Thought Leader | Eusebius McKaiser: As a thinker he enriched our public life, encouraging seriousness and inviting his audience into public discussion rather than the mere observation of spectacle.
emocracy is a practice as well as a set of political arrangements, and shared spaces for disputation are central to its practice. Within national states, and national dramas, there are always multiple publics and multiple public spheres, some of which are structurally subordinated to others.
Those who assume that engaging an audience beyond the usual bounds of those authorised to participate in the elite public sphere requires a reduction in intellectual seriousness, patronise and stultify. “Everything”, Frantz Fanon insisted, “can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.
With his quick mind and willingness to draw the line against intolerance and toxic forms of discussion McKaiser irked some people. Inevitably his judgments in the hurly burly of the moment were occasionally off but that is the price of being in the ring. No one can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee without a lapse day after day and year after year.
McKaiser held the line as the project in support of Jacob Zuma and the Guptas descended into outright propaganda, cynically claiming to be anti-racist as it defiled such a noble principle and the centuries of struggle behind it. He also held the line as years of often monomaniacal reporting on state corruption encouraged a grim white revanchism in influential chunks of the media, a revanchism which, unlike the project in support of Zuma and the Guptas, remains in full bloom.
He leaves his family, partner and a remarkably wide circle of friends and private interlocutors in grief. But the big man also leaves a big hole in our public sphere, a hole that is much more significant than the sense of knowing a person one has never met that comes with certain kinds of celebrity, and perhaps especially talk radio.
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Letters to our friend Eusebius McKaiserFriends pay tribute to a true companion and indefatigable truth-teller.
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Eusebius McKaiser: Pedant, iconoclast and man of wisdomEditors know there are columnists whose work could get both of them fired. Fast. So it’s a good idea to scrutinise their work carefully before publication. McKaiser was one such columnist, writes Sefara_Mak
Read more »