take the analysts seriously but afterwards, when Friedman spoke to the person who chaired the meeting about an error in the presentation, he was met with a blank stare. ‘He looked absolutely uninterested,’ Friedman recalls.
He also remembers that senior IEC officials all had offices on the same floor and heads of departments went there to see them. However, when the vote count reached its peak the heads of department were not allowed onto the executive floor. Friedman was told it was because the political heavies – the ANC’s Cyril Ramaphosa, the NP’s Roelf Meyer and a senior IFP official – were there and the conversation was confidential.
Friedman says there was only one credible explanation for the mounting circumstantial evidence: the result was a negotiated compromise. ‘I actually don’t have a problem with it, though, because it took the country forward,’ he adds.
Before voting day, Friedman wrote a paper on what would constitute a free and fair election and concluded there was one major criterion: whether the losers accepted the results. ‘It’s a legitimacy issue. If the losers accept the results, then does it matter if five votes go astray here or there?’
Besides, he argues, it was impossible to produce an accurate result under the circumstances. The IEC had been cobbled together just a few months before voting day. With little experience and limited resources, it had to establish itself and organise the election.
In fact, it would have been a real miracle if the IEC had pulled together a flawless poll. Some rural areas had virtually no infrastructure and were inaccessible. There was no voters’ roll. Officials had to guess how many voters would turn up, and as a result there were often not enough election materials.
In academic circles, says Friedman, the line was that the result looked like it was written by Arend Lijphart, a political scientist who peddles ‘consociationalism’ – a theory that states that groups must share power for political and social stability. From a technical point of view, the election was shambolic; from a political perspective, it was a triumph, he says, because if the country had gone the purist route conflict would have been inevitable.
‘The problem was not that everyone knew what the real result was but decided to suppress it and announce another result which would make everyone happy. It was that no one knew what the real result was and that there was no way of ever finding out what it was,’ says Friedman.
‘And so, it was agreed that the key parties would get what they wanted so that no one would have an interest in demanding that the IEC establish an accurate result. In my view, it was not a lie but a negotiated “truth” or an “agreed fiction”.’
The upside of the bargain was that it ensured the country transitioned from apartheid to freedom without massive bloodshed.
1994 ELECTION RESULTS
Party
Votes
%
seats
African National Congress (ANC)
12 237 655
62.6
252
National Party (NP)
3 983 690
20.4
82
Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP)
2 058 294
10.5
43
Freedom Front (FF)
424 555
2.2
9
Democratic Party (DP)
338 426
1.7
7
Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC)
243 478
1.2
5
African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP)
88 104
0.5
2
The decuplets debacle
It was the scoop of the century. Under the banner of a world exclusive, the Pretoria News’ 8 June 2021 headline announced – well, screamed – that a Tembisa woman had given birth to ten babies. This was a fantastic distraction from the country’s daily news diet of the three Cs – Covid, corruption and Carl Niehaus.
On the front page was a photo of the wonder mom, Gosiame Sithole, before she gave birth. It looked like she had just swallowed a giant yoga ball.
The story buzzed its way around the world but after 15 minutes of virtual high-fives the more sane among us realised the babies were about as real as a unicorn solving a crossword puzzle with three hooves tied behind its back.
No doctor had confirmed the rare and complex event, there were conflicting and vague reports about which hospital handled the births, the miracle mom was nowhere to be found and there were no photos of the babies – telltale signs that it was a massive scam. However, the smoking gun came in the form of the reporter’s byline, which belonged to Piet Rampedi, who also happened to be the newspaper’s editor.
Rampedi is no stranger to spreading misinformation and his past journalistic sins include peddling the much-discredited South African Revenue Service ‘rogue unit’ fiction when he was at the Sunday Times. Rampedi resurfaced at Independent Newspapers, Iqbal Survé’s stable of rags. Independent’s plummeting circulation and nose-diving credibility had made it an unstable stable.
When people raised doubts about the decuplets story, Rampedi doubled down and insisted it was all true. He bragged that when the ten bundles of joy were paraded for the world, he’d have the last laugh. But where were the babies?
A decuplets hunt scoured every nook and cranny of the country but there was no sign of the babies. Each day the Pretoria News published yet another exclusive, revealed a new twist and trumpeted a fresh conspiracy. Rampedi tripled down, quadrupled down, then quintupled down, insisting the ten babies existed and accusing anyone demanding details of being insensitive to the mother’s race, culture and class.
Even a report by a panel set up by Independent found that the story was a hoax. Panel member Moegsien Williams wanted to know why the focus of a world exclusive story about a mother giving birth to decuplets was angled on an appeal for donations.
‘Why would a “feel-good story” of about 20 paragraphs contain 13 references to appeals for donations in cash and kind, as well as two graphics containing bank account numbers of Sithole and [the decuplets’ father Teboho] Tsotetsi and drop-off details for donations?’ Williams asked.
The story became ever murkier. And just when we thought we’d seen it all, Rampedi did the unthinkable – at least for Rampedi. He apologised. Then, with our jaws still on the floor, he unapologised. In an apology for his apology, he said he had apologised only to his colleagues because the story had been used by his detractors to impugn their professional integrity.
Rampedi stood by the story. He insisted that senior government officials, politicians and healthcare personnel were colluding to hide the birth of the babies in pursuit of an obsessive political agenda to bully, discredit and silence him as a journalist. He said they were punishing him because he exposed their scandals.
It was a case of when you’re in a hole, keep digging – and Rampedi dug all the way to Bullsh!tsville, then turned left and dug some more. He accused the Gauteng health authorities of holding Sithole hostage and orchestrating a cover-up of mammoth proportions.
Rampedi had the full backing of his boss, who is no stranger to truth-stretching (see #49).Survé promised to reveal the ‘truth’ at an ‘explosive’ briefing. Despite the findings of Independent’s panel, in a briefing of almost three hours Survé insisted the decuplets were part of a baby trafficking scandal at Gauteng government hospitals. He said the answers to what happened to the babies would be revealed in a ten-part docu-TV series produced by his titles.
Clearly Survé had an image of how he – SuperSurvé – would be filmed swooping into a bunker in the bowels of a government building, giving the minister of health a karate chop and scooping up the ten babies in his arms. Unfortunately, for SuperSurvé, there was still no sniff of the babies – just the foul stench of Rampedi’s rotting reputation.
In a 57-page report, acting Public Protector Kholeka Gcaleka found that on the basis of medical evidence, Sithole had not given birth to a single baby – let alone ten. In fact, she had not even been pregnant. In response to Gcaleka’s report, Rampedi decupleted down and said her investigation and findings were deeply flawed and had serious shortcomings.
A month after Gcaleka’s findings, Rampedi resigned from the Pretoria News and sailed into journalism’s sunset. Four months later, the Pretoria News stopped printing and folded into the Johannesburg daily, The Star.
The decuplets debacle had more turns than Kyalami, more twists than a bag of pretzels and more holes than a pair of fishnet stockings. Perhaps there will be one more twist and in a few years the babies will be found. Has anyone looked inside President Cyril Ramaphosa’s couch recently (see #26)?
In the meantime, one mystery remains: what the hell was under Gosiame Sithole’s shirt when she was photographed for the front page? An over-inflated king-size yoga ball? A Toyota Hilux? Or maybe that was where Thabo Bester was hiding before he skipped the country?
THINGS IN SOUTH AFRICA EASIER TO FIND THAN THE DECUPLETS
!The Guptas
!An honest politician
!A copy of the Cape Times without a photo of Iqbal Survé
!A stable coalition government
!A photo of Police minister Bheki Cele without his hat
!A statue of Cecil John Rhodes
!Anyone who voted for the National Party
Sex, lies and apartheid
Celeste Cross was sleeping peacefully when she was rudely awakened by shouting. She opened her eyes but was blinded by camera flashes. The 22-year-old Afrikaans woman had nothing on and while trying to make sense of the commotion she pulled the blanket over her naked body.
It was Saturday night, 17 February 1979, and 14 officers of the South African Police ‘Peeping Tom’ squad had just smashed down the door and burst into Cross’s Pretoria flat, hoping to catch her in flagrante delicto with a coloured man. But, according to Guardian correspondent James Cameron, the police found no flagrante at all. Cross was tucked up in her bed and the coloured man was fast asleep on a couch in the living room.
What’s more, the coloured man she wasn’t having sex with was, in fact, a white man. Swarthy, to be sure, but a white man nonetheless. His only crime was spending too much time in the sun. The man – John Fraser – was her boyfriend. They had had a fight earlier in the evening and Cross had banished him to the couch.
The officers took Cross and Fraser to Pretoria police station where Fraser – an Afrikaner who had been a paratrooper in the South African Defence Force, a unit only white people could join – hauled out his identity document to prove his whiteness.
Even though she hadn’t broken any laws, Cross was fired from her job. The incident also caused her to become estranged from her father, who was outraged that she would date a man who didn’t look white. Understandably, the incident made Cross, well, furious.
Writing about the gaffe, Cameron said: ‘If ever an administration revealed itself as a bunch of Charlies, albeit cruel and creepy Charlies, it was the South African police.’
One of apartheid’s biggest lies was that sex between white and black people (and sex between men) was immoral. The National Party (NP) government went to extraordinary lengths to protect whites’ ‘racial purity’ but its reputation for blundering incompetence was legendary.
In 1927 the Immorality Act banned all ‘illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and Africans’, an offence punishable with prison terms of up to five years for men and four years for women. This law was the progeny of Justice minister Tielman Roos, who explained that it was passed to teach poor white men that sex with Africans was a threat to white civilisation.
Unless interracial couples were caught red-handed, which is to say with their pants down, proving intercourse was difficult. To overcome this obstacle, the authorities set the bar for conviction low – people could be found guilty on circumstantial evidence.
To nab these interracial sex deviants, the police formed a special unit and trained them in the Peeping Tom protocol. These officers enforced the law rigidly and hundreds of men and women were convicted every year. The whites in the dock weren’t the ‘poor white men’ Roos wanted to educate. They were Dutch Reformed Church ministers, headmasters, attorneys, farmers and even a prime minister’s secretary (dictation the next day must have been awkward).
The Peeping Tom cops were given a manual, presumably without pop-up pictures, that explained how to determine if illicit carnal intercourse had taken place, was taking place or was about to take place. Their tools of the trade were binoculars, two-way radios, a tape recorder and a camera – standard kit for your average stalker.
When they suspected that interracial hanky was about to get panky, they were advised not to rush in but to wait 10 minutes before bursting through the door to catch the offenders in a compromising position. They wanted to apprehend hardened criminals. Bedding and clothes were confiscated for laboratory analysis and the suspects were taken to the district surgeon. The Peeping Tom cops relied on informers and used black women as bait to trap white men.
The Immorality Act combined cold viciousness with extreme pettiness, often with tragic consequences. According to history professor Susanne Klausen, white men – often Afrikaners – were aggressively pursued by the police, punished by the courts and ostracised by their communities. The law tore families apart and caused untold pain for thousands of people whose lives and careers were wrecked because the press named and shamed them.
Many Immorality Act victims took their own lives. After a white man in Port Elizabeth learnt that police would bring Immorality Act charges against him, he drove his car off the pier and drowned. A father of four in Klerksdorp asphyxiated himself rather than go to court for his affair with a black woman.
‘Shaming, the National Party assumed, would serve as both punishment and deterrent. The regime welcomed the impact of public exposure on countless “race traitors” … and for years greeted reports of their suicides with a shrug,’ says Klausen.
There’s the Romeo and Juliet story of Bubbles Mpondo and Jannie Beetge in the 1970s. She was a beautiful black model, he was a white bodybuilder from a conservative Afrikaans family. They were found dead in their Johannesburg flat on 24 August 1978. After shooting Mpondo between the eyes, Beetge shot himself. According to Klausen, the NP saw the Immorality Act suicides as evidence that the men knew they had committed a heinous race crime and that the law was right.
But not all people charged under the laws were victims. In 1969, a Peeping Tom cop climbed a tree to peek through the bedroom window of the head of the Department of Social Anthropology at Wits University, John Blacking, and his future wife Zureena Desai. The couple were arrested, convicted of conspiring to have sex and given suspended sentences, but the trial backfired for the government. The couple refused to be shamed, says Klausen, and Blacking and Desai’s display of moral courage bolstered the anti-apartheid movement while the news coverage of spying policemen conveyed an image of South Africa being ruled by uptight, sexually repressed, dirty-minded men.
NP members seemed particularly fond of feasting on forbidden fruit. One of the first people to be convicted and jailed soon after the Immorality Act was passed was a Nat member of the Transvaal Provincial Council.
The Immorality Act’s biggest scandal took place in the platteland town of Excelsior, about 100 kilometres northeast of Bloemfontein. In December 1970, police uncovered a sex ring there involving ‘leading citizens’ – farmers and businessmen who were senior members of the local NP and dedicated followers of the government’s separate development policies — which included the Immorality Act.
The men were involved in sexual liaisons with their black domestic workers that included partner swapping. The affairs had gone on for many years, said novelist Zakes Mda, who fictionalised the saga in The Madonna of Excelsior. Apparently, the police had been tipped off to the shenanigans because there were so many ‘half-caste’ children in town.
Seven white men and 15 black women were charged under the act. One man was freed at a preliminary hearing; a second, butcher and town councillor Johannes Calitz, killed himself while out on bail; the wife of a third left him; and all were ostracised by their 700 fellow townspeople.
Some of the white men were charged with sleeping with up to three black women, and one farmer had six black women all to himself. It promised to be a sensational trial and local and international reporters converged on the town. But a few minutes before the case began, Percy Yutar, the attorney general of the Orange Free State and the advocate who had prosecuted the accused in the 1964 Rivonia trial, spoilt the show by withdrawing the charges. The women danced for joy, the men breathed sighs of relief and the disappointed journalists left without a scandalous story to file.
The official reason for the withdrawal of the charges was that too much publicity had intimidated state witnesses. Another theory is that the Nats put pressure on Yutar to take a soft line on the case to avoid further embarrassment for the party.
From 1950, at least 19 000 people were prosecuted under the Immorality Act – with 11 000 convictions – until it was repealed in 1985. It was another six years before the Group Areas Act went the same way. During this time, interracial couples could have sex to their hearts’ content, they just couldn’t live together.
MAD ABOUT SEX
The authorities had been trying to stop sex across the colour bar since the beginning of the 1900s. After the South African War, all four British colonies enacted legislation restricting sex between white women and black men.
Women in the Transvaal who voluntarily had ‘unlawful carnal connection with any native’ earned five years in jail and the punishment for women in Natal who had sex with Africans was two years in jail and 25 lashes.
British sex workers were responsible for the law being imposed. They had arrived in the country to ‘cater for’ British soldiers during the war but found clients among Africans.
The early laws punished only white women and black men. The 1927 Immorality Act banned interracial sex but not interracial marriage. A central promise of the National Party’s 1948 election campaign was finally to stop marriages between black people and white people.
In 1949, a year after DF Malan’s Nats came to power, mixed marriages were banned, and in 1950 an amendment to the Immorality Act criminalised all interracial sex. In 1957, a clause was added prohibiting sexual intercourse or ‘immoral or indecent acts’ between white people and anyone not white.
FOR PIET’S SAKE
The National Party’s most senior member to stray across the colour bar was the former cabinet minister Piet Koornhof, nicknamed ‘Piet Promises’ for promising much and delivering little. At the age of 68, Koornhof, who had overseen forced removals during apartheid, left his wife to live with Marcelle Adams, a 24-year-old coloured woman he met at a Cape Town nightclub. Koornhof wasn’t arrested, convicted and jailed because, fortunately for him, his relationship took place in 1993 – eight years after the Immorality Act was repealed.
WELL DUNN
If the settler and frontiersman John Dunn had been convicted for every black woman he married, he would have been sentenced to more than 200 years in prison. A friendship blossomed between Dunn and King Cetshwayo, who fought several battles against the invading British, notably at Isandlwana in January 1879, which resulted in a famous Zulu victory. Cetshwayo was so taken with Dunn he gave him land, cattle and two Zulu virgins to be his wives. This last gift upset Catherine, Dunn’s Cape Malayan wife, but it didn’t stop him taking another 46 Zulu wives by official accounts (62 unofficially). Dunn fathered 131 children and the sprinkling of genes left thousands of pale-skinned Dunns, coal-black Dunns and in-between Dunns. ‘We like to say there is every kind of race classification in South Africa, and then the Dunns as well,’ Dunn’s great-grandson, Daniel Dunn, told the Daily Telegraph in 2014.
The Gupta spin cycle
Make no mistake, publicists don’t lie, they spin. They don’t fabricate, they provide alternative facts. They don’t manipulate reality, they manage the message.
Okay, who are we kidding? Of course they lie. They are hired guns who get paid to shoot down attacks on their clients. They try to control the news and protect reputations – and if they have to tell a few porkies to preserve the ‘greater truth’, then so be it. And that’s what Bell Pottinger did when it was hired by the brothers Gupta.
Representatives from the company, Britain’s masters of the dark arts, flew to Johannesburg in 2016 to meet Oakbay representatives Tony Gupta and Duduzane Zuma, the son of then-president Jacob Zuma. At the end of the discussion, Bell Pottinger was given a $130 000 monthly retainer (about R2 million) plus expenses to activate the public relations machine on Project Biltong (the nickname it gave the account) and turn the propaganda dial to ‘damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead’.
The Guptas’ PR woes began three years earlier when a private jet landed to a VIP welcome at Waterkloof air force base in Pretoria. Journalist Barry Bateman heard about the illegal landing and wanted to know how a private plane could land at a military base. Who received special treatment and why?
At the time, chief of state protocol Bruce Koloane said the person who gave the go-ahead was ‘No 1’ – and he did so as a personal favour to his friends. Bateman started to dig. Who was No 1, who were his friends and who were the passengers? No 1 turned out to be Zuma. Koloane later claimed it was all just a misunderstanding between him and his personal assistant and he took the fall. He was charged and received a suspended sentence (and a diplomatic post to the Netherlands for his trouble).
No 1’s friends were the Indian-born Gupta brothers – Tony, Rajesh and Ajay – and the passengers were guests from India who had arrived to celebrate a niece’s nuptials at Sun City. It was, the brothers boasted, going to be the wedding of the century.
The Guptas’ journey from ‘humble’ immigrants in 1993 to Zuma’s BFFs 20 years later is the stuff of legend. Even their fiercest foes can’t deny the brilliance of how they captured a president and hijacked an entire country without a shot being fired.
When the Guptas arrived, they established a computer business, acquired a uranium mine, a steel manufacturer and other companies and hobnobbed with the inner circle of business and political elites. But by far their most valuable asset was in their pocket – Jacob Zuma, a man who lived far beyond his means and had an insatiable appetite for wives and money. They supplied cash and he supplied influence they could leverage for lots more cash.
The brothers effectively ran a shadow government with friendly ministers who ensured their interests were served and procurement decisions went their way. Their heist was so successful that they soon became one of the richest families in South Africa.
During this time, they launched their propaganda arm – a daily newspaper, The New Age, and a news channel, ANN7 – whose purpose was to protect their asset in the Union Buildings and target his opponents. Even so, Zuma’s foes didn’t have much to fear. The New Age was poor and never attracted readers. Piles were dumped in government offices, unread.
It was amateur hour all night on ANN7. Models were hired instead of trained anchors because they were cheaper, and the poor women fumbled their way through bloopers and blapses. Viewers were once greeted by the sound of a backstage technician mooing. People only tuned in to see how bad it really was and if it could get worse. It could and it did.
