This is my farewell column; this is the last time that I get to share my voice in this hallowed space. I say goodbye with enormous gratitude for having been allowed to write 1,000 words every week.
It has been a privilege to express my views and share my stories.
But everything has a shelf life, and it’s my turn to make good on my expiry date. Everything has a beginning and an end.
Here’s how this column began.
On April 15 2015, my formal 34-year career in journalism ended. Early; a decade too soon. That retrenchment was a difficult, unexpected, ending. I was 55, a long way off from my planned retirement.
Suddenly — overnight — I was unemployed. I had to give up all the things that having a job needs: work clothes, make-up, an alarm clock, weekends… As in the hard lockdown of 2020, those early retrenchment days morphed purposelessly into each other. I was more than a little lost: it felt like a death; like being cast out of home to fend for yourself without any preparation or training.
I had devoted my entire life to journalism, to the pursuit of truth, to the accurate telling of stories. Journalism was my life.
In the very early 1980s, my first news editor at Port Elizabeth’s Evening Post, Bill Krige, told us rookie reporters that our job was to keep politicians honest. And also to amuse, entertain and inform readers.
Not for nothing is the media known as the Fourth Estate. According to Wikipedia, the term refers to the press and news media “both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues. Though it is not formally recognised as a part of a political system, it wields significant and indirect social influence”.
I just happened to have a front row seat during what was the most important period in the history of our country — and, some would argue, the world.
I reported through the darkest days of oppression and human degradation that was apartheid; I saw the fall of the National Party responsible for that cruel system of separation; I covered the release of the man the world has quite rightly revered as an exemplary political leader, Nelson Mandela; I witnessed first-hand, and recorded for posterity, the birth of our new democracy. It was a marvellous time to be alive; and a pivotal time to be a journalist.
It is fitting that today, as I write my last column, Trump is leaving the White House as the most unpopular president of all time
Altogether, I’ve had a remarkable, adventure-filled career and so, when it ended abruptly in 2015, I did not know how to define my new state of being.
When people asked, What do you do? I never knew quite how to respond. Should I say “former journalist”? But I’d always considered it a title for life, like doctor or professor or president. No matter it they’ retired from the position, they retained the title.
And so it was something of a Godsend when, in 2015, former Sunday Times editor Ray Hartley offered me this column, to be published as original content behind a pay wall on his new Rand Daily Mail news aggregated website. It meant I could retain my connection with newspapers and also keep my writing hand and my brain active.
Ray had one rule: No politics. Instead, he asked for a combination of the personal, of memoir, woven into the fabric of what was happening in the world.
I’d had a strange newsy decade that included marrying — really late in life — a bipolar man (mistake); giving up my city life and moving to a tiny hamlet in the Free State, Zastron, with my manic depressive husband. In so doing, I became the only Naidoo within a 200km radius. It was in Zastron that I learnt to drink vodka for breakfast, a habit I took with me when I moved to Port Elizabeth to work on newspapers there.
In the end, I went into rehab three times before I finally found sobriety.
Sober, finally, I got divorced; moved back to Johannesburg; buried my 49-year-old brother, Shaun, who choked to death in a Los Angeles restaurant; got breast cancer; had a double mastectomy and some brutal chemotherapy; quit smoking; and went back to being a practising Catholic.
Ray thought that would qualify me as having enough life experience to write the column.
For me, these past four years will be remembered as the crazy Trump years in which we witnessed the dismantling of centuries of “truth” as we have always known it; truth that I have spent a lifetime defending. Fake news, blatant lies, narcissism, self-interest; Donald Trump sowed dissent, encouraged racism, and was entirely self-promoting. Divisiveness and hate were Trump-era words.
And so it is fitting that today, as I write my last column, Trump is leaving the White House as the most unpopular president of all time, with the lowest approval rating of all time.
As I write, Joe Biden, a good, kind man — exactly what America, and the world needs to heal — is being inaugurated as the next US president. It will, I hope, signal the return to a world that is “normal”, or as normal as things can be during a pandemic.
2020 was the strangest of years. It was difficult to write about anything other than Trump and the pandemic — often intertwined as Trump largely ignored Covid-19, refusing to wear a mask in public and throwing garden parties that allowed the White House to become super-spreader central.
And so, as I take my leave, I am buoyed by the glimpse of hope I see, even though it is still on the distant horizon.
Winds of change are blowing as Biden replaces reptilian Trump and the rollout of several coronavirus vaccines begin around the world. (Hopefully vaccines will become available to South Africans in 2021.)
To borrow from Douglas Adams’s 1979 comedy, science fiction, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.
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