THE Gupta empire, it's written, spanned much of the Indian subcontinent from about 320 to 550 CE. A peaceful, prosperous civilisation, it brought together advancements in science, architecture, philosophy, religion, art and literature to form what is now considered Hindu culture.
The game of chess was said to have originated here, as did the world's first base ten numerical system. During this time it was also first proposed that the earth was not flat but round and rotated about its own axis. Thanks to the Guptas' beneficence, the scholar Vatsyayana, fired by stirrings in the trousers department, wrote the Kama Sutra, the well-known knobbing manual.
Those Guptas, of course, are not to be confused with the lot currently based in the Johannesburg suburb of Saxonwold. All they've given us thus far is The New Age, a newspaper of unswerving devotion to the ruling party. In return for its grovelling ovine fealty, the publication has, at least according to Helen Zille, been handsomely rewarded, and it is not surprising that the Western Cape premier has called for a judicial inquiry into its affairs.
There is, it seems, substantial justification for such an inquiry. Government, Zille has alleged, has spent at least R64.6 million on the rag in the last two years.
And journalism professor Anton Harber has pointed out that apart from the close scrutiny warranted by an editorial policy of shameless sycophancy -- particularly in a newspaper started by the friends and bankers of President Jacob Zuma -- there is the not inconsequential matter of The New Age's refusal to join the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The reason for this, Harber wrote recently, was that the newspaper may be embarrassed about its poor sales, and wanted to keep its circulation figures hidden.
Thus, when the ANC's national spokesman, Jackson "Slugger" Mthembu, suggests -- as he did this week, in one of the several broadsides fired at Zille by the ruling party -- that The New Age has a "national distribution footprint and coverage" and "covers all nine provinces . . . in one publication without exception" he is being a wee bit selective with the facts.