Media in Postapartheid South Africa

Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization

Sean Jacobs

• Verlag: Indiana University Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253040596
• Thema: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Thema: Historia y crítica de la televisión

In Media in Postapartheid South Africa, author Sean Jacobs turns to media politics and the consumption of media as a way to understand recent political developments in South Africa and their relations with the African continent and the world. Jacobs looks at how mass media define the physical and human geography of the society and what it means for comprehending changing notions of citizenship in postapartheid South Africa. Jacobs claims that the media have unprecedented control over the distribution of public goods, rights claims, and South Africa's integration into the global political economy in ways that were impossible under the state-controlled media that dominated the apartheid years. Jacobs takes a probing look at television commercials and the representation of South Africans, reality television shows and South African continental expansion, soap operas and postapartheid identity politics, and the internet as a space for reassertions and reconfigurations of identity. As South Africa becomes more integrated into the global economy, Jacobs argues that local media have more weight in shaping how consumers view these products in unexpected and consequential ways.

CHAPTER 1

The Mandela Channel

IN THIS CHAPTER, I review the broad outlines of South Africa’s media history, honing in on a series of media events associated with the nation’s transition from institutional apartheid to the new democracy. In short order, they are Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990; Mandela’s April 1993 television address in the wake of the murder of Chris Hani, a popular communist leader; the first democratic election in 1994; the 1995 Rugby World Cup (which I have already discussed to some extent in the introduction); and the proceedings of the TRC between 1996 and 1998. These events, familiar to many students of South African politics, are recounted here because they helped to inaugurate not only a democratic age but a media age—specifically a television age—in South Africa. Equally, they ushered in an intensified, mediated politics that has defined political life in South Africa since the beginning of the second decade of democratic rule. This is a political epoch in which journalists, screenwriters, television producers, advertising copyeditors or creatives, and activists on social media became central actors in South Africa’s political drama and in the process helped define the terms of debate over the meaning of citizenship in postapartheid South Africa.

The life trajectory of the most visible South African public figure of the twentieth century, Nelson Mandela, captures this transformation well. It begins with Mandela walking out of a prison outside Cape Town on Sunday, February 11, 1990, after spending twenty-seven years behind bars, most of them on Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town. Mandela’s first steps as a free man were also South Africa’s first “media event” in which all South Africans were participants.¹

I remember the lead-up to Mandela’s release. At the time, I was a student at the University of Cape Town and also a journalist at the campus newspaper. I watched the live broadcast of Mandela walking out of prison with my family in a township about nine miles from the city. For viewers in my family and community—who had mostly known political censorship—it was a new experience. Many of us had never seen images of Mandela because his likeness had been banned by the state from the time he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. His likeness and voice mostly existed in yellowed images passed along by hand or on pirated copies of documentaries made by foreign television and film crews. Now he was live on state television, walking triumphantly out of the gates of Victor Verster prison outside Paarl with his then wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, at his side. Television viewers watched on the SABC as Mandela’s motorcade sped to the city. Then, before a crowd of tens of thousands in front of the Cape Town City Hall, in a city still governed by a white mayor, Mandela declared himself “not a prophet, but a humble servant of you the people” and drew from his now famous 1964 statement at the Rivonia Trial where he was sentenced to serve a life sentence on Robben Island: “I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”² Mainstream media—both local and major Western sources—fretted about Mandela thanking the South African Communist Party for its principled support or for not denouncing armed struggle, but this did not take away from the historical significance of the event as well as its media implications.

A few days earlier, on February 2, 1990, F. W. de Klerk, the last white president of South Africa, had delivered an explosive speech to Parliament that was carried live on the SABC. De Klerk announced the release of Mandela and remaining political prisoners and the unbanning of the ANC and other liberation movements. Most of the resistance movements had been banned from public life (and the media) for nearly three decades. In the days before the opening of Parliament, local and international presses had widely speculated that De Klerk would make a major announcement (it was an open secret that the government and the ANC had been negotiating behind closed doors). Nevertheless, there was still skepticism about whether De Klerk would follow through—he had a reputation as a hard-liner in the National Party—so many television viewers did not tune into his speech.

It is clear from the sequence of events surrounding Mandela’s release, including De Klerk’s speech days earlier, that the South African government understood its media power and was keen to control how the news would be received. For example, in the lead-up to Mandela’s release date, De Klerk and his advisors worked hard to create a media image of the president as a reformer, someone who had taken bold steps in his decision to release Mandela and lift the ban on what was arguably the most popular and powerful liberation movement on the continent during the twentieth century.³ De Klerk and his advisors knew they would negotiate themselves out of power. What they wanted to secure was their legacy—how they would be perceived for posterity (in this they were aware of the fate of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who in the wake of perestroika and glasnost was generally viewed as a pragmatic, bold reformer in Western media). They also wanted to control public opinion of the ensuing negotiations between the government and the ANC.

A week before Mandela’s release and to ensure that the government dominated the front pages of Sunday newspapers (the most popular newspapers in South Africa at the time), De Klerk’s office released an official photograph of the president posing next to Mandela. In the photograph, the two men stand stiffly beside each other in a study. The focus is on De Klerk, who smiles confidently at the camera, while Mandela looks away, awkward in an ill-fitting gray suit. The government arranged for every press conference or announcement by De Klerk’s office about Mandela’s release to be broadcast live. Its intent was clearly to spotlight De Klerk as an able statesman driving the political transition to democracy.⁴ This was a definite departure from the norm of how successive South African governments had treated the press and radio and television journalists—that is, with contempt. The apartheid government had little time for media, with the exception of the pro-apartheid Afrikaans press, the SABC, and local and international media that acknowledged the supposed unique predicament of white people in South Africa and who could be counted on to rationalize apartheid to readers and listeners back in their home countries.

That said, the National Party government had a deep sense of the agenda-setting function of broadcast media. Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, a white parliamentary opposition leader, recalled in his 1985 memoir how National Party government ministers put state media, especially the SABC, in the service of the local version of the Southern strategy used by the Republican Party in the United States. The strategy involved the National Party presenting itself as the only bulwark against “black radicals” and majority rule on the one hand and as the only “moderate” alternative to more extreme white supremacist elements in white politics on the other. In this case, a cabinet minister told Slabbert: “Come election time, all we do is show Eugene Terre’Blanche [a local buffoonish neo-Nazi] giving his Nazi salute on TV and your voters will flock to our tables in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.”⁵

The Introduction of Television

Television as a broadcast medium came relatively late to South Africa. The apartheid government passed laws regulating television as early as 1949 but only introduced a national television service in 1976. Albert Hertzog, the cabinet minister responsible for broadcasting services in the 1960s and early 1970s, once famously described television as “that evil black box; sickly, mawkish, sentimentalist, and leading to dangerous liberalistic tendencies.” Hertzog claimed that these “dangerous liberalistic tendencies” induced by television were foreign ideas. They originated outside South Africa, especially in the United States. In 1964 Hertzog, in graphic terms, warned the all-white Parliament about the negative effects of television: “It is afternoon and the Bantu [black] houseboy is in the living room cleaning the carpet. Someone has left the television set on. The houseboy looks up at the screen, sees a chorus-line of white girls in scanty costumes. Suddenly seized by lust, he runs upstairs and rapes the madam.”⁶ For National Party politicians, television normalized integration propaganda and, worse, promoted sameness. J. C. Otto, a National Party member of Parliament (MP), imagined a global conspiracy, invoking veiled anti-Semitic stereotypes: “What happened in regard to the Freedom Riders in the U.S.A.? There the television cameraman came along to photograph everything. There too the black man was represented as being the oppressed and ultimately emerged as heroes. The overseas money magnates have used television as a deadly weapon to undermine the moral and spiritual resilience of the white man.”⁷ In the end, the frustrations of most white South Africans—who felt cut off from the West and therefore were missing out on global events—led to the government changing its mind. It did not help matters that South Africa was also lagging behind more than 130 nations—including a number of African nations, much to white people’s and the government’s embarrassment—that already operated public and commercial television services. South Africa thus became “TV’s final frontier in the industrial world.”⁸

After the launch of SABC TV, the apartheid regime and the National Party predictably dropped their opposition to television and proceeded to trumpet the virtues and supposed benefits of the medium with the same fervor as they had previously rejected it. But this enthusiasm for television did not mean the apartheid rulers would abandon state control or overt political interference. For the bulk of the remaining period of apartheid rule, South African television was effectively an arm of the state and became the key means with which to build consensus for government policies and to cater exclusively to the anxieties and desires of the white minority.⁹

Documentary filmmaker Kevin Harris recalls the television of his childhood:

In those days, television was white. There was no black television. It was a service for the white viewer. Their whole thrust was to make one-dimensional films about life in South Africa. Soap operas, that kind of thing, . . . reflected a white society as whites saw it. You had black townships like Soweto, which was [hidden] over the hill. Basically, black people came into your homes to work for you during the day and at night they went back to their homes. Television very much endorsed and propagated that [ideology]. It was broken down into [separate programming by race]. . . . White South Africans were not confronted with what was happening in their name.¹⁰

The SABC’s programming was replete with regular broadcasts of military parades, state funerals, and heavily censored news bulletins that consistently disparaged any form of resistance, demonizing protesters as “Russian-trained,” “terrorists,” or as “agitators.” A heavy dose of Calvinist Christianity shaped broadcast schedules: “Daily transmissions were bookended by stern scripture readings, the first lesson usually broadcast at more or less the same time that rival television channels [in South Africa] nowadays air their early evening dramas.”¹¹

It is necessary to emphasize the point that when television was first introduced to South Africa, apartheid as a system of rule still appeared invincible: white people were politically united behind the National Party (voting for it with large majorities in parliamentary elections), the economy was booming, and all the major liberation movements were banned, exiled, or experiencing a lull in activity. The resistance leaders of the main organizations that dominated the 1950s and early 1960s were either in prison, in exile, or had been murdered or co-opted. In 1973 the apartheid regime successfully suppressed a major worker’s strike and in June 1976 achieved the same against a national school boycott that became known as the Soweto uprising. One year later, in September 1977, South African police murdered Steve Biko, a key leader of internal resistance and Black Consciousness thinking.¹² Despite the official pronouncements by the apartheid regime and its Western allies, the white government could count on quiet but unwavering support—including access to weapons technology and sanctions-busting—by major Western governments such as the United Stat...