Buy freedom

I recently attended a strangely cheerless, hour-long panel discussion on media freedom in Africa. Hosted in the hermetic confines of the United States consulate in Sandton, the discussion employed video linkups with Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, Swaziland and Zimbabwe to bring more heterogeneous voices into the fray.

It’s a tired point that has to be made again — South Africa really is in a very different constitutional and economic space to many other African countries, and especially so when it comes to media freedom. But South Africans are also, perhaps inevitably, perceived as arrogant when it comes to our attitudes towards other African countries.

Arrogance was a word that the excellent moderator of the panel, Philip De Wet, used when describing how tardy the South African media has been in not paying enough attention to the media freedom landscape in the rest of Africa. An aside — I tweeted that De Wet could have been auditioning for the job of host on Survivor: Democracy, and I meant that as a compliment. He really kept the discussion moving, and this was a necessary intervention. I used the word “cheerless” earlier, and by this I meant that there was very little jolly revolutionary spirit in the air.

The majority of participants appeared wearily suspicious of the endeavour, and some of the questions indicated why this might be so. A journalist from Swaziland, for example, asked what advice panellist Dr Francis Ikome, head of Conflict Prevention Research at the Institute for Security Studies, could give journalists in a country where all media is owned by politicians. Ikome’s solution was that those journalists had to fight for a space of freedom. Not very practical advice, perhaps.

The reality seemed to be that the battle for a free media is always going to be hyper-local, and that advice from outside will always be too general. Advice offered by the Christian Science Monitor‘s Scott Baldauf, for instance, was always qualified by Baldauf’s insistence that he was speaking from a position of privilege vis-à-vis media freedom, and that advice such as “people must punish crap media by not buying it” has little efficacy in countries with no alternatives.

But enough about foreign devils, let’s get back to talking about South Africa. In De Wet’s introduction, he said that we arrogant South Africans, initially delinquent in our duties with regards to our own media freedom, were, “just in time, casting our eyes further afield”. South Africans, represented in this case by Free African Media, a sister site of the Daily Maverick (the thinking news editor’s news site) “are trying to make amends”, said De Wet, by sharing ideas around the struggle for media freedom.

Stirring sentiments, which De Wet underlined in his closing remarks by saying that South Africa stands ready to share the challenges of other African nations, and to offer help. As well meant as this is, I couldn’t help thinking, sitting in that little bit of Sandton that will forever be America (or at least until the airlifts start), that this was all a little too reminiscent. For the very, very few of you who need to be told, it’s reminiscent of that country droll Africans refer to as “the South Africa of the World”, or America to everyone else.

Baldly put, any enterprise that speaks from the position of power held by South Africa continentally, and the US globally, must inevitably be coloured by that power. Each of the video linkups to African countries was actually a linkup to an American consulate in those countries. In the same way that a US embassy can be a locus of safety and sanctuary for discussions that would be punished if they took place beyond that pale, the safe place that social media provides for political discussion is also circumscribed by the necessary conditions of its production.

Am I saying we shouldn’t use these spaces? No, I’m saying we should be grateful for all and any help that we can get, and that, like those tetchy guardians of media freedom from Free African Media, we should get on with fighting the battle. But we are going to have to be very vigilant about how we proffer help and advice, and we’re going to have get used to being sneered at as busybodies with big wallets.