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SOUTH AFRICA'S GRIMMEST DAILY RAG

The South African

Daily Voice

is what all newspapers will look like after the apocalypse. It's like

Heat

for the age of Mad Max;

The Grapes of Wrath

in handy

Daily Star

format. It's leading the way with a new model of what a tabloid can be. Forget Jordan and Pete's knobbing schedule. What people want, it suggests--what they really, really want--isn't escapism via slebs, but a reflection of the horrible privations going on around them. Only five years ago, there was no such thing as tabloids in South Africa. Then someone noticed that a huge slice of the demographic pie had never read a newspaper in their lives. So Tony O'Reilly's Independent Newspapers (who own the likes of the UK

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Independent

and the

Irish Independent

) decided to set up shop and crank out simple, universally readable products like the

Daily Voice

. The

Voice

was aimed at your so-called "Cape Coloured" market--a unique ethnic identity of mixed-race people who speak a mixture of English and Afrikaans. They were second-class (as opposed to third-class) citizens under apartheid, and live mainly near Cape Town. In order to hit them, O'Reilly's team had to hit low, so they decided to give them the blood and guts of everyday life on the Cape Flats in a real penny-dreadful, no-holds-barred way. A lot of eight-year-olds giving blowjobs for crystal meth, basically. Visually, the

Voice

was modelled on the

Sun,

which is aimed at people with a reading age of around 12. But in Cape Town you have to shoot a little closer to eight. It was everything their journalists could do not to just draw stick figures and arrows in the spaces where the articles were supposed to go. I should know. I used to work for them. Here's a random recent edition.

The front page tells the story of a mother and child who live in a disused stormwater drain in the middle of a field. For the baby, now six months old, it's the only home he's ever known. His mother says that they escaped death only a few weeks ago after local gangsters set the tunnel on fire at one end. Apparently a gang called the Nice Time Kids come round every week or so and threaten to rape her if she doesn't give them R2 (approximately 35 cents). As you may be surmising, the newspaper silly season isn't exactly Children's Letters To Santa round here.

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Turning the page, there's a piece about the Voice's terrifying team mascot Captain Voice Power, who dresses in black and has exceptionally bad photographs taken of himself with readers, whom he accosts on the street if they're carrying a copy of the paper, and then gives R200 (about $35). This would all be a fairly innocent bit of marketing gimmickry if the guy's sinisterly miscast uniform didn't make him look like he murders for kicks. He basically resembles the kind of figure you'd expect to be spotted fleeing from the scene of a recent tunnel arson. The reality is that he's a sub-editor posing on his lunch break, but this still doesn't resolve my suspicions.

There's a play on words in the headline Kers Vrees, which means "candle fear"--the Afrikaans name for Christmas is "Kersfees." The story involves a woman who'd been posting candles above her bed to ward off evil spirits. Oddly enough, her home burnt down. ALso, a witch doctor was involved. "She was instructed to leave a candle burning inside her house every time she went out," her neighbor tells the Voice's reporter. In fact, the story goes on, a relative had asked, just before she left the house, whether it wasn't maybe a lil' bit wiser to blow out the candles. But instead Nomkhululi Bikani decided to press ahead with the cleansing ritual. With predictable results. Neighbor Nozakuthini Gxakwe (pictured) lost her entire business as well as her house. "We don't care what her faith healer told her," another neighbor vents, "we want our houses back."

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Page three. Well, it's a pair of tits, isn't it? The

Voice

began life by getting local girls to whip out their baps for money, until their market research came back and told them that their target audience was displaying signs of race-based breast conservatism. Readers were apparently uncomfortable with the idea of local, coloured girls derobing, but had no problem lapping up white, foreign girls. So now they just syndicate their tits from the web. Everyone's happier.

REK JOU BEK ("shoot your mouth off") is the letters page, though "letters" are all sent in via text message. Already,

Voice

readers have grasped the tabloid knack of holding opinions slightly to the right of Hitler. "This country has become a haven for beggars," writes M. "It's f**ken sickening. Everywhere you go, some drunk is begging. I say f*k them." In South Africa, M is the equivalent of Outraged in Oakland.

As ever, where there's poor people, there's also that great friend of the poor--the gambling industry. The disclaimer at the bottom notes that at Grandwest Casino "winners know when to stop". After all, if you lived in a stormwater drain, you'd know when to stop, right? Stop when you're living in a sewer.

Finally, we end up grazing the classifieds, poring over King Osman, a healer who has specialized himself as a "financial healer". "Big Boss for all your problems. All your debt solved NOW with short boys in 1DAY!! Vuma briefcase [?] remove unwanted people, separating lovers and special powder for love affairs, with God's mercy everything is possible." More modest in his ambitions is Dr Gavin, below, who advertises among his specialties "Win Court Cases. Win Lotto/Casino. Selling Properties Quick." And the slightly mysterious "Unfinished jobs by other doctors (free)." Of course, however base they are, however much they present their baps and ultraviolent world with all the finesse of a dead baby being lobbed through a plate glass window, there are always those days when the

Voice

outdo themselves; when somehow, serendipitously, they match the lyricism of a young Martin Amis.

GAVIN HAYNES