THIS MORNING I awoke to social media by a veteran journalist, reposting the words of a KZN academic about one of the seminal moments of my generation, an event known as Purple Rain. One would expect a journalist whose writing, often on behalf of a major weekly, suggest she is more than capable of checking her sources, to be a source of truth.
What follows is an abject lesson in why apartheid memory is slipping away from a generation moving into senility and old age.
Trouble with her nugget of a post — not only did they both get the dates wrong, the Post-Tiananmen Square event with its attached image, occurred on 2 September 1989 not 30 October 1985 — this year is the 36 anniversary not the 40th, a fact backed up by the Sunday Times Heritage Project, things got a lot more confusing besides.
“PURPLE RAIN … screamed the headline: “It’s the Women’s March in Cape Town that we seemed to have pushed out of the recesses of our memory” enthused the academic “because we are made to believe that the only women’s march was the march to Pretoria.” Was the academic perhaps testing us all by raising a bizarre point about memory?
That’s odd, I thought, I can’t be that old, as I begin subtracting the anniversary from my age.
Yet another faux pas was revealed: “On this day in 1985 women in Cape Town marched down Adelaide Street (sic) to protest against the deployment of soldiers in townships. They were sprayed by the police with Purple Rain.”
Trouble is, Purple Rain was a general march against apartheid, nothing to do specifically with women as such. The event occurred in Church street, Cape Town, not Adelaide street, Brisbane (Presumably a street in Australia?)
I was thus with Nat Tardrew (captured flying the middle finger in a red hat behind the Shawco van) and the late Billy Mandindi when the two came back drenched with purple dye, sitting with Billy in Tardrew’s car as he picked up a piece of lino and determined to record the event as a printed art work.
I inboxed the academic only to receive a link back pointing to a Mail and Guardian article supposedly by one Moira Levy
The image itself is cropped from the same image I scanned from Die Suid-Afrikaan for the Wikimedia Foundation, along with its South African National Library stamp and date, November 1989.
Confabulating History
The Levy article appears to be a confabulation of a previous article which may have once appeared in the Weekly Mail, and which may predate the actual event? A slug suggests it to be a rewrite of a South African Press Association news brief, who remembers SAPA?
In other words, somebody along the way, may have rewritten a story about a women’s march which may have occurred in October of 1985, then added in the Purple Rain water cannon details from the September 1989 event, when the articles were digitised?
SAPS used water up until the very first use of the purple dye in 1989.
The Mail and Guardian did not exist in 1985, nor 1989, so the source is rather questionable. Typical of a media outlet that destroyed my book review of A Secret Burden (The Border War – Memories of the War by South African Soldiers Who Fought in it), which refuses to acknowledge any guilt, and has failed to provide compensation to this day?
The Weekly Mail, a print-only publication, only became the Mail & Guardian in 1995. This rebranding followed a partnership with the UK’s Guardian Media Group, which became the majority shareholder in the paper that year. Like most of South Africa’s press, it went online over Y2K, the original newspaper’s articles are all in archives.
Could the article and its dateline, be deliberate misinformation,or something more malign, an attempt to avoid any implication of 1989 like Tienanmen? Was it the accidental result of foreign AI delivering woke ideology, same as images of America’s founding fathers, re-imagined by Gemini, seeking to please everyone with thoughtful adherence to DEI?
In the future, South Africa’s non-racial anti-apartheid protests may mistakenly be cast as exclusively female affairs, the Rainbow culture which congregated on Greenmarket Square in 1989 is being reduced to an ersatz facsimile — merely to conform with contemporary academic notions of intersectionality — every protestor is now suddenly a disabled transsexual opposed to Zionism or railing against Taiwan?
Post-thought. So I take another look at today’s online Mail & Guardian, which carries total garbage, like “Why the HUAWEI WATCH GT 6 Pro is the top pick for style, performance and endurance“, as most South Africans, I no longer read. The outlet is a highly subsidized media trap, a quasi-government technocrat site stuck in the technology of 2010, plastered with advertising from the Nelson Mandela Foundation for a lecture by Franceska Albanese, feeding on its own entrails.
