Claudia Braude
‘MANAGING the package” is how truth commissioner Hugh Lewin describes selecting 12 statements from 150 submitted for public hearings in one community.
“Which is the story to choose, the story we say you should hear?” he asks. He’s upfront about the process, difficulties and discomfort involved in narrating the role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the public.
Participants at the Media Peace workshop articulated other challenges and limitations involved in the telling. Some obstacles, like the SABC’s financial cut-backs and subtle censorships could be solved while other hurdles (such as destroyed archival material) will be of critical and popular concern for many years. Either way, the public requires insight into how the biggest and most important story in South Africa’s media history is produced. If reconciliation comes with truth, illuminating the way the truth is told is crucial to building a critical and self-critical nation.
What are the implications for a post-apartheid understanding of the past, of the corporation’s radio journalist Sophie Makoena’s difficulty in finding adequate background material in the corporation’s archives? Or of the quiet but powerful censorship encountered by radio journalists Antjie Samuel and Kenneth Makatees whose report of torture, involving the slamming of a detainee’s penis in a drawer, was pulled by a corporation hard-copy writer who refused, in the name of Christianity, to allow the word “penis” on air?
Both Mokeona’s and Samuel/Makatees’s incidents indicate continuity between the corporation’s past as a propaganda tool of the apartheid regime and the new, democratic public broadcaster – what the corporation’s general manager for KwaZulu-Natal, Khaba Mkhize, calls “reporting driven by the baggage of the past”.
What are the mechanisms for putting an end to news production motivated, intentionally or otherwise, by an apartheid mindset?
The question arose at the workshop as to how the commission will deal with editors and journalists proven to have collaborated with the apartheid regime. Whether they should continue to influence public opinion needs to be publicly debated.
Also, the question of intimidation which still exists at the SABC should be examined, especially when journalists and producers are being gagged across-the-board. Or hauled across the coals in disciplinary hearings after speaking to the media.
The workshop was largely aimed at assisting reporters to understand the difficulties they face as well as debating the shortcomings of the truth commission.