Stronger Than Lions - 27. The Cape Town Herald—Editorial, March 21st, 1986 (Archive)

From The Archives of the Cape Town Herald (Vol 13: June 1985–May 1987)

EDITORIAL—We Are All In A Soap Opera Now

March 21st, 1986

TODAY MARKS THE 26th anniversary of the massacre at Sharpeville. It is now also nearly forty years since less than 20% of the population of this country saw fit to disenfranchise and subjugate the other 80%.

Three months have passed since the State President has mooted the "restoration" of citizenship to Black inhabitants of the Republic. Under Mr Botha’s largesse of spirit, bombs and shootings continue unabated on all sides, the Nationalist regime sends its sons to be processed as meat in Angola (p. 2), we teeter on the brink of civil war, and we watch soap operas, the one thing that unites all inhabitants of this country.

Our outgoing Editor-In-Chief writes far more succinctly than I ever could about Sharpeville on this edition's front page; I was a toddler when it happened. I will limit my inaugural invective to our President’s little gesture in January and call it a sham. Citizenship, in its most narrowest definition, implies some sort of equal participation. Lest I be called (again) a "communist harridan" by a certain Disgruntled in Woodstock (p. 18; regarding last week's article on our segregated healthcare system) I grant that the hapless citizens of the “Democratic” People's "Republic" of North Korea (p. 4) enjoy less freedom than the average battery chicken (p. 5, see also our recipe for Salade Niçoise with a Mauritian spin on p. 17).

The North Koreans’ misery remains simpler to ponder because they are dominated uniformly. To my admirer in Woodstock, this is not an invocation for universal suffering, just universal suffrage— though do see my colleague’s excellent piece on p. 11 on what NASA's Voyager probe has discovered about our universe so far; I suppose you'd be allergic to the news of the Soviets' success with the Mir station, but it's also on that page.

Two weeks ago, this newspaper was shut down for three days because a suspicious package was delivered and promptly intercepted by the police (who may have sent the package in the first place). Astonishingly, these words are safe to print. It is Easter next week, and having run this column past the Sanhendrin of the censors and received a begrudging go-ahead, I can now be my own Pilate and declare that what I have written, I have written. Steve Biko, lying on a mortuary table in 1977, may have titled his writings I Write What I Like, but he certainly did not write what the Nationalists liked.

I suspect I am not lying on a mortuary table because (1) my father is a Member of Parliament, and (2) this tenacious little rag does not reach as wide an audience as I hoped. It would also not look good to add the body of a heavily-pregnant white woman to the pyres of so many oppressed masses already torched.

So I remain as something to be tolerated. I can drive home in my little Passat with air-conditioning, listen to the Pet Shop Boys on Radio Five, and go next week to my obstetrician for my last antenatal visit. I can do all this because I am White and incongruously Afrikaans.

The outgoing editor has had to relocate himself in London for various reasons, all of them out of safety: he has received five death threats, whereas I am a rookie with only one. Richard Arliss’s flight is also for more intimate reasons, which he has given his express consent for me to allude to: he cannot live out a life here with the person he loves, in the way I can do with my husband. The regime will tolerate a heterosexual liberal like myself or a homosexual conservative posting opinions in the presses (several references available on request) but not the chimaera my friend, colleague, and mentor is to the moral majority.

We will miss Richard terribly at the Herald but are grateful that he has an opportunity to live more safely and happily. Our loss is the British press's gain.

While the Herald was shut down, I watched several episodes of the regretfully-addictive Dynasty which my husband and I rent out in bulk VHS tapes. (We have succumbed to the luxury of curating our own entertainment with the sturdy silver box on our TV, and it is so much better than SABC news).

It was a revelation. Had the censors experienced a mass absence seizure when they encountered the Carringtons of Denver, Colorado? Steven Carrington, TV son of the silver-Brylcreemed Blake, is blond, successful, handsome, kind, and homosexual. (A better word is “gay”, but nuance is not exactly this decade's strength.) Steve is also boringly homosexual and has rather mundane relationships. The most shocking thing about Steven is how unrealistically perfect his hair is in every shot, nearly eclipsing the Vaseline-lensed bouffant of Linda Evans.

Because I am a belligerent nuisance of a woman, I brought this up over tea and melktert with two religious men whom I love: my father, who is an elder in the Gereformeerde Kerk in which I grew up, and my husband, who would go to Mass every hour if given the chance.

What did they make of this young Steven? He is supposedly ensnared in sin, yet portrayed so banally, so frustratingly kindly in this most central medium of American entertainment. He is possibly the moral centre of the series, if a soap opera could be said to be moral. Meanwhile, 1600-odd miles east of the actual city of Denver, a praying cowboy sits in the White House, ignoring the death of thousands of young men, because AIDS is apparently God’s punishment for being born a Steven Carrington.

It turns out my father is as addicted to Dynasty; he and my mother rent it from a rival video shop. Pappa tried to dodge the issue by telling me “a story is just a story”. I reminded him he takes the Bible literally but also accepts some form of evolution. He also agrees that books should rather be read than banned and has allowed his daughter to quote him in the press. He will soon be the grandfather of a little boy. I impressed upon him that, according to a medical textbook my husband (a dentist) conveniently owns, up to 10% of the male population might prefer their own sex to the opposite. Did this sit well with a Calvinist elder who agreed with his Catholic son-in-law that evolution and the Big Bang “just made a lot more sense” than the "beautiful poetry" of Genesis? Would he accept Steven Carrington as a grandson?

Pappa relented, but only after checking with my mother that there was still melktert left in the fridge. He admitted that if Steven Carrington is allowed a reasonably torture-free existence in a soap opera, it might be kinder to dispense with the ridiculous and unnecessary purity laws that hearken from an area long before the odious Land Act stripped Black South Africans of their territories.

My husband was an easier study—he did not ask for more melktert, but hoped merely that his future son would enjoy watching a Premier League game with him, regardless of his preference of partner (football is the only English thing my husband seems to like, for he is a Scot.)

The MP Stefanus Rousseau will be supporting the motion in Parliament to decriminalise homosexuality. The motion will probably be defeated. I still urge all readers to support him, for, when the abominations of the Land Act and the Group Areas Act and the State of Emergency are dispensed with, when Mr Mandela is released (I suspect within three years), and when the current regime runs out of power —if not for moral but for economic reasons—it would look ridiculous to tell consenting adults where and how they might connect with another human. As long as these inanities remain, the concept of citizenship feels as ridiculous and untrue as what Mr Botha wishes to “award” Black South Africans as the barmhartige Afrikaner baas.

Now that I have ruffled a battery's worth of feathers and gleefully exceeded the 900 word count by over a third, readers can calm down because this is both my first and last post as acting Editor before I go on maternity leave. I am soon to be delivered of a son who will 100% be white and is 90% likely to be attracted to girls. I hope, like Steven Carrington, he is at the very least kind, possibly successful. If gay, I hope he could build a life with someone who makes him happy without the spectre of Bible verses and extant laws that would brand him a reprobate. And that this fiancé or fiancée could do so too regardless of their skin colour.

Stefanus Rousseau, Steve Biko, Steven Carrington—three men with the same name: two are real; only one is alive. I may give my son "Stephen" as a second name. I could name him after all three, but perhaps limit the official story to the first two, until he is old enough to read this and groan at the foibles of a dyspeptic, pregnant, but not quite communist harridan.

Would he understand why I extended his name to a soap opera? The fictional citizens of Dynasty have a better human rights record than both the United States and South Africa.

We are all living in a soap opera now, it seems, but God knows we need better writers.

—Susanna Rousseau, acting Editor-in-Chief

Ms Susanna Rousseau, staff reporter and sub-editor, has stepped in as acting Editor-in-Chief of the Herald after the sudden resignation of Mr Richard Arliss. She writes in her personal capacity. Ms Yvonne Carelse from our Afrikaans sister publication Die Kaapse Voog will take over as caretaker Editor until Ms Rousseau's return from maternity leave.