CLIFF ON EDGE
Never one to leave a scandal unmonetised, Gareth Cliff has written an engagingly pissed-off memoir, writes Carlos Amato
BOOKS by celebrity broadcasters can be redundant vanity projects, serving only to regurgitate ideas they have already aired, in industrial quantities, during their day jobs. But it does help matters if the author in question has an axe or two to grind — and Gareth Cliff’s memoir, Cliffhanger, packs just enough print-exclusive animus to keep it readable.
He was digitally pilloried in January for an ill-timed but fairly inoffensive tweet (“People really don’t understand freedom of speech”) he posted in the wake of the Penny Sparrow racism furore. In response, M-Net fired him as an Idols judge — only to be nailed in court for unfair dismissal when Cliff engaged the EFF politician and ace advocate Dali Mpofu SC.
The whole preposterous tale can be deemed a monumental strategic blunder by the pay-TV giant. But Cliff’s biggest beef in his book is not with his former employers but with the censorious “social justice warriors” of South African Twitter — a “kangaroo court” who are “drunk on their own sense of moral authority”. Racism is real and rife, he says, but he’s not it — and the hunt for racist speech on social media can inflict significant collateral damage in the shape of slanderous bullying of undeserving targets.
Fair point. Needless to say, Cliff can look after himself — over
nearly two decades on air, he has built his massive clout by wandering along, and sometimes beyond, the frontier of unacceptable speech. His crude and cold celebration of the death of Manto Tshabalala-Msimang — an outburst he regrets — was arguably his nadir. But until Sparrowgate, the periodic spasms of outrage he provoked served only to strengthen his position as the voice of young South African liberal smart-assery.
Cliff has expertly channelled and shaped the irreverent and often facile sensibilities of an initially white but increasingly multiracial, suburban youth culture. As he is willing to tell you, he promotes an iconoclastic, anti-parochial, libertarian, secular humanist world view. It’s a punchy package — and one that appeals to black and white audiences alike.
But there’s a glibness and smugness to Cliff which is grating to many, whether or not they consider him a racist. While the argument he makes for the sanctity of free speech is coherent and hard to refute on its own terms, it does not acknowledge the wide and many-shaded boundaries of South Africa’s spectrum of racist and sexist thought.
The kneejerkery of Twitter’s antiracism warriors is made by structural racism; dispassionate thought is always a casualty of intolerable injustice, and it’s easy to be doctrinaire about the principle of free speech when you’re a rich, successful white man who grew up unassailed by dehumanising hate. The fact that identity politics has produced a hysterical and intellectually sterile rhetorical assault on “whiteness” does not erase the pre-existing and continuing assault on “blackness”.
To be fair, Cliff does briefly discuss his colonial ancestry (his distant forebear, Wessel Schout Pretorius, landed at the Cape in 1658) as an influence on his psyche. In a brisk discussion about epigenetics — the theory that the psychological scars of our ancestors’ experiences are passed down to our own DNA — Cliff locates some smallanyana skeletons lurking in his family tree. One Lady Anne Gordon, his greatgreat-great-great-grandmother, owned a tobacco estate in Jamaica — and 18 slaves. “Every male ancestor of mine, as far back as I can go, was involved in some kind of open conflict, and was usually conscripted to do so . . . It’s no wonder men have such a problem finding peaceful resolutions to conflict; we have a preponderance of violence in our inheritance.”
It figures that Cliff also has some bookish genes in his pool: his greatgranddad was the historian Gustav Preller, who wrote biographies of Lobengula, Moshoeshoe, Mpande and various Voortrekker leaders. Cliff has a proper brain on him, no doubt — but you get the sense throughout the book that the smirking self-satisfaction of stardom has cost him the depth that true iconoclasts need to have.
And even in the unavoidably reductive formats of radio and TV, and even when a broadcaster is obliged to be funny and provocative, there is room for more subtlety and rigour than Cliff offers the national conversation — as 702’s ferociously smart Eusebius McKaiser is demonstrating.
It seems Cliff’s most valuable insights are entrepreneurial: his CliffCentral podcast channel, now joined by Touch Central, a 24-hour radio channel anchored by former Metro FM star Tbo Touch, is opening up a brave new world of online broadcasting in South Africa. With the SABC’s credibility crumbling, and the youth market increasingly indifferent to mainstream media, we need free and dynamic alternatives, and Cliff is delivering those, and grooming a cohort of gifted young broadcasters in the process.
In the book, Cliff tells us at some length about why he’s a new-media visionary, and fair play to him. You can’t be a modest soul if you want to be a celebrity broadcaster, and you can’t be a saint if you want to remain one.
Haters gonna hate, he says, and he takes a forgivable pleasure in belittling the rage of his trolls. “As a rule on social media, a person’s level of anger is often inversely proportional to the number of followers they have. In other words, you’ll find that someone shouting in an empty room usually says the vilest things of all. I call it Arsehole’s Law.”