This week’s guest writer Mandla Langa gives a personal account of his time as chair of Comtask
A POET friend and comrade of mine who spent nearly three decades of his exile in the United States, speaks of menacing racist graffito sprayed on Alabama walls at the beginning of the civil rights movement. One particularly inspired scrawl warns: Nigger, if you can read this sign, you’d better run for your life. In fact, even if you can’t read it, you’d better run anyway.
This message stayed with me at the first meeting of the Communications Task Group (Comtask) on January 14 as we posed for a group photograph in the first floor auditorium of the South African Communication Services in Smal Street.
Apropos of nothing, a series of questions bugged me: what happened to the African American who couldn’t read the message? Or to a blind one? Did it mean that, since the Ku Klux Klan had communicated, however informally, with the people for whom the message was meant, they had justification to set upon anyone unfortunate enough to be lingering in the danger zone?
Access to information and communication – and delivery mechanisms – suddenly assumed a different feature; to be outside the information “loop” was akin to being up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
The brief from Deputy President Thabo Mbeki required Comtask to examine government communications at the local, provincial and international level, to make recommendations on new policies, structures and budgets. There was a need to look into training and affirmative action, the way in which ownership of the media affects government communication, and South Africa’s international information dissemination. Comtask was asked to draw on the experience and best practice of other democracies.
The task group got a stormy reception, in accordance with the principle that no prophet is appreciated in his or her own backyard. One or two editorials trashed it, one journalist opining that what government communications needed was “three or four journalists” and the job would be done and everyone would go home and have a beer. This brought to mind the unpolitically correct joke of a white foreman who watches a group of white men putting up a building in London. “Just give me 40 kaffirs,” he says, “and I’ll do the job single-handedly.”
Academic Ruth Tomaselli called us “government hacks”, causing us to wonder whether this dismissal was not occasioned by a sense of pique. Some of us shrugged this off as hollow howls of a gadfly and read the subtext beneath the brickbats: How dare Mbeki institute a process without first checking with us?
The other overriding suspicion was that Mbeki wanted a justification for regulation over the media. What this ignores is the calibre of people in Comtask. Raymond Louw is a doyen of South African journalism. In his veins, one might say, runs the blood of press freedom. David Dison is a lawyer who has been involved in matters relating to freedom of the media, especially in the broadcast area. Mathatha Tsedu, now a Nieman Fellow, is the political editor of the Sowetan. Steve Godfrey, the only Canadian in the group, works for the Commonwealth Secretariat, a structure which stands consistently for press freedom. Tsepo Rantho was president of the National Community Media Forum. Val Pauquet had worked for Deutsche Welle and is familiar with censorship. Sebiletso Mokone-Matabane is an Independent Broadcasting Authority councillor; Professor Willem De Klerk is a former editor and media consultant for whom press freedom is the first principle. And Stephen Mncube, from the Development Bank of Southern Africa, has wide international experience, especially in the provision of information to far-flung communities. Anyone gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagination would have known that these people would not endanger press freedom.
Some muted disapprobation came from self- styled protectors from the same political parties which have shied away from making submissions to Comtask. This provides a piquant flavouring to a screamingly unfunny political joke, really, because structures of civil society, to whom these politicians are presumably accountable, have lauded the courage which informed this process, and even pledged sums of money and resources for the training of future communicators.
But these are the smarts that come with any inquiry. A lesser-known fact is that the Commonwealth Secretariat, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) and the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) contributed much to the process, significantly lowering costs to government.
Through the Commonwealth Secretariat, Dr Paul Lusaka was seconded to the task group, and he helped plan trips to African countries. We all miss him now, his warmth and his unflappable, avuncular style.
Comtask held 37 full meetings, all of them open to the public. In March, advertisements calling on individuals and institutions to make submissions were placed in national and regional newspapers and on radio stations in nine official languages. To date, we have received 150 written submissions.
Sometimes, these submissions had a surreal quality to them, such as when one of my colleagues – I forget who – asked during a presentation by the disabled whether it were possible to invent a radio for the deaf.
I remember the angst over the budget when we were planning our international investigations. But, finally, with financial and technical assistance from the UNDP and Commonwealth Secretariat, we travelled in teams of twos and threes to eight developed and 11 developing countries to research international perspectives.
Mathatha, Raymond and I went to Canada, to Brazil, and to the United States.
It was in Rio that I saw the favelas, the slums which defy imagination. But what distinguishes them for our squatter camps is the elegance of Brazilian poverty: in the most rundown favela there will be a television set and a satellite dish. I knew, then, why this country had given birth to writers such as Jorge Armado and Machado de Assis. Nowhere else do you find such a heady mix of poverty and splendour, madness and a frustrating pragmatism, all under the unwavering gaze of Christo Redemptor.
But, much more importantly, the people in the international arena treated us with respect, praying that our task would deepen the South African miracle about which they had heard so much. They seemed to say: We have tried and haven’t managed to get it right. We are stricken by pestilence and poverty, and our destiny, the bettering of our lot, is somehow irreversibly intertwined with yours.
Early this month, Comtask held a colloquium of communicators and stakeholders in Caledon to provide a “road map” through which a new comprehensive communications route could be charted. I must admit to a certain amount of trepidation before Caledon, because some of our findings had already been aired in the media and there was a possibility of bedlam over the South African Communication Service (SACS).
My fears were confirmed when Chris Vick, Gauteng’s director of communications, praised the process that Comtask had embarked on. “But,” he said, “to use Mandla’s own analogy of the road-map, we are all here on a journey, and there is a wounded animal lying on the road. And that animal is SACS.” I could have killed him.
In the heat of the moment, Louw stood up and said that “SACS will be closed down” – and all hell broke loose.
This knotty problem was resolved in the commission which dealt with the future structures of government communications.
Comtask has had a two-day bosberaad to fine- tune its findings and recommendations which will form the basis of the report to the deputy president next week.
The process has changed Comtask members and shaped their apprehension of the imperatives of communications. It was in the words and eyes of the young First Nation woman we met in Ottawa, and in the apprehension of the newspaper mogul over the latest depredations of the Ethiopian government, that we realised the importance of the task Mbeki had set for us. Because, nowhere else – at least in public – has there been such a review or transparency in the discussions of government communications budgets, personnel and structures.
We have learnt to look at the world from the perspective of the illiterate and the disabled. As a country, we might never be able to solve all the problems, but it is in acknowledging their existence that people start to have a vision of the way forward.
The story of this country has never been told for the simple reason that the structures we have set up throughout the shameful half- century of apartheid have impressed on us, black and white, the expediency of silence, or, a fluency in half-truths and obfuscation. And it is only when all the voices of this country are unleashed and given space that we will begin that rigorous journey to confront ourselves. The grim testimonies coming out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are just the tip of a bloody iceberg; the media and government still have to dig deeper to the marrow of what made certain men – some of whom are still occupying the seats of the mighty – such monsters.
When those who have been the wretched of the earth start taking control of the means of communication and information, this country will engage in a healing process. And – notwithstanding the snide comments from Washington of Simon Barber, who wrote what amounted to a stream of consciousness about Comtask – this is not the Unesco school of journalism talking. It’s pure common sense.
— The Mail & Guardian’s guest writers’ series will run weekly, featuring top South African authors doing special news features