Freedom of
expression has always been one of the hallmarks of democracy.
South Africans only recently tasted this liberty. Until the
creation and ratification of the new constitution in the mid-1990s,
the South African government was empowered to curtail free speech
as it saw fit. During the final years of apartheid, it often
exercised this prerogative. Newspapers were frequently shut
down, novels banned, and films censored. Yet the ruling regime
did not wield power in a purely negative manner. It also attempted
to impose its dogma through the creation of a system of radio
and television broadcasting authorities that faithfully replicated
the central credo of the ruling party. The South African Broadcasting
Corporation (SABC) gave the regime a powerful tool for articulating
apartheid ideology and for controlling access to representations
from outside the borders of the apartheid state. During the
transition to democracy after 1990, South Africa faced the pressing
question of how to transform this strategic organ of racist
ideology into a forum for the advancement of national unity
and equality.
The abiding
urgency of this task has been made clear by the recent controversy
surrounding the Human Rights Commission's inquiry into racism
in the post-apartheid media. [1] By
ordering thirty six editors of the country's main newspapers,
radio, and television stations to testify, the Commission set
off a firestorm of controversy concerning the ruling African
National Congress (ANC) regime's attempts to muzzle criticism.
Substantial debate has taken place concerning the autonomy of
the Commission from a ruling party that appears increasingly
skittish about charges of corruption coming from the press.
Particularly noteworthy in this controversy is the dissension
among the editors themselves. Breaking ranks with white editors
who refused to appear before the Commission in response to a
subpoena, five black editors agreed to cooperate with the inquiry.
The Commission's pointed argument that little institutional
change has taken place within the media, seventy six percent
of whose top managers are white, appears to be gaining increasing
traction as the hard realities of post-apartheid economic and
social inequality hit home. [2]
The task
of democratizing South Africa's media is complicated by the
broader changes that accompanied the demise of apartheid. Public
service broadcasting is in retreat around the world. In an era
of information capitalism, the clarion call to build the nation
through the creation of public authorities has grown increasingly
faint. Moreover, the rise of transnational technologies such
as satellite broadcasting has undermined both the regulatory
power and the ideological presumptions of many national broadcasters
to a significant extent. After being denied access to the national
broadcaster by the apartheid regime for decades, democratic
forces are now confronted with a similar problem as a result
of globalizing currents. Yet such trends are by no means inexorable.
As Neil Lazarus has stressed, neo-liberal ideology that represents
globalization as uncontrollable effectively obscures the specific
social and economic policies that canalize the transnational
flows of capital and culture. [3] Indeed,
one of the many galvanizing dramas during South Africa's transition
period has been the struggle to establish a national public
sphere using the media. From the organization of the Campaign
for Independent Broadcasting in opposition to the National Party's
plans to privatize the SABC to the contemporary struggles over
racism in the media that I described above, democratizing the
media has been a central issue in post-apartheid South Africa.
[4]
The new
nation's ability to foster popular access to the airwaves is,
admittedly, limited in a variety of ways. In the years since
the unbanning of resistance organizations such as the ANC, South
African society has been transformed to an extent few could
have predicted. The transition to democracy offers a beacon
of hope in a world where almost all forms of collective belonging
and belief seem to be suspect. Yet the sweeping changes of the
last decade have also shifted the terms that animated the national
liberation struggle. Despite the ANC's electoral victories,
South Africa remains one of the most materially unequal societies
on earth. The issue of democratizing the media may seem relatively
unimportant in a nation faced with spiralling crime, urban and
rural immiseration, and a collapsing health care system. Yet,
as Benedict Anderson has argued, forms such as the newspaper,
and now film and television, are integral to a nation's consolidation
of its identity as an imagined community. [5]
If any of the country's material problems are
to be addressed on a national level, the primary media sites
where the imagined community is conjured up will have to become
vehicles through which demands for change can be phrased. Recognition
of the crises which vex the nation may not in and of itself
be adequate, however, serving in many cases simply to divert
attention away from the sources of such problems. To what extent,
then, does popular culture reflect both the promises and the
pitfalls of current initiatives to establish democracy in post-apartheid
South Africa? [6] What kind
of national subject was being constructed by indigenous television
broadcasts during the transition period of the mid-1990s?
I intend
to explore these questions through discussion of a specific
television series that punctuated the transition to democracy
in South Africa in a particularly dramatic manner. Ordinary
People was the first independently produced current affairs
program to be aired by the SABC. Broadcast for three seasons,
from 1993-1996, the series was conceived as a concrete embodiment
of the ANC's call for a multicultural, non-racial South Africa.
Episodes of Ordinary People were aired during prime viewing
time on SABC-TV [1], which
also commissioned the program, on Thursday evenings. This prime
slot suggests that both the producers and the channel strove
to garner the broadest possible national audience for the series.
Obviously, many South Africans living in rural areas may not
have had access to television, lacking either the material or
linguistic resources necessary for such access. However, given
the fact that Ordinary People was broadcast on the channel
associated with the nation's new
lingua
franca - English -, it seems logical to assume that the
series' producers imagined themselves as broadcasting to and,
to a certain extent, constituting the nation. Production and
transmission of the series would have been unthinkable without
the signal institutional transformations that took place at
the SABC in response to popular mobilizations for equitable
access to the media. Consequently, this milestone documentary
program offers a particularly significant case study of the
struggle to forge a new South African national identity during
the transition to democracy.
The Campaign
for Independent Broadcasting
Despite
the qualms that retarded the introduction of television until
1976 in South Africa, the apartheid regime quickly found the
means to use the medium to further its separatist ideology.
[7] However, while adopting
the model of public broadcasting embodied in agencies such as
the British Broadcasting Corporation, South Africa departed
radically from other nations where broadcasting played a historic
role as the primary public sphere of the nation during the postwar
period. Seeking to allay the concerns of ideologues who argued
against the potential for cultural fusion implicit in the model
of a unitary public sphere, SABC-TV began broadcasting exclusively
in Afrikaans and English, the two languages of the hegemonic
white minority in South Africa. After four years, this policy
was supplemented through the addition of two channels, TV and
TV, which broadcast in the major African languages. Programming
for whites and blacks was thus rigidly segregated according
to the spuriously multicultural, essentialist logic that characterized
apartheid ideology following the introduction of the bantustans,
or "native homelands," in 1971. This arrangement banished fears
that TV could act as an agent of cultural miscegenation. [8]
The SABC's instrumental use by the apartheid
regime has given the question of equality of access to the public
sphere a far higher profile than in other nations during our
current era of globalization. Consequently, although the move
away from state regulation is being felt in South Africa as
it is in other nations, this move is not taking place in the
typical ideological environment in which the public good and
decentralization are disaggregated from one another and wholly
subject to a market logic.
Despite
the fact that the SABC is no longer the only broadcaster, its
transformation during the years following 1990 suggests that
noncommercial, democratic media systems remain a crucial resource
in South Africa. Changes at the SABC were initially catalyzed
by a group of anti-apartheid film and media organizations and
unions which publicly claimed the right of access to the national
broadcaster. [9] Such claims
were particularly important given the ruling National Party's
move to privatize the SABC before losing power. The importance
of these claims to democratic access was further underlined
by the need to ensure the SABC's independence before the first
democratic elections. A coalition of labor and progressive political
groups coalesced in the early 1990s as the Campaign for Independent
Broadcasting. This coalition managed to pressure the government
into electing a new board for the SABC prior to the 1994 elections
and helped establish an Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA)
to diminish state power over broadcasting. The Act which established
the IBA emphasizes the responsibility of broadcasters to advance
the right to representation of historically disadvantaged groups
in the nation. [10] These
goals have been cemented through the promulgation of broadcasting
regulations stipulating linguistic equality for South Africa's
eleven major languages and through content quotas which aim
to increase the representation of local issues in programming.
Despite the limitations imposed on such laudable objectives
by lack of funding and worries over continued state intervention,
the establishment of the IBA and its subsequent democratic initiatives
clearly represent an important foundation for future extensions
of equal access to the media in South Africa.
Concurrent
with these institutional forms of democratization has been an
emphasis on documenting the popular history suppressed during
the apartheid era. Many of the approaches employed in programming
such as Ordinary People were pioneered by anti-apartheid
media activists during the 1980s. Radical collectives such as
Video News Services (VNS) made documentary programming for local
branches of the United Democratic Front, a broad anti-apartheid
alliance of workers, community organizations, and youth groups
founded in 1983. Following the unbanning of anti-apartheid organizations
in 1990, VNS members and other antiapartheid activists began
to produce documentary material for the SABC. By stressing popular
identity and power in their work, these documentarians moved
beyond the white-dominated view of South African history disseminated
by previous media.
Recuperating
Popular History
Ordinary
People is one of the landmark broadcasts to embody this
strategy of recuperating popular history. Produced by Free Filmmakers,
a collective composed of former members of one of the apartheid
era's underground video groups, the series was conceived as
a video journal of changes in South Africa during the transition
to democracy. The first season of episodes was aired on SABC-TV's
Channel 1 during the powder-keg year of 1993, shortly before
the first democratic elections confirmed South Africa's transition
from apartheid. Each episode of Ordinary People frames
the radical changes and social disruptions of this period from
multiple points of view. Cameras follow three of four 'ordinary'
people as they experience some of the events that define the
new nation. Through this populist strategy, the series sets
out to chronicle a significant set of events from a series of
different perspectives, producing a complex weave of voices
that reflects the variety of contemporary South Africa. In addition,
however, the disparities that are revealed as different individuals
and groups of people experience identical events offer a powerful
implicit comment on the social polarization that is apartheid's
primary legacy. Indeed, by opening up the lives of South Africans
to one another, Ordinary People bears witness to the
dramatic inequalities that have to be overcome in the process
of nation-building. Yet in doing so, the series allows the viewer
to engage in the process of identification and understanding
that structures other aspects of the nation's negotiated transition.
Perhaps the most internationally well-known embodiment of this
process of transformation has been the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. Yet Ordinary People suggests that the Commission
is but one element in a much broader culture of confession and
conciliation, as well as, on occasion, aggression and dissent,
that characterized South Africa during these years.
Ordinary
People includes episodes that focus on extremely public
moments in the nation's history. They include a day in the life
of President Nelson Mandela, which was, according to the group's
promotional material, the most watched documentary in the history
of South African television. In addition, the filmmakers also
focus on the moments of spectacular antagonism that occurred
during the transition. Perhaps the most well known episode along
these lines is the collective's account of an extreme right
wing Afrikaner party's storming of the conference hall where
multi-party negotiations were being carried out. Certainly,
such accounts are an important document of their time. By recording
the reactions of workers inside the conference hall as swastika-wearing
Afrikaners smashed through the hall's glass doors, the filmmakers
provided a galvanizing portrait of the menacing violence that
pervaded everyday life in South Africa during the period. Given
the reconfiguration of the nation's political terrain since
the mid-1990s, however, these episodes may seem dated. While
many of the underlying cultural and racial attitudes documented
in these episodes persist, the specific political forms through
which they are organized have changed markedly and, in some
cases, completely disappeared from the scene.
However,
the series also includes portraits of more mundane, if no less
grave, events in the lives of South Africans. These episodes,
while perhaps less spectacular or sensational than those previously
described, nonetheless more aptly embody the series' brief to
elevate the everyday life of the average South African citizen
to historic significance. I will be concentrating my discussion
on two such episodes. The first of these is entitled "The The
Tooth of the Times." As the voice-over introduction explains,
this episode focuses on the impact of an Afrikaner's loss of
his family farm. According to this introduction, the government's
reversal of its policy of 'buying' white votes by subsidizing
farmers has, in conjunction with years of drought, forced many
farmers to default on their substantial loans. Ordinary People
documents the impact of this situation not simply on the Afrikaner
family who own the farm, but also on the black laborers who
have lived for generations alongside the white landowners.
Shortly
after providing us with this information, the film cuts to the
series' introductory sequence, a medley of images that captures
the essence of the program. In ravishing black and white photography,
we are treated to a sweeping tour of contemporary South Africa.
The camera zooms down rural roads and over urban highways, stressing
the dynamic and varied character of the new nation. The camera's
focus on black and white faces, on women and men, children and
grandparents invokes the celebratory multiculturalism that has
become a part of mainstream discourse in the United States since
the Civil Rights movement, a discourse that leaders in post-apartheid
South Africa have appropriated to great effect. Yet we are also
shown signs of the tensions that simmer in the country today.
A young white man scuffles with a black man in a street. The
swastika of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner People's Party is etched
on a wall next to which a white woman stands passively. Squatting
like an ominous metallic beetle, an armored troop carrier parks
itself on a plain outside a township that is engulfed in acrid
smoke. A couple of black men argue over a fence with a film
crew, seemingly intent on rejecting the version of reality members
of the media are constructing. If the series is intent on documenting
the common experiences of South Africans, this introductory
sequence also insistently draws our attention to the grim realities
that trouble the utopian hopes of the transition.
The primary
narrative threads from the body of "The Tooth of the Times"
enlarge on this interweaving of identity and difference. Eddie
Jacobs, the Afrikaner family patriarch, has left his farm while
the implements, livestock, and land that have given him and
his family a sense of meaning for five generations are auctioned
off. His son watches, anger at the humiliation of having to
buy back the tractor he grew up with clouding his face. Yet
the scene set up by the filmmakers to follow this account of
the auction jars the sense of identification we feel with the
Jacobs family. The camera cuts to Fanie Letsimo, perched on
his crutches in the middle of a desolate plain, within which
are buried generations of his ancestors. His prayer to them
suggests the absolute sense of loss he will experience when
the Jacobs farm passes into new hands. Not only will his connection
with the land he has worked on but never owned be ruptured,
but he will also be deprived of the link with generations of
his ancestors who are buried on the farm. While the Jacobs family
confronts a tragic loss of vocation that might be seen as analogous
in many ways, Fanie Letsimo and his family are faced not simply
with emotional and spiritual loss but also with total destitution.
Without the 'baas' upon whom he depends as a result of the enduringly
feudal system of labor relations in rural South Africa, Fanie
is helpless.
I have
not yet touched on one of Ordinary People's most significant
features: language. Both Fanie and the Jacobs family speak in
their respective languages in the episode, with English subtitles
illuminating the meaning of their words. This strategy allows
each to speak using the resonant linguistic forms employed by
their diverse communities. Moreover, the Jacobs family often
slips in and out of English, dramatizing the importance of Afrikaans
as a badge of cultural identity as well as a form through which
the deepest feelings of grief are articulated. The filmmakers'
strategy is particularly significant in this regard. While using
English, the lingua franca of the new nation, they also allow
individuals to speak in their mother tongues. Given the history
of linguistic, cultural and racial segregation that, as I argued
previously, has characterized SABC-TV services, this constitutes
a signal recognition of difference. Ordinary People's
use of subtitling is a subtle but crucial part of a nationalist
pedagogy, one that emphasizes forms of common experience that
link South Africa's diverse cultures.
The central
element in this strategy of interpellating national subjectivity
comes through the different narrators employed by the episode.
As I mentioned earlier, the series typically employs three or
four narrators within each episode. So far, however, I have
only discussed two such narrators: Fanie Letsimo and Eddie Jacobs.
Although they experience a similar set of events, the binary
arrangement of these two narrators would seem to reinscribe
problematic racial oppositions. However, the third narrator,
whom I have not yet mentioned, disrupts this binary, helping
to create a sense of unity among the two primary narrators.
The filmmakers choose the visiting auctioneer to be their third
narrator. We see him arriving at the farm, telling the film
crew in the car with him that the boers don't feel animosity
towards him but rather see him as simply doing his job. However,
as we find out in the bitter auction scenes which follow, both
the Jacobs and the Letsimo family see themselves as the victims
of the bank for whom the auctioneer works. A human community
with long traditions of mutual conciliation is conjured up in
contrast to the largely faceless and rapacious force of capital.
Through the common feelings of despair articulated by Eddie
- he returns to his farm after everything has been sold and
says "now I'm under the mud" - and Fanie, a structure of collective
feeling is created by the filmmakers. Linked in a grieving community,
Eddie and Fanie offer a microcosm of national identity. Although
viewers are certainly offered the materials with which to produce
an oppositional reading that focuses on the material disparities
differentiating the subjects of this community, this episode
of Ordinary People strongly evokes the project of nation-building
by asking us to identify with the common sufferings of all the
inhabitants of the Jacobs farm. [11]
The Transition
and Land Reform
"The Tooth
of the Times" demonstrates the complex bonds that link blacks
and whites and thereby gives the viewer an important opportunity
to perceive the complex, wounded humanity of both groups in
South Africa. Yet the episode also suggests that the political
transformation which galvanized the world's attention following
1990 is a necessary but not sufficient condition for meaningful
democratization. Without genuine agrarian reforms that benefit
the rural African population, South Africa's fledgling democracy
will be built on shaky foundations. The ANC's legitimacy as
the hegemonic party of national liberation during the apartheid
era rested to a significant extent on its promises to redistribute
the ill-gotten gains of colonialism and apartheid, both through
the return of land to African farmers and through broader forms
of economic and social levelling. Restitution of at least a
portion of the lands of which Africans have been dispossessed
during the four hundred year long European domination of South
Africa was an important element in the process of multi-party
negotiations that produced the new constitution during the mid-1990s.
These negotiations achieved many dramatic successes: South Africa's
new constitution has some of the most progressive human rights
clauses of any nation in the world. The issue of land reform
and restitution has, however, proven an intractable problem.
Currently, a small portion of the nation's white minority owns
86% of South Africa's land.
One of
the chief catalysts behind the formation of the ANC early in
the twentieth century was the upcoming passage of the Natives
Land Act of 1913 by the newly formed South African legislature.
The Land Act constituted a precedent for much of the legal framework
established during the era of formal apartheid after 1948. In
response to the growing wealth of African farmers during the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Act introduced
the division of land in the nation between firmly mapped out
areas of white and black settlement. The minority white population
was given control of over 92% of South Africa's territory; Africans
were limited to reserves covering less than 8% of the nation's
land. The Act also contained provisions intended to limit the
numbers of Africans settled on white farms, where they had been
carrying out highly competitive agricultural production. The
long-term effect of the Act was to reduce African agriculture
to purely subsistence conditions, ensuring that sharecropping
and other rent operations would be transformed into labor tenancy,
which would in turn become (unfree) wage labor as part of a
cycle of increasingly capitalised white agriculture. [12]
This move placated the white owners of large
farms, who had been meeting increasingly stiff competition from
African family farms. In addition, the Act also helped push
African labor into the gaping maws of the gold and diamond industries.
The "reserves," which eventually mutated into the nominally
independent bantustans after the creation of formal apartheid,
became overpopulated, economically and environmentally devastated
holding pens for the black industrial reserve army needed by
South Africa's mining industries. By allowing these industries
to shift the cost of reproduction to Africans themselves and
by permitting industry owners to pay exorbitantly low wages
to migrant laborers who were seen as 'supplementing' income
earned through farming by working in the mines, rural segregation
became an integral element in the massive accumulation of profits
that gave South Africa's white population one of the highest
living standards in the world throughout most of the past century.
In the
course of the twentieth century, the newly organized South African
state built a virtually impregnable position by consolidating
a two-nations hegemony. [13] The
state, in other words, garnered support from the white working
class and from industrial and agricultural capital by passing
on the benefits of the extreme exploitation of the black majority
to the white minority. Hein Marais calls the situation instituted
by apartheid, in which high standards of living for whites were
fostered through super-exploitation of blacks, "racial Fordism."
[14] While the impact of
this strategy may be most visible in the creation of a middle
class Afrikaner bureaucracy during the apartheid years, it is
also evident in terms of the agricultural policies pursued by
the regime. In addition to the racial legislation described
above, substantial subsidies were allocated to white farmers,
keeping families like the Jacobs afloat. Moreover, the post-apartheid
state continues to support white farmers by sanctifying private
property, which translates into routine police intervention
on the side of landowners in disputes over land claims. Afrikaner
farmers essentially operate as a rentier class, extracting rent
in the form of labor from African tenant farmers, whose land
had been seized during early colonial period. [15]
The establishment of the bantustans coincided
with yet another attack on the labor tenure system. The illegality
of labor tenure proved highly convenient to white farmers, who,
as a result of the mechanization of agricultural production
that characterized the 'green revolution' of the 1960s, had
less and less call for the large numbers of Africans whose labor
they once exploited. Indeed, migrant farm labor is a far more
effective solution in this case, since it means that the white
farmer does not have to pay the costs associated with the reproduction
of his labor force. The 'homelands' were thus also a convenient
solution for changes prompted by the increasing industrialization
of large-scale South African farming.
Despite
the central role which land dispossession has played in South
African colonialism and apartheid and its own origins as a movement
of protest against the Land Act, the ANC has paid scant attention
to land issues since its founding. [16]
Rural issues have been displaced in the organization's
thought by the task of mobilizing the urban black working class.
It might be argued that the ANC has so steadfastly refused to
focus on rural issues in order to deny the apartheid regime
any legitimation for its bantustan policy, which was predicated
on representations of Africans as inherently rural people. However,
given the constitutive relation between land dispossession and
labor migration discussed above, this lack of attention to rural
issues represents a key theoretical and strategic elision. The
organization's failure to capitalize upon and augment rural
uprisings during the period before its banning in 1960 has,
for example, been seen as a crucial missed opportunity to expand
the ANC's support base beyond an urban base. This elision seems
particularly grave given that some of the central pillars of
apartheid, the "efflux and influx controls" embodied in the
notorious pass laws, were based on nakedly economic considerations
related to the regulated distribution of black labor between
agricultural, mining, and urban sectors. Approximately three
and a half million Africans were affected by the accelerated
rate of forced removals between 1960 and 1983 that accompanied
the increasingly capital intensive character of South African
agriculture and industry during this period. [17]
The ANC's
historical inattention to agrarian issues has also raised key
dilemmas during the transition period. While in exile, the ANC
concentrated on mobilizing its urban constituency for a frontal
assault on the state. However, significant forms of grassroots
organization took place outside the ambit of ANC power. The
United Democratic Front, formed in 1983 in opposition to the
regime's attempts to create a tri-cameral parliament that would
include representation for "coloureds" and South Asians, was
instrumental in creating a structure of civics located in urban
and rural areas. [18] After
its unbanning, however, the ANC attempted to absorb these local
initiatives and to refocus them on building regional and national
structures. [19] Local
activists and protesters found that the local issues that had
helped mobilize a popular constituency for the UDF were now
being given short shrift. Despite establishing a National Land
Commission and affiliated Regional Land Commissions on short
order following the organization's unbanning, the ANC failed
to connect these organizations to grassroots groups adequately.
[20] As a result, the rhetoric
of 'nation-building' often actively militated against local
organizations' attempts to foster social and economic justice.
One of
the key initiatives taken by the ANC during its first term of
office was to endorse the Reconstruction and Development Program
(RDP) developed by a COSATU-affiliated group shortly prior to
the 1994 elections. The RDP's ambitious plans included a targeted
redistribution of 30% of South Africa's land to poor, black,
rural households during the party's first five-year term. However,
according to a report by the National Land Committee (NLC) published
in 1998, less than one percent of the country's total farmlands
area had been reallocated by the government thus far. [21]
The NLC report found fault, among other things,
with the government's marked-based policy of redistribution.
Faced with the fear of capital flight should it follow through
on any of the hopes raised by the socialist language of the
Freedom Charter of 1955, the ANC foregrounded the sacrosanct
status of private property during constitutional negotiations.
As Levin and Weiner argue, the prominent place accorded to private
property rights in the new constitution was ample evidence of
the ANC's decision to subordinate the interests of the nation's
rural dispossessed to other considerations. [22]
Rather than expropriating land from the politically
powerful white farming sector or turning over vacant state lands
to the dispossessed, the architects of land reform proposed
to subsidize the petitions of black farmers for land, allowing
them to buy such land back from willing white farmers. Not entirely
surprisingly, this strategy not only failed to convince many
white farmers to sell their land, but also helped to drive the
price of land up, making it impossible for individual rural
households to gain access to land with their relatively meager
government grants. In order to buy land, people were forced
to band together into communities whose lack of common interests
sometimes produced very uneven results following successful
purchase of land. In addition, money was allocated exclusively
to male heads of households, revealing a disturbing gender inequity
in the ANC's thinking about rural communities. The fundamental
unworkability of this market-based approach, however, results
from the enormous historical imbalances in terms of access to
rural land resources produced by colonialism and apartheid,
not to mention the income inequalities that persist in post-apartheid
South Africa. The two other initiatives taken by the Department
of Land Affairs during this period, the Restitution of Land
Rights Act of 1994 and the Land Reform (Labor Tenants) Act of
1995, had similarly insignificant impact on rural poverty and
homelessness. As the editors of a volume produced during the
initial debates over the government's plans put it, "the countervailing
tendency to push people off the land... is likely to override
state supported efforts to buy into the land market." [23]
The ANC
has been given the unenviable task of forging a historical class
compromise. [24] Accordingly,
during the period of transition, the party valiantly embraced
the language of nation-building. Yet, as Hein Marais has argued,
this rhetoric obscures the fundamental class character of the
nation. [25] While it has
made genuine and impressive changes in the political character
of the nation, it has been far less effective in challenging
the economic inequalities produced by apartheid. The transition
should be seen, then, less as a total rupture - as the term
'post-apartheid' suggests, than as a reconfiguration of existing
class-, race- and gender-based inequalities. [26]
In other words, although the ANC employs a
rhetoric that implies the fostering of consensus and has made
genuine and original efforts to make such consensus possible,
the economic policies that the party administers often militate
against the livelihood and rights of its major constituency.
The party is caught between two tendencies, between the alliances
forged in the name of 'nation building' and the aspirations
and demands of its own support base. Without substantial economic
changes that entitle the economically disenfranchised African
majority, the project of national unity implies the legitimation
of social inequalities. Denied such substantial reforms, the
ANC's mass constituency is likely to challenge the party's commitment
to 'national reconciliation,' seeing that this rhetoric increasingly
serves the class interests of dominant sectors of both industrial
and agricultural capital in the country. [27]
These questions
are not simply significant in South Africa's rural areas. Pushed
off the land by a vicious combination of forces, South Africa's
immiserated rural population winds up as slum dwellers in both
rural towns as well as in increasingly violent and dysfunctional
urban conglomerations such as Gauteng. The inequalities that
deprive African communities of basic services, job prospects,
and educational opportunities have been coming home to roost
in the cities where the majority of the white population lives
since the National Party's abandonment of the pass laws in the
mid-1980s. In 1986, the National Party's White Paper on Urbanization
sketched out a new policy of what it called "orderly urbanization."
Abandoning its earlier role as direct provider of housing for
urban blacks, the state sought to reap the benefits of the accelerated
urbanization of the period without absorbing any of the costs.
[28] The outcome was the
spread of squatter camps, accommodating an estimated seven million
people or one quarter of the nation's black population shortly
prior to the 1994 election. The rate of urbanization that helped
to topple the apartheid regime shows no signs of slowing: in
the new millennium, the nation's major urban conglomeration
will be approaching the size of New York and São Paolo. This
urban area will, moreover, display some of the world's starkest
contrasts between rich and poor. Under these conditions, urban
crime may, as Hein Marais suggests, be a substitute for the
civil war which South Africa's peaceful transition so famously
averted. [29]
Mobilizing
National Subjects
In its
second season, Ordinary People returned to the issue
of land rights with an episode entitled "Land Affairs." This
time, it took a less consensual approach than the one evident
in "The Tooth of the Times." The producers decided to cover
a land dispute taking place near the town of Weenan in northern
Natal/KwaZulu province. The severe drought of the early 1990s
that forced Eddie Jacobs into bankruptcy also led to a wave
of evictions of farm labor families, creating a rural crisis
that the ANC-led Government of National Unity attempted to address
with the legislative innovations described above. [30]
How successful, this episode of Ordinary
People asks, are these reforms proving on the ground? To
assess government policy, "Land Affairs" focuses on a potential
land invasion by a group of labor tenants, who, the narrator
explains, have been evicted from the white-owned farms where
they have lived for generations. The three protagonists of the
episode are Philip Buys, a white farmer whose property is likely
to be seized by the "squatters," Mr. Mzalazi, a black labor
tenant who was evicted from one of the farms now owned by Buys,
and Derek Hanekom, the new ANC Minister of Land Affairs, who
drives in specifically to act as a mediator between the aggrieved
parties. The shift in tone and subject matter that characterizes
this new episode of Ordinary People demonstrates the
increasing tensions that threaten to rend the ANC's rhetoric
of nation-building apart.
We are
introduced first to the white farmer, Philip Buys. Although
the narrator begins the episode by stating that Buys is a descendent
of the voortrekkers who first colonized the area, Buys is quick
to explain that he inherited none of the land he currently owns.
According to Buys, he scraped together savings while working
in a post office in order to buy some land. His success over
the years has made him the owner of several large, industrially-farmed
properties in the area. Buys's insistence on the hard work that
has brought him to his current prosperous position is a significant
move on his part. Faced with imminent land invasions, Buys sets
himself up as someone who has been given nothing for free. His
hold on the land, Buys argues, has been earned, unlike that
of the labor tenants whose infringement of property rights the
government seems set to defend. Not much reading between the
lines is necessary to understand that Buys is impugning the
provisions for social justice embedded in government legislation
such as the Land Reform Act.
Although
Eddie Jacobs expresses subtle forms of racism in "The The Tooth
of the Times", speaking about servants who have been working
for the family for years more as if they are household objects
than sentient human beings, nonetheless at least there is some
mutual recognition of shared suffering in the earlier episode.
In "Land Affairs," by contrast, the white farmer evinces a paternalism
so thoroughgoing that it displaces all possibility of the recognition
of black subjectivity. Buys argues that he provides his laborers
with everything that they want. When asked whether he is like
a father figure to the Africans who are piling into his truck
for a day of work in the fields, Buys answers affirmatively
with no trace of irony. He also offers a variety of pathologizing
explanations for the current plight of former tenant laborers,
saying that the protestors have been manipulated by outside
agitators, that they've simply reproduced too much on their
reservations and now want more land as a result, and that they
lack the self-discipline necessary for the wage labor which
replaced the tenure labor system after 1969. There is not one
moment in this film when Buys recognizes the sufferings of displaced
black farmers and the legitimacy of their claims to compensation.
One of the final images we have of Philip Buys comes as he gives
us a tour of the graveyard where his ancestors are buried. Quick
at the outset of his narrative to disavow the idea that he inherited
the land he now farms, Buys now stakes his claim for the antiquity
of his relation to the land through this tour of the graveyard's
time-worn tombstones.
Interspersed
throughout Buys's narrative is the story of the displaced tenant
laborer Mr. Mzalazi. Mzalazi lives in a "reserve," an arid stretch
of unfarmable land to which he was transported after his eviction
from one of the farms Buys now owns. As he prepares for his
trip to the meeting between fellow displaced farmers and the
Minister of Land Affairs, Mzalazi explains that he and his family
were driven from the land where they and their ancestors had
lived by the white 'baas' at gunpoint. Their possessions were
flung to the wind. Mzalazi's narrative cuts across Buys's explanations
of the motivations of land invaders. These portions of the episode
thus provide a subaltern history that disrupts the pathologizing
explanations offered by Buys for the plight of former tenant
laborers. Walking around the area on Buys's farm where he once
lived, Mzalazi extends his hand over the landscape, where not
a trace of his people's presence remains. The juxtaposition
of this scene with that of Buys's graveyard tour, which follows
immediately afterwards, underlines the way in which power disparities
write themselves into the landscape. Buys's heritage is visible
in the enduring lineaments of tombstones, while Mzalazi's has
been thoroughly erased, its history evident only in the cadences
of his voice as he walks across the featureless land.
If "The
Tooth of the Times" sought to articulate a new national subjectivity
capable of identifying with and reconciling both extremes of
South Africa's racialized class structure, "Land Affairs" relentlessly
exposes the incommensurability of contemporary social identities
in a manner that places national unity under question. These
disparities are, of course, embedded in the long history of
racial division in South Africa described in the previous section.
Not only do the historical narrates of Mzalazi and Buys diverge
totally, but the two never actually meet in the flesh. Instead,
we witness their separate encounters with the ANC-led negotiation
team that is attempting to adjudicate the white farmers' and
black laborers' claims to land. In these sections of the episode,
the rhetoric of reconciliation and nation-building that animates
the ANC on a national level rings hollow. Derek Hanekom, the
Minister of Land Affairs, is powerless to do more than simply
patch over the rancorous animosities and inequalities that manifest
themselves at a local level. This episode consequently reveals
the increasing differences between the ANC's role as leader
of a historic class compromise and its position as leader of
extra-parliamentary, civil social protest - a dual role that
the organization pledged to retain during a congress in the
mid-1990s. "Land Affairs" pushes the ANC to recognize the demands
of its popular base, if not, ultimately, to live up to those
demands.
The chief
actor in these segments of the episode is Derek Hanekom. Hanekom
shows great sympathy for Mzalazi and his friends. Indeed, we
first encounter him dressing nervously for his meeting with
the laborers' organization, worrying amiably about which tie
would be most suitable for a rural constituency. Perhaps too
much should not be made of this relatively human moment. Yet
by emphasizing Hanekom's concern with self-presentation, these
portions of the film dramatize the significance of the ANC's
rhetorical commitment to rural affairs. It is unlikely that
the color of Hanekom's tie will make much difference to the
dispossessed farmers he is going to meet. But his concern with
such issues underlines the gulf that separates him from his
constituency. Hanekom extends this sense of a gulf when he talks
about the need for a person in his position not just to have
a thorough knowledge of farming, but also to have empathy with
those who have lost their land. While this perspective certainly
contrasts favorably with Buys's paternalism, it does not suggest
a very pragmatic commitment to concrete forms of redistribution.
Instead
of offering specific forms of redress, Hanekom offers the laborers
sympathetic sentiments that veil his role as an ANC spokesman
engaged in coopting forms of militant local organization. During
his meeting with the evicted, Hanekom again talks about his
empathy, describing the years he spent in prison as a result
of his opposition to apartheid. Despite such sentiments, however,
it becomes clear in the course of the meeting that Hanekom has
not come to offer the dispossessed what they want: a firm date
for their return to the farmland from which they have been evicted.
Indeed, Hanekom offers precious little at the meeting other
than a recommendation that the group think through a series
of specific measures rather than attempting to reoccupy lands
in a piecemeal and individualized basis. The producers cut backwards
and forwards between this meeting and some of Buys's most unsympathetic
comments, suggesting that the government policy of market-led
redistribution of land based on a philosophy of "willing buyer,
willing seller" is unlikely to return the evicted black farmers
to their homes. Indeed, during the meeting with white farmers
that comes at the end of "Land Affairs," Hanekom's most challenging
proposal is simply that no further evictions should be engaged
in, since these steps are fanning the discontent of the already
evicted. The optimistic statement with which Hanekom closes
the episode, suggesting that a community has at least been constituted
through these two meetings to address the difficult issue of
eviction, is undercut by Buys's final words. In a menacing undertone,
Buys says that the white farmers of the area have been doing
their best to fit in with the changes that have followed apartheid's
collapse, but that their nerves have grown frayed and are likely
to break at any moment.
Buys's
belligerent comment constitutes a challenge to the ANC's language
of nation-building, just as does the struggle for social justice
engaged in by Mzalazi. "Land Affairs" allows us to witness the
unfolding conflict between South Africa's historically dispossessed
and those who have benefitted from this dispossession and who
continue to own the means of production after the demise of
apartheid. As Hein Marais has argued, the language of African
nationalism that is embedded within the ANC allowed a miraculously
bloodless transition. It has, however, proven an inadequate
vehicle to articulate and resolve the racialized class contradictions
in contemporary South Africa. Hanekom's empathetic language
in "Land Affairs" suggests that the ANC continues to recognize
the claims of its dispossessed constituency, but has been unable
to generate meaningful forms of entitlement for much of this
constituency as a result of the limitations imposed by the negotiated
character of the transition. Although the peaceful end of apartheid
and the scrapping of its heinous legal infrastructure remain
inspiring milestones, the transition prolongs rather than resolves
the central contradictions of South African society. Mzalazi's
wish for peace and justice at the conclusion of "Land Affairs"
is likely to grow more rather than less fragile under such circumstances.
Conclusion:
Television as the Angel of History
Ordinary
People provides dramatic evidence of the possibilities opened
by the SABC's transformation during the years since 1990. The
series offers a bold corrective to apartheid-era depictions
of South African society. More broadly, the series demonstrates
that although South African social movements are confronting
a difficult struggle to create meaningful forms of community
in the face of enduring inequalities, the recent history of
resistance against apartheid has introduced notions of popular
power and equality of access into public discourse with an unmatched
force. These possibilities will only be realized, however, through
continuing initiatives to open the new global conduits of media
production and distribution to democratic forces.
While demonstrating
the impact of popular struggles for democratic access to the
popular media, Ordinary People broaches the question
of property rights and of racial ideology without attempting
to offer any solutions to these increasingly significant issues.
The series thereby demonstrates the ever-increasing strains
on the cultures of collectivity developed during the struggle
for majority rule. To what extent will increasing forms of mass
mobilization in the countryside be seen as a threat to the ANC's
politics of reconciliation, to capitalist confidence, and to
the government's pledge to deliver order and stability? How
will the discourse of nation-building shift under the strains
produced by the historical class compromise forged by the ANC?
The ANC's quick retreat from a policy of growth through redistribution
to an orthodox neo-liberal strategy of fiscal discipline has
raised issues of cardinal significance for the future of the
nation. Such policies ramify not simply in the tripartite alliance,
with the SACP and COSATU struggling to define a viable oppositional
stance to the ANC, but also in the lives of ordinary South Africans.
The radical social movements that generated Ordinary People's
focus on popular history have long contested state power. The
success of such movements in democratizing the media during
the transition suggests that popular movements retain a decisive
role in rearticulating South Africa's economic and political
forces along more egalitarian lines.
Footnotes
[1]
Chris McGreal, "South African Media Accused of Racism," Daily
Mail and Guardian. 23 November 1999.
return
[2]
Rachel Swarns, "A Battle in South Africa Over Racism and Press
Freedom," New York Times 8 Mar. 2000: A3+. return
[3] Lazarus, "Charting Globalization," Race
and Class 40, 2/3 (1998/99): 92. return
[4] This point has been clearly recognized
by South African scholars involved in media theory and policy
formulation from the outset. For representative early responses
to the dilemmas raised in this context, see R.E. Tomaselli,
"Public Service Broadcasting in the Age of Information Capitalism,"
Communicare v.8, n.2 (1989), pp. 27-37 and P.E. Louw,
"Media, Media Education and the Development of South Africa,"
Screen v.32, n.4 (1991), pp. 32-42. return
[5] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New
York: Verso, 1991), 44. return
[6] The centrality of this question within
contemporary South Africa is underlined within a recent volume
of the nation's principal journal of cultural studies that is
devoted to the subject. See Critical Arts v.11, n.1-2
(1997). return
[7] For a discussion of the National Party's
quite remarkable resistance to the introduction of television,
see Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African
Culture and the World Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1994),
pp. 43-76. return
[8] Nixon, p. 46. return
[9] For a discussion of some of the early
programming produced by such collectives, see Jacqueline Maingard,
"Television Broadcasting in a Democratic South Africa," Screen
38,3 (1997). return
[10] Maingard, p. 262. return
[11] As Barry Dornfeld has recently argued,
"producers projections about their audiences greatly affect
the selection, encoding, and structuring of the media forms
these institutions distribute. The multiplicity of audiences'
interpretive positions, the various things people do in consuming
these texts through dominant, contested, or oppositional readings
and the various imagined identities that grow out of these acts
are constrained from the start by the way producers prefigure
those acts of consumption." See Barry Dornfeld, Producing
Public Television, Producing Public Culture (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton UP, 1998), pp. 13-14. return
[12] Henry Bernstein, "South Africa's Agrarian
Question: Extreme or Exceptional?," The Agrarian Question
in South Africa, ed. Henry Bernstein (Portland, OR: Frank
Cass, 1996), p. 5. return
[13] Hein Marais, South Africa, Limits
to Change: The Political Econ of Transition (New York: Zed
Books, 1998), p. 11. return
[14] Marais, 21. return
[15] Marais, p. 8. return
[16] Richard Levin and Daniel Weiner, "The
Politics of Land Reform in South Africa After Apartheid: Perspectives,
Problems, Prospects," Bernstein, p. 107. return
[17] Bernstein, 12. return
[18] Levin and Weiner, p. 100. return
[19] Levin and Weiner, p. 101. return
[20] Levin and Weiner, p. 108. return
[21] Ann Eveleth, "Land Reform Targets Are
Far, Far Away," Daily Mail and Guardian 05 June 1998
. return
[22] p. 108. return
[23] Teresa Marcus, Kathy Eales, and Adele
Wildschut, Land Demand in the New South Africa (Land
and Agriculture Policy Centre, University of Natal: Indicator
Press, 1996), p. 190. return
[24] Marais, p. 85. return
[25] Marais, p. 245. return
[26] Marais, p. 97. return
[27] Levin and Weiner, 116. return
[28] David Smith, ed. The Apartheid City
and Beyond: Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa
(New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 2. return
[29] p. 110. return
[30] Bernstein, p. 17. return