Adieux: Despair as the lights grow dimmer

AS WE bid farewell to Vrye Weekblad, my despair over our future deepens. You will forgive me, I am sure, for sounding glum and terribly pessimistic. I am always pessimistic about our world. It has to do with reading too many works of dead white men from Europe and Russia. It has to do, also, with a mad rush deeper into a world where we are told what to believe, and where our achievements in science and technology, cultural exchange and human endeavour, are all measured in terms of monetary or economic value. In this world nothing makes sense if it does not make cents.

That is a general concern I have about the way that the lights of independent journalism, beyond the fakery of objectivity, are growing dimmer around the world. We may be left in the not too distant future with a journalism that is compliant, shaped by fear that leads to self-censorship, and driven by the caprices of fashion and funding. In each of its lives, Vrye Weekblad has always resisted the seduction of easy money, and avoided convenient irresponsibility.

When the great news magazine Les Temps Modernes shut down in 2019, we, fellow travellers, remembered the words of Jean-Paul Sartre in its first edition:

Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was Dreyfus’s condemnation Zola’s business? We at Les Temps Modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps Modernes will take sides.

Vrye Weekblad took sides. It was always on the side of those people who faced the worst wrath of the worst regimes that this country has seen. I made clear which side I chose, when I came out on the side of change and transformation of the world order.

“I pick the side of historical change, as opposed to status quo patriotism. Any future world order will take shape under leadership from Asia, specifically China. This is the side I pick,” was the nub (explicit as it was) of what I wrote in July 2024.

My contributions to Vrye Weekblad have not always been the best that I could produce. I should apologise to the reader who expected more. I quite often slipped into bathos. There have been times when I simply got things wrong, and when I drifted between the ridiculous and the sublime, at least in a literary sense. Pin nothing sublime on me.

That has been what has been most profound about Vrye Weekblad. Its writers were unleashed, and when they ran astray, (hulle name gat gemaak) they showed readers their flaws.

Since I returned to writing full-time again seven or eight years ago, this time without a regular income (probably because I had become unemployable, after having failed at everything else) I have had to funnel my energies into different channels, and draw on different reservoirs of resources. I kept Vrye Weekblad in a special place, where sometimes I did not have to be coherent, cogent, intellectually clever or clear.

I was once asked whether I read what I had written after it had been published. No. I do not. The reasons are quite simple. I am devoted to the act of writing (the devotion I feel for a woman), and I get a thrill from the way the mind works. Those are good enough for me. 

Vrye Weekblad has always embodied everything that is good and great about journalism, quite often at the expense of material wellbeing. As a columnist and an essayist, I have found great expression in Vrye Weekblad. I despair, now, at the imminent demise of this great newspaper and can only hope that, as Jean-Paul Sartre tried to tell us, life begins on the other side of despair.

Adieux.

♦ VWB ♦

NEEM DEEL AAN DIE GESPREK: Gaan na heel onder op die bladsy om op hierdie artikel kommentaar te lewer. Ons hoor graag van jou, maar hou asseblief by ons kommentaarbeleid.