Sir, - It is a pity that The Irish Times, which like the Irish people as a whole stood so squarely behind our efforts to overthrow the evil that was apartheid, should now be without a permanent correspondent on the ground in South Africa, to cover without fear or favour the complexities of our changing country during the victory that we have won. It was your victory as well.
In the absence of such a correspondent, your otherwise excellent newspaper remains reliant on belated syndication from London newspapers which, on South Africa as well as other issues, are not always the final authority, certainly not on facts.
Take Justin Cartwright's essay (Weekend, April 28th), first published in the Guardian. When the essay originally appeared in London on April 19th, there was arguably some excuse for Cartwright to have ignored my statement, issued on the same day, repudiating the conclusions of the Gauteng set work evaluators who had described the work of Nadine Gordimer and other eminent and talented South African writers as unsuitable for study by 18-year-olds. There was no decision by the Gauteng educational authority on this act of cultural literacy. But to have reproduced the piece so many days after events had moved on begins to look like negligence.
Worse than this is Cart wright's statement, in both versions of the article, that the Gauteng set work evaluators were "presumably black". In fact, had Cartwright deigned to investigate the matter instead of retailing lazy "presumable" news (a remarkable innovation in a profession that I thought prizes fact above presumption), he would have discovered that three of the four evaluators were white. Such facts, which would have spoiled Cartwright's tidy little black-white morality play, were simply to be displaced by overt presumptions.
A similar conjuring trick is in the works when Cartwright translates Gordimer's well known description of South African crime levels in Freudian terms, as the return of the repressed: Cartwright translates this into "revenge of the repressed", a term not known in Freud, the better to suit his morality play.
In a bout of faint praise, Cartwright describes Gordimer as an "obedient servant" of the ANC, servitude I can assure you of which we were unaware. Yet at the same time, Cartwright credits Gordimer as a "brave intellectual" with a "fierce intelligence", so he is apparently unable to swallow his own conclusion about her servile qualities. Thus, in addition to racialised presumption he now adds self-contradiction.
Having belatedly realised that the Gauteng books affair was a ripple in a tea cup, and that it did not really add up to a case of blacks victimising whites or a return to apartheid-style book burning, Cartwright turned to sulk. He now invokes a little-known anti-Africa ideologue called R.W. Johnson, who says that Gordimer has shown "equivocation on ANC lapses". So now The Irish Times is doubly ill-served: first by Cartwright, then by Cartwright's illjudged reliance upon a man with a grudge.
Your readers and South Africa deserve better. - Yours, etc.,
Kader Asmal, Minister of Education, Pretoria, South Africa.
Dr Asmal should refer also to Seamus Martin's report from Johannesburg in our editions of April 23rd, which gave an accurate account of the affair. - Ed., IT.