Communication — the art of getting people to listen to, and more importantly, hear one’s intention — is the most crucial tool in our human arsenal.
How we say it is as important as what we say or even what we mean to say. Tone, the language we choose, our delivery method … all these are key in message delivery.
This week, the DA felt the weight of both excoriating criticism and praise when it unveiled a controversial billboard as part of its 2019 election manifesto.
With leader Mmusi Maimane leading the way, the DA took to the streets on Wednesday, their march ending with the big reveal of their election billboard that remembers those who’ve died because of the ANC’s lack of good governance.
The massive hoarding records the names of people who’ve died: dead Marikana miners, children drowned in pit latrines, psychiatric patients lost in the Life Esidimeni horror.
Of course, the ANC was going to take exception. I’ve heard several angry outbursts from ANC faithful express angry reasons why the DA should be forced to bring down its giant advert.
Writing down of the names of the dead for political purpose is offensive to the families of the dead. It’s un-African. It’s an insult to the memory of the dead. And so on.
Still, in this time of fake news, it must be said that there is not one shred of a lie on that billboard. Every name printed is that of a person who lived, and died horrifically.
So in the world of communication, I find nothing wrong with the DA’s method of shaming the ruling party.
But it is how Maimane explained it to the media and to the masses using public platforms that I found interesting.
Most regular readers of this column will know that I celebrated my 60th birthday early last December with a trip to my beloved New York, where I indulged myself with a host of my favourite things.
I bought an exorbitantly expensive ticket (which still sat me in the cheap seats) to see La Boheme, my favourite Puccini tragic opera and cried the requisite amount when the heroine Mimi died (a full throated lilting, brilliant aria emerging from her mouth) of galloping consumption.
I took in a profound new play on Broadway, The Ferryman, written by English playwright Jez Butterworth who takes a searing historical look at The Irish Troubles and details how the IRA dealt with their impimpi.
I ate Korean barbecue and watched skaters on the ice at Bryant Park; I went to Christmas Markets and breathed in the fresh scent of pine radiating off the icy pavements in the form of newly cut Christmas Trees.
But the highlight of what was an extraordinarily wonderful holiday was being part of the magic at a production of My Fair Lady, the musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
The story tells of Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl whose broad accent identifies her as uneducated, uncouth and unsophisticated. Prof Henry Higgins, a phoneticist, bets his friend Col Pickering that with speech lessons he could make Eliza pass as a lady. It’s a funny, poignant, warm musical with beautiful songs. A bit of frippery really, that shouldn’t hold as much sway in a life as it does in mine.
But then, I have history with My Fair Lady. Almost 42 years ago, as a first-year drama student at Rhodes University, watching Rex Harrison’s musical soliloquy when he first encounters Eliza was a seminal moment for me,.
He tells Col Pickering, when he first hears her:
“Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter,
Condemned by every syllable she ever uttered.
By law she should be taken out and hung,
For the cold blooded murder of the English tongue.”
You see, these words resonated because in 1977, my speech teachers Beth Dickerson and Joan Osborne took me on as their Pygmalion project.
I spoke with a strong Indian accent. They wanted to change that. Lists of my speech impediments were made:
I had a tight tongue.
I lengthened my short vowels.
I shortened my long vowels.
I placed emphasis on the wrong parts of words.
The women bet that they could have me speaking Queen’s English by the end of my first year.
If I worked very hard, they said, I would have received pronunciation — an accent of standard English that would make me BBC newsreader ready.
And so it began. First we had to loosen my tongue sufficiently to let me begin to practice the new vowel sounds. For weeks, I wandered around with my mouth filled with small pebbles. Eventually I was able to reshape my vowels and change the emphasis on words.
The world has changed considerably since 1977. Today, regional accents litter the BBC and received pronunciation is a thing of the past. Even the young princes Harry and William speak less formally than their father and grandmother.
As for me, I still speak proper. But, when I’m in Durban with old aunts and uncles, I allow myself to slip into heavy accented speech. I stretch my short vowels, I use phrases that are particularly Indian working class, I drop the first syllable of some words, I use English words that mean something completely different among my Indian relatives (For example: healthy means fat. “You got so ‘elthy” means you’ve gotten fat. Um … I get that a lot!)
Why do I revert to an accent that is no longer me? I’ve realised it’s because I want the ancients to feel comfortable around me. I don’t want them to think I have airs and graces, that after all, I’m just one of them, even if I speak differently.
I’ve often wondered why it is that SA actors, unlike their Australian counterparts, change to an American accent and never revert.
Charlize Theron is an example. She never uses her SA accent, not even when she’s home. Australian actors Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Hugh Jackman and Mel Gibson (to name a few) only use American accents should the parts they play require them. For the rest, they go back to their Oz accents.
Which brings me to the issue of accents and identity and fit-in-ability. And the DA billboard and the head of the DA, Maimane, and his method of communicating his party’s message to the masses.
Of course, every news outlet and television station wanted to speak to Maimane on Wednesday.
I watched with fascination as he changed his accent depending on the audience he was addressing. He went from his normal mild African flavoured accent — that identifies him as an educated African man to a guttural rural twang. And back again.
He phrased words differently, he exaggerated his accent, he slipped into several African languages when he wasn’t using working class idiom.
It’s war out there in the run up to the May (?) elections. Will his “voice-of-the-masses” win over the rural audience that we imagine favours the EFF?
Will his imitation of EFF big boss Julius Malema work as he speaks to the proles in a blue-collar accent?
We are going to hear a lot of mudslinging and accusations and angry voices in the run up to this (we are told) most important election in the history of our young democracy. Add to that fake news; fake accents; fake messages… Poor us, the voters. How are we to make sense of it all?
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