The day Percy pitched me onto the street

I’m pretty damn sure I was the first white person in South Africa to be fired by a black person.

I am revealing this little-known truth now in the hope that such credentials might earn me a place at the back of the queue behind those gay, disabled, half-Chinese women standing in line for some of that empowerment loot.

My sacking took place in the late-Seventies when you would have been hard-pressed to find a black supervisor let alone a black manager in our beloved country. I was working for Sunday Post newspaper as a junior subeditor. Post was owned by the Argus Company, which had reluctantly found itself caught up in the struggle when its World newspaper became collateral damage in the October ’77 swoop on the Black Consciousness movement.

The darkie who had caused all the trouble for Argus was World editor Percy Qoboza who, throughout the 76 riots and its aftermath, had driven his journalists hard to cover the Soweto uprising and they had done a superb job considering the meagre resources dispensed by the Argus Co’s famously frugal Catholic mafia. Qoboza himself rose to the occasion with powerful editorials and spent six months in detention for his efforts.

Percy Qoboza

After the banning of World/Weekend World, Argus immediately created Post and Sunday Post, and Qoboza resumed his editorship after his release from jail. Percy Qoboza was my boss.

My sacking was a surreal experience. I had written a headline over an innocuous picture story showing a group of PAC treason trialists being carted away in a black maria after their conviction. The headline I had naively written said: Hamba kahle bafo wetho (Go well, brothers) without any distancing quotation marks. Now we Post journalists were not exactly paid-up members of the objective school of journalism; our news editor Zwelakhe Sisulu would later famously demand of journalists that under apartheid we had to choose sides — either become part of the struggle or part of the problem; quotation marks seemed so irrelevant, so trivial.

Percy must have thought otherwise because on the Monday morning he shafted me with pin-striped precision: there I was, a white kid on the streets after being fired by a black boss for saluting struggle heroes. It was, well, disappointing; confusing even.

Having learnt nothing from that experience I later joined a solidarity strike of white journalists in support of members of the black-only media union MWASA who were engaged in a protracted dispute with the Argus Co. The MWASA guys — especially Sisulu — were really pissed off and told us to piss off; gestures of racial camaraderie actually sabotaged their cause.

Some years later when I was news editor of City Press, Percy was appointed editor. We got on quite famously this time around. Often on Fridays the gin bottle would emerge around lunchtime and remain in circulation for the remainder of the afternoon.

Thinking about this piece, I Googled “Qoboza” hoping to refresh my memory of the man. Sadly, there is but a thin sliver of information about Percy and just two photographs stashed on the Web. Apart from a New York Times obituary (Percy died young, on his 50th birthday of a heart attack in 1988) and a few Nieman Foundation snippets (he was a Fellow), there really isn’t much about him.

You can read Percy’s NYT obit here:

Denis Pather also wrote a warm and thoughtful tribute to Percy.

Qoboza, I think, has been treated poorly by history; his life and work deserve much more attention, a fresh appraisal, greater respect. He was, in his day, a truly heroic figure, not revolutionary enough for the Black Consciousness youth, but pretty damn fearless nonetheless.

He was a controversial figure, arrogant and abrasive and a seriously heavy drinker. But he wielded a powerful pen and used it to great effect.

I recall Percy fondly and owe him a debt of gratitude for teaching me early on in my career that, used skillfully, quotation marks can be journalistic bullets — you can get away with murder with them.