Into the painted case went a bottle of red wine, an old floppy disc, a CD and scores of written messages. It was sealed for the next decade, to be opened in 2016.
The action of creating the ”time-box” took place at the Highway Africa conference in Grahamstown this week, where hundreds of journalists got together to talk technology, media freedom … and, unusually, media history.
By meeting immediate deadlines, journalists often tend to look only at recent events. But the time-box signalled the need for media to take a longer view.
The floppy disc symbolised an earlier era; already it is not readable on most contemporary computers. The wine may be drinkable by the 2016 date, but it is not so clear that the CD will survive the confinement. It’s doubtful anyone will have a device to play the relic ten years hence.
It was in marking its 10th anniversary this year, and its status as the world’s biggest annual gathering of African journalists, that Highway Africa got journalists to think of historical trajectory.
The scale of this week’s gathering involved about 550 media practitioners from 44 countries on the continent, from Algiers to Accra and Addis — not to mention the more Southern African states.
Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies started the event, but many others have seen shared interests in the subject matter and come on board -‒ including the South African Broadcasting Corporation, the Department of Communications, Absa, Telkom, MTN, Johncom and a range of donor foundations.
When the conference commenced ten years ago, very few African professional communicators, let alone the wider public, had heard about the internet. Over the years, Highway Africa has focussed on this central Information and Communication Technology (ICT) -‒ popularising it to the media, and providing the skills to use it.
In the beginning, Highway Africa’s training was about online research to enhance the input side of journalism. Soon, it grew to encompass media output in the form of web publishing and convergence.
There was no way any of this could be purely technical. Questions of the culture and language of online content, and the economics of e-publishing, were quick to attract attention. Free expression, the digital divide, democracy, the diaspora and gender had to be tackled.
Finally, as the conference grew beyond an event into something of a movement, Highway Africa broadened by linking to the World Summit on the Information Society in 2002 and 2004, a global process organised under United Nations auspices.
What the WSIS engagement did was to give Highway Africa the framework of an ”information society” within which the significance of media’s relation to all information issues could be understood. On top of this, the concept also helped Highway Africa encompass the central matter of government policies related to an African information society.
Ten years since the first conference, many more journalists understand, use and report on ICTs and the information society environment, than would otherwise have been the case without Highway Africa.
While technology and media freedom have been common threads in past Highway Africa events, what was new this year was putting these into historical focus. But the conference also went further back in time than its 1996 roots.
It also started a process to reflect on 50 years of African media since Ghana became the first country on the continent to secure independence.
There is a wealth of lessons to be learnt from this history.
- First were indigenous media forms of rock art, drums, and Timbuktu manuscripts ‒ a rich legacy for the future.
- Then, the colonial press came, leaving a legacy of highly repressive media laws which still have to be scrapped in many countries.
- Next came the nationalist media which contributed to independence in the 1950s: a pertinent stance in today’s globalised culture.
- The next wave -‒ enabled by FM broadcasting -‒ was the 1960/70s tradition of media regarded as a tool for national development. The cause was good, but government-control turned sour.
- In reaction, independent newspapers emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, linked to the Windhoek Declaration, and exploiting new advances in cheap desktop publishing. These organs are still vibrant today.
- In turn, this was followed by a focus on broadcast pluralism (including community radio), and converting government-broadcasters into public ones. A move away from a state broadcasting monopoly remains relevant.
This is a generalised sketch, and in reality there have been many overlaps, co-existences and lags. But overall, the development shows five decades of progress in media freedom and its uptake of technology. And much wisdom for the future.
For the Highway Africa delegates, the coming technical issues relate to digital broadcasting, cellular telephony, wireless internet, and African broadband. The matters of media freedom and the character of content continue to be a cause to champion -‒ and compounded by issues like the impending World Intellectual Property Rights ”casting” treaty.
These are the subjects that will be at the heart of a new Chair in Information Society and Media, to be set up at Rhodes, which was announced by Lyndall Shope-Mafole, the Department of Communications’ top civil servant as a contribution to Highway Africa.
The conference ended on Wednesday, although Africa’s first indaba of bloggers runs another two days, and the momentum will continue.
And when Highway Africa delegates open the time-box in 2016, they will enjoy excavating the archaeology of today’s thinking, and themselves making sense of what will have happened in the ten years since today.