The idea of postapartheid South Africa
2.7. A short history of media and cultural studies in South Africa
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The case of the Sowetan and its target shows that, just like in the West, in the colony, the newspaper emerges as an urban phenomenon. Limb notes that the rise of the black resistant press was because
“African workers in South Africa had few mediators to communicate their grievances — given the oppressive social system, the silence of the white press, and the fragile nature of black trade unions” (2000: 79). Limb, therefore seeks to link the liberation movement, the ANC, and the workers’ plight arguing that “a study of how workers were represented in the African nationalist press reveals not only a general sympathy for their harsh conditions but also a level of engagement with worker struggles that suggests a more complex set of attitudes toward labor than hitherto acknowledged by historians” (2000: 79). This is important because “the ANC has been viewed by historians as essentially middle class, a nationalist elite with few organic links to workers” (Limb, 2000: 79). In this light, Limb argues that “nationalism rarely emerges without involvement of both elites and masses” (2000: 81). Limb (2000) points to how this is seen in the role of “ordinary Africans” in nationalism and how the “labouring poor” gave nationalists a firm ground to prosecute their politics. Anderson has conceptualised the nation as an “imagined” political community in which intellectuals, making use of tools such as the press, play a pivotal role in developing nationalism, notably in colonies (such as South Africa) with a stunted indigenous bourgeoisie (Limb, 2000: 81). However postcolonial critics ask whose imagined community is Anderson referring to.
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existentialism and administrative research (Tomaselli, 2002: 116 – 117). The Black Consciousness debates that were at their strength in the 1970s, leading to the students uprising that were put down in Soweto on 16 June 1976 had no space in these intellectual debates. The answer could be in Tomaselli and Shepperson’s observation that while, media studies have over the years come to embrace neo-Marxist approaches most scholars remained politically aloof (2002: 190). Citing Pieter Fourie’s response to the NRF report on the state of the discipline, Tomaselli and Shepperson note that “South African communication scholars who, while alert to political issues, do not consider them primary” (2002: 191).
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). Tomaselli notes that the media’s own practice ethos was the libertarian ethos introduced by Thomas Pringle in the Cape in 1824 and it “has continued to be influential, despite countervailing positions” (Tomaselli, 2002: 112). The libertarian ethos puts emphasis on individualism. Tomaselli notes that in the mid-1990s, the decade of South Africa’s coming of freedom, the ideological battles in the media had shifted from the English versus Afrikaans debates to be between Black Nationalism and libertarianism (Tomaselli, 2002: 113; see also Berger, 1999; Tomaselli, 1997). Tomaselli argues that the base provided by the black press “provided the roots for the ‘progressive’ and alternative presses of the 1980s which confronted the Nationalist hegemony in particular, and monopoly capital in general” (2002: 113 – 114). The struggle between the libertarian and Black Nationalist press ethos seems to have been the struggle that has continued into the postapartheid era and can be seen in the struggle between the ANC and the media and recently the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the media. While the media are now decidedly liberal, including the indigenous media, operating within the ambit of the liberal pluralist normative expectations, it is political parties and other organisations that contest this from outside. The emergence of the social media, as a space for alternative media production, has allowed political parties like the EFF to contest the mainstream media. Tomaselli notes that the libertarian ethos of the mostly English press in South Africa was modified by social responsibility during the 20th century. The social responsibility ethos had earlier come under the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC)’s British Reithian concept of public service broadcasting (Tomaselli, 2002: 113). The whiteness of media studies in South Africa is confirmed
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by Les Switzer, as a historical fact. 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). In a sense the black subject had no space in the media, either as subject or as a reader. 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 posit that “the history of South African journalism and mass communication (JMC) scholarship at university level stretches back to the 1960s” (2000: 9). They note that there were about five primary paradigms that informed communication studies and can be traced over history as, first, the German and Netherlands tradition that focused on media history, law, and ethics; second, positivism; third, functionalist; fourth, interpretative; and last, the Marxist approach (De Beer and Tomaselli, 2000: 9). De Beer and Tomaselli note that “the last four approaches corresponded broadly to three sociological paradigms, namely: the positivist, idealist and realist” (2000:9). For De Beer and Tomaselli the question is over “how do we write about journalism and mass communication scholarship in a society so seemingly complex, so distraught but also so filled with hope?” (2000: 9). As a result of the unravelling of time, and writing this at the end of the second decade of the millennium, one’s response about postapartheid South Africa would be, complex, yes, filled with hope, not sure. In terms of the complexity of the country, they point to the irony of “jubilant blacks celebrating the 1995 Rugby World Cup victory of the ‘white’
team” (De Beer and Tomaselli, 2000: 9; see also Steenveld and Strelitz, 1998). However, this irony repeated itself again in 2019 when blacks were once more jubilant over the Springboks, a symbol of Afrikaner supremacy, victory at the Rugby World Cup.
De Beer and Tomaselli note the lack of vibrant scholarship on South African journalism, media and communication studies (2000: 10). However, in their paper they go on to problematically posit that “due to the international readership of Journalism Studies we restrict our references as far as possible to texts in English, thus leaving out a substantial amount of work published in Afrikaans and to some lesser degree in publications in other South African languages” (De Beer and
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Tomaselli, 2000: 10). Languages of the majority South Africans are Othered due to the international audience of the journals that they are publishing in. This is significant for many reasons. It reaffirms the argument that black people have never been part of the conversations in the media and in the academy, from the start, they have been closed out. When they joined the conversations, language closes them outside. The most important debates, especially in the English liberal universities like Rhodes, UCT, Wits and the University of Natal were between
“administrative vs. critical communication” research providing students with theoretical grounds to understand the alliance between the National Party government and sectors of academe and the media “to legitimate apartheid in its new “reformist” guise between 1979 and 1990” (De Beer and Tomaselli, 2000: 12). Over and above everything, theoretical influences at both English and Afrikaans universities were from European schools of thought. It was never a search for a South African theoretical idiom. In that blacks were closed out of the media and the academy, that search would have been futile and impossible.