Could a writer in SA be attacked like Rushdie? How free are creatives here?

While closing her garage door one day, an intruder wanted to enter journalist Karima Brown’s property.

She had to pull down the door very quickly to stop him from doing so. He shouted two words, venomously, to make it clear he knew his target: “Karima Brown!”

Brown, unfortunately, was all too familiar with being a target of online and offline harassment. More than once, also close to her home, she was followed by thugs wanting to drive her off the road. She acted swiftly, averting disaster. At least one of the companies she worked for offered her temporary security.

This besides the continuous online death threats, hate speech and other illegal, vile speech hurled her way.

Political analyst Ebrahim Fakir and I spent several hours with Brown at the Rosebank police station one evening, assisting her to lay a criminal complaint against the thugs. Activist warrior that she was, she took it in her stride, responding with the eerie calm, resolve and tactical pragmatism of an anti-apartheid fighter. She was not the only such target.

Women journalists in our country generally suffer abuse, threats, and online violence which are delivered with new technologies that enable greater volumes of hatred and rights violations.

The types of abuse and online violence directed at legal journalist Karyn Maughan and investigative journalist Pauli van Wyk, for example, are nothing short of abominable.

It is little wonder a research report from Unesco found many women journalists suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result.

I have lost count of the number of times members of the public have asked me whether I am scared to walk around so casually, without protection, given the nature of my  opinions and arguments. They assume there must be many powerful people who are angry with my work and that I must be a target of violence. I have never personally felt unsafe at a book festival or book event, or feared that while I am in a radio or television studio an overzealous, criminally minded person might attempt to harm me.

Given Brown’s experiences, I have often wondered whether I should be less indifferent, but the idea of overinvesting in security, even as someone habitually fearing crime in Johannesburg, does not strike me as worthwhile psychologically and financially.

How does one know where and how to strike the balance?

I am not free of the fear of wondering about the space and time we are living through. I share a lot of my private self on Instagram and Facebook. I use mostly Twitter for more formal journalistic engagement. Anyone following my Instagram and Facebook accounts, however, could locate me within minutes.

The restaurants and coffee shops I frequent are so well-known that I routinely bump into folks who stop me and say, “I am here at The Fat Zebra because of your post”.

Like my friend and fellow broadcaster Redi Tlhabi, I may as well have a permanent table at Tasha’s. Yet today, for example, as I talked literature with a friend at Tasha’s in Rosebank, it occurred to me that a few weeks prior, at the same spot, someone was murdered. I could be killed while sipping coffee.

This could be a brazen act of everyday South African criminality or a response to my work.

Is it possible to ever be free of such macabre thoughts while living in this beautiful, but messy country?

I am not sure I am even aware of the cumulative number of minutes per day thoughts about crime preoccupy me. But the reason for this meditation on speech and harm is the attack on award-winning author Salman Rushdie in New York on Friday. Just before he was to give a public talk, a man jumped on stage and stabbed him in his eye, neck, chest, stomach and thigh.

The investigation is ongoing, but speculation is rife that the suspect may have been, like many before him, targeting the author because of his novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims regard as an insult to Islam and the prophet Muhammad. The late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a religious decree, or fatwa, in 1989, calling for Rushdie’s death. This latest attack is presumed by many to be a continuation of the hunting down of Rushdie by those who deem his work blasphemous and deserving of lethal retaliation.

As a broadcaster, analyst and writer it raises at least two questions for me: could this type of attack happen in SA and why do they happen at all?

In a recent episode of Eusebius on TimesLIVE former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas did an excellent job of explaining “democratic backsliding”. He warned us, essentially, to not take for granted that we have sturdy democratic architecture. Instead, we should be constantly on the lookout for signs of backsliding.

Countries do not become anti-democratic overnight. A warning sign, he argued, is the use of violence by the state to suppress political opposition and quell perceived threats to incumbency power in civil society and social movements.

While the attack on Rushdie appears to be the work of an individual, it is likely there is an ideological arc from Khomeni’s Iran to the anti-democratic impulse in the attacker that inspired an intentional act of vicious violence.

Violence has a social structure, cultural location and history. It is seldom inexplicable, even if it is often shocking and delivered by a lone ranger.

SA is ripe for all forms of violence. Sadly. We cannot take for granted that the speech rights enshrined in our constitution will always be animated in social reality. It requires ongoing work to safeguard, affirm and entrench these freedoms.

Readers, and the public more generally, are unaware that many creatives experience abuse and backlash for their work in their industries, including the media, than the very few cases that receive public narration, discussion and debate. Most of my colleagues take it on the chin or quietly move from one beat to another, or move away from journalism to other careers, or choose underemployment and self-employment.

This involves, at its core, trade-offs between safety and mental health on the one hand and work safety on the other.

It is remarkable how little appreciation there is for the rights of creatives to work in safe conditions.

Perhaps we are partly to blame for this because we do a poor job of publicly telling the story of journalism. We are neither great at self-policing nor reporting on the media in recognition of it being a source of critical power, like big business and the state.

We have political assassinations in our country, we have assassinations of and attacks on social movement leaders and activists, we have kidnappings of businesspeople and their families. A lot of this is the work of organised criminal networks.

It would be naive to exclude writers, analysts, broadcasters and other creatives who shape and influence public debate — and who, therefore, at least indirectly, can also affect the distribution of power in society — from the target lists of hitmen who do the work of those who hire them as goons. This is why a book launch by author and investigative journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh could be attacked. Without irony, the title of the book being launched when it was disrupted is Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule’s Web of Capture. Myburgh could easily have been knifed or shot.

If someone can walk into a Tasha’s during the day, with witnesses everywhere, and shoot someone, what stops a hired political goon from doing the same at a book launch in Sandton?

We are a gangster state, and while panicking will not help us, pretending all is “not quite that bad” is equally irresponsible, evidence-averse and unhelpful if we are to plot a way out of the morass. Rushdie could have been knifed on a stage in SA. A South African author, especially working on the political beat, could be knifed or shot in the country. Those are not realities that are farfetched.

Our freedoms need constant reinforcement. This happens for many reasons. People are emotionally vested in beliefs that are central to their self-identities. The subjective experience of hurt when a provocative cartoonist, for example, lampoons the deity you worship is real for you in ways that it is not for me as an agnostic. Subsequent violence stems, I can only guess, from an existential threat experienced by the person picking up the newspaper and seeing an offensive cartoon or coming across, say, a copy of The Satanic Verses.

Some of us are not good at accepting limits on how we are allowed to respond to feeling offended or mocked. However, the depth and sincerity of our passions cannot save us from punishment for harming someone who offends us.

It is illegal and immoral to strike violently at someone you disagree with, however deep that disagreement runs. I suspect we also respond violently because we have ineffective public education across the world about how to disagree deeply but constructively.

The idea of public discourse and critical engagement needs to be re-examined and curricula must be developed as part of civic education to enable us to learn how to navigate our differences.

Forums in which we avoid robust engagement for fear of offending each other are not conducive to truth-seeking and evidence-based argumentation. On the other hand, gladiatorial language games in which there is no discursive generosity are also not meaningful or productive ways in which to converse.

We need not choose between self-censor or silence and violently attacking each other.

We need to reclaim the space for genuine, forthright, sincere and productive critical engagement. Doing it is partly constitutive of meaningful social interaction. Rushdie’s attacker didn’t get the memo. Neither did the goons who disrupted Myburgh’s book launch.

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