Nat Nakasa Awards

Sipho Masondo, City Press’ investigative reporter, was last night honoured with the annual Nat Nakasa Award for his courageous reporting on corruption and other shenanigans at the Department of Water Affairs.

Masondo was bestowed with the award at a gala dinner, hosted by the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) and Sanlam held in Durban, South Africa on Saturday evening.

Masondo, has been offered bribes in millions of rands, but remained resilient and pursued the story that uncovered a number of activities including shocking maladministration at the department as well as the minister’s relationship with a “Ben10”, who was said to have an influence on decisions at the department.

The Nat Nakasa award is awarded for courageous and brave journalism. The award is an expression of the recognition of journalists who have distinguished themselves by demonstrating courage, tenacity, integrity and fearlessness in their practice of journalism.

Despite the threats to his life, Masondo still continued to uncover the rot while working under tremendous pressure. There was even talk of making him “disappear.”

The runner-up of the Nat Nakasa awards was Suzanne Venter of Rapport for her relentless pursuits of the story that led to national outrage at the deaths of over 100 mentally ill patients at Esidimeni in Gauteng.

Veteran journalist Mathatha Tsedu was also honoured at the awards as SANEF paid special tribute to him. Tsedu was thanked by SANEF for his contribution as executive director and as a founding member of the organization – as well as for his undying fight for journalism.

For any inquiries please contact Reggy Moalusi, SANEF Secretary-General on 071 682 3695

Socials

Twitter: @SAEditorsForum

Email: [email protected]

Website: SANEF

Call for entries
Prize Money: R20 000.00
Deadline: 28 May 2017
SA National Editor’s Forum and the Nieman Society of Southern Africa are now accepting nominations for the 2017 Nat Nakasa Award for Media Integrity.

Nat Nakasa was a prominent journalist and writer who died in exile. This annual award recognises any media practitioner – journalist, editor, manager or owner – who has:

* Shown integrity and reported fearlessly;
* Displayed a commitment to serve the people of South Africa;
* Tenaciously striven to maintain a publication or other medium despite insurmountable obstacles;
* Resisted any censorship;
* Shown courage in making information available to the SA public;
* Any combination of the above.

Please submit your nomination by close of business on 28 May 2017, accompanied by a motivation of 300 words to:

[email protected]

Or Administrator
Ground Floor Room 1, Block A
Richmond Forum,
18 Cedar Avenue
Richmond, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 482 5771
Fax: (011) 482 9132

For Attention: Mathipa Chepape

The Award is open to all journalists irrespective of whether they serve a community / national newspaper, magazine or an electronic medium (including online publishers).

Previous winners of this Award are, however, not eligible for entry. The winner will receive R20 000 in prize money and a certificate.

NAT NAKASA PAST WINNERS

1998 Jon Qwelane
1999 Mzilikazi wa Africa
2000 Joint Winners:
Mathatha Tsedu
Wolfram Zwecker
Special Mention:
Baldwin Ndaba
2001 Mzilikazi wa Africa – Sunday Times Investigations Team
Andre Jurgens
Jessica Bezuidenhout
2002 Justin Arenstein – African Eye News Service
Special Mention: Elise Tempelhoff – Beeld
Martin Welz – Noseweek
2003 Debbie Yazbek –  The Star
Special Mention: David Macfarlane – Mail & Guardian
2004 Buks Viljoen -The Lowvelder
2005 Alf Kumalo
2006 Guy Berger
2007 Jacques Pauw
2008 Max du Preez
2009 Greg Marinovich
2010 Terry Bell
2011 No Winner
Special Mention: Anton Hammer
2012 Joe Thloloe
2013 Mondli Makhanya
2014 Alide Dasnois
2015 Peter Magubane
2016 The SABC 8

The winner will be announced at the Nat Nakasa Awards ceremony on 10 June in Durban.

Background on Nat’s Life

In the Sixties, freedom of the press was an anathema in South Africa. Angry black voices were heard in the townships and in shebeens, but never in print. Government-controlled white newspapers freely regurgitated propaganda on a daily basis. Today, the written word has a platform without restriction – and to celebrate media integrity in South Africa, the Nat Nakasa Award is awarded on an annual basis by the SA National Editors’ Forum and the Nieman Society. If he were alive today in the new South Africa, perhaps he would have been a diplomat or politician, perhaps a prominent editor, a major publisher? One thing is certain – whatever lofty post we could dream up for him now, one thing he would remain…. a writer.  “I must tread softly. This is time-bomb ground – the world of Nathaniel Nakasa. The man who, with a subtle humour in the mind, and a sharp bitterness in the heart, set out and attempted to create order out of the disorder of the South African white prejudice and racism and that other thing,  South African black timidity and subservience.”

Strong words from poet Mongane Serote as quoted from The World of Nat Nakasa (Raven books).  But then, pussy-footing around the truth was never Nakasa’s style.  Born Nathaniel Ndazana Nakasa in 1937, he spent the major part of his adult life as a journalist in Johannesburg, a regular contributor to the Golden City Post, an assistant editor of Drum and later as the first black columnist on the Rand Daily Mail.

At the height of his career in 1963, he founded a literary tell-it-like-it-is journal called The Classic.  Nakasa’s personal style gained a substantial following, although his middle-of-the-road views in a divided South Africa were often a little too liberal for some of his fellow black journalists.  Nakasa had a knack for seeing a situation from 360 degrees. Says Essop Patel, “In spite of bitter nostalgia and occasional despair Nathaniel Ndazana (Nat) Nakasa had “the ability to see an upside-down situation in an upside-down way.”  The 1960s were dark days for black South African journalists when repressive apartheid laws stifled a decent day’s work, never mind inspiring any glimmer of creativity. For many the only way was out.  Exile to foreign lands, far away from the oppression and humiliation that was home. As Essop Patel says in the introduction to The World of Nat Nakasa, “The creative output of the Sophiatown Renaissance came to an end as the bulldozers rolled in.”  But out of the rubble emerged a new kind of black journalist elite, and for the young and ambitious Nat, fresh in Johannesburg from Durban, these were the formative years.

Drum journalist Can Themba remembers Nat Nakasa in the early days of his career. In a tribute to Nakasa titled: “The Boy with the Tennis Racket”, Themba recalls: “He had a puckish, boyish face, and a name something like Nathaniel Nakasa. We soon made him Nat.”  Nat was different from the start. Said Themba, “He came, I remember, in the morning with a suitcase and a tennis racket – ye gods, a tennis racket! We stared at him. The chaps on Drum at that time had fancied themselves to be poised on a dramatic, implacable kind of life. Journalism was still new to most of us and we saw it in the light of the heroics of Henry Nxumalo, decidedly not in the light of tennis, which we classed with draughts.”  Many recall Nat and good friend Lewis Nkosi being bookish and serious – not the carousing, drinking shebeen aficionados as the rest of the Drum team were notorious for in those days. These were heady days for Nat Nakasa and his black colleagues (a group of maverick journalists charting new territories without any real role models to look up to. Although times were bitter, for Nat it was all about crossing boundaries: “There must be humans on the other side of the fence; it’s only we haven’t learned how to talk,” he said. Says Patel, “. . . Nat Nakasa focused his attention upon the idea of Common experience. He desired a truly South African nation.”

In 1963, he saw the way clear to put out his own literary contribution in the form of The Classic. The magazine’s main objective was to encourage “. . .those writers with causes to fight for, committed men and women who look at human situations and see tragedy and love, bigotry and common sense for what they are.” Good friend and author Nadine Gordimer says of those days, “Nat’s approach to The Classic was serious and yet light-handed, gay; candid and unflustered. He was a clever young newspaperman but had no literary background or experience – yes. There was not enough money for the venture and there were endless practical difficulties – yes. Nevertheless, he felt that day-to-day journalism floated, like oil indicating the presence of a submarine, on the surface of African life, and he wanted to make soundings of his own. He asked for help, and what’s more, he did so aware that help more often than not must take the form of criticism, and in the self-knowledge that he could take that, too.”

Certainly, conditions were not improving in South Africa and while Nakasa’s career was gaining ground despite a system that dictated the opposite, the global village was calling with the voice of freedom. In 1964, Nat Nakasa was awarded the Nieman Fellowship to read journalism at the University of Harvard. Of course, obtaining a passport from the government of the day would take nothing short of a miracle, leaving Nat in an impossible situation. As he said in a well-known piece titled, A Native of Nowhere: “Sometime next week, with my exit permit in my bag, I shall cross the borders of the Republic and immediately Part Company with my South African citizenship. I shall be doing what some of my friends have called, “taking a grave step.” Little did friends and relatives know just how grave that step would be, and how moving away from the land of his birth would affect the psyche of this sensitive writer. Says Gordimer of this emotionally traumatic time for Nat, “It was a strange time, the last year in South Africa; on the one hand, he was making a name for himself in a small but special way that no African had done before, his opinions and ideas were being considered seriously by white newspaper-readers whose dialogue cross the colour line had never exceeded the command, do-this-or-that, and the response, yes-baas. On the other hand, he had been awarded a scholarship to Harvard and was involved in the process of trying to get a passport – for an African, a year-long game in which the sporting element seems to be that the applicant is never told what you have to do to win, or what it was he did that made him lose.”

Eventually, Nat “gained his freedom” in the form of an exit permit, and although missing his first flight out of the country, safely made it into the US. He was not crazy about New York and quickly moved on to Cambridge where life at Harvard was spent “steeped in the somber business of education”.

Although the Harvard year was good on the learning front, things went downhill from there – Nakasa grew increasingly homesick, isolated and unhappy, although this was not largely apparent to those around him. Says Patel of his death at the age of 28, “Nat Nakasa’s death by suicide on 14 July 1965 was an apartheid tragedy, and a tragedy of exile. After his year at Harvard, he wrote extensively for several newspapers and magazines in the United States. He appeared in the television film The Fruit of Fear, a critique of apartheid, and was to have written a biography of Miriam Makeba. But two days before his death he told a friend, “I can’t laugh anymore and when I can’t laugh I can’t write.”

Nadine Gordimer sums up Nat Nakasa’s contribution beautifully in The World of Nat Nakasa: “The truth is that he was a new kind of man in South Africa, he accepted without question and with easy dignity and natural pride his Africanness, and he took equally for granted that his identity as a man among men, a human among fellow humans, could not be legislated out of existence, even by all the apartheid laws in the statute book, or all the racial prejudice in this country. He did not calculate the population as sixteen millions or four millions, but as twenty.  He belonged not between two worlds, but to both. And in him, one could see the hope of one world. He has left that hope behind; there will be others to take it up.”

References:
 The World of Nat Nakasa, edited by Essop Patel (Raven Press) Nat Nakasa
 Native of Nowhere (Times Media Productions)
Ends

Socials

Twitter: @SAEditorsForum

Email: [email protected]

Website: SANEF

Introduction
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, esteemed guests and fellow patriots.  I owe my presence here to Mathatha Tsedu, your executive director.  He used all imaginable struggle sentiments and memories from past trenches against apartheid to get me out of retirement to this South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) awards dinner.  It was not necessary.  First, because I am grateful to be not amongst lawyers and judges, but rather amongst South Africa’s thought leaders in media (print, broadcast, and internet) and trainers constituted as the forum famously known as SANEF.  Since its inception in 1996, SANEF has stood for media freedom and transformation and for other significant things I care for.  Second, it was not necessary to plead with me to be here tonight because, in the 40 years of public life, principally as an activist lawyer and later as a judge, I have thrived under the peering and piercing eyes of media practitioners.  Perhaps it is not entirely inapposite to come at the end of my career and say thank you and goodbye to a chattering class that has so kindly documented so much of my public career.

The third reason why I would have accepted this invite is that this evening is so closely connected to Nat Nakasa.  The tale of Nat Nakasa is as harrowing as it is tragic.  He tried to escape the scorn of apartheid and the silence it sought to impose on him only to die in 1965 – young, exiled, heart-broken and perhaps even more alienated from himself and from his newly-found world.  What saves his tragic tale is the short but dynamic career he lit up by his journalistic courage and integrity.  It is therefore an honour to be here and to pay respect to Nat Nakasa and indeed to other media practitioners who are similarly situated at home, on the rest of the African continent and abroad.  Media practitioners, much like judges, easily and quickly earn the wrath of ruling elites around the world.

On a lighter note, Mathatha, I would have agreed to be here in any case, to meet up with SANEF’s Secretary-General.  I have known Katy Katopodis, since she was a young activist university student.  She studied and later worked in media with my daughter, Duduzile.  Both have since grown to be enterprising women and are currently running a competition on who may produce more grandchildren for their adoring parents.  My daughter has three and Kate may be lagging behind.

Excited as I am about being here this evening, I don’t think I have any new or thunderous insights that travel beyond your own expertise.  Let me underline the point in this way.

On Thursday, 19 September 2002, shy of 14 years ago, Henry Jeffreys, Guy Berger and Mathatha Tsedu drew up submissions to the parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications on the Broadcasting Amendment Bill, 2002.  This is what they wrote then.

“The position of the SANEF on the Bill is premised on a number of principles.
These are:

1.1. Information is power, and those who have it have power and those that do not, don’t have any power.
1.2. From this flows the fact that all the people of this country, in their myriad of cultures and languages, have to have an ability to receive and impart information and views in their own languages through all the mediums available through the national broadcaster.
1.3. For the information to be empowering and useful, it must be reliable.  Embodied in this is the need therefore for journalists to provide news and current affairs that are as unfettered by political and commercial interests as are humanly possible.  The public needs to have confidence in the impartiality of the news they receive.
1.4. The state must create an enabling legislative environment that allows for the public broadcaster to fulfill its functions.  This particularly entails funding, but should never extend to any implied, overt or covert role in the determination of the credibility of the news items that are broadcast.
1.5. Section 16 of the Constitution is the embodiment of all the protections that are needed to guarantee that South Africa is able to converse with herself and with the world in a free and fair manner.  Whatever steps might be needed from time to time to improve this national discourse, must adhere fully to this section of the Constitution.  It should in no way dilute its effectiveness.”

I can’t do better than that exposition of the place of free expression in our democratic arrangements.  Mine is to admire and applaud.  It is, however, astounding that in present times we have to assert afresh these fundamental but commonplace articles of faith in an open and democratic society which we must claim to be.

So, I will restrain myself and not belabour the intrinsic value of free expression in a democratic society.  Also, I have chosen not to say a word about current developments in the media terrain.  I prefer to scrum away from the saga at the SABC.  I choose to be tight-lipped about its incumbent COO or its departed acting CEO who has fallen on his sword.  I am still about Vuyo Mvoko’s account of his “hellish” stint at the SABC.  I am tight-lipped about the different take of Chairman Maghuve on the affairs of his corporation and contrasting the response of the chair of the parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications on the same subject.  I won’t speculate about the pending Indepndent Communications Authority (Icasa) ruling or perhaps about the much vaunted Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF) court application against the public broadcaster.  I need not apply my good sense because I am no longer a judge in active service.  Also, I dare not venture into the reports on the toyi-toying SANEF and other activists outside a variety of newsworthy media sites and other venues.  This is so because your assessment of these gripping events is probably as good, if not better, than mine.

So I rather opt to mull over two vital conversations that may find echo in the position of the media in the current state of our nation.  The first is the social imperative of an open society.  The second is courage of conviction.

Openness
One of the vital functions of a constitution is to define and deploy public power.  Simply, most constitutional arrangements in democracies try to make plain who may exercise which public power.  That is also true of the private terrain where companies, trusts and foundations exercise a measure of public power.  But here is the point.  Public power is conferred for one purpose only – to do good – to advance public good.  Put clearer, public power is never conferred to advance an ulterior purpose, to benefit its holder or her patrons, or to serve private or selfish interest.  It is never conferred to glorify or make important its holder.  Public power is a tool to enhance and advance public good.

It follows that public power must be used rationally and only in a lawful manner and for a legitimate purpose.  Apart from the seminally important guarantee of free expression, when we established a democratic republic in 1994, we saw it fit to write in values of openness, accountability and responsiveness.  This because if public power is to advance public good it must be exercised transparently and must be capable of being held to account.  Also, public power must be deployed responsively to the needs of the governed and not for improper or oppressive purposes.

You see, openness and accountability are to repression and bad governance what light is to darkness.  They are meant to dissipate public secrets, bad governance and backwardness.  They are meant to install freedom, social equity and the best interest of the people against autocracy and bad and unrepresentative government.

That must tell us why we wrote these ideals in our first law.  Openness and free expression have always been the bedrock of the long, arduous struggle for justice.  Apartheid, like all oppressions, failed because it sought to oust openness with secrecy, responsiveness to popular needs with repression and negated its duty to account to the people it ruled.  In the end, besides the deteriorating economics, apartheid failed because the ruling elite fancied their chances to silence all dissent.

We are clearly not there.  Or am I deluding myself?

Courage of conviction: Willingness to bear the consequences
I have suggested earlier that beyond a vision, concrete and credible steps are required to make it real.  That much is true of media practitioners.  Courage of principle would require media workers to do what’s to be done.  Much like other social activists who are expected to take practical steps to realise the vision, journalist too must show absolute fidelity to their craft and public duty.  In this sense, the media is an integral part of the transition and the achievement of a variety of social and economic goods our Constitution envisages.

I suggested at the beginning that the inevitable consequence of courage and principle must be a willingness to bear the consequences.  Ruth First paid that ultimate price.  In extreme repression those entrusted with power soon forget and resort to death, torture and exclusion to prop up their hegemony.  We are a proud democracy.  In many respects we have established an admirable state and proud nation.  We have picked much of the low lying fruit.  In some respects our courts are one such example.

However, judges, and certainly all of us, cannot now back off from our bounden duty to educate and train the young, to transmit to them the very best values of our long and heroic struggle.  We must keep our collective vision well in sight.  We must garner the courage and comfort to speak out and act on it.  We must require our public functionaries to pursue in truth a better life for all.  The price we are to pay for social activism is small indeed – nothing comparable to the supreme price many compatriots had to pay.  We must be truthful and rigorous in the pursuit of a more equal and just society.  We must have the courage to call it right in the most difficult circumstances.  That is so because our collective vision is not open to debate.  Its primacy is well settled by a long line of virtuous struggle.

Thank you for listening and good night.