Permission to speak freely
About the free speech of Gareth Cliff, Dali Mpofu and Richard Spoor
Some months ago Sam Cowan and Gareth Cliff spoke at the Lowveld Book Festival about life in the public eye and the drawbacks of telling it all to a greedy public. I was there, and was greedy for some answers to some questions about our intoxication with free speech.
South African radio personality Sam Cowen’s book From Whiskey to Water is one of those books that delight social workers. Sam is a popular radio talk-show host who has not shirked from speaking freely about demon drink.
Sam is an alcoholic.
She found her way to sobriety with the support of Alcoholics Anonymous, but soon found herself with a process addiction to eating. She climbed out of that by submerging herself in water, and now finds her solace in the swimming pool.
In the preface she says her book is not about,
“how I stopped drinking, started eating, became clinically obese, stopped eating (everything that wasn’t nailed down) and swam my way to freedom”.
“It is about addiction and learning and sadness and anxiety and love and drive. It’s about channeling the unchangeable into the miraculous. It’s about dragons and learning how to put them to sleep when you cant slay them. It’s about being my own Daenerys”.
Check out her FaceBook and Instagram pages and you will see she also loves sun, sky and cloud shots. That’s good. Clients tell me they find it therapeutic to gaze up to sky at times of depression, crisis and distress. In tribute to Sam, here’s one for her collection, with words from Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” embossed.
I chanced upon this skyscape on New Year’s eve in 2002, while on holiday with my family at the Sani Pass Resort. I promise, it is not photoshopped. Something to contemplate as a thematic for this essay.
The cracks in Sams life widened into large fissures, but in keeping with Leonard Cohen’s minstrel ministry, she has let more light penetrate for healing and hope. As one who has enjoyed much limelight, she speaks her own truth about the deep darkness that exists behind the spotlight.
“If I was given two weeks left to live, I would be in the bottle store like a shot”, she confessed at the Lowveld Book Festival in August last year. She was in conversation with an eager audience together with another popular but much more controversial radio and TV personality, ‘Shockjock’ Gareth Cliff.
Gareth was promoting his book, Cliffhanger. The cover blurb says:
“From campus radio to host of South Africa’s biggest youth breakfast show to pioneering his own online hub, Gareth Cliff has always claimed the headlines with his brand of strong opinion and whiplash wit. He has been suspended from the airwaves or crucified by his critics more times than he can remember — whether for interviewing himself as Jesus or comparing Shaka Zulu to Cecil John Rhodes. Most recently, Cliff was fired by M-Net as one of the Idols judges after facing accusations of racism over the Penny Sparrow incident. He fought back, employing the services of the EFF’s Dali Mpofu, and was reinstated.”
It was fascinating to have Sam and Gareth, both highly skilled communicators, exchange thoughts and insights about life in the public eye. They steered each other along. All very entertaining and edifying.
When the eager audience were invited to join the conversation, I leaped to my feet.
“Sam, I am a social worker in the late stage of a forty-year career. I have read your book with zeal. For months I have been desperate to ask you a burning question…. But now I have forgotten what it was.”
That raised some laughs, pumping up my dopamine levels to embolden me to engage further.
“I think it had something to do with the fact that social workers don’t feature in the book. Is there anything you have got to say for the benefit of those of us in the helping professions who have to help our clients deal with their addictions?”
I probably should have stopped there, but decided to frame it with the powerful insight that fellow social worker and writer Brené Brown shared with her 3.5 million followers about the necessity of owning ones story. If you fail to do so, you abdicate the conclusion to someone (or something) else.
“I get the impression that you have taken ownership of your own story. I ask this because I have found your book extremely helpful to give to clients to read, because it carries the authority of someone with extraordinary courage to do that.”
I probably should have stopped with the double tot. But given that Gareth Cliff was sitting next to her, I could not resist adding a shooter.
“A question for you too Gareth. Do you perhaps have your own chronic dependency? A ‘process addiction’ to free speech?”
The backstory:
Gareth had been sucked into a twitter storm in early 2016 after a local estate agent from the South Coast, Penny Sparrow invoked her right to freedom of expression to complain about the state of the beaches after the New Year holiday season, likening black people to “monkeys”.
“People don’t understand free speech at all”, Gareth tweeted. Gareth did not understand that sometimes its better to shut up.
Despite owning up to being an “insensitive asshole” at times and apologising, Gareth continued to trend on twitter for two days, but came around to acknowledge, “as regards free speech and hate speech, I need to continue my education”.
That wasn’t good enough for MNET. Despite Gareth having become something of a fixture on their “Idols” talent show, wary about the harm he had done to their brand, they fired him. He fought back and won.
Gareth went first. He doesn’t enjoy free speech discussions. “They get me into enormous trouble. That whole episode was the most miserable professional time of my life — and whether I have a process addiction or not, speaking my mind is precisely what I do for a living”.
He said his absolute commitment to free speech, even when people abuse it to ventilate their racist attitudes, was not because he agreed with them. “I want to know what is going on inside the heads of such people, and be prepared for it”.
He disclosed that he had been disinclined to take MNET to court.
“In fact I was happy to move on from Idols. I was getting bored with it. Also it is never a good idea to go to court on a matter of principle. But Dali Mpofu is a friend of mine, and persuaded me to do so. We won and MNET lost.”
There was an exquisite irony inherent in the mention of the controversial outspoken advocate, former CEO of the SABC (who left with an R11 million severance package) and National Chair of the Economic Freedom Fighters.
Seated next to me was someone whom Dali Mpofu had once threatened to take to the equality court for exercising his right to free speech on FaceBook: Richard Spoor. Google his name and click the “news” tab and budget time for a few hours of reading.
Richard Spoor and I have been friends since 2006, combining our social worker/lawyer roles to challenge social injustice with a “good cop/bad cop” routine to Name, Unmask and Engage the Powers, especially those responsible for letting mining rights trump human rights.
But Richard’s public offering has not been perfect either.
In October 2015 Richard got himself into trouble for his very unhelpful explanation as to why there were no black lawyers among the 30 or so legal representatives representing black mineworkers in their class action lawsuit to secure compensation for having contracted lung diseases from silica dust while working underground in South African gold mines.
Spoor uses social media as a confessional to ventilate his thoughts. He tried to explain the racial asymmetry on somebody else’s timeline. It backfired spectacularly. The black legal fraternity, led by Mpofu (who was at the time Chair of the Johannesburg Bar Association and President of Advocates for Transformation), refused to accept Spoor’s apology and retraction, spurned his offer to meet with them and did not rule out the prospect of pressing charges against Spoor in the Equality Court.
“We believe one cannot apologise for harbouring and articulating racist beliefs about the inherent inferiority of fellow human beings”, Mpofu had fumed.
GroundUp helped a fellow activist Pasika Nontshiza and me frame the dreadful saga in a larger context and try to distil the truths in a greater whole.
Before writing the article, I managed to have a brief conversation with Dali Mpofu on the steps of the Johannesburg High Court during this much publicised protest to plead with him to consider the interests of Richard Spoors clients. He was dismissive. “This has nothing to do with his clients”.
Perhaps not. But was it all about race? Or maybe about the money? His response prompted me to write some more words, which NoseWeek eagerly published to try and ferment the bitter lemon into a sobering cider for the benefit of all legal practitioners who get too high on their own juice.
A few weeks later the Penny Sparrow racism controversy erupted. It served to both eclipse the race row around Richard Spoor and give Dali Mpofu a chance to shine and show that he was quite capable (or should that be culpable?) of juggling balls of contradiction: lambast a fellow lawyer for “entrenched racist beliefs about the inherent inferiority of blacks” while defending Gareth Cliff’s right to speak freely to defend the racist Penny Sparrow’s right to speak freely.
There can be no view other than from a view point. Subjective perception and objective reality seldom square. That is why triangulation is so important. The easy reduction to binaries may, in the short term, give the illusion of control, but the infinitely complex reality of the real world quickly exposes the dumbing down as mere self-deception.
“If only it was so simple!” wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
“Yes John, we all have our blind spots” I can hear the voice of one of my mentors and guides telling me “But they do not show up as dark patches. We don’t know we have them”.
Well, yes and no.
The conscious, ego driven, self-preserving mind doesn’t see the blind spots, but dark patches are ‘seen’ by the sub-conscious mind. And of course everyone else — friends and enemies. What we are speaks more loudly than what we say. I may think I am saving the world from a monstrous evil, but in reality may be simply be virtue signalling to win public approval, to compensate for a childhood trauma of abandonment.
As is now evident my addiction is to not simply ask questions of people in the public eye, but to do so when “the public” is present. It is a compulsion. I can’t stop myself from opening my mouth, and phoning in to talk shows. It is nerve wracking because I am never quite sure what is going to come out once I have opened my mouth, and whether I will be able to stop once the “question” gets popped.
We live in an extremely dependency-producing society. None of us are immune.
We tend to only think of addiction as a matter of dependence on harmful substances like alcohol, drugs, nicotine, sugar, coffee etc. Since Anne Wilson Schaef’s best seller When Society Becomes an Addict was published in 1988 insight has grown into the “addictive system” that “calls forth addictive behaviours”. Shaef distinguishes between Substance Addictions (usually artificially refined or produced that are almost always mood-altering and lead to increased physical dependence) and Process Addictions (habitual behaviours that stimulate the release of dopamine in the reward centre of the brain). Freedom has become a historical, cultural, political and social imperative, but the “addictive process”, ironically increasingly curtails the very freedom we cherish, and robs the individual of “choices in terms of the roles they must take and directions they may pursue”. The tonic of Liberty becomes a toxic licence to over-indulge. Human Rights become disconnected from human responsibility.
Shopping, sex, religion, work, commercial TV, computer gaming, gambling all have the potential to end up with the same harmful consequences that ingested substances produce. Up to a certain threshold secretions of dopamine have a tonic effect. Once that threshold is crossed the same chemical substance becomes toxic, with the same risks and dangers that ingested substances produce if over ingested.
So, can free speech really become a ‘process addiction’ too?
One day I hope discuss that question at a dinner party with Dali Mpofu, Richard Spoor and Gareth Cliff as guests.
I had better invite Sam Cowan too, as it will test my skills to facilitate the free speech binge fest without me getting drawn into a bare knuckle brawl and a hangover next day while trying to my explain to my neighbours what the commotion was all about. Sam, with eleven years of sobriety, will no doubt use her wit and charm to keep us civil, make it fun, and insert her story to gently encourage us to own ours.
No alcohol will be served, both in deference to Sam and because I am really interested to see if we can all sober up to see the underlying addictive process that may be bedevilling the realisation of the fuller potential of highly gifted people like Richard, Dali and Gareth.
The great paradox of life is that our “enemies” will tend to be more brutally honest about our blind spots than our friends. Loving them may just turn out to be a very good idea. Let’s give them permission to speak freely. For ultimately “spirit or shared consciousness is the ultimate, substantial, and real thing”, according to spiritual writer Richard Rohr. Anne Wilson Schaef gets the last word.
“We must move in our recovery from one addiction to another for two major reasons: first, we have not recognized and treated the underlying addictive process, and second, we have not accurately isolated and focused upon the specific addictions.”
This is Brené Brown’s Live FaceCast. It is a response to the events at Charlottesville and directed mainly at white America but it doesn’t require much imagination to transpose to South Africa.
And if you want to understand the deeper roots of Brown’s insight, listen to Anne Wilson Shaef’s talk which give the gist of her book “When Society Becomes an Addict”
