By Willem Kempen, Editor of Die Matie 1993-’94
If you’re reading this, you’ve ignored the advice in the headline. That’s on you, so don’t complain that I’m not writing here about artificial intelligence and its impact on everything we do, climate change, youth unemployment, the global scourge of misinformation, the general distrust of journalists, or even that wicked American who somehow manages to sneak into almost every discussion.
When Emma Giles invited me to write this, she quite professionally suggested some hooks for me to hang my skryfsel on. I could write about a highly relevant topic such as the ones above, she said, or I could share some of my favourite Matie memories from those ridiculously deurmekaar years before and after the 1994 elections. Perhaps, I thought, I could list all the things we did but shouldn’t have done, the things we didn’t do but should have done, and all the things we might well have done a lot better. But that would be a long list, and I firmly believe that no one has the right to bore other people, nor to preach to them.
What is the significance for me of Die Matie celebrating 85 years? If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be ‘survival’. The days are long past when every single issue was a veiled challenge to the university authorities to close Die Matie down – sometimes for good reason, now that I think about it – but today the environment is hostile for other reasons. If professional journalists are to survive in a world of “citizen reporters” and free-to-read publications, it will be because they tell the stories no one else can or will, and tell them better than anyone else.
Those stories are not always convenient or profitable to tell, or even from the present. Does it matter today that in the early 1990s SA Communist Party leader Chris Hani came to the campus to speak to Stellenbosch students, not long before he was shot and killed on 10 April 1993? Of course it does, yet when I searched for details of that event when writing this, some robot on the internet told me: “There is no widely documented historical record or public evidence indicating that anti-apartheid leader Chris Hani formally spoke to students at the University of Stellenbosch.”
Maybe the truth lurks somewhere between the phrases “widely documented” and “formally”, because I’m pretty sure it really did happen.
Or does it matter today that when Hani was killed, Maties and alumni were still fiercely debating, year after year, whether to remove “old boy” Balthazar Johannes Vorster’s name from what is today known as the Arts and Social Sciences Building? (Long rumoured to have been the only place on campus where a BJ was legal.) Or that the building itself was erected on what was formerly called Die Vlakte, from which coloured and black communities were forcibly removed under the Group Areas Act? Or that the new name for the building was only adopted in 2002?
Who knows, indeed.
On a more positive note, and mindful of the dangers of allowing an Australian to dictate one’s thoughts about the future, maybe a student publication like Die Matie is perfectly positioned to live up to The Conversation founder Andrew Jaspan’s ambition for journalism: Academic rigour, journalistic flair – to combine the thoroughness and accuracy of academic research with writing that’s engaging and accessible.
There can be no better way to keep telling the stories that matter. After all, journalism often begins long before history decides that something was important.
