Broadcasting the End of Apartheid

Live Television and the Birth of the New South Africa

Martha Evans

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781780768625
• eBook ISBN: 9780857735836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

South Africa came late to television; when it finally arrived in the late 1970s the rest of the world had already begun to boycott the country because of apartheid. While the ruling National Party feared the integrative effects of television, they did not foresee how exclusion from globally unifying broadcasts would gradually erode their power. South Africa was barred from participating in some of television's greatest global attractions (including sporting events such as the Olympics and contests such as Miss World). With the release of Nelson Mandela from prison came a proliferation of large-scale live broadcasts as the country was permitted to return to international competition, and its re-admittance was played out on television screens across the world. These events were pivotal in shaping and consolidating the country's emerging post-apartheid national identity. Broadcasting the End of Apartheid assesses the socio-political effects of live broadcasting on South Africa's transition to democracy.
Martha Evans argues that just as print media had a powerful influence on the development of Afrikaner nationalism, so the 'liveness' of television helped to consolidate the post-apartheid South African national identity.

CHAPTER 1

MEDIA EVENTS AND SOUTH
AFRICAN NATIONAL IDENTITY

The study of the ritual significance of live televised events can be traced back to the early 1950s. Kurt and Gladys Lang’s groundbreaking analysis of the broadcasting of the MacArthur Day Parade in Chicago in 1951 compared the experiences of television viewers with the accounts of those who were present at the parade, finding that television viewers were in fact more enthralled by the experience than those in attendance.¹ While General MacArthur’s homecoming from the Korean War did not constitute a global media event, it was important in laying the foundations for the study of live televised events. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC’s) broadcast of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation on 2 June 1953, an extraordinary moment in television’s history, provided the next event for analysis, which was taken up by Edward Shils and Michael Young.² After considerable debate in parliament (with Winston Churchill opposing the idea out of fear that the presence of cameras would corrupt the sanctity of the occasion),³ the Queen insisted on her subjects’ right to participate in the event. Television sales skyrocketed with the announcement of the impending broadcast and an estimated 20 million viewers⁴ watched the event around the world. Applications for BBC television licences rose by 50 per cent in the aftermath, and the event is often credited with having ‘made’ the BBC.⁵

How do we explain the mass interest in such events? Lang and Lang found that, for television viewers, MacArthur’s homecoming better fulfilled expectations of the occasion and that the ‘significance attached to the video event overshadow[ed] the “true” picture of the event’.⁶ The coronation has been noted mainly for its integrative effect on society;⁷ Shils and Young concluded that ‘the Coronation was the ceremonial occasion for the affirmation of the moral values by which the society lives. It was an act of national communion’⁸ made possible by television technology.

The celebratory ‘communion’ of the events was also enabled, in part, by the fact of their ‘liveness’. The ability to share in and witness proceedings as they unfold has marked several key moments not only in television’s history but also in the history of the twentieth century. Other mass televised events, such as John F. Kennedy’s funeral (1963), the moonlanding (1969), and Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding (1981), also constitute major moments in national and global memory. Lang and Lang went on to study several subsequent mass televised events, including the KennedyNixon debates and the congressional hearings of the Watergate scandal, arguing that in both cases live television played an important role in political change.⁹

A related work, Daniel Boorstin’s 1964 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America, critiqued the proliferation of events constructed solely by media agents in American culture.¹⁰ Boorstin focused on the ways in which media create versions of reality – ‘pseudo events’ – that have little to do with people’s everyday experiences. His approach led to the development of a different tradition – marginal to this study – focusing on pseudo events and spectacle and influencing later theorists such as Guy Debord.

While these studies have proven to be insightful analyses of the role of live broadcasting, most remain unique to the contexts that produced them. They examine specific events and do not provide a general theory of live television broadcasting. It was not until the publication of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s pioneering 1992 book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History that these powerful broadcasting events were analysed as a kind of television ‘genre’, aiding scholars in a variety of disciplines (including sociology, history, media studies, politics and anthropology) to understand the symbolic influence of such events on society as well as the sometimes contradictory ways in which television helps to unify societies. Dayan and Katz posit that, in addition to the banal, everyday consumption of television, a unique, ritualized and extremely powerful genre emerged during the first 40 years of broadcasting. Based on intensive research, beginning with an examination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s 1977 televised visit to Jerusalem, and continuing with similar events throughout the 1980s, they make a case for the study of rare, preplanned live broadcasts that operate as a modern conduit for public and historical ceremonies. In line with Shils and Young, they argue that the mass interest in certain televised events can be explained by the pleasure derived from sharing in an expression of society’s ‘sacred centre’.¹¹

What Are Media Events?

Media events, as Dayan and Katz term them, are typically remote (i.e., they occur outside the studio), they monopolize broadcasting channels by enthralling mass national (and sometimes global) audiences, and they are credited with exceptional historic value. The events, which conquer ‘not only space but time’, ‘have the power to declare a holiday, thus to play a part in the civil religion’ of a nation.¹² Importantly, ‘even when these events address conflict, as they do, they celebrate not conflict but reconciliation’, differing markedly from the ‘daily news event, where conflict is the inevitable subject’.¹³ As such, media events can be seen as extremely effective nation-building tools; in the words of the authors, ‘these broadcasts integrate societies in a collective heartbeat and evoke a renewal of loyalty to the society and its legitimate authority’.¹⁴

While real-life ceremonial events (such as the 1953 coronation) provided early content for these kinds of broadcasts, the genre is not limited to such subject matter, and the televising of ceremony alone does not necessarily constitute a media event. Instead, the events themselves serve as a kind of modern-day ceremony in the Durkheimian sense. Media events are thus rituals that work to hold society together. Their ceremonial nature extends to their viewing context; frequently, they are highly social occasions, often accompanied by the special preparation of food and after- and/or before-parties.¹⁵ In fact, as some studies have found, the act of viewing a media event on one’s own can be distinctly alienating as it somehow inhibits participation in the event.¹⁶

The ceremonial nature of media events is also realized in their structure. Dayan and Katz distinguish between three different narrative types or ‘scripts’: the Contest, the Coronation and the Conquest,¹⁷ all linked to Max Weber’s forms of authority – rationallegal, traditional and charismatic – in some way.¹⁸ Added to this, and frequently excluded from discussions of the theory, is a rare sub-genre of the Conquest, the shamanizing media event,¹⁹ arguably the most powerful form of media event.

The first type, the Contest, includes events that ‘celebrate’, ironically, some kind of conflict, competition or clash – usually a challenge between two men or teams, with a set of rules accepted by all parties. The viewer is positioned as the absent ‘judge’ of the event, which is mediated by a non-partisan TV presenter. As Contests are usually recurrent or cyclical events, they are also the most common form of media events, and sporting competitions provide the most pervasive examples. Other forms include election debates and televised senate hearings. Scholars soon started to use media events theory to shed light on specific sports mega-events and vice versa. Recently, for instance, a collection of essays on the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games edited by Monroe Edwin Price and Daniel Dayan used the Chinese mega-event to examine the changing nature of the media events genre.²⁰

Post-apartheid South Africa enjoyed a proliferation of Contest-style media events, including its one and only pre-election debate (see Chapter 5) and a series of sporting matches whose impact was increased because of the country’s exclusion from such events under apartheid (see Chapters 2 and 6).

The second type of media event, the Coronation, includes the live broadcasting of ceremonial occasions, such as weddings, inaugurations and funerals, which are bound by the rules of tradition. Their allure stems from the magic of ritual; ‘they deal in the mysteries of rites of passage’, pitting ‘society and culture against nature’.²¹ The TV presenter usually adopts a reverent tone, while the viewer is positioned as a witness to the ceremony. Princess Diana’s wedding (1981) and funeral (1997) present some of the most memorable examples of this script in the Western world, and numerous scholars have found media events theory useful in uncovering their significance for British society.²² In the South African context, the inauguration of Nelson Mandela (see Chapter 5) and his recent funeral fall into this category.

Conquests, the third script, are the rarest form of media event because they are unique (i.e., one-off) and because, unlike Contests and Coronations, they tend to break rules. Typically, they involve the charisma of a televised hero who crosses geographical or symbolic borders to reach some goal and proclaim ‘a new symbolic order’.²³ The audience withholds disbelief, while the television presenter adopts a bardic tone. The 1969 moonlanding provides the most famous example of this script. In South Africa, there were various attempts (not always successful) at staging Conquest-style media events, including P.W. Botha’s failed Rubicon speech (see Chapter 2) and F.W. de Klerk’s parliamentary address on 2 February 1990 (see Chapter 3). In some ways, South Africa’s first democratic election played out as a kind of Conquest media event.

Shamanizing media events constitute an even rarer form of this kind of broadcast. While the other three scripts are hegemonic or ‘reinforcing’ – reminding ‘societies to renew their commitments to established values, offices and persons’ – shamanizing events are ‘transformative’²⁴ and ‘seek to influence a future reality’.²⁵ The function of the shamanizing media event differs from the ‘restorative’ function of Contests and Coronations; even if they may be hegemonic in origin, they ‘involve a discernible change in both the symbolic and the real’.²⁶ Also, unlike the sporting contest or wedding ceremony, for example, shamanizing media events do not rely on any external event:

The ceremonies contain their events within them: they are the event. […] There is, of course, a general context from which the event takes its meaning and a genre of ceremonial protocol that is called upon. But as far as specific events are concerned, the ceremony is the event and the event is the ceremony.²⁷

Dayan and Katz mention here Sadat’s 1977 visit to Israel and Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1979 when the country was still under communist rule. Both cases involved historic firsts: Sadat was the first Arab leader to visit Israel, while John Paul II was the first pope to visit a communist country. Mandela’s release from prison after 27 years’ incarceration (see Chapter 3) also falls into this category. In Dayan and Katz’s analysis, these are the televised occasions that have the potential to trigger longer-term political effects.

While there is considerable debate over the validity of Dayan and Katz’s approach to media events (discussed below), few would disagree that such events are worthy of study. First, as the authors point out, they attract the largest audiences in the modern world. Importantly, these are audiences with ‘veto power’;²⁸ for a television broadcast to qualify as a media event, mass audiences are required – something that is often forgotten in discussions about their relationship with power. Audiences must willingly accept, promote and celebrate their importance, and media events can thus serve as potential barometers of national and global feeling. Because of this, Dayan and Katz assert that media events are essentially a phenomenon of democratic societies; totalitarian states are limited to ceremonial ‘establishment initiatives’ which in democratic societies might not proceed without appropriate endorsement.²⁹ For this reason, perhaps, the theory has also proved rich in analyses of sporting and cultural events associated with the Western democratic world, such as the Olympics³⁰ and Miss World.³¹ Due to their link with democratic nations, case studies also often emerge from societies in transition. Since the mounting and reception of media events can reveal much about the political context in which they are produced, scholars have focused on the role of media events in Germany’s reunification,³² for instance, and the invention of a new Russian tradition.³³ This may also well be because, as Dayan and Katz point out, dramatic examples of shamanizing media events are ‘provided by the live broadcast of the mass demand for political change in Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989’,³⁴ and their own work draws on events in countries such as Czechoslovakia. South Africa’s transformation offers another fruitful context in which to examine the workings of media events.

Second – and this is no doubt part of their magic – media events ‘realise the full potential of electronic media technology’,³⁵ collapsing boundaries of time and ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Detecation
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1. Media Events and South African National Identity
• 2. Events Envy: South Africa’s Exclusion from the Media Events of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s
• 3. The Shamanizing Ayatollah: Mandela and the Dismantling of Apartheid
• 4. Disrupting the Centre: ‘Liveness’ and the Negotiation of Disaster During the Transition
• 5. The Televised Birth of the Rainbow Nation: The Election and Mandela’s Inauguration
• 6. Consolidation: South Africa’s Return to the Global Fold and the Making of Madiba
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover