An insider job on The Outsider

It is the curse of the biographer that the person he is writing about is usually such a narcissist as to believe that everything they say is worth something, especially money.

In fact, the subject might even say: “My time is money and you will have to pay me for it.”

I know this because some time back a famous conservationist asked me to write his biography. Things turned rapidly sour, however, when he called me one day to ensure he was on track to get half the proceeds from sales. At which point all writing stopped, forever.

If Herman Mashaba did pay political commentator and author Prince Mashele R12.5m over three years to write The Outsider, all I can say is “go, Prince!” That would be four bar a year — a phenomenal amount of money for a writer in these impecunious times.

As it turns out, it was allegedly a different outsider — someone unhappy because his contribution as researcher for the book was not acknowledged and the fact that the book was called unauthorised — who spilt the beans. Tata my millions.

The French writer and philosopher Albert Camus also wrote a book called The Outsider, or L’Étranger, about a simple, uncomplicated and utterly detached man, who is living a simple, uncomplicated life until he shoots a man dead on a beach in Algiers and is sent to the guillotine.

Now Mashaba is anything but detached from this world. Hence his version of The Outsider.

Camus’s Outsider is fairly soaked in absurdism, the philosophical theory that existence is absurd and cannot be rationally explained.

The French writer would likely have been amazed, however, to see absurdity boosted into the stratosphere last week with the statement of Michael Beaumont, national chair of ActionSA — Mashaba’s party —  that “financing a project does not provide editorial control of the content”.

Now that’s detached. Unmoored, in fact, like a child’s party balloon drifting away into a harsh, bright Johannesburg sky.