I wouldn't fire Kuli Roberts

There is nothing that Sunday World columnist Kuli Roberts can say or do that will justify or excuse her racist bilge and at a time like this it might be opportune to consider bringing back the death penalty for people like her.

Outrageous?

Well South Africa that’s pretty much what you sound like about now.

Personally I wouldn’t even have sacked Kuli Roberts and neither would Ferial Haffajee, editor of City Press, who quickly picked up how bad the column was.

From Roberts I would have expected two apologies.

The first for a substandard column, which was obviously an attempt at humour (staggering that anyone needs to think about this) and secondly to the coloured community for not having had the decency to have ensured that it works as a piece of satire before unloading it on them.

In that second humble apology explaining what she was trying to achieve and how it imploded.

If there is any community in South Africa that is genuinely funny it is the coloured people who have us all in stitches at the unique way in which they see things and, better yet, their incredible ability to deliver humour.

If you want to pitch to them Kuli you have to be extremely quick on the draw and possess the necessary timing and powers of observation that allows them to sum up a situation in a flash and drop a few words that explain it, in its entirety, in an instant.

Your piece failed but that does not justify the way in which you have been slaughtered.

In terms of accountability the editorial staff of the Sunday World should have accepted full responsibility and Avusa Media editor-in-chief Mondli Makhanya has said that the company had already begun an internal inquiry.

That is the correct and sensible approach to the matter.

However it is the editorial staff led by Wally Mbhele and not Kuli who need to look in the mirror this morning.

Where she knew what it was that she was trying to say, the editor and the subs are the ones who possess the independence to see what it actually comes across as.

Nobody can check their own work because they know what it is that they are trying to convey but only strangers can see if that comes through in the piece.

Often what you write, when read by a stranger, comes across as complete mumbo jumbo. Half of the ideas that should have created the aggregate of your idea are still in your head and not on the page.

Once pointed out the article will normally achieve what the writer intended.

No doubt on Saturday night Mrs Roberts was eagerly awaiting an enormous response to what she must have thought was the best translation of stand-up comedy into writing in years.

In her mind, using her own version of how she thinks the community speaks, she would have been delivering the routine line by line.

Problem is that a column is just a collection of dry words, without inflection or the faces that stand-ups use to deliver their product to audiences.

As a result most readers would have just read it as a shocking and uncalled for attack on that community.

While she would not have seen that coming why didn’t the editor and his staff pick it up?

They read the same dry garbage that came across to the public.

Either they didn’t think it was racist as it stood and allowed it through, in which case they are at fault or they did pick up the humour and allowed it through unwittingly believing the public would too but made no effort to explain this afterwards, in which case they are at fault.

Accordingly if you want to talk about journalistic hari-kiri on a Tuesday morning rather look to the people who should have picked it up in the first place and come out to bat for this young lady when the proverbial hit the fan.

Or is her career of so little value that skin saving has gone into overdrive?

As for South Africans it’s time for us to start laughing at ourselves — not just saying we do, which is garbage, we don’t — and believing the best in people before turning the lynch mob loose.

The only reasons why Roberts, in the new South Africa, would have unleashed a racist attack in the manner in which this is being portrayed, is if she was insane or suicidal.

I haven’t met her but from what I’ve heard she doesn’t appear to be either.