A disgraceful libel on the academic, author and journalist RW Johnson has been published on the blog ZNet by Mandisi Majavu, the book reviews editor of the online journal, Interface, and subsequently circulated as an official statement by the Unemployed People's Movement (UPM). Not a shred of evidence is produced by Majavu to support his slander, which is reproduced below.
A masterpiece of misrepresentation, Majavu's smear appears in an article headed "I thus caught that colonial mind-set at work: The mis-representation of post-apartheid social movements." (ZNet, 9 April)
In his article, Majavu does not bother to cite one word, or phrase, or sentence by Johnson - who has published ten books, most of them on South Africa - in order to smear him. Initially posted on ZNet, his article was circulated by email the next day (10 April) by UPM Media, under the official heading "UPM Statement."
The passage relating to Johnson is as follows. Readers will judge its quality of moral or literary integrity (or lack of it) for themselves.
"...In a country like South Africa where the colonial legacy still affects every single aspect of people's social life, a white person's word carries a lot of weight. It is against this backdrop that even the most unreconstructed colonial creature and, an out-and-out racist like R.W. Johnson can still be accorded intellectual respect and have their racist work circulated in civil society internet forums. In 2010, over 30 academics from around the world wrote to the London Review of Books (LRB) objecting to the continued publication of RW Johnson's racist rants and ravings. In their letter, these academics noted that '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.'
"To understand how voices such as RW Johnson are continuously given space to air their white supremacist myths, one has to keep in mind that, among other things, the white supremacist system gives authority and legitimacy to white voices that would be regarded as unmitigated racist ravings in an egalitarian society. What the system aims to achieve is to prevent understanding, while, simultaneously, reinforcing white supremacist points of view."
This is the methodology of the witch-hunt. It is as unsupported, unproven and unjust as if I had published an article on an online website such as Politicsweb, or ZNet, saying completely falsely that "X is a drug-dealer", or "Y is a molester of little children", or "Z is a witch", without a shred of factual proof, for all the world to read.
Not far from the blood libel - by which Jews were once accused of the murder of Christian children so as to acquire blood for the making of matzos for the Passover Seder - this base methodology should be noted by the "post-apartheid social movements", which Majavu imagines himself to be defending. Anyone who uses this methodology claiming to do so on behalf of any social movement, or any individual, tarnishes them too. Slander of this kind was the method of nazism, and Stalin in his show trials. People were necklaced in previous decades, or murdered as "enemy agents", with the same lack of evidence.
The citation below contains my response on the blog of the London Review of Books to an act of censorship carried out by the LRB against Johnson in July 2010, following a smear circulated by his political and academic opponents. That smear, reproduced by Majavu in his article on ZNet, was as shamefully unproven as Majavu's, and set a bad precedent.
I might add that I was one of the first to rush to the defence of the "Kennedy 12" when they were unjustly arrested and charged with murder after an organised assault upon the members of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a post-apartheid social movement separate from UPM, at Kennedy Road in Durban/eThekwini on the night of 26/27 September 2009. My article "Pogrom murders in the Durban area" was published on Politicsweb on 1 October 2009, within days of the attack.
RW Johnson was one of the first recipients of emails from me containing this article, and I received firm support from him.
This was followed by an article by me, "AmaMpondo under siege in KZN?", in the Daily Dispatch, East London (16 November 2009).
The difference between my articles and Mandisi Majavu's smear on Johnson is that...I provided factual evidence to support my argument, whereas Majavu provides not one shred. The Kennedy 12 were finally acquitted after a very long trial in July last year. An article on Wikipedia, "Attack on Kennedy Road", contains my statement in another article on Politicsweb - shortly after the acquittal of the Kennedy 12 - that their arrest, prosecution and trial had taken place "without a shred of reliable evidence" - the same methodology used now by Majavu against Johnson.
This is not the way forward, whether for unemployed people, or politics, or journalism, or academic writing in South Africa. For the Unemployed People's Movement to have further circulated this smear as an official "UPM Statement" is a further backward step.
Shame on Mandisi Majavu, shame on ZNet and shame on the UPM.
A public retraction, and an apology to Johnson, is called for from each.
*****
My response to the removal by the London Review of Books blog of an article by RW Johnson, following an unproven slander against him, appeared on the LRBwebsite as the last of a series of responses, on 30 July 2010:
It reads as follows:
Paul Trewhela says:
The London Review of Books has carried out a disgraceful act of censorship.
Earlier this month it removed from its website the 24th in a series of blogspots written to provide background to the football World Cup in South Africa by a long-standing contributor, RW Johnson, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and former lecturer at the Sorbonne, who lives in Cape Town.
The LRB's removal of Johnson's text was accompanied by its publication of a letter from 73 signatories accusing Johnson of having a "racist and reactionary opinion", 16 of the signatories being designated as professor. A small number of the signatories are South Africans. Initial authorship of this letter to the LRB appears to have originated there.
The signatories' letter gives no citation from Johnson's offending text, bar three words. Their sole direct reference to his text is that he "makes a comparison between African migrants and invading baboons. He follows this with another between ‘local black shopkeepers' and rottweilers. He concludes with what he presumably thinks is a joke about throwing bananas to the baboons".
The letter ends: "And there we all were thinking the LRB was progressive".
In truly progressive fashion, nobody may now read Johnson's text on the LRB site so that they can make up their minds for themselves, while everyone may read the inflammatory accusation directed against him. The LRB has effectively endorsed this accusation by its act of censorship, together with a public apology for having posted Johnson's text in the first place. The words "local black shopkeepers" are the sole glimpse from Johnson's own writing available to the public.
As far as matters racist and reactionary are concerned, I am not aware of the qualifications of the signatories in the struggle against apartheid rule in South Africa. Let me cite my own.
In 1963 I worked in underground journalism for the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and their military organisation, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), in association with Ruth First, who was later assassinated by the regime.
After Ruth left for London following her release from detention, I edited Freedom Fighter, the underground newssheet of MK, in 1963/64 during the Rivonia Trial, when Nelson Mandela and his colleagues stood under threat of sentence of death. I was then a political prisoner between 1964 and 1967, as was my wife.
Like First and many others, I could not be published or quoted in South Africa as a banned person, for more than 20 years. The exile journal of which I was editor between 1988 and 1994, Searchlight South Africa - published in London in collaboration with my co-editor, the late Dr Baruch Hirson, who served nine years in Pretoria prison - was banned too.
The vendetta in the LRB against Johnson, whom I have known as a friend and colleague for 20 years, carries for me more than just a whiff of the apartheid state and its suppression of freedom of thought and expression.
Any fair-minded reader of Johnson's text - if one could only locate it - would find at its heart a passionate concern for the massive black diaspora in South Africa .
Only one month before his offending blog, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that almost a quarter of a million people sought asylum in South Africa last year: nearly as many claims as were lodged in all 27 states of the European Union combined. Zimbabwe was reported to have provided the largest number of new refugees in the world, almost all seeking sanctuary in South Africa.
Johnson's censored text cited "rising tension in the squatter camps as the threat mounts of murderous violence against foreign migrants once the World Cup finishes on July 11. 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 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."
That was the context to Johnson's three words, "local black shopkeepers", all else eclipsed in the signatories' letter of denunciation of the "racist and reactionary", who, as the Johannesburg Sunday Times reported (25 July), shares his house in Cape Town with two black Zimbabwean refugees.
While this letter was being crafted, Jacob Dlamini - author of an acclaimed memoir, Native Nostalgia (Jacana, Johannesburg, 2009), in which he explores his growing up under apartheid in the township Katlehong - published a column in the Johannesburg Business Day (15 July) under the heading: "ANC fiddles while xenophobic sentiment swirls".
His column begins: "The first time I heard about plans to expel foreigners from SA after the World Cup was in December last year. I was conducting research on an African National Congress (ANC) branch in Katlehong at the time, and the person who alerted me to the plans was a branch member. He said residents, including ANC members, were talking openly about a plot to send foreigners packing. The talk was not limited to any section of the community. It involved both young and old, men and women."
A further article by Dlamini - published in Business Day a week later on 22 July, when the LRB had already done its work - was on the same subject, with the title: "ANC's arrogance blinds it to danger of pogroms."
Dlamini was Ruth First Fellow in Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2009, and is studying for a PhD in history at Yale. He must have been surprised to learn that literary pogromists had found their seat at the LRB.
Johnson's heresy, according to the witchfinders-general, was that he had prefaced his report on desperate people coming to South Africa in search of food with an introductory paragraph reflecting on baboons, in mid-winter search of food themselves, which had descended on the area of Cape Town where he and his wife live. Thus the word "too", in the passage from his text quoted above: human beings, "too", had entered South Africa "essentially searching for food".
And that was enough! Enough to trigger the assault on the reputation of a writer published by Viking/Penguin, Yale University Press, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, OUP and Macmillan, together with the craven capitulation of the LRB.
Employing the literary techniques of "juxtaposition" and subliminal association, the heresy-hunters also neglected to inform their readers that in his final paragraph Johnson somehow also mentioned baboons in close proximity to...Mick Jagger.
As Johnson wrote: "Cape Town is awash with visiting celebrities ranging from Angela Merkel to Mick Jagger and Paris Hilton.... It's not clear who Jagger is supporting now: the local press is full of jokes about how he can't get no satisfaction. He isn't the only one. The baboons are getting hungry and I've decided to encourage them to the extent of giving them bananas".
By the perverted syllogism of the witch-hunters, Johnson should have been accused here of suggesting that Jagger was a baboon (or black).
By these techniques of juxtaposition and association, one may as well argue:
Adolph Hitler, the leader of the Nazis, wore a small moustache.
Charlie Chaplin wore a small moustache.
Therefore Chaplin was a Nazi.
Shame on the authors of this letter, shame on its signatories, and shame on the LRB.
Paul Trewhela
Author, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Jacana, Johannesburg, 2009)
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