Anything more typically South African than the driver’s licence fiasco or more ideally suited to local city and suburban television coverage would be hard to imagine. Panicking mobs, exhausted officials, crass policymaking and low technical capacity all combined to make the great rush to get licensed before the February 28 deadline a marvelous visual display of the miracle society in breakdown mode. Government arbitrarily threatened to withdraw the licences of some 1.1 million drivers who did not meet the deadline.
So where was local TV’s roving eye to capture the grassroots outrage? Answer: there wasn’t any, because national TV is it, and national TV handles these matters well, carefully, with respect for government. Any resemblance between South Africa and a truly 21st century participatory democracy is pure window-dressing by the powers that be and those who are licensed to convey reality.
If the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US can somehow manage to find the spectrum for local stations allowing every town and city to have several then so can our communications authority, Icasa. A major plus from permitting local television would be news-sharing arrangements with national and international channels.
Local then becomes national and global by extension: glocal for short. This could generate revenue for the locals over and above what they can garner from retail outlets and sponsors in their areas. Yet while local television can be viable, it will take a change of mindset in the regulator and in the media and marketing industry as a whole to open the way for true Citizen’s TV.
Advances in technology make local broadcasting a much more practical proposition than it was even ten years ago. Economies-of-scale are made possible by digital streaming via the Internet direct to TV sets, as well as by advances in digital transmission that allow the broadcasting spectrum to be parceled out in much finer segments, increasing the number of frequencies available.
One has to wonder, though, if the authorities are ready to make the change. Take the driver’s licence debacle again. The last-minute concession extending the deadline by two months was couched in terms that blamed the public rather than acknowledging government’s mistakes. Acting Transport Minister Jeff Radebe, who inherited the mess from his predecessors, said he feared disorder. Police commissioner Jackie Selebi expressed an old South African phobia when he said queue-jumping was beginning to create a situation of instability.
There are continuities in history, and the Old South Africa is very much with us. Which is why this concluding article in a series of four on the Afrikaans media newspapers, magazines, radio, and now finally television moves quickly from the particular to the general. Afrikaners are no more special than any other ethnic group in the population. But because they have been richly represented in the mass media in the past, and now seem to have lost much of what they once controlled, their frustrations point to a glaring deficiency in our media system: the lack of authentic local expression.
This in turn means that what filters up to the national level is more a product of the priorities of the media themselves than of any genuine responsiveness to audience needs and wants. As far as TV goes, there are only two Afrikaans channels anyway, and only one of them, KykNet reaching DSTV subscribers, is entirely in Afrikaans. The other, SABC TV2, sees Afrikaans alternating with English in a popular commercial line-up that aims at all races.
Afrikaners, very broadly, are dissatisfied with the media that they have, but not in agreement about how to reform the system or even whether it is possible to do so by an act of collective effort. Can people make a difference? A Professor of Communication at Potchefstroom University, Johannes Froneman, told me he thought Radio Oranje and others that are moving towards English programming are making ”a big mistake they will lose their Afrikaans audiences if something better comes along.” The people, he suggests, will vote with their ears.
Against this perception is the view that Afrikaans media must take its place in the line-up of 11 official languages. Young Afrikaners in business, the professions and entertainment know that the English behemoth will roll on regardless. There is a huge gap between the constitutional ideal of multicultural diversity and equal recognition for all, and the reality that survival in modern South Africa means fitting in with the dominant paradigm.
The past is not another country. The new country we live in is evolving from the old, fleshed out on the bones of the past but changing with the times. A largely liberal middle class of Afrikaners is ready to welcome compatriots of all races, but are frustrated today by what they see as their exclusion from the political process.
This frustration extends to resentment that under market economics, the common denominator of the English language is the main language of media and hence also of advertising despite the fact that Afrikaners comprise 16.2 percent of the total adult population with a very high proportion of middle to upper LSMs.
Newspapers have shrunk from 11 in the last years of the old regime to merely three today. With circulations stable or declining amongst white readers, editors are restyling the news agenda to seek gains amongst the ”brown” and black Afrikaners. Afrikaans consumer magazines, meanwhile, are booming as they mirror the content of their English competitors and pioneer new forms of popular religious publishing.
The religious magazines offer a combination of ethnic identity and Christian values. They are gift-wrapped with personalities, fashion, health, sport and even sex advice, but they are not and do not seek to be the voice of civic concern and mobilization that earlier Afrikaans magazines certainly were during the rise of white nationalism.
Our scan of radio suggested that commercial stations are capitulating to English and only the community stations soldier on with pure Afrikaans. This raises interesting possibilities for the survival of an Afrikaans broadcasting culture on the community level, though a lot will have to change in programming and professionalism before community radio can deliver its full potential.
Turning to TV, on the whole the quality of Afrikaans television on both channels is good to excellent. TV2’s actuality programme, Fokus, and its arts and lifestyle journal, Pasella, are favourites with discerning viewers. The quirky title of the local music slot, Geraas (Noise), is no turn-off and it is a must-see for the younger generation. It is the Afrikaans programmes on TV2 that pull the highest audience ratings for this channel. They also do well in overall TV Ratings terms compared with programmes in other languages and on other channels.
Two years ago, the Afrikaans Culture Segmentation Study, conducted for Afrikaans media by agencies Millward Brown and Strategic Diagnostics, showed that Afrikaners want to receive important information in their own language. So quite naturally they switch onto the Afrikaans news on TV2. The document was used by Media24 to show English advertisers the pulling power of Afrikaans media.
KykNet, flighted by MNet for the first time in 1999, was a brilliant idea for exclusive Afrikaner programming. It serves those who essentially consider themselves underserviced by the public media. Currently there are just under 600,000 DSTV subscribers, of which approximately 41 percent are Afrikaans speakers whose demographic profile is predominantly that of whites in their 40’s and 50’s.
Nevertheless, KykNet has gone for progressive themes and is pioneering younger markets. According to its management, KykNet has segmented its market into:
the very progressive younger segment, at ease with the new South Africa and with other racial groups, with no hang-ups about religion or sexual orientation; the middle-of the road (30 and 40 somethings) who are much less alternative than the above group but still progressive, successful and excited about being part of the new SA; and the older, more conservative segment, interested in factual programming, who are churchgoers, not really racist but disgruntled about the state of things.
KykNet was launched with daring programmes like Ja-Nee Seks (sex), but it also made a cultural pitch with Afrikaans movies and classical music. A well-watched magazine tour is Fiesta, covering festivals from Sosatie feasts to flower spectaculars.
Despite the differences between them, both Afrikaans channels offer market-driven TV with varied programming suited to all audiences across the country. Regionalism does make its presence felt, but there is no local televisionhence no local identity, and no mobilization on issues of local concern.
National TV as we know it is all one-way controlled by station heads anxiously looking at the TAMS (Television Audience Measurement Surveys) conducted by the SA Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF). This is all to the good if some of it is in Afrikaans, as an economically viable service for an audience segment with a particular language preference. It is not, however, a substitute for what white Afrikaners enjoyed in the past: a sense of dominating the broadcasting system, and it does not necessarily reflect the concerns of grassroots communities.
The frustration is palpable, but the alternatives by no means clear-cut. Broadcasting expert John van Zyl crystallises the problem for Afrikaners and all others. Writing for the global audience of the International Institute of Communications, Van Zyl said South Africans lacked ”social capital” the heritage of shared values to foster ideas of citizenship despite ethnic differences. In the absence of a popular consciousness that permits co-operation between all of us, society is fragmented and civic organisations are weak and there is no real political culture to unite us.
In this situation, Van Zyl sees a vital role for community radio broadcasting. ”Once it has been granted a licence, a community radio station can create a ‘community’ where there was not one before, it can pull the interest groups together through dialogue and debate. It’s that reflexivity principle: ‘I see you through your eyes, you hear me though your words’,” writes Van Zyl.
Unfortunately what emerged from the review of Afrikaans radio in these columns was that right-wingers with a restricted, racist agenda have got control of some stations. Meanwhile, stations that do try to reflect whole communities lack the skills, the finance and the advertiser support to realize their ambitions. Community radio (and television, if the regulators ever allow it) could be one area for ”local is lekker” to give rise to real citizen-centred services, but first we have to decide what a community is.
Van Zyl is careful to point out that ”community” is an ideological concept (at least the way it has been applied under SA broadcasting regulation). The community radio sector was created by the new democratic government as an empowerment tool specifically to uplift the community, and while this is laudable aim it does imply that communities are created by media rather than the other way around.
So we strike another typically South African cast of mind: that ideology comes before identity. You are not who you are, you are who others think you are (and then proceed to classify you accordingly). Whether it is what is written on your ID about your race, or the date and format of your driver’s licence, the State is a past master at sticking labels on people in order to put them in legal pigeonholes or target them for discrimination.
Ironically, by applying the word community to groups such as the previously disadvantaged, or to various ethnic groups like Afrikaners, Zulus, Portuguese and Asians, we succeed only in fragmenting the media’s reflection of its audience, instead of projecting a common picture. It may be time to move away from the notion of community of interest or origin to something much simpler, less loaded.
Local broadcasting means just that geographically localised and reaching everyone in that area. Granted, people in a city may have little in common except that they all inhabit the same space: but that’s the very reason to have a local channel. Apartheid was about Group Areas, remember? Local TV stations can integrate local consciousness better than any other vehicle because they capture the face of the community, its words, its actions and its secrets.
Afrikaans local or regional programming could then take its place alongside other languages. The outcome? Improved community awareness that permeates upwards to national media. If the system allowed for all the news and views that’s fit to see, we’d all have a share in social capital formation.