If South African author RW Johnson has ever written two consecutive paragraphs more ill-considered than these, we’d like to read them. Because the Rhodes Scholar and former director of the Helen Suzman Foundation has just been labelled a racist by 73 prominent writers and academics, and he’s got no-one but himself to blame.
On Tuesday 20 July a letter arrived in the inbox of the LRB’s editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers. It was signed by 73 prominent authors and academics – some of the more recognisable names included those of Professor Elleke Boehmer, Professor Patrick Bond, Dr Sean Jacobs, Kwame Kwei-Armah and Professor Achille Mbembe – and it stated, amongst other things, the following: “We find it baffling therefore that you continue to publish work by RW Johnson that, in our opinion, is often stacked with the superficial and the racist.”
While the complainants were referring to Johnson’s work in general, their specific objection was to an article posted on the LRB website under the title “After the World Cup”. The article appeared on 6 July and had finally been taken down after 13 days, but the URL of the vanished post suggested, ominously, that its original title had been “The Coming of the Baboons”. The New Left Project, under whose aegis the letter had been sent, kept the offending passages on file.
“We are being besieged by baboons again,” Johnson wrote. “This happens quite often here on the Constantiaberg mountains (an extension of the Table Mountain range). Baboons are common in the Cape and they are a great deal larger than the vervet monkeys I was used to dealing with in KwaZulu-Natal. They jump onto roofs, overturn dustbins and generally make a nuisance of themselves; since their teeth are very dirty, their bite can be poisonous. They seem to have lots of baby baboons – it’s been a very mild winter and so spring is coming early – and they’re looking for food. The local dogs don’t like them but appear to have learned their lesson from the last baboon visit: then, a large rottweiler attacked the apes, who calmly tore it limb from limb.
“Meanwhile in the squatter camps, there is rising tension as the threat mounts of murderous violence against foreign migrants once the World Cup finishes on 11 July. These migrants – Zimbabweans, Malawians, Congolese, Angolans, Somalis and others – are often refugees and they too are here essentially searching for food. The Somalis are the most enterprising and have set up successful little shops in the townships and squatter camps, but several dozen Somali shopkeepers have already been murdered, clearly at the instigation of local black shopkeepers who don’t appreciate the competition. The ANC is embarrassed by it all and has roundly declared that there will be no such violence. The truth is that no one knows. The place worst hit by violence in the last xenophobic riots here was De Doorns and the army moved into that settlement last week, clearly anticipating trouble. The tension is ominous and makes for a rather schizoid atmosphere as the Cup itself mounts towards its climax.”
The parallels, according to the New Left Project and the 73 signatories, were obvious: African migrants were the “baboons”; black shopkeepers were the “rottweilers”. Local literary website BookSA appeared to be first in South Africa with the story, and included in their coverage a link to an article in the Guardian newspaper published on 21 July, where Johnson professed his innocence. “I’ve only just arrived back from a trip in a game reserve and have no knowledge of this,” he wrote in an email. “I would be astonished at any allegations of racism.”
The LRB, after vacillating for a few days, issued this apology late on the afternoon of Wednesday 21 July: “We have had a number of complaints about a post on the LRB blog on 6 July on the grounds that it was racist. The LRB does not condone racism, nor does the author of the post, RW Johnson. We recognise that the post was susceptible of that interpretation and that it was therefore an error of judgment on our part to publish it. We’re sorry. We have since taken the post down.”
The question readers of the LRB, and all other interested parties, will now be asking is simple: does the phrase “susceptible of that interpretation” cut it?
The fact of the matter is that good writers – as Johnson sometimes is, irrespective of what you make of his politics – deal in analogy. Norman Mailer once said that the best way to evaluate a piece of prose is to look at the maturity of the metaphors, and it’s difficult to disagree. Was Johnson unaware that by writing about baboons and rottweilers in one paragraph and African migrants and black shopkeepers in the next he was drawing a comparison? Not likely. Is this a mature or even an acceptable metaphor? No way in hell.
By Kevin Bloom
Read more: New Left Project, Guardian, BookSA
I remember being particularly annoyed at the beginning of last year (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n24/rw-johnson/diary) when he reported that Cape Town's multibillion rand public transport project had been cancelled, after one phase of the project was delayed. Never mind that this is being rolled out over 15-20 years and a six month delay is relatively insignificant...
I'm just astounded they keep him on.
If you want to see "racism" then you will find it - shall we stop calling rubbish bags "black bags" because of the negative connotation of the word black associated with rubbish??
Please, get a life!
What's next? The word baboon, like spinster before it, is to be elided from the English language?
I don't really get what the big deal with all these "-isms" is. Whatever happened to sticks and stones? I guess if somebody is offended these days it's automatically equated as a violent transgression when, in reality, it's nothing more than a "thoughtcrime".
And a cautionary note, just because these 73 were a tad hysterical does not mean that racism does not exist or is irrelevant.
This is why "isms" matter Gareth, it is no coincidence that the age of "isms", the 20th century was the most murderous in human history.
I'm not afraid of a million professed racists; I'm afraid of the seemingly self-righteous state.
Having spent some time swamp-wading through NLP's website, I tried rewriting RW Johnson's, uhm, "Animal Planet" script to better suit the august and venerable literary tastes of the NLPeeps. This is what the evil Goebbels Johnson should have written:
"“We are being besieged by capitalists again. This happens quite often here on the Constantiaberg mountains (an extension of the Table Mountain range). Capetalists are common in the Cape and they are a great deal larger than the rightwing monkeys (that's a bit iffy - LK) I was used to dealing with in KwaZulu-Natal. They jump onto roofs, overturn dustbins and generally make a nuisance of themselves; since their teeth are very dirty, their bite can be poisonous. They seem to have lots of baby capitalists – it’s been a very mild winter and so spring is coming early – and they’re looking for food. The local leftists don’t like them but appear to have learned their lesson from the last capitalist visit: then, a large Marxist attacked the Capetalists, who calmly tore it limb from limb.
“Meanwhile in the gulags, there is rising tension as the threat mounts of murderous violence against Western refugees once the World Cup finishes on 11 July. These refugees – Zimbabweans, Malawians, Congolese, Angolans, Somalis and others – are often victims of capitalist expansionism and they too are here essentially searching for food. The Somalis are the most enterprising and have set up successful little shops in the gulags and resettlement zones, but several dozen Somali shopkeepers have already been murdered, clearly at the instigation of local black shopkeepers who don’t appreciate the competition. The ANC is bravely fighting against it all and has roundly declared that there will be no violins. The truth is that someone knows. The place worst hit by capitalist oppression in the last xenophobic riots here was De Doorns and the glorious army of Heroes of the Bleeding Heart moved into that gulag last week, clearly anticipating trouble. The tension is ominous and makes for a rather schizoid atmosphere as the Cup itself mounts towards its climax. But justice and leftist-liberal equality will prevail.”
Such a pity he didn't let the facts spoil a good (well, kinda mediocre to trashy) story.
Seems "racism" (n: discrimination against or antagonism towards other races [SACOD] or more precisely white hatred and denigration of black people of African origin) is a definite A-grade baddie.
What about "ageism" (ditto for old people)? Probably only a C-grade. And "sexism"? B-grade or A-(minus)? Black-on-black hatred? Oh, yes, that's xenophobia (except what about amaZulu hating isiXhosa?). What about "Sandtonism" (the irrational hatred and denigration of everything to do with Afrikaans or "people of Dutch origins" - a favourite of TDM "Opinionistas")?
Hey, wait a minute. This could be a whole subject for universities (maybe the NLP misanthropes could write the curriculum). You could major in Lappism, Gypseyism, Sanism, Semitism & anti-Semitism, heightism, shortism, fatism, albinism, dwarfism. And stop at the -isms? What about the other irrational fears that seem so central to the fabric of social dynamic tension - homophobia & heterophobia, omniphobia, technophobia, Yankophobia, Ozzophobia, theophobia communophobia, claustrophobia, arachnophobia, triskaidehaphobia - the sky's the limit!!
Maybe I could get another PhD in scatographism (n: discrimination against or antagonism towards shit writing).
The two issues here are "did he Johnson know what he was doing?" and "was it so bad?"
He actively draws comparison between the two paragraphs by referring to the first in the second. He knew what he was doing and probably thought it was a clever metaphor.
You can compare people to animals when they deserve it. You could call criminals beasts because of violent acts. You could even say a victim was treated like a dog, which insults the perpetrator not the victim.
You can never compare black people to baboons without being racist. That is a fact of life and there is no getting away from that no matter which way you spin it, and even a child could make that connection in Johnson's writing. There is too much history associated with that metaphor and too many connotations with being sub-human for it ever to be acceptable.
Only Mogli from the Jungle Book could claim that kind of innocence and total unawareness of the world in which we live.
If the loss of a crude metaphor is the price we pay, I'll make a deposit on behalf of better writing and racial harmony.
Welfare state gives rise to xenophobic violence, Business Day, 2010/07/14):
But Mr.Bloom thinks that encouraging poor black people to be population explosion breeding factories for more poor black people... somehow has got nothing to do with other people, from other cultures, who do practice sexual restraint, who don't breed children unless they can afford them, and who don't encourage other poor and ignorant people to breed children if they cannot afford htem, and who do consider such breeding behaviour to be 'baboonlike', to be 'racist'.
Mr. Johnson thinks that blacks and whites are capable of the same standard of behavioiur, if they want to; and hence expects blacks to live upto the same standard of behaviour he expects white people to. This Mr. Bloom thinks is racist?
Mr. Bloom however thinks that black people are not capable of behaviour and procreating with sexual restraint, so that what we need to do is lower our standards for black people, cause black people are incapable of procreating or behaving to the same standards we expect of white people.
So Mr. Bloom thinks we should lower the standards expected of black folks, cause he does not think it is fair that we expect the same behaviour from blacks, they are not capable of the same standards.
So who may I ask is the bigot?
The one who expects blacks to live upto a certain standard of decency, and if they don't has harsh honest words for htem? Who challenges them?
Or the one who thinks that blacks are incapable of living up to certain standards of decency and we should all just be politically correct and 'be nice' and don't tell them we honestly think they are baboons, cause they can't live up to the white mans standards?
London Review of Books
In response to RW Johnson’s ‘Reptilian Mind Progressives’ Critics:
I must say, I found the hysterics from the self-righteous ‘progressives’ opposed to the ‘racism’ of RW Johnson difficult to wrap my head around:
***“It is of deep concern to all of us that the LRB could be so impressed by RW Johnson that his racist and reactionary opinion continues to be published in the magazine and now, in the blog too. And there we all were thinking the LRB was progressive.”***
It reminded me of Yosef Lapide, a journalist for the Tel Aviv newspaper Ma’Ariv’s views about ‘progressives’:
***”Well, the so called liberated African states are, with a few exceptions, a bad joke and an insult to human dignity. They are run by a bunch of corrupt rulers, some of whom, Like Idi Amin of Uganda, are mad according to all the rules of psychiatry. I feel unburdened when I say this; I wanted to say this all these years, and all these years I had the feeling that we fool the public when, for reasons of diplomacy, we do not tell them that the majority of black African states are one nauseating mess.
“The lowliest of Negroes in South Africa has more civil rights than the greatest Soviet author. The most oppressed negro in South Africa has more to eat than millions of Africans in “Liberated” countries. The people advocating “progress”, who were so worried about the rights of the majority in South Africa, have never raised their voices for the majority in Hungary or in Cuba, in Red China or in Egypt. In half a dozen states-including Ethiopia thousands of persons die every day of hunger, while the rulers travel by Cadillac and steal food that is being sent to aid their subjects.
“Only in the sick minds of “progressives” do the babies die of starvation with a smile on their lips, because the ruler who starves them to death has a black skin.”***
Just today we are informed about how infant mortality in South Africa is going up again, thanks to ANC ‘progressive’ policies towards poor black Africans.
***“Unicef estimated that under-five mortality had risen from 56 deaths per 1 000 live births in 1990 to 67 in 2008.” (‘We are failing our children’, Genevieve Quintal, Mail and Guardian, July 27, 2010)***
Has any ‘progressive ever asked themselves, who killed more blacks: Apartheid or the ANC?:
***”During apartheid, our population grew apace however because we also had the benefit of the Broers’ medical knowledge and their excellent agricultural skills.
“Our population growth and our average life expectancy in fact showed us Africans in South Africa to be in better than average health when compared to other Africans on the rest of the continent: in the decades prior to the official policy of apartheid, (which was started in 1948), the average life expectancy of African South Africans was only 38 years.
“However, during the last decade of the apartheid era from 1948 to 1994, our average life expectancy had risen to 64 years — on a par with Europe’s average life expectancy. Moreover, our infant death rates had by then also been reduced from 174 to 55 infant deaths per thousand, higher than Europe’s, but considerably lower than the rest of the African continent’s. (Who Killed More Black Africans? Apartheid Nationalist Whites, or Apartheid ANC Blacks?; by Vusile Tshabalala, in 2001)***
Do these cultured London Review of Books La-di-Dah ‘progressives’ know – or care, if that is something ‘progressives’ are capable of — that:
***“…the life expectancy of black South Africans nearly equaled that of Europeans during the last decade of Apartheid? Did you know that the black population nearly trebled during Apartheid? Did you know that black South Africans had the highest per capita income and education levels in Africa during Apartheid?” (Was Apartheid Really The Most Evil Regime In The World?, by Albert Bremmer, 10/08/2007)***
Do these progressives know –- or care – that ‘evil apartheid’ raised poor black South African living standards to the highest in Africa:
***“At the height of Apartheid in 1978 Soweto had 115 Football fields, 3 Rugby fields, 4 athletic tracks, 11 Cricket fields, 2 Golf courses, 47 Tennis courts, 7 swimming pools built to Olympic standards, 5 Bowling alleys, 81 Netball fields, 39 children play parks, and countless civic halls, movie houses and clubhouses. In addition to this, Soweto had 300 churches, 365 schools, 2 Technical Colleges, 8 clinics, 63 child day care centres, 11 Post Offices, & its own fruit and vegetable market. There were 2300 registered companies that belonged to black businessmen, about 1000 private taxi companies. 3% of the 50,000 vehicle owners in 1978 were Mercedes Benz owners. Soweto alone had more cars, taxis, schools, churches and sport facilities than most independent countries in Africa. The Blacks of South Africa had more private vehicles than the entire white population of the USSR at the time.” (Opening Pandora’s Apartheid Box – Part 9 – The lies about the Townships, Mike Smith Political Commentary)***
Do these progressives know – or care- about the opinions of poor black folk in Zimbabwe:
***“When the country changed from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, we were very excited,” one man, Kizita, told me in a village of mud-walled huts near this town in western Zimbabwe. “But we didn’t realize the ones we chased away were better and the ones we put in power would oppress us.”
“It would have been better if whites had continued to rule because the money would have continued to come,” added a neighbor, a 58-year-old farmer named Isaac. “It was better under Rhodesia. Then we could get jobs. Things were cheaper in stores. Now we have no money, no food.”
Over and over, I cringed as I heard Africans wax nostalgic about a nasty, oppressive regime run by a tiny white elite. Black Zimbabweans responded that at least that regime was more competent than today’s nasty, oppressive regime run by the tiny black elite that surrounds Mr. Mugabe. (Postcard From Zimbabwe, Nicholas D. Kristof, April 7, 2010, New York Times)***
Or what about the people of Transkei?
***”I heard things I thought I’ll never hear again; old people, with rheumy eyes, saying things were much better under the Bantustan government.
Here in South Africa (and this applies equally to the public and private sectors) dishonesty and incompetence are either rewarded or simply ignored. With a few exceptions, those who expose and confront the truth – and who try to uphold collective and personal accountability – are punished, marginalised and labelled.
When lying, cheating and conscious ineptitude become standard “governance” practice (whatever the “sector”), we are in deep crisis.
In conclusion, tata, I hope my letter does not upset you too much, but sometimes we need to take toll and assume responsibilities for our failures. We’ve failed our people. There’s no other way of looking at it. I don’t see the bunch that came after you doing things better, instead things seem to be going from bad to worse. (Why is the Transkei Collapsing? An open letter from Mbulelo Ncedana to Nelson Mandela; Mbulelo Ncedana, Cope, 05 February 2010)***
Or what about South African citizens – you know ‘the common people’, who aren’t La-Di-Dah ‘progressives’:
***Most South Africans, both black and white, believe the country was better run under apartheid and say unemployment and crime are the government’s top challenges, according to two new polls released this week (2002).
Overall, the polls showed that about 60 percent of South Africans felt the country was better run under apartheid, with both blacks and whites rating the current government less trustworthy, more corrupt, less able to enforce the law and less able to deliver government services than its white predecessor. (‘Things were better in the bad old days’, by Andrew Quinn, IOL, December 11 2002)***
Needless to say, the media have not done another such poll again since.. the statistics would only increase and increase….
Sounds like Yosef Lapide’s Ma’Ariv’s description of ‘progressives’ is kind of apt, doesn’t it?
***Only in the sick minds of “progressives” do the babies die of starvation with a smile on their lips, because the ruler who starves them to death has a black skin.***
And these are your readers, who consider RW Johnson a ‘racist’! It would be really fascinating to find out what the Reptilian Mind Progressives actual definition of ‘racist’ is, don’t you think?
Radical Honesty – RSA