Nobuntu Mkhize, I knew your late dad and he would not have behaved that way

Nobuntu Mkhize, I knew your late father, Khaba Mkize. Our 20-year stints on The Natal Witness in Pietermaritzburg coincided.

Your behaviour on a FlySafair flight on 26 December disproves the maxim, “the apple never falls far from the tree”– in Afrikaans, die appel val nie ver van die boom af nie.

The expression suggests family characteristics are indelibly inherited but you have shown this to be untrue. Your conduct is anathema to your father’s legacy. Former colleague Khaba, who died in 2016, would not have behaved in the manner you did.

For years we exchanged ideas at daily editorial meetings, including “leader conferences”, where topics worthy of comment in the paper were debated. Khaba was not shy about expressing controversial opinions, often robustly. But he was never abusive, even when others pushed sensitive buttons.

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Wherever you learned your manners, it was not from your dad.

Khaba was no teetotaller. We shared a few drinks together, including in shebeens, in the days when imbibing was more common among journalists than it is today. But not once did we see him resort to assault, racist insults, or foul language.

He relished playing with words, often deliberately altering the spelling to present an insightful, different meaning. Pietermaritzburg became Pitymaritzburg; infrastructure became inferiorstructure when he was highlighting the lack of development in townships.

No one knows how he would have responded to your SABC job title being tweaked from brand manager to brandy manager. Possibly the thespian in him would have adapted Shakespeare’s King Lear to say: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a tactless child”.

In your public outburst you called yourself an ANC bitch. Presumably, you meant in the sense of someone who submits to the will and control of a dominant other. The ANC has sensibly noted your behaviour “with disgust and disdain”.

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The DA has laid charges at the Bishop Lavis SA Police station, accusing you of racial abuse targeting the coloured community. The PA are taking that issue to the SA Human Rights Commission. You are also in trouble with your employer, the SABC. And with the SA Civil Aviation Authority, whose regulations you flouted.

Consider, all this hoo-ha came about because of your response when the airline declined to serve you an alcoholic drink. Contrast that with the life-and-death political turbulence your father had to deal with, day and night for years in the Midlands. He did so without ever causing as much discord as you have done.

And, whatever his political allegiance, he did not shout it from the rooftops. If he was ANC, he was never their “bitch” or a male equivalent.

While an apple may never fall far from the tree, sometimes an apple may fall and roll away. Or it may simply lie there and rot, or become part of a fetid alcoholic concoction.

Liquor often brings out the worst in people who otherwise have good qualities. One way to make amends would be to give up booze entirely, apologise, and move on.

• Williams is a former managing editor of the Natal Witness and former editor of The Citizen

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