In a recent article in Daily Maverick, She’s been gone so long, but Twit-Zille is mounting a comeback, Richard Poplak launches a worryingly extreme attack on one of the country’s few respected politicians. This is a brand of journalism that needs to be challenged on a number of fronts.
Let’s look at the facts. Ms Zille’s tweet reproduced a picture of four University of Cape Town students, with the question: “If this woke bunch hate being UCT students so much, pls help them out of their misery and withdraw their funding.”
Let me concede at the outset that Ms Zille must bear the blame for raising a serious issue in a medium that is wholly inappropriate for reasoned discussion. She is lucid and convincing in argument; the better course would have been a short article on her website with the tweet pointing to it. It was stupid to tweet a complex thought, especially in the current climate, in which everything, it seems, is wilfully misconstrued.
Mr Poplak takes special exception to the use of the epithet “woke” in a way that does not imply total approval. Worse, Ms Zille is committing the sin of mounting an attack on “four black kids who think UCT Is a bit of a dive”. But this cannot be admissible as a criticism in the context of political debate—within the confines of 140 characters, Ms Zille was simply signalling her feeling that “wokeness” has pressing questions to answer. It surely can’t be that the “woke” movement can be presumed to be composed of highly sensitive people—it has a record of violent, intolerant and even faecal protest action and speech.
In fact, it is hard to see why this tweet should be seen as inherently racist. It can’t be the fact that the students in the picture were black and brown, because given the demographics of the country and the movement in question, any representative photograph would properly show people of these hues. Mr Poplak foregrounds their colour, which Ms Zille does not mention.
And it can’t be that Mr Poplak himself shies away from robust discourse. His articles generally, and this one in particular, cross every imaginable line when it comes to excoriating those of whom he disapproves.