Introduction
0.4. Background and context of the study
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3. To challenge the hegemonic narrative of black-of-black violence as the single narrative around xenophobia and account for gaps between ‘officialised’ narratives and subaltern narratives of black African subjects in postcolonial Johannesburg.
0.3.3. Research questions
1. What would the study of media representations in postapartheid South Africa look like if conceptualised from Anti-colonial/decolonial theories?
2. How do practices around the media, migration and urbanity intersect in discursively constructing black African subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa?
3. How do people in townships and other impoverished spaces of the city negotiate and understand their subjectivity and subjectivation in a postcolonial Johannesburg? What is the gap between their self-understanding and narratives of their subjectivity as
‘officialised’ in the media?
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Naspers, which through its print media subsidiary, Media24, has more than 64 titles. The third newspaper group with 35 titles is Independent Newspapers. According to MDDA (2009), in terms of circulation, Media24 has the largest number of newspapers, followed by Independent Newspapers. The English newspapers were purpsosively selected because they are two of the largest media companies in South Africa. In a sense, their operations influence and carves out the media discursive space in the country. The isiZulu newspaper was selected because it is part of the two biggest newspapers publishing in isiZulu. Unlike Isolezwe, Ilanga is not owned by any of the big English media companies. It can be regared as independent.
0.4.1.1. Media24
Media24 owns more publishing houses when compared to the rest of the publishing companies.
Naspers owns 85 percent of Media24 magazines and has an 85 percent share in Touchline Publishing which has 11 magazine titles and an additional 4 through its wholly owned subsidiary Atoll Media (Pty) Ltd (MDDA, 2009). Naspers, which is based in Cape Town and is also a multinational media company, has lately been in the news for divesting from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and likely to offload its stake to a bourse out of the country. Naspers is an old media company with roots in the country’s colonial media. The company was founded as Die Nasionale Pers (The National Press) on 12 May 1915 and catered for the Afrikaner population. Its print media division, Media24 publishes 5 national dailies: Daily Sun; Die Burger; Beeld;
Volksblad and the Natal Witness. The tabloid Daily Sun is the largest daily newspaper in South Africa. On Sundays, the newspaper publishes Rapport; City Press and Sunday Sun. More is discussed on this big media company in Chapter 3.
0.4.1.2. Independent Newspapers Online (IOL)
The Independent Newspapers has for a long time been owned by the Independent News & Media Plc, a multinational media group where Irish businessman, Tony O'Reilly, is the major shareholder.
However, in 2012, Avusa that held some of the shares in the company were bought out of Times Media Group. In 2013, the Independent News & Media Plc sold its stake in Independent Newspapers to a local consortium Sekunjalo Independent Media (SIM) in a R2 billion deal.
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According to Daniels, the sale of the newspaper house to Sekunjalo Independent Media meant that ownership of the company returned to South African hands (2013: 4). O’Reilly’s Independent News & Media Plc had bought the shares in the then Argus Newspapers in 1994 from Johannesburg Consolidated Investments (Anglo American) and renamed the company, Independent Newspapers. The group’s flagship daily newspaper is The Star, and other dailies in the stable are the Cape Argus, the isiZulu newspaper Isolezwe, Daily News, Cape Times, the Mercury, Pretoria News, the Diamond Fields Advertiser, Business Report and Daily Voice. The group also publishes Sunday newspapers that include the Sunday Tribune, Weekend Argus, Independent on Sunday and Sunday Independent (MDDA, 2009). More is discussed on this newspaper’s stable in Chapter 3.
0.4.1.3. Ilanga newspaper
The isiZulu newspaper, Ilanga, that I study in this research is part of the two of the major newspapers publishing in the country’s biggest indigeneous language (Buthelezi, 2007: 128). To say the two newspapers – Ilanga and Isolezwe - are major newspapers publishing in isiZulu means that they have the largest circulation in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa (Buthelezi, 2007: 128; Bloom, 2005). Ilanga is a bi-weekly, more traditionalist newspaper that first published on 10 April 1903 by the first president of the African National Congress (ANC), John Langalibalele Dube (Buthelezi, 2016: 67; Gasa, 1999; Harber, 2003). Dube’s aim of publishing the newspaper was to strategically create “a space where Africans could freely engage among themselves on issues that affected them” (Buthelezi, 2016: 67). It is published on Monday and Thursday. The newspaper also publishes a Sunday edition, Ilanga LangeSonto (the Sunday Sun) and a community supplement, Ilanga LeTheku (the Durban Sun) (Buthelezi, 2016: 65). It is the longest standing isiZulu language Newspaper in South Africa. The newspaper distributes about 500 000 copies per issue primarily in the KwaZulu Natal province (Buthelezi, 2016: 65). Buthelezi points out that, during colonial rule, the newspaper was a “reflective tool through which the colonised people critically and collectively engaged with their own neophyte colonised identities and their African identities” (2016: 60). The old newspaper was bought from its new owners, Argus Company, in 1987 by Mandla- Matla, a company owned by the Inkatha Freedom Party
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(IFP). This has created the impression that it pushes Zulu nationalism (Buthelezi, 2016: 67;
Gillwald and Madlala 1988).
0.4.2. The ethnographic field: Johannesburg
The ethnographic aspects of the research were conducted in Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital city. The city occupies a central place in the economy and cultural life of South Africa as it is “where the evolving story of the new South Africa is most fully played out” (Murray, 2011: 1). Kruger notes that Johannesburg is a “city distinguished both by innovation and illegality”
such that it is praised by its leaders as a “world class African city” and condemned by its critics as a “city of extremes” (2013: 1). Historically, it appears out of the country’s colonial history with the discovery of gold in the 19th century. As a result, the city has been described as ““World’s Greatest Gold Producer,” the “New York of Africa,” the “City of Record Sunshine,” and the
“Heartbeat of South Africa” (Sihlongonyane, 2005: 22). However, as Murray points out, Johannesburg is a highly differentiated space that is also heterogeneous reflecting “a great diversity of experiences, activities, and lifestyles” (2008: viii). In illustrating how the new and the old subsist side by side, in Johannesburg, Kruger juxtaposes shopping malls with shantytowns, natives with foreigners, claims of cosmopolitanism with inequality, scarcity and xenophobia (2013: 3). Every person from the rest of Africa who treks to this city hopes to be the next ‘Randlord,’ within the humble imaginations of earning a living, and not necessarily be a millionaire (Murray, 2008).
However, the city has continued to be haunted by “the lack of regular work, affordable housing, and social security for ordinary people” engendering “increased demands for the “right to the city,”
including spatial justice and legal enforcement of the entitlements of full citizenship” (Murray, 2008: viii). It is in the context of an apartheid history, lack of jobs and increased demand for ‘the right to the city’ that this dissertation locates xenophobia and the emerging black subjectivities on the margins of Johannesburg and South Africa’s Rainbow Nation. The history and context of Johannesburg in postapartheid South Africa is dealt with in detail in Chapter 2.
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0.4.3. The media and cultural studies landscape in South Africa
The hegemony of western-centric media theories endures although there are efforts to shake it through decolonial scholarship. However, most of this scholarship still remains as lip service. To put it in another way, it would seem like, up to this moment, media scholars have done everything to examine and explore the Eurocentrism of media studies in the postapartheid South African university. To bastardize Marx’s Thesis Eleven, the point is to decolonise it. Tomaselli’s (2002) history of media studies in South Africa reveals how, historically, the discipline is positioned within a western theoretical heritage. Media studies has remained impervious to the Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s and the work of radical black thinkers like Bernard Magubane and Archie Mafeje. This is because media and cultural studies in South Africa emerged at a time when “critical discussion on South African communications scholarship was very sparse during the 1970s, and sometimes institutionally discouraged” (Tomaselli, 2002: 112).
Communicatio, the first media studies journal to published in South Africa starting in 1974 emphasised Western approaches of hermeneutics, reception theory, phenomenology, existentialism and administrative research (Tomaselli, 2002: 116 – 117). The failure to embrace critical lenses from the black tradition could be because, even though media studies have over the years come to embrace neo-Marxist approaches most scholars remained politically aloof (Tomaselli and Shepperson, 2002: 190). Even though black issues were starting to appear in the Black Press, they were still absent in media studies. In response to Tomaselli’s questionnaire on the state of media studies in South Africa, Switzer points to the fact that “virtually all popular as well as scholarly publications by and about the South African press before the 1970s were written by and for white audiences in South Africa and interested, influential lobby groups in Western Europe and North America” (in Tomaselli, 2002: 115). The original sin, therefore, not only affects the media whose beginning is at the hands of corrupt slave dealers, but also extends to media studies itself that begins as a white hamlet for debates between the English and the Afrikaans intellectual positions. De Beer and Tomaselli note the lack of vibrant scholarship on South African journalism, media and communication studies (2000: 10). In locating this study in the media and cultural studies field in South Africa, it is important to touch on the language issue. Media studies scholarship in South Africa is mostly in English to reach international audiences (De Beer and Tomaselli, 2000: 10). This means that Afrikaans and languages of the majority South Africans are
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excluded from scholarship. This reaffirms the argument that black people have never been part of the conversations in the media and in the academy since from the start they have been closed out.
When they join the conversations, language closes them outside. There is a serious lack of the search for a South African theoretical idiom and methodology.