An emaciated old woman with two snotty toddlers sat on the narrow traffic island at Empire Road, dispirited and not even trying to beg. I had to attract their attention to hand over a few rand. The robot changed. The trio with their plastic bags and air of utter destitution grew smaller and then vanished from the rear view mirror.
So it goes in the country described by Stellenbosch professor Sampie Terreblanche as ‘morally unjust, dysfunctional, and also unsustainable”. The coexistence of a new political system controlled by an African elite bent on self-enrichment, and the old economic system still controlled by a neo-liberal white elite constitutes, according to Terreblanche, a dual system of democratic capitalism in which the plight of the poor is not only getting worse, but is simply neglected despite all the rhetoric about poverty alleviation.
In his recently published history of nearly everything unsatisfactory about the new dispensation, ‘The History of Inequality in South Africa 1652-2002’ (University of Natal Press and KMM Review Publishing, 2002), the radical Afrikaans academic makes common cause with populists and those whom our President has called the ultra-left. He writes: ‘We are forced to ask: for how long can white wealth and elitism remain entrenched; for how long can the black elite continue to indulge in black elitism; and how far can the inequality between the black bourgeoisie and the black lumpenproletariat extend before the system cracks? Against this background, the possibility of a second struggle cannot be discounted.”
Neo-Marxist in form but charitable in spirit, Terreblanche conveys an almost Dickensian sense of bleakness and despair. The poor are bamboozled by liberatory slogans while battered by the redistributive injustice of ‘transformation’ and ‘black empowerment’. Agree with him or not, the passion of the man is like a moral tornado whirling from the statistics of wages, job losses, expenditure and income differentials.
Down Empire Road and up Yale Road to the parking lot at Wits University, my route took me to a workshop on Regional Television in the ground floor gallery of the Graduate School for Humanities and Social Sciences. Here a collection of media people sat around an immensely long and heavy table made of varnished railway sleepers, listening to speakers from government, the broadcasting regulatory authority, and the commercial sector debating the pros and cons of station viability, cultural aims, and local production quotas.
If not the media elite, the audience comprised the subalterns of a swelling media army – those who have fought on the front lines of broadcasting for a decade since broadcasting began to be liberalised. Like me and other journalists in the room, all were aware that the broadcasting system remains skewed to English, and tends to favour the middle class with disposable incomes.
Everyone acknowledges that the broadcasting system we have is exclusionary, though the connection between this, poverty and mass frustration are seldom highlighted – at least in the scramble to get and keep commercial broadcasting licences.
While I was on my way to the Graduate School, colleague Refiloe Mataboge tackled Lwazi Mjiyako, Head of African Languages at Wits for a view on the adequacy of existing black language services. ‘Perhaps we need a new channel to sufficiently house programmes that are broadcast in the vernacular,” said Mjiyako, stressing that at the moment the variety of popular serials and magazine programmes is limited. Only the public broadcaster, the SABC, flights these programmes – there are none on commercial TV channels.
On the other hand, SABC 2 has for years carried news bulletins in at least five language groups – SiSwati, IsiNdebele, Setswana, Sesotho, and Sepedi – and has recently introduced Xitsonga and Tshivenda news bulletins. A problem is that some of the news comes on around 5:30pm when most people who could (or should) be watching the news are still on their way from home from work.
Mjiyako and others are unhappy that the Nguni and Sotho news appear to them to be nothing more than direct translations of the English news and do little to bring fresh insights to the matters under review. Defenders say the news and local productions are heavily loaded towards English because budgets are limited and, as the one common language, English is employed to attract a wider audience and keep advertisers on board.
The broadcasters see themselves caught between commercial imperatives and the public responsibility to promote language cultural diversity. But looking at the longevity of SABC TV’s programmes such as Emzini Wezinsizwa, Muvhango, Jam Alley and Ezodumo, there is a strong case for mass-based vernacular programming.
At the Regional TV workshop, spokespersons from the government’s Department of Communication (DoC) and the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), hosted by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), told of plans to launch additional television services that will broadcast in black languages and Afrikaans, as required by legislation passed in Parliament last year. An inference from the legislation is that there will be two such services, one for the northern regions of the country and one for the south.
The northern region television service will cover the North-West, Limpopo, Gauteng and the Free State, broadcasting primarily in Setswana, Sesotho, Sepedi, Xitsonga and Tshivenda. The southern region service will cover the Western Cape, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, broadcasting mainly in Afrikaans, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana, SiSwati and IsiNdebele.
The Broadcast Amendment Act does not specifically say that there should be two such services, leaving it to the SABC to apply to ICASA with a plan. But, given the complex of languages listed in the legislation, it would be natural to split the country into northern and southern regions.
‘I can’t speak for the Treasury but I can say with no fear of contradiction that government has made an absolute commitment to regional television,” said Peter de Klerk, Special Advisor to the Minister of Communications, in answer to a question about how Regional Television would be paid for.
The launch is set for as early as March 2004. At least as far as the northern service goes, production facilities are already in place with the old Bop TV studios in Mafikeng standing empty and ready to be used. Bop TV was finally closed in July on grounds of being uneconomical but – irony of ironies – the former homeland showpiece looks set for rejuvenation as the foundation for a new initiative aimed at black South Africans.
Plans for the southern service remain uncertain as no obvious production facility presents itself. For this reason, the North is likely to be launched ahead of the South although the details have still to be proposed by a joint team comprising the DoC and the SABC, according to de Klerk.
Language and viability are key issues, underlying the issue of access to media by the majority of the country’s people. What’s really needed – and maybe regional TV can deliver the goods – is to create a new ‘communication community” around the issues that concern the majority but that are skirted or downplayed in the hyped lifestyle-orientated media that we have now.
If there is one thing that this four-part series on the black media has highlighted, it is the lack of a communication community and a sharp division between populist and establishment media. Populist black newspapers have shown a tendency to line up with the oppressed, while establishment newspapers and magazines are cosily tucked into the folds of black/white elitism. Black radio offers a more democratic channel, but it is not very influential in the political scheme of things.
A communication community is one where experiences are shared and compared and where social pathologies are addressed in a spirit of joint problem-solving. Poverty, crime, disease, joblessness and landlessness, the issues of which revolutions are made, are being obscured by mainstream media, while the great national enterprise of building a strong black business class occupies the foreground.
Perhaps only television can assemble a mass popular audience around questions that everyone wants to see resolved. Television has often been accused, as a genre, of ignoring the real world, but if one looks at the content of black programmes they are colourfully, and sometimes painfully, true:
Jam Alley (Friday afternoons) attracts a throng of teenage and adult listeners. It is a simple format in which young people are asked questions about music videos. Presenters speak the township lingo and sometimes re-invent it.
In a recent launch, the SABC aimed to set a new standard for SA youth television with a Xhosa drama series called Tsha Tsha with educational undertones about HIV/Aids. Set in the dusty streets of an impoverished rural town in the Eastern Cape, a far cry from the violent urban ganglands of Gauteng, the series follows the lives of four 20-somethings as they struggle into adulthood.
Tsha Tsha maybe points the way forward. Jointly commissioned by SABC Education and SABC TV1, the series was slotted into prime time on Friday nights. Although in Xhosa it can be dubbed into other languages and would possibly be exportable to Africa and other parts of the world. Thus, it compromises both local programme development and saleable content.
It is all very well to pronounce on the desirability of media diversity and local content, but exactly how such services can become sustainable is a question that looms large over all discussions of television. Inevitably, the need to appeal to a wider audience in English, and to attract advertisers to the upmarket slots, leads to compromises.
A great danger of ‘black’ media (or any kind of racial compartmentalisation) is that it effectively cuts us off from one another. Market segmentation around ethnic and language differences effectively maintains media apartheid.
It is also a mistake to make the patronising assumption that a drama series in an African language must be aimed at poor people and must therefore be heavily educational. The poor, like the rest of us, are human and perhaps more than most they want to escape the stresses of everyday life to laugh and be entertained. Successful commercial programming should try to appeal to all of us.
If the media have a role in nation-building, which most of us fondly believe they do, then the questions posed by Sampie Terreblanche need answering. What kind of media system are we busy constructing? One that is elitist and exclusionary, or broad-based and inclusive, or something in-between? In every society where ethnicity is an issue, attempts to regulate broadcasting have run into the difficulty that language communities are not the same thing as a national community.
And the problem that arises from this is that some communities are more equal than others: inevitably there are jealousies and conflicts over resources, and in many cases this is only resolved (to the dissatisfaction of other parties) when a dominant language emerges. In a comparative analysis of TV regulation in seven European countries including Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium, done for the European Institute for the Media in 2002, the researchers found that every country had similar goals for programming diversity, but all of them had very different regulatory mechanisms to achieve it.
None had all the answers. The more sensitive the language communities were, the more difficult and complex the regulatory mechanisms tended to be. So South Africa is not alone in wrestling with its linguistic demons.
But the key question is whether commercial imperatives drive language dominance by English and whether this implies elitism in media content. Mass black newspapers have demonstrated that English is a very successful medium for popular publishing. Maybe only a common language can provide the vehicle for a dialogue over national ends and means, to avoid a damaging second struggle of a kind that we have seen in Zimbabwe.
Ultimately, though, is it the social responsibility of the media to build the nation? All media tread a tricky path between acting as a watchdog on government and performing as development agents in an emergent economy. Like a family at war with itself, we need an uncle in the truth-telling business to furnish us with an honest appraisal of the good, the bad and the ugly so that a real conversation about family values can begin.