Sorry, Not Sorry

by Haji Mohamed Dawjee

  This specific experience at this specific job is as clear an example as any that as long as this kind of racism exists, it will continue to inform the actions of those in power. Those actions will continue to foster this kind of racism, and this kind of racism will continue to foster that special kind of ignorance that makes the racist incapable of recognising their racist ways. And like this, the terrifying narrative of systemic inequality will continue to be disseminated, concussing its victims.

  I survived this concussion the hard way and I am learning that no system is worth me forgetting my words. No system will break my speech. And I will remain unapologetic about that.

  When Nelson Mandela died

  When Nelson Mandela died, I had one job: take pictures and tweet about it. I was so grateful. You see, I am a faulty journalist. I like writing, but I don’t like reporting. My wiring is messed up and the electricity doesn’t always spark. I am not interested in chasing breaking news. I don’t believe in scoops. I have no desire to be on the scene, doorstopping people for interviews and comment so that I can win the journalist Olympics. The idea of making phone calls so I can write lengthy investigative stories that ensure my byline lands up on the front page is of absolutely no interest to me.

  So when Madiba passed on and I was still social media editor at the Mail & Guardian (M&G), I felt like the most blessed human being in the world. Many journalists will point and laugh at me for thinking any of this, but to me, it was a gift. A gift wrapped in honour and humility. A gift with zero need to rat-race with other journalists. This was the stuff digital journalism was made of. Accessible and immediate information, filled with emotion for people on the ground who couldn’t be as close to the events as I was. And all this was possible via one click on a mobile phone. This was my forte.

  When Nelson Mandela died, his death had already been written. His obituaries were composed months before he took his last breath. They rested in the secure and secret hard drives of editors. Special editions were planned and ready to be pressed. Images were sourced and purchased in high-res from reputable photo wires months in advance. Shorter, punchier pieces with ‘did you know’ trivia were prepped. They would support the lengthier articles containing the finer details. At the M&G, all the digital content was queued and ready to be posted on every platform possible. Listicles, gifs, memes, videos, slideshows. All of them. They lay waiting on the back-end benches of a special microsite that would go live as soon as news broke. Extra servers across the ocean hummed with enthusiasm, ready to host more page views. All hands were on deck, each individual finger fulfilling some role in a carefully planned granular strategy.

  The only thing missing in all of this, of course, was a date. What year, month and day would host this content? When would the announcement of his passing be made? We waited with breath that was bated and feet that tapped and thumbs that twiddled, until 5 December 2013.

  This is a sad confession and a terrible journalistic truth that does nothing to eradicate the vulture stereotype of the media. We are disgusting scavengers who wait to feed off the suffering of others and, often, of each other as well. But it is also a fair reflection of how seriously we took the imminent loss of the first democratically elected president of South Africa. His life deserved to be lauded with material composed in the sweat of pure effort and dedication. More than that, journalists were tasked with quenching the thirst of an entire nation who wanted to drink from his life a little longer. In death, stories are cathartic. Information is the bridge between loss and acceptance. Social media becomes web therapy.

  When Nelson Mandela died, I had just returned from a holiday in India. I came back with a Goa tan, a Delhi belly (not the sick kind, the fat kind, from eating way too much naan bread and delicious food with clarified butter) and Japanese encephalitis. I went straight to work. I had no inkling of the weird virus living in my body. My aching bones, migraine and constant fever were jet lag, I was convinced, and I didn’t care about that. I don’t really believe in jet lag.

  I arrived at the office in a hoodie that had not been washed in over three weeks. Do you know what India smells like? It smells like human faeces and old ash and life, real life. It is the most amazing place in the world. I brought that amazing place with me that day and wore it wherever I went. It was rainy and I had no choice. There were bigger priorities than going home to change and smell better. Things needed doing. Queue-standing, for example, was of absolute importance. There were identification queues, verification queues and accreditation queues. After all that, we received our passes to the statesman’s funeral, memorial service and other newsworthy events. If you were one of the people standing within a 500-metre radius of me that day, you also got a free tour of the great subcontinent through your nasal passages. I hope you enjoyed the ride.

  Mourning had started a few months prior to Mandela’s death. In June 2013, he was hospitalised in Pretoria. It wasn’t long before #prayforMadiba started trending on Twitter. I started an M&G Instagram account, so along with tweeting about absolutely everything, I also posted pictures of absolutely everything. President Jacob Zuma cancelled a trip to Mozambique so he could visit Madiba. Tweeted. Schoolchildren in uniform dropped by in their hundreds to deliver cards and gifts and flowers. Instagrammed. Catholic nuns lit candles. Instagrammed.

  Outside the hospital, there were lots and lots of cameras. I had never before covered a news story surrounded by celebrity journalists from CNN and the BBC and Al-Jazeera and Sky. Any news outlet you could think of was there. No one from my generation had seen anything this huge happen, and if they couldn’t be there, then I was. I made memes and gifs, and I shared the stories of stories of everyone who pitched up and had something to say and something to share. Like the ninety-year-old woman who had been an ANC supporter her whole life and forced the nurses to drag her from her hospital bed so she could pay her respects with the crowd outside. For anything more hard-hitting and ‘journalistic’, the public could watch Al-Jazeera or CNN or the BBC or Sky. Or the work of all the other South African journalists who were doing an excellent job reporting. There were balloons and banners and teddy bears. Tweeted and Instagrammed.

  ANC vigils sporadically took place before and after his death. For example, they bussed in heaps of people to the areas surrounding the hospital in Pretoria that June. They marched and sang and prayed. Soon after, when they were done with Madiba, they used the opportunity to picket and campaign for Jacob Zuma’s presidency for the next few hours. It wasn’t long before #prayforMadiba turned into #prayforanotherterm.

  I experienced what can only be described as an emotional landslide. Initially, I felt on top of the world, inspired by the party that fought for our freedom. I remember feeling moved by their pride as they took to the streets. I remember feeling bleak for them about their imminent loss. A decades-long personal relationship with a hero of freedom who was about to leave them. Those feelings quickly devolved into deep sorrow. Huge trucks pulled up and unfolded into podiums. Disturbingly large sound systems called for the support of Zuma. Yellow T-shirts emblazoned with ANC propaganda in support of the president were fed to the masses. I remember feeling like each was a betrayal. These offensive gestures continued. Tied together by disrespect, they hung like a banner at the foot of a stalwart’s hospital bed.

  When Nelson Mandela died, there was a massive memorial service at the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg. The Calabash was at capacity. Love and mourning erupted from every seat. Madiba’s dream nation shook its rattle for him one last time in a rainbow arena. It was rainy and it was cold. Journalists met outside the SABC offices in Auckland Park. The government arranged for us to be bussed in at the crack of dawn. We arrived before the crowds got in, frazzled and unprepared for the rain. We gathered in the pressroom where we were treated to black plastic bags for raincoats and had access to all the plug sockets our hearts desired. Computers and phones needed constant charging. Live blogs and social media feeds needed updating. Missing a single detail because of a flat battery
was a bigger failure than I could handle that day.

  My heart stirred when a hundred thousand people sang the national anthem together. The stadium roared with passion. When they sang ‘Senzenina’, my heart stirred some more. Then Baleka Mbete took the microphone to address the crowd and, with her slow rendition of the same song, my heart stopped stirring. She did not have a great voice. I lolled hard.

  FNB Stadium has a basement parking lot with a ‘secret’ entrance where the celebrities and dignitaries enter so they can be taken straight to their seats on the stage. If you had a special pass, you were allowed to hang out there. The photographers possessed these gems. They snapped until their camera triggers were filed down. I had somehow managed to convince someone that Instagram photography was a real thing, so I was down there too.

  I remember thinking, Gosh, I really must educate myself on the leaders of African countries. I knew none of them when they entered that foyer. Learning their names is still on my bucket list. There was no time for Google, so I ashamedly avoided tweeting pictures of them. How would I caption them? ‘African leader 1’? ‘African leader 2’? God, I am awful, I thought. I was comforted by the fact that most of the journalists around me were muttering to each other and asking who the African dignitaries were as well. But this comfort did not eradicate my shame.

  The leaders and celebrities from the West? Now those I knew. They were the ones in the history books and the news. Of course I knew them. The prince of Monaco and his South African wife (she did not look happy, and I don’t think it was because of Madiba). Bono. The Obamas. Click, click. Snap, snap.

  Then, all at once, there was silence. Heads bowed. Cameras continued clicking, but it was as though they suddenly came with a mute button. Ma Winnie entered. She came in like a vision. A graceful, regal vision. Her frame made taller by her power and her legend. Her eyes downcast, her body clothed in black. A daughter on each arm. She walked in the centre and slightly ahead of them. I remember feeling like that moment passed slowly and quickly at the same time. What stature. All current ANC members looked like fools in comparison. Court jesters, I’m afraid. The magnitude of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela remains, to this day, indescribable to me. I still get goosebumps thinking about it. I also get incredibly sad about the fight she won for a nation that mostly forgot about her.

  When Nelson Mandela died, I thought about my ethics and African studies lecturer a lot. Dr Simphiwe Sesanti walked into our journalism class one day filled with robustness and rage. I got the distinct impression he was tired of how the white students revered Nelson Mandela. He was offended (and rightly so) by the fact that it was becoming clearer with each lecture that Mandela was just about the only black South African they recognised and respected. The only black South African they were ever likely to reference with any degree of positivity. So, with vigour, he shouted, ‘Nelson Mandela did not free us! We freed Nelson!’

  Denial screamed from the throats of the privileged students who got the best deal. They fought back with ‘buts’. There were also gasps and murmurs. My friend Sarah and I turned to each other, mouths open and eyes wide. We had one mutual thought: blasphemy. Sesanti, almost bouncing off the walls, fists in the air, gave us a lesson in apartheid warfare. In the brutalities of frontlines and the dangers of being outside the prison walls for twenty-seven years instead of behind them.

  Aware of the outcry in the classroom but unafraid, he repeated his war cry a little louder: ‘Nelson Mandela did not free us! We freed Nelson!’ That was in 2011. It’s taken seven years, but today, I believe him. Nelson Mandela did not free us.

  Joining a cult is a terrible idea

  When I married Rebecca, I ordered a wedding dress off the internet. It looked kind of awesome and I paid just over R600 for it. A bargain for a wedding dress. Some people pay the equivalent of a down payment on a small house. The postage cost me about another R200. Still a bargain.

  When it arrived, I realised why it was so cheap. It appeared to be an old man’s hanky stretched and stitched into some kind of curtain. There was no old-man snot, but there were a lot of loose beads that fell from it like a breadcrumb trail as soon as I unpacked the … thing. Awesome it was not.

  I was angry. I went back to the drawing board that is the internet. Not to look for another dress. Oh no. I went in search of reviews of this posh place in London with the awesome discounted dresses. Every single review I read, including the ones right there on the website, which I hadn’t bothered to look at before, said the store was a complete sham.

  Most of the comments went like this:

  ‘This place is not based in London. Don’t fall for it.’

  ‘Save your money.’

  ‘What a rip off!’

  ‘This place never delivers and when they do deliver, the dresses are just disappointing.’

  ‘These dresses are sewn by underpaid, blind Cambodian children. You are supporting child slavery.’ (Okay, that last one is a lie. No one said that. But the item I received certainly looked that way.)

  When I was done reading, I facepalmed myself so hard, the indentation is still imprinted on my hand. Everyone told me the same thing and they were right. I should have done my research. Duh! What is wrong with me? You would think that I’d have learnt my lesson and not paid a lot of money for overblown promises. You would think that I’d have learnt my lesson in 2009, when I paid R3500 for a five-day workshop with what, in my view, is a cult.

  I only only came to the conclusion that it was a cult when the trauma ended and my research began. A cult is a social group that subscribes to certain religious, philosophical or spiritual beliefs. What makes a cult a cult, is that followers offer devotion to an unorthodox leader through a process of indoctrination. Historically, cults were associated only with religion. Their leaders and followers were the rebellious offspring of more popular religions.

  Cults remain in the realm of contention and controversy in pop culture, religion, academia and social studies. Their indoctrination can take the shape of abuse, coercive persuasion, humiliation, hypnosis and brainwashing. The workshop I did at the Insight Training Centre of Light in Johannesburg met all of these criteria. It may have met them unconventionally, but meet them it did.

  At the time of my joining – or rather, participation – I was going through some stuff. I saw a lot of quack therapists who didn’t really know what they were doing, my life was a mess and I was desperate. I was the kind of desperate that makes a kid steal from their own family to buy tik. The only difference was that I needed a high from life. I wanted to like life. I wanted to enjoy it. I wanted to be life’s addict. You can’t steal joy from anyone, unfortunately, but this secluded little place on a large property in Fourways promised that, in just five days, they would hand me joy on a silver platter.

  Joy or death? It felt like those were my only choices. I paid the deposit and went to Turning Point.

  Turning Point is torture. It promises to radically change the direction of the participant’s life so they can exist in the world differently and have a better understanding of their behaviour by being aware of the role consciousness plays in their lives. But Turning Point is not this. It. Is. Torture.

  Turning Point promised I would learn a ‘new way of being’. Well, let me tell you, when I was done, I definitely bee’d [sic] in a new way. I bee’d like a person who just got the biggest shock of their life. I had allowed myself to be tortured and humiliated and subjugated by a cult. Nothing teaches you how to enjoy life on the other side more than having the life sucked out of you inside a temple of doom and gloom by a wealthy pop-prophet who pours psychobabble and profanity into your ear over a loudspeaker.

  Turning Point should not be called Turning Point. It should be called ‘The sharp corner you take before you break yourself in half and enter hell’.

  I only read what people had to say about Turning Point and the other courses at the Insight Training Centre about three years after that five-day workshop in the summer of 2009. I was too afraid of what
I would learn. I also carried around a lot of guilt for being quiet about it for so long. As a journalist, I should have written something ages ago. I should have gone back to do the second workshop – as a graduate of the first – and blown the lid off the whole thing. I didn’t. I’m writing about it now, though, so that’s something, I guess.

  If you don’t read past this point, take this one thing away with you: never, ever, ever participate in Turning Point or any of the other workshops at the Insight Training Centre of Light (which you can only pay to participate in, by the way, once you have completed Turning Point – the first phase). Never ever, ever set foot in the Insight Training Centre in Fourways, ever. And if you do, take Derek Watts or whoever is doing Carte Blanche these days with you. In fact, take Debora Patta. Debora Patta doesn’t shoot blanks.

  The training centre’s website offers this definition of the Turning Point workshop: ‘It represents an intensive period in human life, with fifty hours of concentrated self-reflection, introspection and exploration of profound possibilities.’ When they talk about an ‘intensive period in human life’, they aren’t messing around.

  I started Turning Point on a Wednesday. I can’t remember what month it was, but it was warm. First, we had to register by handing in a compulsory questionnaire. It was confidential and required a number of invasive and very personal answers to questions of the same nature. We were warned that if we did not approach these questions with blatant honesty and the utmost degree of vulnerability, no point in our lives would be turned. I wanted all the points of my life to turn hard, so I answered the tough questions with a lot of tough truths. After registration, we entered the hall.

  We were a group of about fifty. When we reached our seats, the entire room flooded with the theme song from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It blared through the sound system. I don’t know how they knew we were in our ‘positions’. Someone was obviously watching us. As the music crescendoed, pop-prophet Royee Banai entered the hall. We only ever sat when he ordered us to do so. If we sat before his command, he shouted at us.