Siphiwe Mpye: Black Empowerment Through the Eyes of an Earnest Editor

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article traces the career of journalist Siphiwe Mpye, as a public intellectual and the editor of two South African men’s magazines. Mpye edited BL!NK in 2004, a publication started with funding from the National Empowerment Fund and intended to provide progressive reading material for a post-apartheid generation of black men. It was a publication intended to entertain but also uplift through cultures of literacy focused on representing modes of masculine citizenship. In 2020 Mpye returned to the men’s press with the online publication notedman.com, this time a literary response to an even more “woke” articulation of masculine subjectivities. His interest in “positive masculinity” is contrasted with a career marked by forthright, albeit hopeful, realism. Through a content analysis of Mpye’s career, writing and the two publications he edited, one gains some understanding of how black empowerment is narrated in the men’s press, a stable notorious for its neoliberal politics and bourgie interest in luxury but used by Mpye to cultivate Left-leaning but inclusive digital literacies. The emphasis is less on Black Economic Empowerment as a governmental initiative and more on black empowerment as something achieved spontaneously but also deliberately from “below”. How do men in media addressing a cis-hetero audience, define, enact and problematise “empowerment”, if at all? Telling this story is important because it demonstrates the awakening conscience of a nation briefly lulled into patient complacency by a narcotic faith in democracy and its long-term bedfellow, capitalism. Whether this faith was misplaced is not the point; rather, the discursive analysis of specifically the digital platform notedman.com in this article is designed to show how middle-class masculinities can negotiate political awakening, even online, with honesty and a sense of responsibility.