The article by Lin Sampson in the Sunday Times that detailed a limited perspective on Port St Johns was both widely read and endlessly talked about and debated.
The Lifestyle supplement in the Sunday Times is an award winning publication and rightly so, as it has, over many years maintained a balanced combination of insightful articles and content with well written, articulate and erudite delivery.
The piece on Port St Johns was well written, articulate and indeed erudite and flows inexorably on, something like our imposing Mzumvubu river here in PSJ which Sampson maligns for no reason at all.
It is difficult but not impossible to decipher the reason many people found the piece lazy, vindictive and not a little mendacious. It is an under researched and a highly specialised piece of sensationalism, an accusation the Sunday Times spent countless years trying to live down.
In short, it is an exquisitely written catalogue of negativity, a litany of missed opportunities to explore the Port St Johns that lurks just beneath that surface veneer of headline grabbing poverty, unemployment, lack of infrastructure, political opportunism and the plight of the average person simply trying to survive here in South Africa.
That surface veneer is not unique to Port St Johns as the entire country will throw up many examples that highlight the extremes of backlog that persist as the ANC government struggles to deliver on its promises to turn around decades of neglect by the old National party.
It almost reads like a script that was prepared before travelling to PSJ and all that was needed was sufficient negative facts to back it up with a facade of credibility, plausible to the majority that don’t know that another side exists in PSJ.
Something akin to what Carte Blanche did a couple of years ago when they came to town to investigate a supposed crime spree and found only isolated instances of opportunistic criminal activity against tourists and travellers. Yet they persisted in graphically depicting the idea of a Jozilike crime epidemic that they brought with them rather than reporting what they actually found on the ground.
The many travellers that venture into the Transkei, for the uninitiated an area wild and untamed and the subject of many legends and myths, and visit Port St Johns have many returnees and repeat offenders in their ranks, some that have returned again and again for years passing on the magic to children and grandchildren alike.
There are also many international travellers that arrive and discover a certain paradise that induces them to rearrange or even entirely cancel the rest of their travel. Of those that manage to leave, many return from as far as Finland, the Netherlands and the United States to revisit Port St Johns.
There is a wild, natural beauty here, a vast area of rural villages with people whose lives have not changed measurably for decades, living off the land like their predecessors did. Volunteer projects with sustainable village communities and schools thrive and help people bring back a measure of self belief.
Backpackers that work hand in hand with the communities in building and sustaining work opportunities for the locals. Surf schools, village gardens, adult education and business ventures all find a place here.
Coastal hikes, both on foot and horseback provide South African and international visitors with an opportunity to explore the rugged coastline, littered with shipwrecks, in tandem with a local guide and sleep over in local communities.
The recent cultural festival in town provided examples of drama, poetry, dance and music to convince even the most cynical neo-colonial of the ample and deep culture that exists here amongst the Amampondo and other tribes.
It would be easy, anywhere in the world to descend on a small town complete with a list of all the possible negatives to track down in order to paint a dismal picture of a dysfunctional, cowboy town.
To go about this without any attempt to provide a balanced score card and highlight any positives at all is not only grossly biased but almost fits an agenda that would not have been out of place under an old colonial approach to talking about the disparity between different communities.
It goes far enough to help perpetuate the old ‘us and them’ mentality that is something most of us are trying to put behind the country and move forward.
The power of the media is an obvious given and this piece by Sampson in a publication not only widely purchased and read but also disseminated via word of mouth long after the date of publication without any positive counterpoint is grossly unfair to Sunday Times readers as well as Port St Johns residents.
There are many different facts and perspectives on Port St Johns that did not qualify for the rigorous catalogue of negativity and the need to provide a more complete and rounded picture of this small town by their inclusion remains an omission on the part of the editors and publishers of the Sunday Times.
Even the people interviewed by Sampson are selectively portrayed in a manner that amplifies and reinforces her thesis that Port St Johns is nothing but a dead end town, peopled by drug addicts and dreamers perpetuating some sort of collective, coastal psychosis.
Ben Dekker was the original focus but he was not in town and could not paint a picture of his Port St Johns.
The one eyed and selectively biased nature of an Oliver Stone movie, constructed around his personal view of the world is the closest and most effective analogy this writer can find to the Port St Johns depicted in this myopic view.
For the record, this writer did indeed drop out to write a book and that book is on course for publication. Not all projects end in unfinished business.
Time does indeed move slowly out here, in fact days can drag while weeks fly by but that is no different to countless other small towns around the world with many long term residents that make a conscious and unencumbered decision to live that kind of life.
The seemingly deliberate perjuration by Sampson of the word dropout, almost making it synonymous with a wasted druggie, is a sensationalist technique worthy of a tabloid, an abject admission that she does not understand Port St Johns at all and has only one definition for the phrase dropping out.
The best quote illustrating the tabloid like sensationalism is the following.
“The hillsides are covered with small shacks, some painted pretty colours, but lack of infrastructure and no sanitation cause an avalanche of faecal material to run down the hillside and through the town.”
The agenda is not so much hidden as blatantly biased and one sided.
