Decolonising methodology
4.3. Data collection methods
The study involves an ethnography and a text analysis aspect. The first chapters in data analysis involve a close reading of English journalism pieces (Chapter 5) and isiZulu news stories (Chapter 6). Chapter 7 discusses material gathered on the field through an ethnographic research. The last chapter of this section seeks to bring together issues and themes emerging from the three data chapters and discuss it against mostly decolonial theory. This section discusses the methods of gathering material analysed in these chapters.
4.3.1. Sampling for journalism texts
The research focuses on the period from 1994 to 2017. This is the period taken as the post-apartheid era, where 1994 marked the beginning of black majority rule. This is a long period and considering that with the rise of the internet journalism content is produced even hourly, it represents a large amount of material to analyse. I therefore focus on what can be called critical discourse moments.
Bruistein and Roberts describes critical discourse moments as, “key events that directed attention to a specific issue […] and that were covered by contemporary media” (2015:43). Such moments
“represent times at which opinion on a subject of interest becomes particularly visible” (Bruistein and Roberts, 2015:43). Such moments are “determining in the construction of an issue and therefore call for an integral analysis” (Carvalho, 2008: 166). In this thesis, I initially use quota sampling in selecting 12 English stories from IOL and News24 and six isiZulu stories from Ilanga newspaper for analysis. Samples were divided into the three news outlets. Within those three newspapers I made an effort not to get stories from one year, that means the quota was according to different newspapers and then different years. What I realised is that, in what Bauman (2000) has characterised as the ‘liquid modernity’, the majority of people might never get to see, handle and read a hard copy of a newspaper but access news online and through sharing facilities on social
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media. I got some of the content on online archives of these news outlets. Accessing journalism content this way cuts out the need to focus on individual texts in over ten different newspapers per stable. The quota in terms of newspapers had to include an isiZulu newspaper, in line with the decolonial imperatives of this research. IsiZulu is the most widely spoken indigenous language in South Africa. I find it important to take the Zulu newspaper seriously because, first, of their proximity to the Zulu king and Zulu nationalism. Second, informed by decolonial theory, I argue that their publishing in an indigenous language might not necessarily mean they are free from the coloniality of liberal journalism. In these news outlets, I focus on three critical discourse moments, as follows:
1. The May 2008 xenophobic outbreak, specifically the burning and subsequent murder of Mozambican national, Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave and the public stabbing and murder of Mozambican national, Emmanuel Sithole in 2015.
2. Zulu King, Godwill Zwelithini’s comments and the subsequent xenophobic outbreak in 2015.
3. The two marches: The march against xenophobia through Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville in 2015 and the anti-immigrants and anti-immigration march in 2017.
Although there have been cases of xenophobic violence reported against African Others in almost over ten different years since 1994, I focus on these three years because they represent critical discourse moments. The 2008 xenophobia outbreak, in general, and the burning of Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, specifically, awakened the world to the problem of this anti-immigrant violence in South Africa. The Zulu king’s comments in 2015 brought numerous dimensions to the issue of xenophobia, with the single most important being that it was the first time that someone occupying a position of power passed comments around migration issues such that it merited investigation by the human rights body in the country. The march against immigration and migrants in 2017, with the blessing of the South African government, stands out as a rich space to make sense of black African subjectivity at many levels. It allows us to evaluate claims not only to African renaissance, as a political slogan by the South African government, but also ethical issues such as claims to Ubuntu.
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4.3.2. Observation, diary, photography, and qualitative and in-depth interviews
The study of journalism texts is combined with an ethnographic methodology. Ethnography is aimed at studying shared meanings and practices, which in a nutshell, can be described as culture and privileges the viewpoints of the people studied (Guest, Namey and Mitchell, 2013: 8 - 9). It almost always uses the phenomenological approach which focuses on individual experiences, beliefs and perceptions where text is “used as a proxy for human experience” (Guest, Namey and Mitchell, 2013: 8). Questions are used to draw out individual experiences ad perceptions, and for this reason “in-depth interviews and focus groups are ideal methods for collecting phenomenological data” (Guest, Namey and Mitchell, 2013: 8.) Phenomenology has been described as the study of conscious experience (Guest, Namey and Mitchell, 2013: 10). Smith, Flowers, and Larkin define phenomenology as “a philosophical approach to the study of experience” (2009: 11). Before briefly discussing the specific methods used in this research, it is important to explain why ethnography was combined with text-based methods. Philo has noted that “textual analysis of media accounts requires the study of social structures from which competing ideological explanations develop” (2007: 175). This is because discourse analysis which remains text based has challenges in showing, first, the origins, relations and entanglement of competing discourses to different social interests; second, showing us the breadth and diversity of social accounts beyond what is present and absent in a specific text; third, the full context of the texts and the journalism practices around their production; and fourth, what the text means to different people in its audiences (Philo, 2008: 175). Recently, ethnography and critical discourse analysis have been combined in “problem-oriented and context sensitive research on language, discourse and society” opening up CDA to fieldwork and ethnography (Krzyzanowski, 2011: 231).
Guest, Namey and Mitchell point out that ethnography “literally means ‘to write about a group of people’” (2013: 11).
I was a participant observer in spaces where South Africans and African immigrants live together from January to May 2019. I had to undertake ethnographic fiueldwork so as to reach the African immigrants and ordinary South African citizens in spaces where they live together. This would allow me to access narratives that are alternative to the mainstream media ones. Since my fieldwork involved participant observation, I kept a notebook. Participant observation involves
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observing and describing a community and its culture (Norman Jr., 1991: 195). The point here is to understand the community from its point of view. I undertook this description in a note book.
Hammersley and Atkinson (1995) emphasise the centrality of the notebook, diary or field notes in ethnographic research. They posit that “fieldnotes are the traditional means in ethnography for recording observational and interview data. Originally, these were handwritten, but now they can sometimes be inputted directly into a handheld or laptop” (1995: 141).
In my ethnographic field work I also used photography as a way of collecting data, which I later analysed in Chapter 7. Sidaway posits that photography has a long history in fieldwork (2002: 95).
I took a number of pictures around Yeoville, Berea and Hillbrow. These are pictures of streets, buildings and building walls. I also took several pictures of public art that stands out and speaks to the themes of my research. These are pictures of a mural of the heroes of the Cuban revolution alongside South Africa’s struggle heroes. I took pictures of African struggle icons on the main street of Yeoville. Caldarola notes that the photograph can be used as a research tool by
"foregrounding the photographic process . . . as a system of communication" (1988: 1). For Norman Jr., “moving beyond the ‘mirror of life’ aspect of photography into its ability to create
‘explanatory models’” emphasise its “usefulness as a research tool” (1991: 194)
Interviews are taken as conversations between a researcher and people they believe can give them information they can use in their work. The interview has been described as “an inter change of views between two persons conversing about a theme of mutual interest” (Kvale, 1996: 2). It is “a conversation that has a structure and a purpose” (Kvale, 1996: 6). However, the research interview is haunted by issues of power as it is not a conversation between equals since “the researcher defines and controls the situation” (Kvale, 1996: 6). The qualitative and indepth interview is a
“construction site of knowledge” (Kvale, 1996: 2). The researcher interviewed both African immigrants and South African citizens who were sampled in the Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville inner city suburbs of Joahhnesburg. The African immigrants and South African citizens wrre interviewed in order to give a voice beyond the newspaper and other media narratives on the relationship between migrants and local citizens. The interviewed individuals were selected through an initial quota sampling that divided the population between locals and foreign Africans in the Johannesburg area. The interviewees in all the three areas of Johannesburg were selected
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through a combination of theoretical or purposive sampling and snowball sampling. For the African other interviewees, the first five or so interviewees were selected with the aim of, first, achieving diversity in terms of countries of origin, and second, with the aim to get interviewees who will yield relevant data (Deacon, Pickering, Golding and Murdock, 2010). Subsequent interviewees were approached mostly after recommendations by the initial interviewees. The broader aim has not necessarily been to build a representative sampling frame but to put together a sample frame that is “illustrative of broader social and cultural processes” (Deacon, Pickering, Golding and Murdock, 2010: 45) around representations and constructions of black African subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa.