1. Striving to be ethical
Jonny Steinberg’s negotiations of his power of narration
Anthea Garman, Rhodes University

2. Steinberg’s biography
Mid-90s: Rhodes Scholarship to study political theory at Oxford.
1998: Journalist at Business Day writing on police and Constitutional Court.
2002: Midlands published while based at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
2004: The Number, also while based at CSVR, but came out of a piece written for Colors magazine on prisons.
2007: Notes from a Fractured Country (collection of columns written for Business Day).
2008: Three-Letter Plague -- about HIV infection at a point when the SA government was refusing to have an anti-retroviral programme in the health service.
2008: Thin Blue – immersion journalism with South African Police Service.
2011: Little Liberia while based at the Institute for the Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at University of Cape Town.
2014: A Man of Good Hope (teaching African Studies and Criminology at Oxford University, associate of HUMA).
2015: Returns to SA to work for the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research as a researcher.
Steinberg’s biography

3. Topic: farm murders in post-apartheid South Africa.
Subject: Ambush of “Peter Mitchell”, 28-year-old son of a farmer in KwaZulu-Natal.
Transaction: anonymity for everyone involved and place concealed.
Topic: Gangs in post-apartheid South Africa, the transformation of jails.
Subject: Magadien Wentzel, a long-time member of the 28s, now released.
Transaction: no money/then money. Certain names concealed.
Topic: HIV infection and testing in a rural area beyond hospitals.
Subject: “Sizwe Magadla”.
Transaction: payment for translation services and anonymity for several people and concealment of place.
Topic: Liberian refugees in New York, war trauma.
Subjects: Rufus Arkoi and Jacob Massaquoi.
Transaction: part of the royalties of the book. No names concealed.
Topic: xenophobic violence against other Africans in South Africa.
Subject: Somalian Assad Abdullahi.
Transaction: payment for time and 25% of royalties. No names concealed.

4. methods
Deep immersion in the subjects’ lives – days of interviewing over periods of months and years.
Visiting subjects’ homes, meeting families and friends and significant people in their lives – interviewing them deeply and intensely.
Going back to places that were significant in the subjects’ lives and pasts.
Getting subjects to accompany him on his quest and exposing them to the topic from different angles and to various people being interviewed.

5. The subject – ? Mitchell MIDLANDS
‘Farm murders’, as South Africans have come to call them, occupy a strange and ambiguous space; they tamper with the boundary between acquisitive crime and racial hatred.” (2002: vii) Mitchell co-operated with me because he believed, initially, that this book might bring him justice. I, on the other hand, approached him because I believed his son’s murder said something of extraordinary value about life on post-apartheid South Africa’s racial frontier, something that had not been properly recorded before. In the gap between our respective motivations lies the violation.” (2002: x). I was on the readers’ side. My purpose was to tell a grander story, one that happened to implicate, and to reach into the life of, a man who had agreed to talk to me… so, having rummaged through Mitchell’s life for my own purposes, I felt that I owed something more to him than truthfulness” – concealment. (2002: xi) Mitchell: “… I have nothing to hide. My story is a simple one. As long as you tell the truth, I can’t possibly have a problem” (2002: 93).
The subject – ? Mitchell

6. The commentator – Elias Sithole
“No my friend. The problem is that your imagination is not big enough to put you in somebody else’s shoes. You come here to the midlands to write about the murder of a white farmer. The farming community opens their arms to you because they want the world to know about their outrage. And you write their book for them. Yes, you go to the other side, with your informers and your old friends from Cosatu. And you try to do the blacks justice. But no matter what you say, your book is still about the white man being chased off the land. And people in the cities read it and get upset, and politicians put pressure on the police to solve this murder so that they can tell the country they are still in control. And so you send a man to jail.
“It would be better if you did not come. Just let things sort themselves out quietly. If it is the destiny of this place to become a peasant society again, then so be it. Get on with your own life in Johannesburg.” (2002: 249)
The commentator – Elias Sithole

7. The subject – Magadien Wentzel
THE NUMBER
This book has ended up taking the form of a single life story. The man introduced to me as William Steenkamp joined the 28s in the late 1970s while still in his teens. By the time I met him, in October 2002, he was at the tail-end of a fraught but ultimately clean exit from the prison gangs…within the confines of a single life he demonstrates the proximity of the history of crime to the central fault lines that shape the world. (2004: 11) … He was the kind of man I wanted to write about. I was frightened of penning a story about hell; I wanted to find a redemptive tale... (2004: 27-28).
Early December Magadien and I are still new to one another; it is our third interview. We are both excited by the person who has just entered our respective lives: the prisoner has found a stranger who arrives faithfully every morning and listens to him with rapt attention for hours on end; the journalist has stumbled upon a subject who talks freely, who shows no signs that he will ever tire of talking. But our enthusiasm is checked by mutual doubts. Why is the prisoner talking so freely to a man he does not know? What is the journalist going to do with these confessions? What, precisely, is happening during these long morning hours?” (2004: 234).
The subject – Magadien Wentzel

8. “It means fuck all to you,” he says
“It means fuck all to you,” he says. “For you, this is just a bunch of prisoners telling interesting stories. Let me tell you a little secret. You came with those documents, and I put them under my bed. I left them there for nearly a month. You know why? I was scared to see what they said… because I believed in this fucking story. I believed it enough to destroy my life… so you ask why its so important that the story is true. You shouldn’t need to ask. You should know.” (2004: 239).
“You are treating me like a fool again,” he says. “You know what? I want to write a book about my life, but I can’t. I can’t because it’s too fucking painful. I need you here. I need to you take me to the man I used to be. I can’t get there myself. And the result is that’s is your book, not mine. That’s the price I am paying. If I was writing this book, it would be so fucking different from your book, people would them both and think this isn’t even the same human being who’s been written about.” (2004: 241).
“I have learned that people come and go; it is myself I have to live with. If the principles by which I want to run my life are only alive because of other people, I’m fucked. I may as well book myself back into Pollsmoor right now, and tell them it’s for the crimes I’m going to commit soon.”
“No matter how many Johnny Jansen’s come and go…” I started encouragingly.
“Ja,” he interrupted, “and no matter how many Jonny Steinbergs come and go.” (2004: 370).
Magadien speaks back

9. Steinberg’s reflections
I leave the prison that day feeling hollow and unhappy. In writing this book, I have used the words ‘I’ and ‘me’. ‘I say to Magadien…’ ‘Magadien tells me…’ As if we are equals. We are not. The relationship between a journalist and his subject is never a relationship between equals. The ‘I’ in the pages of the book the journalist pens is not a flesh-and-blood being with a soul to be bared and a heart to be scorched. He is a cipher, an abstraction; he is a pair of eyes that sees all. The subject, on the other hand, the ‘Magadien’, he is the one with bared soul and scorched heart. The ‘I’ is capable of doing him violence…. (2004: 240)
It occurred to me that of all the motives that propelled Magadien to co-operate so enthusiastically with the writing of this book, this was the most important: he wanted to rescue his history from the tongues of others. (2004: 364)
I had never really entered Magadien’s world. He had fabricated from our relationship an adjunct to his world, a separate chamber. He could talk to me the way he did because I was not a flesh-and-blood human being from his life, but an abstraction, a blank canvas on which he was free to paint. (2004: 412)
Steinberg’s reflections

10. The subject – ‘Sizwe Magadla’
THREE LETTER PLAGUE
On one level, this book is an exploration of the place of blame and resentment in one man’s decision whether to test his blood for HIV. (2008: 7)
I visited Lusikisiki periodically over a period of eighteen months. After meeting many people – nurses and patients, traditional healers and treatment activists – I decided to research much of the book that follows by sitting on the proverbial shoulder of a man I shall call Sizwe Magadla.
I have given him and his village pseudonyms and tried to disguise them both. This is a crucial feature of this book. A story about shame is also about privacy, for who wants others to witness their shame? And yet precisely what privacy means in the midst of an epidemic of shame is far more complicated than I ever imagined. (2008: 8)
I asked him immediately whether I could write about him. He told me he would think about it; it took him more than a month to say yes. (2008: 15)
The subject – ‘Sizwe Magadla’

11. “You are imenemene,” he shouts from the bank
“You are imenemene,” he shouts from the bank. “Do you know what is imenemene?”
I shake my head.
“There is no word for imenemene in English,” he continues. “Maybe the closest word is spy. But spy is still not right. Imenemene is one who pretend not to understand, but he does. And then he goes and uses that information at your expense. Or he laughs at you privately.” He looks down at his wet foot and his dry foot and grins broadly. “I have caught you being imenemene.” (2008: 56)
“So you are Sigcau,” I said. “You are selling your people’s culture and their secrets to me?”
He shook his head and laughed. “I’m not selling you anything so valuable. As I said, it is us who are stealing your culture from you.”
“But what is the exchange? You agreed to do this for nothing.”
“I did it to make friends with the umlungus,” he beamed. “we know that if you make friends with the umlungus now, you gain something later.”
“Like the stooge Botha Sigcau?”
“Yes.” He laughed loudly. “Botha Sigcau and Sizwe Magadla are the traitors of Lusikisiki.” (2008: 305)
Sizwe speaks back

12. Steinberg’s reflections
About illness he is not comfortable sharing his thoughts. The tension pulls his head into his shoulders and he observes me warily. I am knocking on a door to a universe in which I do not belong – because I am not family, because I am white, because I am a writer, because there are matters about which one does not speak lightly, and other about which one does not speak at all. But I am here, after all, to write about illness. We are both aware of that: we must decide either to speak of these things or part ways. He has in fact long ago decided to talk to me of the matters about which I want to know. It is a question of how, of the most respectable approach. (2008: 121)
That he had changed his mind on this question [the cause of AIDS] perhaps signalled a cultural defeat, a belittlement of his world. And thus an elevation of my world and a victory for me. It was a deeply unpleasant victory, one that was thrown in my lap while I was looking elsewhere. (2008: 217)
Yet perhaps it is a good deal more than embarrassing. He is a black man selling his interior to a white man. There is a special transgression in this sale, one as powerful as it is hard to articulate. It is something you know because you feel it deep in your bones; it has grown out of generation upon generation of racial hurt. (2008: 307)
Steinberg’s reflections

13. The subject – Jacob Massaquoi
LITTLE LIBERIA
“You were young to be selling sex,” I commented.
“Yes, and a virgin myself, I had no interest in older women in my class. But the military guys did, and I was in the middle.”
“You were a pimp,” I said.
He roared with laughter and slapped his thigh. His white teeth flashed in the gloom of his shuttered apartment.
“Don’t you dare write that,” he said. “You will ruin the friendship. Completely ruin the friendship.”
“Did they pay you?” I ask.
“Sometimes a few cents. I was, I am, a sociable guy. I made friends with them.” (2011: 67)
“We… read, formed reading groups, developed out intellectual skills. We learned to dissect information, to separate trickery from the facts.” (2011: 99)
He relives some of this as he speaks, something he has studiously avoided until now; his hands are shaking in his lap. When he sees me watching his hands, he shoots me a look of accusation, as if I have caught him out. (2011: 114)
The subject – Jacob Massaquoi

14. The subject – Rufus Arkoi
LITTLE LIBERIA
“I am going to go home one day and become the president of Liberia,” he says. “Because in that country, the one problem they have no clue how to deal with is youth. And it is their biggest problem. Nine out of ten youths in Liberia have no work. They do not know what to do with them. I know what to do with them. I know them. That is my life.”
We sit and watch the rain together. I take a bite out of a lamb chop and chew it thoughtfully.
He has shared this thought with me because it is raining so hard.
The words were swallowed by the noise the moment they left his mouth. (2011: 188-9)
The subject – Rufus Arkoi

15. “I have read everything,' he said
“I have read everything,' he said. 'There are very serious problems with this book: problems that will hurt family back home, other problems that will have repercussions for me here in Staten Island. And then there are still more problems I cannot discuss now. In short, there are problems.”
He had organised his complaints into crisp categories: errors of fact; facts that were true, but whose publication would be damaging; other facts that were true but that one ought never to write down; and, finally, facts that I had used inadmissibly.
“What is the protocol in your business?” he asked. “Sometimes, we were speaking with the recorder on. That was for the book. Other times, you came around and hung out, and I told you stuff because I wanted to tell you as a person, because I grew to like you as a friend. Now some of that stuff is in the book. What's the protocol in your business? You can use that stuff? Because the book you have written: I did not expect you to write this book. It is very close, very private. It is the sort of book you publish when you are old and will soon be dead. It is not the sort of book you publish when you are thirty-nine years of age.” (2001: 260-1)
“And as for your offer of royalties, I will have to think about it.
“I’m not a prostitute. Paying for it does not make it okay to depict African men fighting.” (2011: 262)
Jacob speaks back

16. That afternoon, I finally received an from him about the manuscript. “Dear Jonny,” he wrote, “ you did a great job with most of the research work but there were some mistakes and corrections that should be made. I am listing those areas I found problems with.” I had misspelled his wife's maiden name, gotten the age at which he began high school wrong, and a couple of other things.
I do not think he cared very much about what was in the book. That was my business. His was what he might get from it. I am not sure what he imagined that would be when he agreed to work with me. It turned out to be the promise of a modest royalty. He would take that and move on. (2011: 265)
Rufus responds

17. Steinberg’s reflections
“The writer of fiction,” one of America's most thoughtful journalists has mused, “is the master of his own house and may do what he likes with it; he may even tear it down if he is so inclined. But the writer of non-fiction is only the renter, who must abide by the conditions of the lease.”
A week after Jacob recounted his arrival in New York, I left the city for good. I had undertaken to rewrite the inception of his fight with Rufus and to him the result. We hugged goodbye with warmth and sadness; that we had grown to like one another very much was unerasable. But as renter and tenant we were both dissatisfied, he by what I had done with the room he had leased to me, I because the room was too bare, the household treasures taken away and stored elsewhere in anticipation of my arrival. I had threatened to show this bare room to the world. And so, with reluctance, he had chosen one or two items of value, and put them back.
(2011: 264)
Steinberg’s reflections

18. The subject – Assad Adullahi
A MAN OF GOOD HOPE
A refugee has lost control. Great historical forces have upended him and he no longer has a place in the world. He has become an in-between sort of being, suspended between a past in which he belonged somewhere and a future in which he might belong somewhere once more. But for now he is in abeyance; he is swept this way and that, like flotsam in a tide. (2014: 312)
For Asad, to have lived a fully human life is to have altered radically the course of his family’s history, so that his children and their children and their children in turn live lives nobody in Somalia at the time of his own birth could have imagined. If this is indeed Asad’s idea of a worthwhile life then it must, by definition, entail plunging into the unknown. For there is no bridge from the world of his parents to the one he imagines for his children. Getting there requires jumping over a void in the hope that he will land on his feet on the other side. (2014: 313)
The subject – Assad Adullahi

19. I know he abandoned the book shortly after starting it and has been unable to pick it up again. We have not yet discussed in any depth why he reacted this way. The book has upset him. His upset, I think, has become anger. (2014: 315)
“Why are you unable to read the book?” I ask…
“I am not demanding that you read it,” I continue. “If it is too upsetting, then of course you mustn’t. But I worry. What if I’ve said things that will hurt you or offend you? What if I’ve said things that are just wrong?”
“When you said a book,” he begins, “I thought you would ask ten questions and then go and write. I never thought… “ he throws his head back and laughs. “You came back and back and back. You went deeper and deeper and deeper.”
“I went to Ethiopia – “
“That was fine. I was happy for you to go there, to see for yourself. But when you said you want to come here to Kansas City and it was for more book. Man!” (2014: 325)
Assad’s response

20. Steinberg’s reflections
For months I had walked around with this idea of a collaboration between us, one we both fully understood. I try to remember when I started doubting this story. I do not recall…
I have spent the last couple of years memorialising his life. But there is no intrinsic value in remembering. He has in fact just told me that he cannot afford to take in the sweep of his life. To remember in this way is crippling. It is better for him, I think, to see his past as a series of sparks or flashes, a selection of moments when he was the one who decided what would happen next. That is what he must see in his past in order to craft a future.
The book is for me and those who read it. It is of no value to him but for the money that will come his way… from this book he will fashion another moment when he is the one who decides. (2014: 325)
Steinberg’s reflections

21. Anthea’s reflections
Steinberg is not really writing about murders, gangs, Aids, war trauma and refugees or xenophobia. He is writing about SHAME, LOSS, AFRICAN-NESS and OTHERING CONDITIONS.
Steinberg might have started off doing long-form investigative journalism about big social problems but he is now exploring the interiority of men who are faced with the very worst of experiences – loss of dignity, loss of humanity, loss of agency, loss of purpose and culture.
His techniques are invasive and they alter the way his subjects see themselves and understand their worlds. They often feel shame when they encounter their lives in this way.
He frequently becomes a friend to his subjects thus risking a complete breakdown in trust and risking the project.

22. There are three techniques Steinberg uses to negotiate the power he has of narration and knowledge:
The granting of anonymity and concealment of place, names, details and facts.
The negotiation of payment and royalties.
The disclosure in the text to the reader (a narratival ‘honesty’) about the relationship with the subject, the subject’s reactions to him, and the negotiations made between Steinberg and his subject.
And the ethics?

23. Steinberg’s commitment
His commitment is to the information/to the book and to the reader.
The book is FOR the reader, not FOR the subject, and every book has ultimately disappointed the subject OR been abandoned by the subject.
Steinberg’s commitment

24. Steinberg’s ultimate choice
Daniel Lehman: One aspect of your nonfiction work that really stands out is that you count the costs of your relationship with the subjects who become your characters—perhaps not in an unprecedented way, but in a way that's deeply interesting and significant. This habit puts you out on the frontier as a nonfiction writer.
Jonny Steinberg: Well, I'm not sure that I really count the cost. Really counting the cost might mean abandoning the book I'm writing, and I haven't ever seriously contemplated that. One can look pretty good pretending to count the cost.
Counting the Costs of Nonfiction: An Interview with Jonny Steinberg by Daniel W. Lehman
River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative 11(2) Spring 2010
Steinberg’s ultimate choice