I cannot begin to express how depressed I felt when I read that my old friend Steve Hofmeyr had written, in a letter to Julius Malema, that there were only six black intellectuals on the continent of Africa. Okay, sure, that wasn’t exactly what he said, but he sort of suggested it, even though the precise number of African intellectuals in existence had absolutely nothing to do with Julius Malema, who is certainly not an intellectual and wouldn’t recognise one if he saw one, even if it turned out to be Steve.
I thought, at that moment, that Steve had committed career suicide, yet he survived; the only journalist sufficiently aghast at this statement was the editor of Mail & Guardian online, Chris Roper. The Afrikaans papers all mentioned Steve’s letter to Malema, but failed to call attention to Steve’s dreadful faux pas.
And then I heard about the Dozi thing. I must admit I felt a bit sorry for Dozi when I read about him getting drunk in a restaurant in Oudtshoorn and shooting his mouth off about Julius Malema, offending all the other people in the restaurant by using the “K word” liberally. But the next day, Dozi sobered up and made everything infinitely worse by not apologizing for his behaviour, and by saying (to a journalist from Die Burger): “I was only saying what all of us feel”.
Oh, really?
