I’ve always thought of the English actor, writer, activist Stephen Fry as the modern day Oscar Wilde, the literary giant who, in 1895, was convicted of homosexual activity and sentenced to two years, spent in Reading Gaol.
Fry is himself gay, and a vocal activist about homosexuality – and a host of other things too.
He had this in common with Wilde: they both spent time in prison, Fry for credit card fraud – after being expelled from two schools.
The bi-polar Fry is credited with having said this: “If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.”
It made me think about how shallow we mostly are, how we cry foul at the most trivial of matters and let the heavy, dark ones that really affect us go unsung.
I refer to the hours and hours of talk on radio this week, the television time and the embarrasingly large number of column centimetres devoted to the outrage around Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa’s affair. Or affairs, though I’m not sure if it matters.
We’ve had the editor who chose to publish the damaging story taking to social media to defend his action.
Is our prurient fascination with salaciousness to blame?
Whatever it is, we have skimmed over the death of former ANC Youth League secretary-general Sindiso Magaqu from gunshot wounds or poison. Faction fighting, a deeply disturbing trend that happens everywhere, but that we have come to associate with KwaZulu Natal, has been hinted at.
More space (though not as much the Ramaphosa Affair) has been given to the utterly discredited public relations company Bell Pottinger when they were found guilty of executing a plan aimed at unsettling our democracy.
The British PR regulatory body found that Bell Pottinger had "exploited racial divisions on behalf of the Gupta family" by initiating a campaign on behalf of its client‚ Oakbay Investments. The firm’s membership was terminated for five years as they found that Bell Pottinger had focused on “economic emancipation and pushed the term ‘white monopoly capital’ to the forefront of the South African national conversation.
This stuff has had direct consequences and affects every single one of us. Numerous decisions have been made based on fake news. Completely manufactured news has been disseminated; newspapers and the media in general have been duped into covering and spreading this fake news.
The orchestrated campaign dreamed up and implemented by Bell Pottinger has caused ruinous harm to our democracy by pushing policy and politics into a made-up fictious realm.
And the scary thing is that it was all done to push the agenda (think power and enrichment) of a foreign family who invaded our shores and set themselves up as the single most powerful authority in the land.
It’s the kind of espionage that you see in the movies and think to yourself: this can only happen in the fevered imagination of movie script writers.
The attack included a social media campaign with hundreds of thousands of tweets, hundreds of FaceBook posts… the mind boggles at the extent of it.
Another story that got a small footnote: in our neighbour Lesotho three defence force officers were shot dead after rumoured in-fighting.
Here’s my confusion: why does Lesotho have a defence force? Who are they defending themselves against? They can’t take on their big sister SA surely. It would be a sad and sorry David and Goliath story in reverse, where the giant crushes the boy with a sling by squashing him with a thumb.
Then Bafana Bafana were humiliated by Cape Verde, twice in five day. Cape Verde is a country that is five times smaller than Soweto.
Add to that the happy news that South Africa saw a 2.5% growth in the second quarter and is now officially out of a recession…
So all that – and a damn side more – happened right here at home in the last week and yet a conniving dirty tricks campaign to embarrass, discredit and humiliate Cyril Ramaphosa ahead of the ANC December conference for having an affair gets the most coverage in the digital media, the most column centimetres in the press? I don’t get it. It’s a tactic that – all through history – has never successfully toppled a politician or powerful man.
It’s almost obligatory for French presidents to have mistresses. Francois Mitterand, Jacques Chirac, Nicholas Sarkozy, Francois Hollande, to name a very few, were all rumoured to have had affairs.
In the US, long before John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton, American presidents were known to have a little something on the side. Dwight D Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson… the list is long.
I am certainly not condoning the act of betraying one’s marriage vows. But am I surprised by the fact that powerful, rich men have affairs? No.
There’s a Leonard Cohen song, Everybody Knows, that sums it up for me:
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah, give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Affairs! Kings and noblemen and people in the street and rich men and poor men and wise men and fools… and women! Nobody is exempt from the possibility of having an extra marital relationship.
As the Sunday Times’ American correspondent, I was in the White House in 1998, when Nelson Mandela came to town, at the height of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair scandal.
It was also the day that it was revealed that Bill Clinton had used a cigar, and not to smoke it.
I remember watching Madiba in his lilting way admonish those who were, he said, trying to defame a good man, his friend Bill.
Clinton beamed like a schoolboy as the man he once told a gathering of South African journalists he thought of as his father defended him.
Nobody that Google knows of in a position of power has ever been unseated from their position of power because of an affair.
They might incur the wrath of an angry public, but in the end, the act of betrayal of a spouse is deemed a private matter between husband and wife and the hooha subsides after a while.
And yet, people still try and use the unmasking of an affair a political tool. Why? Its never worked in the past.
At least, people have been quick to point out, the Dep Pres hasn’t been accused of raping anyone. Also, comparisons have been made with the top dog in the land.
For me, Cyril has been a naughty boy. But his public apology and the fact that his wife has come out in support of him is enough for me. I still think he’s our best hope for the future.
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