The Grotesque Symposium of the Tabloid - ai.org.za · paper constitutes a ‘newspaper revolution’5 in ... I may take issue with certain aspects of tabloid reporting (such as the

The Grotesque Symposium of the Tabloid: Reflections for Inclusive Democratic Systems

Sacha Knox1

Using the case study of South Africa, this policy brief attempts to deconstruct essentialist

understandings regarding what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ information through an analysis

of this dichotomy in relation to broadsheet and tabloid newspapers respectively. This dichotomy

is outlined as a socially constructed form of cultural relativism that speaks to a neo-colonial

failure to negotiate between and within different worldviews. If the contemporary public sphere

may be said to be largely constituted through the media, then this observation has potent

implications for inclusion and exclusion within democratic systems – not only do claims of the

superior ethics of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ within the ‘mainstream’ journalistic paradigm

neglect the complexities of lived experience in terms of different ways of knowing, deliberating

and communicating (a train of thought that harks back to colonialist ideologies and paternalistic

attitudes, and their associations with enlightenment thinking) but they also do very little justice

to continued day-to-day realities of inequality. This policy brief will locate the critique of

South African tabloid newspapers as occurring primarily within the frame of a Habermasian

deliberative democracy and point to the possibility for Bakhtin’s conceptions, particularly those

of the carnival and the grotesque symposium, as alternative, and perhaps more appropriate,

frames through which to view this form of media. Viewing tabloids in this way makes it possible

to consider them as rich and vital articulations of mediated politics, citizenship and popular

culture. This policy brief not only encourages policy makers to critically question that which

may be taken for granted as ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ sources of information, but also necessitates

a reconsideration of what actually constitutes inclusive democratic spaces beyond disengaged

and unrealised liberal ideals.

Key words: Tabloid, media, Habermas, Bakhtin, democracy

1© Africa Institute of South Africa AISA POLICYbrief Number 114 – October 2014 111

1. Sacha Knox is a Research Specialist in the Governance and Security Programme of the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA) in the Human Science Research Council (HSRC).

AFRICA INSTITUTE OF SOUTH AFRICA BRIEFINg NO 114 OCTOBER 2014

2 AISA POLICYbrief Number 114 – October 2014 © Africa Institute of South Africa

to Wasserman in an article titled, ‘Attack of the Killer Newspapers!’, this popularity of ink and paper constitutes a ‘newspaper revolution’5 in the context of the newspaper industry elsewhere shuddering with fear of redundancy unless it can radically adapt to new technologies.6 Wasserman states with certainty, ‘the arrival of the new tab-loid newspapers has changed the media landscape in post-apartheid South Africa irrevocably’.7 The problem is that if such essentialist perspectives as outlined at the onset are dominant, than it is not difficult to interpret the landscape of South Africa as somehow ‘going to the dogs’, an unfortunately popular lament for white, middle class, suburban South Africans,8 who often feel justified turning their noses up at the ‘trash’ of ‘Tokoloshe’9 tales now sprawling the isles of their local supermar-kets. While this statement may contain its own elements of essentialism and homogenisation, it points to a strategy that I believe the tabloids themselves often employ, namely, sensationalism in order to speak to wider realities. For example, if not simply disregarded as ‘sensationalism’ the story of the ‘Tokoloshe’ provided in this paper10 could be interpreted as speaking to wider realities within the lives of South African citizens, such as the ongoing negotiation between and within the non-dichotomous, simultaneous and complex positionalities or identities. Further analysis could also point to the wider reality of a sense of help-lessness in the face of the prevalence of gender-based violence and perhaps even HIV/Aids in con-temporary South Africa.11

The point is that tabloid statements need to be located in the world and in lived experience – they are often a form of palimpsest, of layered meaning making, and as such should not necessarily be taken simply as ink on paper. While I may take issue with certain aspects of tabloid reporting (such as the prevalence of homophobic and xenophobic statements,12 as well as gender stereotyping),13 as a white, middle-class South African living in a post-apartheid South Africa there is something that strikes me as particularly arrogant about simply disregarding as ‘trash’14 such an immensely popular form of media, which often carries alternative (in relation to Western, Christian and, in South Africa, often white) worldviews. In other words, it is my feeling that there is something in the disregard for South African tabloid journalism accompanied by the constructed ethical superiority of South African broadsheets15 that speaks to a failure to negotiate and communicate between and within the varying worldviews that constitute the fabric of our country.

Introduction

This policy brief begins with a subjective response to what is perceived as the false dichotomy of ‘truth’ and ‘trash’ prevalent in the landscape of South African journalistic practice, in relation to broadsheet newspapers and tabloid newspapers respectively. This response places this dichotomy as a socially constructed form of cultural relativ-ism that speaks to a failure to negotiate between and within the different worldviews that con-stitute the fabric of contemporary South Africa. This brief will then go on to establish the frame through which this binary opposition is con-structed, namely that of Habermas’ conception of ‘deliberative democracy’ within the ‘public sphere’. Following this, the necessity of viewing tabloids through the frame of Bakhtin’s ‘carnival’ and the ‘grotesque symposium’ will be pointed to. It will be argued that this shift of frame is appropriate when taking into account the socio-economic and political realities of contemporary South African society and that it may, in fact, be essential in order to more fully move towards the social eq-uity somewhat optimistically promised in South Africa’s transition to democracy, drawing par-ticular implications for policy makers concerned with the creation of more equitable and inclusive democratic systems.

Complicating ‘Truth’ and ‘Trash’

If ‘truth’ and ‘trash’ are understood to be di-chotomies, then tabloid newspapers are often articulated as embodiments of the latter extreme,1 pandering to the poorest of tastes. In the context of contemporary South Africa, ‘poor’ here not only refers to matters of aesthetic and ethical judg-ment; it can also refer more literally to the socio-economic status of those to whom such newspa-pers are primarily targeted.2 In a post-apartheid society which remains rife with poverty and where socioeconomic divides are still largely racialised divides (in other words, where social equity is still very much an unrealised ideal), recourse to such attitudes is perhaps essential, as this discourse subtly invokes homogenising conceptions of an inferior ‘other’, not only in terms of the tabloid newspapers themselves, but also in terms of those who consume them.3

South African tabloid newspapers are cur-rently experiencing unprecedented popularity, with the Daily Sun, established in 2002, being the largest newspaper in the country with a regu-lar readership of at least 3.8 million.4 According

3© Africa Institute of South Africa AISA POLICYbrief Number 114 – October 2014

In the first place, tabloids are not in themselves a homogenous entity that can be lumped together for disapproval; they are far more complex and varied than the critique seems to allow.16 It is both this observation and my subjective response to the disregard of tabloids as ‘trash’ rather than ‘truth’ in the context of a post-apartheid South Africa that have provided the impetus for this policy brief. With a concern for ‘wider realities’, as stated earlier, and, therefore, situated contextual knowledge, this paper does not engage in textual analysis. Rather, in an attempt to deconstruct essentialist understandings, this paper will locate the critique of South African tabloid newspapers as occurring primarily within the frame of a Habermasian deliberative democracy and point to the possibility for Bakhtin’s conceptions, particularly those of the carnival and the grotesque symposium, as alternative, and perhaps more appropriate, frames through which to view this media within this context. Thus, South African tabloids will be placed within the socio-political context of post-apartheid South Africa in order to establish them as ‘complex cultural articulations of the often contradictory and shifting processes of transition taking place on various levels’17 and as platforms for and products of ‘the complicated articulations of popular culture, mediated politics, and citizenship in a young democracy’.18 If this may be said to be the case, then ‘truth’ and ‘trash’ are not necessarily the dual oppositions that they are often constructed to be; rather, some ‘trash’ may be found in ‘truth’ and, indeed, some ‘truth’ in ‘trash’.19

Deliberatively Exclusionary?

Habermas’ deliberative or dialogical democracy is based upon a conception of unrestricted rational and informed public debate, independent of the state apparatus, occurring within the public sphere.20 As members of our society do not neces-sarily literally gather in town squares to debate the issues of the day, in the dominant discourse the contemporary public sphere may be said to be constituted largely through the media.21 Thus, ac-cording to the dominant paradigm of ethical and responsible journalistic practice, debate should proceed along the following Habermasian lines, ‘according to universal standards of critical rea-son and argumentative structure that all could recognize and assent to’, without any appeal ‘to traditional dogmas, or to arbitrary subjective prej-udices’.22 However, the actualisation of Habermas’ consensus or ‘discursive will formation’ through

the medium of communicative reason within the public sphere has been criticised for masking a pervasive ‘will to power’ that threatens ‘irreduc-ible value pluralism’.23 This is certainly pertinent for the heterodox and pluralistic nature of such spheres within South Africa and, arguably, for the nature of all such spheres. As Gardiner para-phrases Asen, “Habermas’ stress on a relatively monolithic, overarching public sphere charac-terised by specific regulative mechanisms for ra-tional debate and consensus-building… actively ‘suppresses sociocultural diversity in constituting an arena inimical to difference’”.24 In Habermas’ attempt to establish both inclusive and universal formal criteria for communicative reason aimed at consensus building and in his attempts to sur-mount what he identified as the ‘constraints of a “subject-centered reason”,25 “Habermas fails to grasp adequately the significance of the embod-ied, situational and dialogical elements of every-day human life”’.26

To clarify for the purposes of this paper, if this is the normative framework for journalism in South Africa, the ‘Tokoloshe’ story referred to earlier27 would be disregarded as trash due to its ‘subject-centered reason’. The following critique given by Joan Alway is worth quoting at length as it is particularly germane to our discussion:

[Habermas espouses] a universalism that

depends on a communicatively competent, but

disembodied subject. Such a subject leaves us

unable to acknowledge the important bodily

dimensions of autonomy and self-realization;

such a subject limits our ability to understand

the ways in which domination and resistance

have materialized in and around the bodies of…

oppressed groups; and such a subject inhibits

analysis of the concrete, lived and different

experiences of embodied actors in their everyday

or everynight worlds.28

While the middle and upper classes of South Africa are more easily able to separate them-selves from their bodies and their bodily func-tions through, for example, something as obtuse as highly sanitised flush toilet systems, a great deal of the population of this country are not able to entertain such an illusion. What this analogy points to is the fact that this removed perspective is often a luxury that flaunts a great deal of the realities of lived experience within this country. As Wasserman quotes Glynn, ‘The public (and pri-vate) demonstration of one’s capacity for detach-ment and distantiation… is among the primary practices through which the socially powerful


create and display a sense of their own cultural superiority vis-à-vis the weak’.29

Questioning Neutrality in the Normative

Not only do claims of the superior ethics of ‘ob-jectivity’ and neutrality within the South African ‘mainstream’ journalistic paradigm30 neglect the complexities of lived experience in terms of differ-ent ways of knowing, deliberating and communi-cating (a train of thought that harks back to colo-nialist ideologies and paternalistic attitudes, and their associations with Enlightenment thinking)31 but they also do very little justice to the continued foul-smelling realities experienced in the day-to-day existence of a great deal of the South African population, some twenty years on from the first promises of equality delivered by the post-apart-heid government.32 If the way in which this has been articulated seems somewhat ludicrous in the context of a policy paper, winks at low-brow humour have here been employed as a deliberate strategy in order to subvert the hegemony of the high-brow in the production of knowledge. It is the assertion of this paper that as much knowledge can be contained in such bawdy articulations as in the grammatically beautiful strings of complex words strung between ivory towers.33

What is particularly pertinent for the context of contemporary South Africa is not only that there remains an extremely high rate of illiteracy due to our particular history (and to our particular present) but that, within this context, there are also many different ways of knowing and many different knowledge systems that operate beyond the confines of the written word, as is embodied, for example in South Africa’s rich oral tradition. Bearing these realities in mind, the constructed foundations of ‘quality journalism’, ‘most often associated with textual rather than oral commu-nication patterns (e.g. the use of colloquialisms); with rational debate rather than ritual’34 are clear-ly dubious.35 What has been established at even a cursory glance is that the Habermasian frame-work within which the critique of South African tabloids is often articulated36 is based upon an all-encompassing explanatory system that is not necessarily an appropriate ideal within which to frame the irreducible complexities of the South African context. As Haas and Steiner paraphrase Fraser, ‘a public sphere composed of multiple dis-cursive domains’ is preferable, as ‘in socially strat-ified societies, “arrangements that accommodate contestation among a plurality of publics better

promote the ideal of participatory parity than does a single, comprehensive, overarching public’’’.37

Counter-Discourses as Ethics

In contrast to the Habermasian frame, this paper asserts that the work of Bakhtin is perhaps more adequately suited to the task, as Bakhtin ‘develops what could be termed an “ethics of personalism”, which turns on an unequivocal acknowledgement of the value of otherness in the context of everyday sociality’.38 In other words, for Bakhtin, no genuinely moral philosophy can be formulated without an engaged and embodied or dialogical relation to the other.39 Thus, in contrast to Habermas, for Bakhtin, it is not necessary to ‘engulf the alterity of things in the unity of thought’ nor to retain ‘a sharp distinction between impartial reason on one hand and the embodied and “non-rational” features of human existence on the other’ but rather, ‘it is precisely such an attunement to the vicissitudes and rhythms of daily life that is the hallmark of genuine dialogue and the ethical moment’.40

Viewing tabloids through this frame allows for the possibility of their interpretation as ‘counter-discourses’ and ‘oppositional interpretations’41 of identities, interests and needs.42 This frame points to the fact that claims of neutrality are anything but neutral; rather, such claims ‘could leave journalism supporting the interests of dominant social groups over those of subordinate social groups’, and it is possible that such claims support the status quo ‘as much as does the conventional obsession with factual accuracy’.43 Furthermore, if there is any credence to the popular statement that ‘the personal is political’, South African tabloids, with their often subjective focus on the personal experiences of tabloid readers themselves,44 lend themselves to an interpretation through a more embodied frame in which the personal or the ‘private life world’ is not split off from the public ‘system world’.45 Bakhtin’s approach is also particularly appropriate as a frame for South African tabloids in terms of the conceptions of the ‘carnival’ and the ‘grotesque symposium’. For Bakhtin, the metaphorical ‘carnival square’ is a place where ‘dominant knowledge, a reflection of the “centre of discourse” of officialdom, is challenged by multiple voices’.46 As Meddaugh states, ‘carnival, and its primary agents parody and satire… legitimizes communication practices and behaviors not sanctioned in official life’.47


Towards Alternative Public Spheres

As it has already been established that both the South African tabloids and, often, the citizens at whom they are targeted are in a number of ways excluded from ‘official life’ in terms of Habermas’ conception of the ‘public sphere’, the creation of an alternative public sphere could be said to be essential for the project of democracy in South Africa. Particularly germane is the observation that ‘through sensation and excess, popular texts like tabloids question the dominant social standards and point to the “excessive failure of the normal”… as such, tabloids can be read as having political impact, even if not in the form associated with the rational public sphere of official media’.48 Returning to the carnival, Fletcher has suggested that this notion can include ‘all cultural situations where the authority of a single language and authority is called into question, notably by the simultaneous co-presence of other languages which can challenge it’.49 Within the carnival, Bakhtin calls for a ‘grotesque symposium’ that ‘breaks down fixed and hierarchical distinctions’50 such as those made by Habermas, which Bakhtin identifies as complicit with ‘the desire to control the power to mean, to limit the semantic flux of the sign’.51

Essentially, the concept of the ‘grotesque symposium’ asserts that it is crucial for a primordial heteroglossia to ‘wash over a culture’s awareness of itself and its language, penetrate it to the core, relativise the primary language system underlying [the] ideology [of a unified language] and deprive it of its naïve absence of conflict’.52 If South African tabloids are examined through this frame, then it becomes clear that ‘the typical irreverent tabloid approach can do more than satirise and undermine’,53 tabloids can, as a part of popular culture in a post-apartheid society, ‘force us to redefine our understanding of the public sphere and indeed of politics itself”.54 In other words, to seriously engage with the realm of popular culture is to ‘divest governmental politics of its frightening grandeur… it is to make clear that politics is not something belonging to (informed) elite, that you need to qualify for – but it is about who we are, and what we, all of us, want to make of the world we live in’.55

Conclusion

In conclusion, it must be stated that this paper has not necessarily sought to deify the South African tabloid. As was established earlier,

this particular form of media often employs homophobic and xenophobic statements and in terms of both text and imagery often perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes. However, what this paper has attempted to establish is that the critique of tabloid newspapers often occurs within a framework that provides what Wasserman refers to as a form of ‘paradigm repair’56 for the journalistic orthodoxy, where the tabloid becomes the ‘scapegoat’.57 This points to the fact that the ‘critical debate around tabloids has been focused largely on getting tabloids to conform’, using that critique ‘more to re-establish the existing professional boundaries of journalism in the country rather than to examine the journalistic culture in the country more broadly’.58 What this paper has tried to establish is that the ‘grotesque symposium’ offered by the tabloids is perhaps a necessary one in light of the socio-economic and political context of a post-apartheid South Africa, and in light of the plurality of worldviews that constitutes the fabric of this country.

As Fordred-Green quotes Foucault and asserts with regard to the cultural politics of South African journalism, ‘the challenge for a non-racial South African journalism is “not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth already is power), but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time”’.59,60 The observations of this paper carry weighty implications for policy makers not only because they encourage policy makers to critically question what they take for granted to be ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ sources of information, but also because they necessitate a reconsideration of what actually constitutes democratic spaces beyond intangible and unrealised liberal ideals. Through the case study of South Africa, this policy brief has highlighted that tabloids are potentially rich and vital sources of information for policy makers concerned with the creation of more equitable and inclusive democratic systems.

References1 Wasserman, H., 2010. Tabloid Journalism in South Africa;

True Story!, pp.60-64. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

2 Ibid. p.85.

3 Ibid. p.59.

4 Wasserman, H., 2008. Attack of the Killer Newspapers!, Journalism Studies, 9(5), p.787.

5 Ibid. p.786.

6 Ibid.


7 Ibid. p.788.

8 Wasserman, H., 2010. Tabloid Journalism in South Africa; True Story!, p.65. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

9 The ‘Tokoloshe’ is ‘a domestic spirit of Xhosa origin, but widely believed in by many South Africans’. Steenveld, L. and Strelitz, L., 2010. Trash or Popular Journalism? The Case of South Africa’s Daily Sun. Journalism, 11(5), p.545.

10 See the ‘Annex’ for content from the South African tabloid the ‘Daily Sun’.

11 Fordred-Green, L., 2000. Tokoloshe Tales: Reflections on the Cultural Politics of Journalism in South Africa. Current Anthropology, 41(5), p.705.

12 Wasserman, H., 2010. Tabloid Journalism in South Africa; True Story!, pp.111- 117. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

13 Ibid. p.148-149.

14 Ibid. p.63.

15 Wasserman, H., 2008. Attack of the Killer Newspapers! Journalism Studies, 9(5), p.789.

16 Merrill, J., 2005. Two Faces of Tabloidism. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies, 26(2).


18 Ibid. p.176.

19 Lenta, P. The Tikoloshe and the Reasonable Man: Transgressing South African Legal Fictions. Law and Literature, 16 (3).

20 Gardiner, M.E., 2004. Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Everyday Life and the Public Sphere. The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review, p.28. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell Publishing Limited.

21 Siebörger, I. and Adendorff, R.D., 2009. Newspaper Literacy and Communication for Democracy: Is there a Crisis in South African Journalism? Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 27(4). Steenveld, L. and Strelitz, L., 2010. Trash or Popular Journalism? The Case of South Africa’s Daily Sun. Journalism, 11(5).



24 Asen in Gardiner, M.E., 2004. Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Everyday Life and the Public Sphere. The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review, p.29. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell Publishing Limited.


26 Ibid.

27 See the ‘Annex’ for content from the South African tabloid the Daily Sun.

28 Alway in Gardiner, M.E., 2004. Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Everyday Life and the Public Sphere. The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review, p.31. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell Publishing Limited.

29 Glynn in Wasserman, H., 2010. Tabloid Journalism in South Africa; True Story!, p.66. Indiana: Indiana University Press.


31 Siebörger, I. and Adendorff, R.D., 2009. Newspaper Literacy and Communication for Democracy: Is there a Crisis in South African Journalism? Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 27(4), p.416.


33 Strelitz in Wasserman, H., 2010. Tabloid Journalism in South Africa; True Story!, p.72. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

34 Ibid. p.66.

35 Fordred-Green, L., 2000. Tokoloshe Tales: Reflections on the Cultural Politics of Journalism in South Africa. Current Anthropology, 41(5), p.708.

36 See, for example, Wasserman, H., 2010. Tabloid Journalism in South Africa; True Story! Indiana: Indiana University Press, and Steenveld, L. and Strelitz, L., 2010. Trash or Popular Journalism? The Case of South Africa’s Daily Sun. Journalism, 11(5).

37 Fraser in Haas, T. and Steiner, L., 2001. Public Journalism as a Journalism of Publics. Journalism, 2(2) p.131.


39 Gardiner, M.E., 2004. Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Everyday Life and the Public Sphere. The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review, pp.32-33. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell Publishing Limited.


41 Fraser in Haas, T., and Steiner, L., 2001. Public Journalism as a Journalism of Publics. Journalism, 2(2), p.131.

42 Wasserman, H., 2010. Tabloid Journalism in South Africa; True Story!, p.85 Indiana: Indiana University Press.

43 Haas, T., and Steiner, L., 2001. Public Journalism as a Journalism of Publics. Journalism, 2(2), p.133.

44 Wasserman, H., 2010. Tabloid Journalism in South Africa; True Story!, pp.87,92. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

45 Steenveld, L. and Strelitz, L., 2010. Trash or Popular Journalism? The Case of South Africa’s Daily Sun. Journalism, 11(5), p.535.

46 Meddaugh, P.M., 2010. Bakhtin, Colbert, and the Centre of Discourse: Is There No Truthiness in Humor? Critical Studies in Media Communication, 27(4) p.379.

47 Ibid.

48 Wasserman, H., 2010. Tabloid Journalism in South Africa; True Story!, p.85 Indiana: Indiana University Press.

49 Fletcher in Meddaugh, P.M., 2010. Bakhtin, Colbert, and the Centre of Discourse: Is There No Truthiness in Humor? Critical Studies in Media Communication, 27(4), p.379.



51 Gardiner, 2004. ‘Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Everyday Life and the Public Sphere.’ In The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review. Blackwell Publishing Limited: Oxford, Malden: 37. Ibid.

52 Bakhtin in Gardiner, M.E., 2004. Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Everyday Life and the Public Sphere. The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review, p.38. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell Publishing Limited.


54 Ibid. p.117.

55 Hermes in Wasserman, H., 2010. Tabloid Journalism in South Africa; True Story!, p.117. Indiana: Indiana University Press.



58 Ibid. p.65.

59 Foucault in Fordred-Green, L., 2000. Tokoloshe Tales: Reflections on the Cultural Politics of Journalism in South Africa. Current Anthropology, 41(5), p.711.

60 Fordred-Green, L., 2000. Tokoloshe Tales: Reflections on the Cultural Politics of Journalism in South Africa. Current Anthropology, 41(5).


SunSuDAILY

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– and he’s only this high!– and he’s only this high!

TOKOLOSHETOKOLOSHESPLITSSPLITSCOUPLE!COUPLE!

By SIBONISO SHOZIUNHAPPY Bhekekhaya no longer lets his wife sleep in the bedwith him.That is because a small, hairy toko-

loshe, with a beard, who is only abouta metre high, is threatening to teartheir relationship apart.AND IN THE MARRIAGE BED

OF BHEKEKHAYA AND DELIS-ILE, THERE IS VERY LITTLEHAPPINESS.When trouble first started coming to

their house, Delisile Mthembu (44) andBhekekhaya Meyiwa (60) from Efolweni,southofDurban, thoughttheywouldfightthis thing together.But the little tokoloshe had other ideas!“Whenever I sleep in the bed with my

husband, the tokoloshe drags me off thebed,” said Delisile.

YOUR

WINTER WARMERON PAGE 2!

Delisile Mthembu and herhusband Bhekekhaya Meyiwasay they were attacked by atokoloshe.

Photo by Abraham Kortjaas

CONTINUED ON PAGE 2

MZANSI’S SEXIEST CITIES! SEE SUNLiFE ON SUNDAY!MZANSI’S SEXIEST CITIES! SEE SUNLiFE ON SUNDAY!

Annexure:


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Daily Sun subscribes to the SouthAfrican Press Code that prescribesnews that is truthful, accurate, fairand balanced. If we don’t live up tothe Code please contact the PressOmbudsman at 011 484 3612/8 orfax 011 484 3619 or visit the websitewww.presscouncil.org.za.

Bishop’s holy water fails to keep tokoloshe awayCONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

“I wake up in the middle of thenight on the cold floor.”

Now the poor woman sleeps ona mattress on the floor and they areworried that the tokoloshe mightstill rape her.

She said that her ordeal startedas long ago as February and it be-came so bad that last month theygot a bishop to come to their house.

“He prayed and sprinkled thehouse with holy water, but that on-ly made things worse!” she said.

“That same night the tokoloshe

was back. He was very angry andtoldmethathewasn’t scaredofwa-ter from a tap.”

Bhekekhaya said that at first thetokoloshe attacked him.

“Then later he moved on to mywife,” he said.

“I work night shift many nightsand who can tell if he wants to sleepwith my wife or not?”

He said he knows when the toko-loshe is bothering his wife.

“She starts to breathe heavily.She snores and makes horriblenoises,” he said.

“And many times I immediatelyget very tired and fall asleep as ifI have been drugged.”

He said they pray all the time.“But this thing keeps coming

back!” he said.Delisile said the tokoloshe told

herthat there isa familyintheareawho are against them.

“We don’t really know them. Idon’t know what they would have

against us because we have neverhad a problem with them,” saidDelisile.

Induna Squmfe Mkhize said it isoften difficult to help with thesematters.

“I have been warned to stayaway,” he said.

“I went there to get the familiestalking but when I went to the fami-ly who is supposed to be sendingthe tokoloshe they told me theywould set their dogs on me.”

A well-known and respected tra-ditional healer, Sazi Mhlongo, said

the family must visit a traditionalhealer who will be able to reflectthe evil back to the sender.

“Then the family will get theirlives together again,” he said.

Cut out the clue (right) and stick iton your entry form.You must stick itin the square with the same number.Your entry form should now be full!Fill in your details and Post it off to:PO BOX 291528 Melville 2109.

CLUE

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ANC RACE READY TO STARTConference to discuss key policies for the ruling party

By SIMON NARETHE battle for the soul of the ANC is about tobegin.

On Tuesday the party will gather to dis-cuss 13 key policies.

In a discussion document, the party ad-mits it faces a “crisis of credibility andmust use the upcoming elective conferencein Mangaung as a turning point or it willsoon “reach a stage where it is irreversi-ble.”

Three main weaknesses identified are;) The decay of the ANC’s values,) In-fighting and) Organisational capabilities that don’t matchdemands of the current phase of the revolution.Discussion around the “Second Transition” and

proposed entry to the second phase of democracyis also expected to take centre stage, where focuswill be on social and economic transformation

over the next 30 to 50 years.On the land issue, there has been a

general consensus that the “willingseller-willing buyer” system hasfailed.

The party said land dispossessionproduced negative consequences andconsigned the majority to the mostunproductive land.

This resulted in land ownership biased infavour of a minority racial group and dislocationof the social and economic systems of the majority.

“A clear purpose of both redistribution and resti-tution will be to continue offering the landless ac-

cess to land for residential and productive uses, inorder to improve their income and quality of life,”the document states.

The conference is expected to focus on socialgrants, currently benefiting over 15 million SouthAfricans which the government says is not sustain-able.

President Zuma has called for initiatives thatwould reduce the number of people dependent onstate grants.

The document proposes ways to deal with whatthe ANC has described as triple challenges of un-employment, inequality and poverty.

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