Were we right to do this?

Were we right to do this?

OUT OSF TASTE?: Our headline, and the Guardian's

• Fuck Zuma!

• Guardian cover outrages readers

• South Africa sees progress in Zimbabwe

By Mduduzi Mathuthu

Outraged New Zimbabwe.com readers protested over our front page headline FUCK ZUMA on Wednesday 16 February. Here, New Zimbabwe.com editor Mduduzi Mathuthu explains why the headline was used

THERE are better days in the office, and Wednesday was certainly not one of those.

It all started off with a late night decision on Tuesday to lead on the front page with an editorial comment based on an earlier story in which South Africa’s Foreign Minister Dlamini Zuma told journalists that she was upbeat about the chances of a free and fair election in Zimbabwe.

The story was shocking. It begged the question: where does Zuma get her briefings from, and does she read the South African newspapers which daily document President Robert Mugabe’s demagoguery?

Just the previous week, Mugabe’s shock troops had marched on a police station in Norton, stabbing a police officer and sending other officers fleeing after their colleague had been arrested.

And as if to vindicate our position, the MDC’s elections director was arrested on Wednesday and the party’s parliamentary candidates threatened with arrest while they were holding a workshop at Harare’s Sheraton Hotel.

The main headline usually doesn’t go online before I have approved it, and naturally, I took a keen interest on this particular one because it wasn’t an ordinary story – but the voice of New Zimbabwe.com.

There were several options for a headline, from ‘South Africa upbeat about Zim poll’ to ‘SA quiet diplomacy continues on Zimbabwe’. I considered all these options, but they quite didn’t sum-up the anger and revulsion which I was certain the story would attract from our readers the next day.

For years now, Zimbabweans have watched with disbelief as President Thabo Mbeki and his officials conspired to ensure what the MDC’s Tendai Biti calls the “continued reproduction of tyranny in Zimbabwe”.

Journalists seem to have accepted that Mbeki will not change his spineless policy on Zimbabwe. So they continue harping and yapping this mantra about “quiet diplomacy” – which, if you ask me, appears to be doing nothing to bring about a policy shift.

So the ideal headline, I decided, was one which drove the point home in a forceful manner but in a few words. In my mind, there was only one headline that would shock the life out of the sleep-walking Zuma -- FUCK ZUMA.

Of course I knew the impact that it would have, to say otherwise would be dishonest. I had the benefit of hindsight after the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in Britain caused a storm in 2003 with the headline ‘Fuck Cilla Black’ (Black is a British reality TV show host).

"We accept that we have probably gone a distance that the moral knights and the prudish would call a zone of indecency"

MDUDUZI MATHUTHU

The paper was condemned by its readers, and 60 percent of its journalists said the paper was wrong to run that headline. Many readers said they had read the paper for years, but were not sure if they would continue to do so.

Since our online newspaper is largely designed for a conservative African constituency, I knew the impact would be felt threefold. It crossed my mind what my mother would think when she sees the headline the next day. I thought of the reaction of my colleagues in the journalism fraternity, and the predictable brigade of rather irrelevant curtain twitchers who are forever fainting in the name of moralism.

But the most important person that I considered was Zuma herself. Here was a woman who had the power to beat Mugabe back to the democratic path by just opening her mouth.

And what had she done?

She hopped into bed with Mugabe’s Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge, and they were now speaking with one voice. I thought rather like the Camilla and Prince Charles’ relationship, Zuma should step out and regularise her snug relationship with the regime in Harare.

The choice for me was simple, do we allow Zuma to carry on aiding and abetting Mugabe’s quarrelsome brand of politics or do we tell her in stark terms what we think of her work on Zimbabwe, and that we don’t expect anything more from her?

The latter was more appealing to me.

Once the headline had gone and been beamed on thousands of computer screens across the world, the inevitability of it all was as predictable as Sadc observers passing the Zimbabwe election as free and fair.

From the outright abusive to the soberly constructed criticism from our readers, the e-mails and calls flooded in. There were many whose protest against a perceived obscenity assumed frightening dimensions.

There was one e-mail that stuck in my mind. This came from a friend Stanford Chibanda in Boston, America. “Your headline is just a bit strong. Some of us use your website as the homepage for our family shared computers and the last thing I want is to explain this word you have made your headline to my four year old.”

I knew what Stan was talking about. Sadly, I have no answer to that. Just sorry.

I however, believe that it is better to wage a “shock and awe” campaign where necessary to achieve the stability of Zimbabwe today than wait tomorrow to beam pictures of bloodshed and devastation. The same four-year-old Stan intends to shield from the F-word will inevitably ask: “Couldn’t you see this tragedy coming, couldn’t you stop it?”

I don’t know which would be more difficult to explain.

While I accept, on behalf of New Zimbabwe.com, that the F-word is distasteful, I make no apologies for our overall views on Zuma's kudos for Mugabe.

My anger represents the feeling of many who have watched South Africans vacillate between so-called “quiet diplomacy” and unjustifiable "loud support” for Mugabe, typified by Zuma's utterances.

There is another whole debate to be had, whether the word “Fuck” has lost its sexual connotations which would make it offensive. One can argue that the F-word has evolved in terms of meaning.

Similarly, the word "shit" was extremely offensive in bygone years. In Zimbabwe the term "bloody shit" is commonly used among youths as it is among elders. Today, the F-word is just as common in conversations among the British and others. That it is still some kind of insult is true, but whether it still bears its sexual meaning is subject to debate.

More critically, Zuma is hardly the person against whom you can use the word “Fuck” in a sexual context.

In the media, there is talk about taking freedom of expression too far; the distance by which to take it is still a subject of debate. We accept that we have probably gone a distance that the moral knights and the prudish would call a zone of indecency.

But in apologising for the offence caused, we call upon the moralists and the prude who were quick to condemn us to shout as loud in condemning human rights violations and injustice in Zimbabwe. There is nothing decent about such acts, let alone those who support them, Zuma included.
JOIN THE DEBATE ON THIS ARTICLE ON THE NEWZIMBABWE.COM FORUMS
mathuthu@newzimbabwe.com