Elections and TV News in South Africa: Desperately Seeking Depth 3030717917, 9783030717919

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Elections and TV News in South Africa Desperately Seeking Depth Bernadine Jones

Elections and TV News in South Africa “Those interested in either political journalism or South African politics will find this book a valuable read. It eloquently unpacks how the media constructed their stories of South Africa’s first six post-apartheid elections. Importantly the book also helps build our theoretical understanding of political journalism by critiquing the journalistic practices it uncovers and by suggesting ways that political journalism can be improved.” Professor P. Eric Louw, University of Queensland “This book chronicles the television coverage of the birth and growth of South African democracy. By contrasting local and international perspectives on one of the most tumultuous and exciting periods in the country’s history, Jones asks questions about how the global mediatization of politics has played out in this young African democracy. Covering more than two decades of history in an engaging and accessible way, the book will appeal to scholarly and general audiences interested in the intersection of politics, media and visual discourse.” Professor Herman Wasserman, University of Cape Town “South Africa’s struggle for freedom was one of the defining events in modern history. It was important not only for South Africans, but globally. In the eyes of the world, its future was our future. South Africa was a beacon of hope that democracy would always eventually triumph. We now live in a different world. Almost 30 years on from the election that brought Nelson Mandela to power, Bernadine Jones explores the legacy of that election, the interplay of politics and the media, and the way the ‘foundation story’ of South Africa has been mythologised by the ANC. Incisive, and ofttimes chilling, it is a wake-up call for those who hoped to see South Africa take its place as a role model for democracy in a world where tyranny thrives, and where nations—once thought to be stalwarts of democratic politics—are falling prey to conspiracists and populists.” Mr Tom Collins, OBE, Journalist

Bernadine Jones

Elections and TV News in South Africa Desperately Seeking Depth

Bernadine Jones University of Stirling Stirling, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-71791-9    ISBN 978-3-030-71792-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71792-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To ELJ

Timeline

Beginnings of the Union 1910—Formation of the Union of South Africa. The Union incorporated former British colonies of the Cape and Natal and the Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State. 1912—South African Native National Congress (SANNC), later renamed African National Congress (ANC), founded by John Langalibalele Dube in Bloemfontein on 8 January. SANNC was in direct response to injustice against black people by those in power. 1913—The Natives Land Act introduced to prevent black people, except those living in the Cape Province, from buying land from white people outside dedicated reserves. The Act was finally rescinded in 1991. 1914—Afrikaner nationalists founded the National Party (NP) in Bloemfontein after disagreement with Prime Minister Louis Botha. The NP held Afrikaner ethnic protection at its heart and came to power in coalition with the Labour Party in 1924. 1915—De Nasionale Pers Beperkt (National Press Ltd., or Naspers) founded as a publisher and printer of newspapers and magazines. Cape lawyer and National Party organiser W.A. Hofmeyr launched Naspers and published Die Burger newspaper in June. 1918—Secret society, the Broederbond (literally “band of brothers” or Brotherhood), established to advance the Afrikaner cause. It was originally named Jong Zuid Afrika (“Young South Africa”) until 1920. All leaders of the government and many prominent apartheid figures were members. 1918—Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela born in Mvezo. vii

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1921—Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA; later renamed South African Communist Party or SACP) formed by William H. Andrews. 1923—Radio broadcasting began in the country with the support of South African Railways. 1923—J.L.  Dube renames SANNC to the African National Congress (ANC). 1923—Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe born in Graaff-Reinet. 1927—Radio services merged into the African Broadcasting Company, owned by wealthy American businessman Isidore Williem Schlesinger. 1928—Mangosuthu Buthelezi born in Mahlabathini. 1934—Union of South Africa parliament enacts the Status of the Union Act, which declares the country to be a sovereign and independent state. 1936—F.W. de Klerk born in Johannesburg. 1936—Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela, otherwise known as Winnie Mandela, born in Mbongweni, Pondoland (Eastern Cape). 1936—Government founds the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), taking over the assets of the African Broadcasting Company. 1942—Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki born in Mbewuleni, eSigangeni. 1942—Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma born in Nkandla. 1942—Martin Thembisile Hani (also known as Chris Hani) born in Cofimvaba, Transkei. 1948—National Party wins the general election.

Apartheid 1948—Policy of apartheid (literally “aparthood” or “separateness”) adopted. 1950—Population classified by race (white, black, Coloured, and Indian) as one of the first acts of apartheid legislation. It paved the way for “grand apartheid” that separated races on a large scale. These racial classifications continue to be normalised in South African society today. 1950—Group Areas Act passed to segregate blacks and whites. Resulting destruction of mixed race and black areas included Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District 6 in Cape Town. 1950—The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) banned. ANC starts a campaign of civil disobedience, led by Nelson Mandela. 1951—Helen Zille born in Johannesburg.

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1952—Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa born in Soweto. 1953—J. Arthur Rank Organisation petitions government to introduce television into the country. Government dismisses the suggestion, arguing television was a threat to the system of apartheid and Afrikaner ethic. 1955—The Congress of the People, an event organised by the ANC, formally adopted the Freedom Charter on 26 June. These core principles are driven by the opening line, “The People Shall Govern”. 1959—Pan African Congress (later, Pan African Congress of Azania) launched at Orlando Community Hall in Soweto, in opposition to the ANC’s non-racial Freedom Charter. Robert Sobukwe becomes leader of PAC. 1960—Residents in Sharpeville, Vereeniging, in conjunction with the Pan African Congress, organise a protest against passbooks—the government required all black people to carry passes to enter white areas. Resulting police action led to at least 70 demonstrators killed and the event labelled the “Sharpeville massacre”. Sobukwe was arrested and jailed for three years. Anti-apartheid groups (including the PAC and ANC) subsequently banned. 1961—South Africa declared a republic, and officially leaves the Commonwealth. 1961—In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre, ANC launches its armed wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation” or shortened to MK), with Mandela as first commander. MK launches widespread sabotage campaign with first attacks against government installations on 16 December 1961. United States and South African governments class MK as a terrorist organisation, and Mandela remained on the terror watchlist in America until 2008. 1963–1964—Rivonia trials of 12 ANC members take place in Johannesburg, charged under the 1962 Sabotage Act to violently overthrow the government. Co-accused included Nelson Mandela, Denis Goldberg, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki (Thabo’s father), Walter Sisulu, and Elias Motsoaledi. 1964—Mandela sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. 1966—Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd assassinated by Dimitri Tsafendas on 6 September at the House of Assembly in Cape Town. Verwoerd was replaced by B.J. Foster in September. 1967—Oliver Reginald Kaizana Tambo becomes acting president of the ANC after Chief Albert Luthuli died in 1967. OR Tambo led the ANC while in exile until 1990.

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1971—Television finally allowed in the country but took five years to roll out across the country. 1976—Television introduced in South Africa. First television broadcast (in Afrikaans) on 5 January. 1976—Youth uprising in South West Township (Soweto) on 16 June. Many young people killed by police and security forces, most shot in the back. Official figures state 176 people died, but estimates are well over 600. Hector Pieterson is the second child to be killed, and the image spreads around the world quickly. 1978—PAC president Robert Sobukwe dies of lung cancer in Kimberly, aged 53. 1980—Mmusi Aloysias Maimane born in Krugersdorp. 1981—Julius Sello Malema born in Seshego-B, Polokwane. 1982—Two further television broadcast services introduced on the SABC: TV2 and TV3. 1983—MK bombs the Church Street Airforce Headquarters in Pretoria, killing 19 and injuring 217. This was the start of a widespread bombing, landmine, and torture campaign by MK throughout the 1980s. 1984–1989—Government declares a State of Emergency in the country after widespread township revolts and bombing campaign. This era became known as the “crisis years”. 1986—Competing subscription-based service M-Net launched, backed by the Naspers newspaper consortium. M-Net expanded the media environment by broadcasting imported shows from the US and the UK.

Peace Process 1989—F.W. de Klerk replaces P.W. Botha as president. The young, pragmatic, and verligte (enlightened) de Klerk realises the current form of apartheid is a “cul-de-sac”. de Klerk meets Mandela, starting the process of reconciliation. Many ANC activists are freed and public facilities desegregated. 1990—ANC unbanned. Mandela released from Victor Venter Prison and the images are televised globally. The Pretoria Minute suspended armed struggle of ANC and MK, bringing the state of emergency to an end. 1990—Tripartite Alliance (or “Revolutionary Alliance” or simply “The Alliance”) formed between the ANC, Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and the SACP.

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1991—Start of multi-party talks at CODESA I, the first plenary, to conceptualise the new constitution for the country. National peace accord signed on 14 September 1991. 1992—Increased factional fighting between ANC and IFP members leads to township battles. Boipatong massacre on 15 June where 45 residents were killed by Zulu hostel dwellers. 1992—CODESA II, the second plenary, breaks down, as Mandela withdraws from negotiations. He accused the government of being complicit over the Boipatong massacre and instead recommended mass action. 1992—ANC’s “rolling mass action” met with tragedy at the 7 September  Bisho massacre of 29 people. The Ciskei homeland army opened fire on protest marchers. A new urgency to find a settlement spurred the government, ANC, and IFP to resume negotiations. 1992—Joe Slovo, former leader of the SACP, secured a major breakthrough in the negotiation process by presenting the “sunset clauses”. A coalition government (ANC/NP/IFP) would lead the country for five years following the elections, while existing (white) civil servants would have guarantees of land, jobs, and security. Even today, the sunset clauses are controversial, and many accuse the ANC of “selling out” their Freedom Charter ideals. 1993—South African Communist Party leader and Commander in Chief of MK Chris Hani assassinated on 10 April by Janusz Waluś. His assassination seen as a turning point in the country’s transition—Mandela addresses the nation, speaking like a president, and the negotiation process galvanises into action. The election date is decided for 27 April 1994. 1993—AWB crashes a “Viper” armoured vehicle through the doors of the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park on 25 June, where the negotiations were being held. AWB members took control of the building briefly but departed peacefully. White right-wing groups vehemently opposed the negotiation process as they felt their interests were not being considered. 1993—Agreement on interim constitution of the country occurred in the early hours of 18 November. 1994—Bophuthatswana crisis unfolds as splinter white nationalists from the AWB invade the homeland on 11 March. High-profile killing of AWB militants threaten to destabilise peace process. Images of the dying AWB commanders, taken by Kevin Carter and Greg Marinovich, spread globally and draw the news spotlight to Southern Africa. 1994—Township battles, the bombing campaign by the white right, and IFP attacks precluded the 1994 election. Upwards of 20,000 IFP

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members stormed Shell House (ANC headquarters in Johannesburg) on 28 March where ANC officials opened fire, killing 19 people. Bomb explodes in Bree Street, Johannesburg, on 25 April, killing nine people. Bomb explodes at Jan Smuts International Airport on 28 April, killing 21 people. 1994—First all-race elections in the country over three days in April. ANC wins by landslide. Mandela becomes first democratic president and leads the Government of National Unity between National Party, ANC, and IFP. 1994—Final sanctions on South Africa are lifted and the country resumes its seat in UN General Assembly. Township battles calm and the nation breathes a cautious sign of relief. 1994—New designations for the provinces: Transvaal briefly becomes the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV) before settling on Gauteng. Natal becomes KwaZulu-Natal. Orange Free State becomes the Free State. Cape of Good Hope becomes Western Cape. Bantustans, or homelands, are amalgamated into the nine provinces, including Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, QwaQwa, and Venda. 1995—Joe Slovo dies of cancer and is buried in Avalon Cemetery, Soweto.

Truth and Reconciliation 1996—Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as chair begins hearings on human rights crimes committed by both government officials and liberation movements during apartheid. 1996—Government adopts new constitution on 8 May and is promulgated by President Mandela on 18 December. 1996—National Party withdraws from Government of National Unity on 9 May, leaving the ANC and IFP as sole members until the 1999 election, when the GNU lapsed. 1996—SABC reorganises its programming to three channels—SABC 1, 2, and 3. 1998—TRC report brands apartheid a crime against humanity and finds ANC accountable for human rights abuses. 1998—Competing free-to-air television service e.tv launched, expanding the free television news bouquet in South Africa. 1998—The government procures weaponry and military aircraft to modernise the defence force under the Strategic Defence Acquisition. It

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became known simply as the Arms Deal and was plagued by allegations of corruption, implicating Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, politician Tony Yengeni, and businessman Schabir Shaik. Patricia de Lille acted as whistleblower in 1999 with numerous bribery allegations.1 1999—ANC wins second general elections. Thabo Mbeki becomes second democratic president. 1999—On 28 October, Mbeki gives speech to the National Council of Provinces and questions whether the government should distribute antiretroviral (ARV) drugs to combat AIDS. The epidemic was exploding in the country at the time. 2001—ANC Today, an online newsletter, established to offset the alleged mainstream media press against the ANC government. 2001—Mbeki chairs the “Presidential Advisory Panel on AIDS” which debated the significance of the HIV/AIDS link and the need for AIDS testing in the country. Mbeki argues that alleviating poverty in the country is more important than relying on expensive Western medicine. Mbeki’s approval rating plummets and he acknowledges he caused “confusion” by challenging the mainstream view of AIDS. 2002—Bomb explodes in Soweto and Pretoria, thought to be the work of right-wing extremists. Police also charge 17 right-wingers with plotting against the state. 2004—ANC wins third general election. Mbeki retains a second term as president. 2004—Government-approved ARV drugs to combat the spread of AIDS begin to reach hospitals by April. 2004—Deputy President Jacob Zuma becomes a key figure in the Schabir Shaik corruption trial, related to the 1998 Arms Deal. 2005—Pretoria, legislative capital of South Africa, is renamed Tshwane. 2005—Mbeki sacks Zuma on 14 June due to the intense media speculation of Zuma’s implication in the Shaik corruption trial. Zuma resigns as a member of parliament. 2005—Zuma is accused of raping 31-year-old HIV-positive “Kwezi”, a family friend. During the trial, Zuma dismisses the risk of HIV/AIDS because he “took a shower”. Political cartoonist Zapiro now frequently

1  See Andrew Feinstein’s After the Party (2007) for an account of the Arms Deal process and impact.

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draws Zuma with a shower on his head because of this statement. ProZuma supporters gather at the High Court in December and condemn the trial.

Zunami 2006—Zuma is acquitted of rape charges on 8 May. Throughout the trial, Zuma and his supporters sing “Umshini Wami” (Bring me my machine gun), a song associated with MK and the Struggle. 2006—Arguments between AIDS activists and the  AIDS denialist ANC cabinet continue. Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is labelled “Dr Beetroot” after she advises herbal remedies (including beetroot and garlic) to treat AIDS. 2007—Helen Zille elected as new leader of the DA, the official opposition party. 2007—The Directorate of Special Operations (also known as the Scorpions) serve Zuma with an indictment to stand trial in the High Court on 28 December. He faces charges of racketeering, money laundering, corruption, and fraud. If convicted, Zuma would be ineligible to run for presidency. Zuma appeared in court on 4 August 2008. 2008—Mbeki’s government was responsible for about 343,000 preventable AIDS-related deaths, according to two studies. 2008—eNCA news channel launched on 1 June. The channel became South Africa’s first rolling news service and broadcast 24 hours a day on the DSTV service, with scheduled news on the e.tv channel. 2008—Xenophobic riots sweep the nation as dozens of foreign African nationals die in township battles. Of the 68 people killed in the riots, 21 were South African nationals. 2008—Zuma is accused of fresh corruption charges on 4 August, but a judge dismisses the case on 12 September, declaring the charges unlawful on procedural grounds. Zuma starts campaigning for presidency. 2008—Mbeki is recalled from the presidency over allegations he was involved in the Zuma corruption case. He steps down on 25 September, and Kgalema Motlanthe is inaugurated as interim president. 2009—Congress of the People (COPE) launched by Mosiuoa Lekota, Mbhazima Shilowa, and Mluleki George, and campaigns for the fourth democratic elections. 2009—Zuma corruption trial resumes briefly in January but is dropped on 6 April, days before the election. Supporters celebrate by wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Zuma’s face with the caption “100% Zulu Boy”.

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2009—South African economy slides into recession for the first time in 17 years as a result of the Great Recession of the late 2000s. 2009—ANC wins the election and Zuma is elected as third democratic president in the fourth general election on 22 April. 2010—Artist Brett Murray paints The Spear, a depiction of Jacob Zuma in the style of Lenin, but with his genitals exposed. The painting provoked intense debate on the freedom of expression, and the ANC triggered a defamation lawsuit against Murray in 2012. 2010—South Africa successfully hosts the FIFA World Cup tournament amidst nation-wide strikes.

Splitting of the Rock 2011—Zuma sacks two ministers accused of corruption. ANC suspends its controversial and influential youth leader, Julius Malema. 2012—Mineworkers at the Marikana platinum mine Lonmin conduct a wildcat strike and down tools. Between 10 and 16 August, 78 people die including both police and miners. Prosecutors eventually drop murder charges against 270 miners after public outcry. 2012—Malema visits Marikana in support of the miners’ strike and called for Zuma to resign. 2013—Malema launches the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) on 26 July in Soweto. Malema is then charged with money laundering but says this is politically motivated to silence his campaign. 2013—Nelson Mandela dies at the age of 95 after a long illness. 2013—Anti-Corruption ombudsman criticises Zuma for R246mil upgrades to his private home in Nkandla using mostly public funds. 2014—ANC wins majority in fifth general elections. Zuma retains the presidency. 2014—Oscar Pistorius, the “Blade Runner”, kills his girlfriend and is sentenced to five years in jail. The trial draws heavy media coverage globally. 2015—Zuma announces plan to ban foreign farmland-ownership in an attempt to redistribute land to black farmers. This was a key ANC manifesto from the Freedom Charter. 2015—Power utility Eskom rations electricity to prevent power cuts in a rolling nation-wide system of “load shedding” that continues for years. Eskom blames poor maintenance for the crumbling system.

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2015—On its centenary, Naspers CEO Esmaré Weideman apologised for the company’s role in supporting apartheid. 2016—Supreme Court rules Zuma violated constitution for using public money to improve Nkandla. Zuma is ordered to “pay back the money”, echoing a call from the EFF. 2016—Weeks before the local elections take place, SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng bans news of protests where property is damaged, leading to criticism from South African and international press freedom watchdogs. 2017—Zuma dismisses popular Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, an act that pushes the country’s credit rating cut to junk status.

The New Dawn 2018—Zuma resigns from the ANC and government presidency after pressure from corruption charges. Cyril Ramaphosa is elected as successor to ANC leadership. 2018—Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, second wife of Nelson Mandela, dies on 2 April. 2019—ANC wins the general elections with the lowest majority since 1994. Ramaphosa becomes the country’s fourth president in the sixth general election. 2020—The coronavirus pandemic damages the ANC’s “course correction” agenda as millions are thrust further into poverty and lose their jobs. The country enters into a harsh “lockdown” period before many other nations on 23 March. 2020–2021—Denis Goldberg and George Bizos, lawyers and political activists during the Rivonia Trials, both die. Zindzi Mandela, daughter of Nelson Mandela,  Lungile Tom, promiment eNCA journalist, Mluleki George, former COPE leader, Jackson Mthembu, Minister of the Presidency, andKing Goodwill Zweluthini, King of the Zulu nation, die with COVID-19.

Preface

We are living in a complicated and complex time, saturated by screens and news media, navigating post-truth politics and living in a (post) pandemic world. There is also a so-called ‘crisis’ in global political journalism, arising from mediatised reporting that is more flashy than informative and news media that has been captured by business interests. Our reliance on visual news is at an all-time high, be that through traditional television broadcasts or video on demand via YouTube or legacy news websites. Yet, if we are to flourish as a society, one that can adequately see itself represented in mainstream news, then we must take more care over these crafted and created news narratives. Taking visual news seriously is a step in the right direction. And it is in this imbroglio that Desperately Seeking Depth appears. This book reflects on six South African general elections, from 1994 to 2019, and considers both the journalistic representation of the elections and the shifting professional practice of reporting over the years. But why focus on South Africa and why elections? The political journalism crisis is felt astutely all over the world. And yet so much of our understanding of the practice comes from the North and the West, and few scholars dedicate extensive time to African representations of Africa. Indeed, Achille Mbembe once wrote that we know virtually nothing about what African societies comprise but very much about what they lack. There is still much to be said about the quality and content of actual news media, aside from the structural and policy analysis. So, while election coverage is a popular field of analysis, the scholarship on South African election reporting often starts from a “top down” approach  – political science first, and media studies at the very end if it gets mentioned at all. In this book, election xvii

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reporting is considered through both the practice of that news reporting (context) as well as the news representation itself (content). Media has a growing and valuable role in the political process, and it is the struggle over political meaning that is now at stake, rather than a gauge of political participation through vote-catch events. This book is as much a description and analysis of news media in post-apartheid South Africa as it is a reflection on symbolic representation during elections. This book originated from my PhD studies, completed in 2018 at the University of Cape Town during a particularly intense period of student and community protest action. Researching and writing the treatise during the vigorous and emphatic dissent from students and workers became a merciless task, because I simply could not detach my thoughts of the decolonial movement occurring outside my door with the content of the news and politics that covered the protests, and which I then analysed for my PhD. The gap between my doctoral capping and the publishing of this book allowed for some space between action and reflection, meant that other researchers were able to objectively analyse the experiences I had lived through, and during which time another general election had passed. As such, this book uses the original thesis from my PhD, but expands upon it greatly as I have had time and space to reflect and re-analyse much of the broadcast data. The book therefore does not read as a theoretical treatise as one might expect for a PhD, and I have left much of my emotional connection to South Africa and its democracy within the pages. I am and have always been proudly South African, and I realised while writing up this manuscript in Scotland, a world away from the Hoerikwaggo in Cape Town, that detaching emotion from experience and analysis results in an indifferent account, an aloofness where familiarity is required. Writing chapters 3, 6, and 8 were particularly poignant due to the closeness of my own experiences with the news broadcasts I analysed. My PhD conducted a deep multimodal analysis of the broadcasts, but this book is more of a historical overview of the elections, of democracy in the country, and of the media landscape. I noticed that much of the preceding literature about South African elections and democracy was disconnected between these two – books tend to either be an historical overview and political in nature or discuss media coverage of a single election. It is the aim of this book to draw these two things together with an historical overview in the first part and an analysis of media representation in the second part. This book attempts to provide the field with a comprehensive overview of South African news media, the television news coverage of its

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elections, and a critique of the mediatised political journalism that plagues the practice. By creating a dedicated analysis of television news coverage of South African elections, this book describes and critiques news coverage across six election years. At its heart, this book argues for an approach that revisits the fundamental tenets of journalism to revolutionise the representation of South Africa on visual news. Ultimately, this book shows how the visual representation of the elections on television news kept viewers apart from South African politics, inserting levels of detachment via camera proxemics, evaluative voices, and mediatised news frames. Desperately Seeking Depth takes television news and visual rhetoric seriously, and adds new knowledge about what African societies comprise, rather than what they lack.

Acknowledgements

What respectable body of work would be complete without expressing one’s gratitude to those who have helped carry the author—mind, soul, and sometimes body—through the wilderness of research? It stands to reason then that I convey my utmost appreciation for my two PhD supervisors, Drs Martha Evans and Wallace Chuma, for guiding me along the path to this book with infinite patience, wisdom, and maddening attention to detail. Despite being halfway across the world and enduring difficult and uncertain times, they never failed to give consistently excellent feedback and support on the original form of this research. My mentor at Stirling University, Tom Collins, is a constant source of inspiration and kindly gave his time and care to help develop numerous chapters of this book. Without the financial, academic, and moral support of the Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa team from the Social Science Research Council, this book and the study upon which it is based would not have been possible. The two NextGen Fellowships granted me the time and space to focus on writing the original study. My mentors and colleagues at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town have stood behind me throughout this project and provided funding for the exorbitantly priced broadcasts. Vital funding from the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) enabled this study’s depth and original research. Without this generous grant, I would not have been able to continue with this project, or afford the expensive broadcast data that made up my sample. Speaking of archives, a special thank you goes to Sias Scott and Duma-Sandile Mboni at the SABC Archives and Carmen xxi

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Whitcher at the eTV Archives. Their consistent hard work and helpfulness made a long and difficult task that much easier, and I want to acknowledge their capabilities in what is often a thankless yet important role at these two South African broadcasters. Parental support is not always a given during authorship, and I am lucky to have parents who motivate, support, and encourage me in every step that I take in my career. I am eternally obliged to my father, Arthur, for his undying love and support throughout my degree, career, and my life. Without his advice and encouragement, I would be a lesser person than I am today. My mother, Madeleine, has been a constant source of support, including proofreading endless samples, and keeps the light in me burning even on the bleakest of days. To my soul mate, best friend, eternal optimist, and husband, Emlyn. For all those times you had to listen to my jumbled up thoughts and yet somehow managed to slowly drag them out into a solid, sequential line; for having to speak via Facebook Messenger for hours on end because I needed isolation; for letting me fall asleep on you during exciting movies; for taking me on long walks when all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball. For joining me on this path and always seeing the light in this world; for supporting me emotionally, financially, physically, and mentally, without reservation, for many years. For all of these things, and countless others that you do for me and with me, I dedicate this book to you.

Contents

Part I The Story of South Africa   1 1 Contextualising Election Reporting  3 Introduction   3 Aims   6 Concepts in Reporting Elections   7 Lack of Media Studies in Studies About Elections   7 The Hype-Ocracy   9 Framing and the Game Frame  10 Mediatisation  11 Reporting (South) African Elections  12 Local Media Coverage  13 International Media Coverage  14 Who Studies South African Elections?  16 But Why Television News?  16 Research Methods  18 Sample  18 Characteristics of the Multimodal Instrument  19 Juxtaposition  20 Analysis  20 Structure of the Book  21 References  23

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2 Political Parties Over 25 Years 29 How Democracy Works in South Africa  29 Political Parties Over the Years  30 National Party/NNP  30 Democratic Party/Alliance  31 African National Congress  33 Inkatha Freedom Party  35 Economic Freedom Fighters  37 Congress of the People  38 AGANG  39 White Right/Black Left  39 Election Results, 1994–2019  40 References  43 3 Story of South Africa’s Democracy, 1994–2019 45 Introduction  45 1994: Getting to This Point  47 It Would Have Been a Miracle  48 Qunu Cattle Herder to Freedom Fighter  49 1994–1999: The Rainbow Nation  50 The Outgoing King  51 Problems in Paradise  52 1999–2004: African Pride, Renaissance  53 Deputy President to Favourite Son  54 The Dissipating Froth of the Miracle  55 The Beguiling Academic with Rural Beginnings  56 African Renaissance  57 Loyalty Above All Else  58 Profile of the Electorate  59 2004–2009: Ousting of a Would-be King  59 Polokwane 2007  60 A Push Towards Populism  61 Broedertwis  62 Splitting of the Rock  63 2009–2014: 100% Zulu Boy  63 Zuma’s Damoclean Issues  65 Marikana  66 Changing Electorate  67 ANC on the Defence  68

 CONTENTS 

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2014–2019: Pin Pricks of Light in a Tunnel  69 The Wheels Are Coming Off the Vehicle of Our State  69 Rise of the ANC Party-State  70 The Iron Grip of Umshini Wami: State Capture  71 RET and White Monopoly Capital  72 GuptaGate and GuptaLeaks  73 Polokwane 2017: By a Whisker  76 A Mask for the Elections  77 Ending the Illusions  78 References  80 4 South Africa’s TV News Landscape 83 Introduction  83 SABC: Views, Not News  85 That Evil Black Box  86 Shake Up and Shake Down  88 The Long Walk to Transformation  90 Power Struggles and the Parallel Road  91 An Ugly Monster  92 MultiChoice: A Global Empire  95 DSTV: Shaping Mass Culture on the Continent  96 Plurality of News Choice  97 Diversification and Digitalisation  98 24-Hour Rolling News  99 GroundUp Grassroots News 100 Gupta News 101 Journalism in South Africa 101 Newsroom Challenges 101 Top-Down and View of the Suburbs 102 Trust in Journalism 103 Freedom of the Media and Expression 104 Deteriorating Relationship 105 References 106

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CONTENTS

Part II South African Elections on Television News 109 5 News Values and Frames of Elections111 Introduction 111 Political Journalism 112 Post-Cold War News Values 114 Media Logic and Mediatisation 116 Reporting (South) Africa 118 The Rhetoric of Empire 119 Binaries and Stereotypes 121 Entangled Narratives 123 (South) African Reporting 125 Partisanship 125 “Universal” and “African” Professional Ideals 128 Listening to the Ground 129 References 130 6 The ANC Has No Clothes133 Introduction 133 The Liberation Narrative 134 Under Apartheid Skies 134 Post-Apartheid Struggle with the Free Press 136 The ANC’s Liberation Narrative 137 The Liberation Narrative and Elections 138 Liberation Movements Tend to Age Disgracefully 140 Journalists Emulate ANC Hegemony 141 Sole Liberator 142 The “Mandela Effect” 143 Protests and Dissent Against the Government 146 Implications 149 References 152 7 Power and Populism155 Introduction 155 Representing People: The South African Electorate 157 Early Depictions of Rural People 158 Black Hopes and White Fears 160 The IFP’s Frightening War Band in 1994 162 The “Hands Up” Signification 164

 CONTENTS 

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ANC Fealty from 2009 165 The Red Tide of the EFF in 2014 167 The Blindly Loyal and Confusing Electorate 168 Born Frees and the Youth 170 Disengaging with Realities 174 Representing Politics: Leaders and Speakers 175 The Jacob Zuma Show 176 Offer and Demand 177 Removing Mbeki 178 South African Perspective: Mbeki Is Popular 179 The 20-Year Mark 181 Voicing Politicians in a Lip Flap 182 Non-mainstream News Does the Heavy Lifting 183 Talking Without Listening 184 Political Drop-off 185 Descriptive, Rather than Seeking the “why” 187 The Challenge to Do Better 187 Methods Change Meanings 189 References 189 8 Visuals and Violence193 Introduction 193 Violence 195 Election Violence Bookended the 1994 Election 196 Peace Journalism or Simply a Lack of Violence? 198 Protest Action Reduced to Neoliberal Values 200 When Journalists Listen to Citizens 202 Neoliberal Values Undermine Contextualisation 204 Understanding the Protests 205 Control of Violence 206 Controlling the Edge of Democracy 206 A “Subjective Angle” of South African Police 208 Security in Maintenance Mode: 2014 and 2019 209 Distance and Hesitation 210 At Arm’s Length 210 South African Hesitation 211 The Lack of Listening 212 References 212

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Contents

Part III Conclusion 215 9 Desperately Seeking Depth217 Neoliberal Values and Mediatisation 218 So, What Is a Journalist to Do? 219 Mediatised Political Journalism 220 Local and International Reporting 221 Local Political Journalism 221 International Political Journalism 223 Voicing the Populous 225 Top-Down Organisation of the Media 226 The Lack of Listening 227 Suggestions for Improving Practice 228 Characteristics of Constructive Journalism 228 Conclusion 234 References 235 Index239

About the Author

Bernadine Jones  is Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Stirling, Scotland. She was the Next Generation in Social Science Fellow at the University of Cape Town where she completed her PhD, and has written on visual analysis methodology, African representation in news, and political journalism during elections. She voted in her first South African general election in 2009 in Rondebosch, Cape Town. Jones lives in Stirling, Scotland, with her husband. She is proudly South African.

xxix

Abbreviations

ACDP AMCU ANC AVF AWB AZAPO CODESA COPE COSATU CP DA DP DSTV EFF FF FF+ GEAR GNU IEC IFP IM MK MMA NA NEC NNP NP

African Christian Democratic Party Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union African National Congress Afrikaner Volksfront Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging Azanian People’s Organisation Convention for a Democratic South Africa Congress of the People Congress of South African Trade Unions Conservative Party Democratic Alliance Democratic Party, see DA Digital Satellite Television Economic Freedom Fighters Freedom Front Freedom Front Plus Growth, Employment, and Redistribution Government of National Unity Independent Electoral Commission Inkatha Freedom Party Independent Media Commission uMkhonto we Sizwe Media Monitoring Africa National Action National Executive Council (of the ANC) New National Party National Party xxxi

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ABBREVIATIONS

NPA NROC NUM PAC RDP SABC SACP SAPS SANDF TRC UDM UNOMSA

National Prosecuting Agency National Results Operations Centre National Union of Mineworkers Pan African Congress Reconstruction and Development Programme South African Broadcast Corporation South African Communist Party South African Police Service South African National Defence Force Truth and Reconciliation Committee United Democratic Movement United National Observation Mission in South Africa

PART I

The Story of South Africa

CHAPTER 1

Contextualising Election Reporting

Introduction On 27 April 1994, the new South Africa was born a democracy with universal suffrage. Having risen like a Phoenix out of a low-scale civil war, the new democracy seemed a resplendent example of negotiation vanquishing conflict and peace victorious over violence. Nelson Mandela, the charismatic icon of the Struggle, united South Africans under the Rainbow Nation umbrella. The world watched as Madiba smiled his way into the hearts of everyone. International journalists walked along unending lines of newly enfranchised black South Africans who stood in their millions in the autumn sunlight, ready to cast their first ballot no matter what the circumstance. After the bloodshed of the previous weeks’ bombing campaign and ethnic violence, this election seemed like the miracle panacea— perfect narratives to soothe a war-weary world. South Africa’s democracy turned 25 in 2019 in a celebration of freedom and unity and culminated in the sixth free general election held on 8 May 2019. By 2019, the news spotlight had faded from the heady days of 1994, as Cyril Ramaphosa took hold of the presidential reins. Ramaphosa followed three previous leaders, Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, and Nelson Mandela, to steer South Africa through a complex post-apartheid setting. For the sixth time, the South African electorate queued in the early morning, waiting to cast their hard-earned ballot. South African journalists were quick to compare these scenes to the first poll in 1994: voting lines, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Jones, Elections and TV News in South Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71792-6_1

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political leaders, and enthusiasm for the national vote were described in tones of awe and wonder. Democracy in South Africa, symbolised through ballot casting, is a jealously guarded and evocative experience. It is not, as in many established nations, just a meaningless moment of political theatre. The sixth election ran as expected—South Africans sang songs and ate braaivleis while waiting for the polling stations to open, the long ballot paper filled out in secret, thumbs marked and ID books scanned, and the ruling party claimed victory once again. Political violence interspersed the snaking lines, however, for all was not well in the Rainbow Nation. In the run-up to the 2019 election, mirroring previous elections, protest action against a government that failed to deliver on election promises resulted in clashes with authorities across South Africa. From 2004 onwards, protest action has intensified in the country, igniting especially during election time. Protesters blockaded roads, burnt down polling booths (often hastily erected tents), and threw stones at the government cavalcade entering the area. Security forces tried to curtail the destruction, occasionally with rubber bullets and stun grenades but in later years through sheer show of force and numbers. When captured on news broadcasts, the dramatic scenes were not unlike those in the closing moments of apartheid. Running battles in city centres, debris, and smoke grenades clouding the air. Enthusiastic news channels, driven by news values that favour the dramatic, focused in on the bright tyre fires and destroyed municipal buildings while the protesters themselves were rarely featured. Such is the way of modern election reporting: bright colours and flashing lights, an empty diet of mediatised reporting. But why were news channels so disengaged with the details of South African democracy? In 1994, news channels from across the globe scrambled to tell the story of a country victorious in the negotiated settlement. In 2014, the same channels descended on the 20-year-old democracy to explain the “Born Free” youth vote. Why were the same channels silent in the intervening years? What factors drive this shift in attention? What is this relationship of the media with the government? And ultimately, how is the story of South Africa’s 25-year democracy told on the news? These are the questions that this book answers. Along the way, we will explore the nature of transnational political journalism in an era when political-­ journalistic synergy is at an all-time high. During the apartheid era and quite far into the transformation period of the 1990s, the competition for identity formation, cultural politics, and political representation was fought between mass media and mass party

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politics. Now, facing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, these concepts are dispersed amongst newer forms of mediated communication: social media allows further (but not absolute) diversification of voices, global news networks disseminate messages to scattered audiences, and, crucially for elections in South Africa, the fractured diaspora can vote in their country of residence. These scatterings of South Africa receive most of their televised political information not via local SABC news but through international news channels that report on the country. Global news channels reporting on South Africa are therefore important for the voting diaspora but also for the internal voters too. With new arenas for public debate and popular culture narratives, South Africans finally received global representations of their own country. Pluralism of media enhances democracy because there is more choice for substantive and deliberative information in the public sphere. This book therefore considers the election coverage on local, South African news channels as well as broadcasts from international news channels when attempting to answer those questions. Both perspectives will explore how television news depicted South Africa’s democracy across six election periods. Achille Mbembe once wrote that, although “we now feel we know nearly everything that African states, societies, and economies are not, we still know absolutely nothing about what they actually are” (2015, p. 9). Many studies that look at African news media during elections focus on developmental frameworks of the postcolony, access and funding of the media, freedom of expression, and partisan news. This is a worthy and necessary avenue of exploration and we know quite well what African news lacks in terms of election reporting, yet we know very little about what actually occurs. There is still much to be said about the quality and content of this representation on news media, aside from the structural and policy analysis. There should be a break from the normative frameworks to the more descriptive, analytical perspective that questions the notions of power and rhetoric in the visual. This book therefore takes television news seriously. It treats the text and the context as equals. Election reporting is considered through both the practice of that news reporting and the contents of the news representation. Media has a growing role in the political process, and it is the struggle over political meaning that is now at stake, rather than a gauge of political participation through vote-catch events. This book is as much a description and analysis of news media in post-apartheid South Africa as it is a reflection on symbolic representation during elections.

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Aims This book occurs at a time when there is a so-called crisis in global political journalism, from mediatised reporting of elections to post-truth politics running rampant in a media captured by business interests. Most books written about South African elections sorely lack an overarching discussion of the media’s representation, particularly from a visual, narrative, and journalistic perspective. Election compendiums are generally year-­ specific, focus on political science data, and, when media narratives are mentioned at all, tend to lump print media together with broadcast news. Doing so creates confusion about how the country is represented on the media firstly and secondly how this representation has changed, if at all, over the years. It is therefore the aim of this book to interrogate the shifting challenges of political journalism, and the changing news narratives of one of Africa’s most famous democracies: South Africa. Desperately Seeking Depth is more than just an academic discussion of South African democracy and election narratives, although that is the first point of entry. Instead, the primary aim is an overarching investigation of news narratives, focusing on the visual representation of the country’s democracy, and critiquing the shifting journalistic relationship with politics over the years. When this book ends with three suggestions to improve, enhance, and challenge the status quo in political journalism, it does so with an aim to transform our normative understanding of South Africa’s democracy, its representation on local and international news, as well as the underlying issues of mediatised reporting. Over the next nine chapters, we will discover what news stories are told about South African democracy, as well as how and why they are told in that way. This investigation rests on two central hypotheses: firstly, Louw (2005), Strömbäck (2008), and Bennett (2012) suggest that global political journalism became increasingly mediatised in the 1990s and 2000s (see the following conceptual background for an overview of this term), and so it is assumed that media coverage of the South African elections will follow suit. Secondly, international interest in South African elections decreased substantially from 1994 to 2019 as democracy was further consolidated and normalised, therefore of little interest to a global political media that prefers hype over consequence. Louw and Chitty (2000) suggest that South Africa effectively fell off the global radar post-1994 because global interest and investment in the country’s democracy evaporated.

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Investigating South Africa’s six elections relies on understanding some key concepts about the intersection between media and politics because election reporting effectively draws these two disparate fields together. These concepts involve some key debates about global political journalism (mediatisation, framing, and the role of the media in democratisation); how South African democracy works (in terms of the process of elections, voting, and political parties); and what constitutes the study of television news (structure, context, and process).

Concepts in Reporting Elections Among the major characteristics of democracy, conducting regular, free, and fair elections is paramount. The electorate use mass media as their major tool in sourcing information about political leaders and a free media is therefore an important prerequisite for an informed electorate (Strömbäck & Kaid, 2008, p. 14). The media coverage of elections can therefore give a good indication to the degree of media freedom—of information, from interference, and from censorship—which can also be an indicator of the freedom and fairness of the elections themselves. Elections are also seen as highly ritualised national media events, especially in the West (cf. Lauerbach, 2007, p.  316). It makes sense, then, that scholars have invested considerable time and effort in understanding the news coverage of political campaigns, and there are robust debates about media coverage of elections to be found in this scholarship. Because election reporting relies on the intersection in disciplines (political science, journalism practice, media studies, cultural studies and anthropology, and even psychology), the focus of research is often very diverse. To keep it simple, key concepts about the study of media and elections are manifestly two-fold: the lack of media theory in studies about elections, and concerns about the “hype-ocracy”, that is, framing in the news, the game frame, and mediatisation. Lack of Media Studies in Studies About Elections We understand that the media’s role in democracy is important and invaluable, with a free and fair press at the heart of the public ethic. And yet scholarship on the role of the media in covering elections tends to approach this from a “top down” style: how politicians and authorities use the

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media, rather than how the media represents the politicians, or a broader discussion of the media’s role in democratisation. There are, for example, studies that focus on the political aspects of coverage, rather than the media in which they are represented: Norris (1997), Louw (2005), Bennett (2012), and Graber and Dunaway (2015) investigate campaign and electoral coverage in the media in general, while others look specifically at campaign coverage in television news (see Hallin, 1992; Lichter et  al., 1999), print news (Benoit et  al., 2004; Kiousis, 2006), and more recently online or convergence media (Iyengar & McGrady, 2007; Glantz, 2016). Some studies get closer to the aim of this book and analyse the news narratives of the general election campaign (Graber, 1971, 1976; Stempel & Windhauser, 1991; Mantler & Whiteman, 1995), yet most of this research is still a “top down” approach: politicians over journalists and narratives. Many of these latter examples detail the narrative framing of candidates and visual cues but do so with a methodology that often incorporates the length of time a politician is on screen, subsequently lacking visual analysis or semiotic discussion of news narratives. Research tends to focus on the length of time any party or candidate is on air during television broadcasts (“airtime” or “sound/image bites”) or how often they appear in the newspaper (“space”). This length measurement ignores the content of the media message, such as framing or semiotic representation, as well as the context of production, such as partisanship, political economy of the media, and governmental/commercial influence. The emphasis is therefore still mostly political science, rather than media studies. A few notable examples refreshingly exist where the media, rather than politicians, is the focus: Broh’s (1980) examination into the game frame during political debates; Woo (1996) investigates the South Korean journalistic profession in representing politicians during elections; Bucy and Grabe in 2009 examine the visualness of political news on television; Cross (2010) studies the Known and Unknown sources on Canadian television news of elections; and lastly Cushion and Sambrook (2015) and Cushion et al. (2015) continue their notable studies into the UK general elections on mainstream television news. Ultimately, there is a general paucity of political communication analyses that take into account visual studies and this book adds significant data to this scarcity, from a South African perspective. Scholastic research about African elections in general, and South African elections specifically, is lacking in both breadth and depth. Principal

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analyses of election reporting that dominate our understanding of political journalism come from North America and Europe: collectively titled the “West” or “Global North” (Huntington, 1996, p.  26). Research on Western media coverage of Western elections is in abundance, with fewer analyses available on Western media coverage of African elections. Even less research is available about African media coverage of African elections, and there seems to be very little significant investigation about the African media coverage of Western elections to date.1 Much of the discussion about the role of the media in democratisation has therefore been from a Western perspective. Because of this Western dominance of our understanding of political journalism and elections, this book goes some way to “de-Westernise” the field by adding a South African perspective. The Hype-Ocracy It is generally accepted amongst scholars that the media’s role in a democracy is to ensure the maximised flow of information to create an informed citizenry in order to deepen democracy. Without a free and plural media, the lights dim on democracy. And yet, current news narratives don’t so much create an informed citizenry as create a hype vehicle for political parties, Eric Louw (2005, p. 50) says. Louw terms this a “hype-ocracy”: democracy that has been undermined by the hype-machine, by spin doctors, selling stories rather than telling them. Bucy and Grabe (2009, p. 74) push this idea further and consider how political journalism has turned into “image bite” politics—the visual nature of television has irrevocably changed how politicians are represented in the modern era of journalism. Candidates are shown but not heard for longer periods, yet these images are often the least scrutinised and understood aspects of political news. Turning news into an entertaining spectacle has altered the journalism profession: public relation agents (or spin doctors) often use journalists to “tame Western publics” (Louw, 2005, p.  53) and distract, rather than inform. Deepening issues of the newsroom—juniorisation of staff, the stranglehold of economics on news bureaux, spirals of silence generated 1  Throughout this book, I refer to the “West” and “non-West” rather than “developed nations” or “developing nations” and so forth, for brevity and coherence. Previous research (Patterson, 1994; Lawrence, 2000; Esser & Angelo, 2006; Abate, 2013, p. 22) shows that there is little difference in how North American and most European media frame elections. Conversely, Abate (2013, p. 22) finds that the difference between Western and non-Western media coverage of elections is noticeable, hence the divide in terms.

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by government flak, and yellow journalism—further this hype-ocracy and generate stories for cash, rather than for the public ethic. Similarly, news values have come to define the news making and gathering process. There is a fragile link between news and democracy because news is shaped largely by a combination of commercial forces, sold and manufactured with few quality controls. While the political economy of the media outlined in Chap. 5 (News Values) is only one part of newsroom management, many researchers across generations (Gans, 1979, p. 83; Gitlin, 1980; Bucy & Grabe, 2009; McChesney, 2005; Van Dijk, 2009, p. 199; Voltmer, 2010, p. 6; Bird & Dardenee, 2012, p. 210) suggest news coverage of elections and democracy is often, directly or implicitly, shaped and driven by external gatekeeping forces. Yet, in spite of these governments, political, or commercial interventions, the role of the media in elections must not be underestimated. These pressures can affect the framing of elections, both in terms of narratives about the political process and in terms of the style of reporting. As scholars, we cannot study news media texts in a vacuum: the pressures that shape and drive narratives are key to understanding the texts themselves. And a predominant pressure for journalists is shaping the story to fit audiences and publications. Framing, the game frame, and mediatisation are important aspects of this storytelling process. Framing and the Game Frame When conducting textual analysis of media narratives, the father of framing studies Robert Entman describes the news frame as the “imprint of power” (1991, p. 55) whereby some aspects of a news item are emphasised over others in order to promote a causal interpretation, problem construction, or moral evaluation. Yet, as proponents of the visual Bucy and Grabe (2009, pp. 100, 203–211) argue, most discussions about framing are derived from the verbal aspects of media coverage and neglect the visual aspects. Bucy and Grabe (ibid., pp. 98–102) suggest that editing, camera proxemics, and journalist mediation should be included in this visual framing analysis. Proxemics in this definition is taken from mise-en-­ scene analysis. It is the visual positioning of the camera, the sense of space in a shot, and the framing. Camera editing, colour variations, shot angle, and shot size all play into the sense of space within a visual shot. During this analysis of South African elections, the identification of “framing” will include not only the discourse but also the visual elements of the broadcast.

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Scholars across generations and nations suggest that the “game frame” or “horse race” style of journalism is still a paramount news frame during elections. Under this “horse race” frame, media present election campaigns in terms of a win-or-lose competition or battle. In one of the first pieces of research to use the term, Broh defines the metaphor of betting on a horse race: one candidate “leading” ahead of the other, and the unpopular candidate “chasing” the leader (1980, p. 516). There are benefits of such a framework in attracting audience interest in politics, but distortion of information is possible and harmful to the electoral process. Mediatisation Another major debate about media coverage of elections is the “mediatisation” of politics. This is the degree to which political journalists use media logic to present easily digestible information to television audiences. “Logic” in this sense means the system of principles guiding the practice. Media logic is simply knowledge of those processes that pertain to the media. For example, news deadlines, news values, the inverted pyramid, sound bites, “image bites”, camera proxemics, and journalistic ethics all pertain to the processes of the news media. So, a politician employing media logic knows what journalists are looking for and then tailors the speech (from the tone of voice, controlling the lighting of the podium, dressing in a certain way, and being aware of the journalist’s deadlines) in such a way so as to make the headlines. On the other side, a journalist using media logic would represent the politician’s speech by employing news values, sound bites, and camera proxemics to make the story more palatable to audiences. The two sides, the journalist and the politician, using media logic combine to create “mediatised” reporting. Political logic is the opposite: when politicians focus on policy, solutions, consequences, and impact of that policy (in elections, campaigns, or in general) in presentations, they follow political logic. Their focus is politics, rather than getting media attention. A journalist using political logic would present a news story about the politician’s speech that focuses on impact of policy, consequences of politics, and campaign details, rather than news values, visualisation, and framing. Media logic means understanding and using the processes of the media. Political logic means understanding and using the processes of politics. Throughout the twentieth century and in modern democracies, the media are the kingmakers of politicians. Politicians understand this and

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work towards pleasing the media to win space and time on the news. In using media logic to promote their stories, politicians become mediatised: the media is the most important source of political information and knowledge of the media system shapes and drives that political information. It is important to note that mediatisation of politics does not mean simply “mediated” politics, whereby the media is the vehicle of communication between politicians and electorate. Mediatisation instead refers to the degree to which the media content and political actors are governed by political or media logic. Therefore, a journalist using media logic (sensational storytelling, simplification, personalisation, and televisual hype-­ ocracy) rather than political logic (policy, debates, consequences, solutions, and impact) to frame the elections would be a symptom of mediatisation. This book explores the degree to which news has become mediatised when representing South African elections. While Part I tells the story of democracy and media in the country, Part II looks deeply into the representation of South African elections (1994–2019) on television news. Chap. 5 investigates the overarching issues of news values and the push towards mediatisation in the global political journalism profession. Chap. 6 details how the ruling party in South Africa react and interact with journalists in South Africa. Chapters 7 and 8 explore how this degree of mediatisation changes the news narratives about South Africa’s democracy, from the representation of the powerful elite and the ordinary citizens to the visualisation of violence pre-election. To get to the heart of these objectives, it is important to get a grounding on key concepts that inform the field. This next section will detail how international news media has covered both South African and more broadly non-Western elections, and why this differs from Western or Northern election coverage.

Reporting (South) African Elections Hanitzsch notes, scornfully, that throughout various studies on non-­ Western political journalism, a certain “Western bias” (2009, p. 422) is often present because Western researchers often fail to acknowledge the internalised and normative expectations of political journalism that have skewed their interpretations. Further problems of the Western gaze on non-Western elections include the lack of understanding or inclusion of developmental journalism. Colonial history is an important factor to consider here as mass media in many non-Western nations developed as derivatives of those in the West; yet few who study non-Western election

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coverage acknowledge this and tend to avoid taking into account the local professionalism of journalism. Wasserman (2010, 2013), Ward (2009), and Nyamnjoh (2005) advocate a kind of “glocalisation” of media research that acknowledges the effect of colonialism, postcolonialism, and independence has on journalism in non-Western states, particularly Africa. This book, in particular Chaps. 5, 6, and 7, analyses election coverage on TV news by attempting to consider this local journalism practice at the same time. Key concepts that shape media coverage of (South) African elections include partisanship and news process in local news, and post-Cold War frames and binarised news reporting in global news. Local Media Coverage Most studies about local African media coverage of African elections—that is, the country’s own news media—look at the use and effects of media during elections: see Mäkinen and Kuira (2008); Moyo (2010); and Bailard (2012) for the effect of social media and the internet on the electorate during African elections, and Norris and Mattes (2003) and Eifert et  al. (2010) for the effects of negative stereotypes on voting patterns. There are also overarching debates about media ethics in Africa, particularly during the time of elections, from Wasserman (2010, 2013, 2014), Nyamnjoh (2005), and Berger (2007). Many studies discuss whether an independent press of the Western fourth-estate standard of journalism is useful to African democracy (e.g. Waldahl, 2005a, 2005b) as it seems that partisanship, and the media’s relationship with the government, is a driving force in local media coverage of elections in Africa. Election coverage begins pre-campaign or manifesto launch, and the media’s role in covering elections is based on the overarching legislative and regulatory frameworks of the media. These frameworks in Africa are often complicated by factors of colonisation and the relationship between Western and African media ethics (see Wasserman’s wide library of analysis: 2010, 2013, 2014, 2020a, 2020b). Josephi (2009, p. 52) notes that African media is largely characterised by partisanship and is more closely aligned with the ideology of loyalty than objectivity, but these conclusions are problematic mostly because the continent’s media is homogenised. Conflating all African media as “partisan” neglects the very real paths blazed by opposition media in a convoluted and controlled “glocalised” (Wasserman & Rao, 2008) media system. Far from “praise-singing”, much of Africa’s mainstream press is

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polarised along ethnic and party lines. While partisanship in the Global North appears linked to the political economy of the media, partisanship in Africa seems related to the development journalism framework and the relationship between media and government, as well as access to technology. Studies on African elections postcolony speak back to the global trend of mediatised election coverage but also note that unequal funding and improper access to information hamper this coverage in Africa (see, e.g. Temin & Smith, 2002, Chuma, 2005, Waldahl, 2005b, and most recently Nothias, 2020). Nyamnjoh too suggests that the journalism profession in Africa is often underpaid, job insecurity is rife, and in South Africa particularly elite black journalists are often pilfered by the business sector because of higher pay and better working conditions (2005, pp. 74, 82). The poor professionalisation of journalists across the continent further damages democracy when junior journalists seemingly cannot criticise oligarchs or the government, while donor funding means the alternative press often flounders (see Chap. 4 for further discussion of how this plays out in South African newsrooms). International Media Coverage The well-known problem with African coverage on mainstream Western media is that it simply doesn’t exist in any great amount. Two concepts underline the coverage of African elections in Western media when it does appear: the impact of the end of the Cold War and reductionist coverage that tends to binarise African democracy into “failure” or “progress”. Since the end of the Cold War, democracy has emerged as the most favoured political system with elections as the key component for legitimacy. The Cold War effectively divided the world into “friends” and “enemies” (Norris, 1995, p.  359), a division based primarily on American foreign policy. Strong guiding stereotypes of “conflict” and “communism” influenced story priority, together working as a framing narrative for the early to mid-1990s news representation of African elections. African politics that fitted into the “communist” frame (the African National Congress, for a time, the South African Communist Party, the Pan-African Congress) were relegated to bit-players on the news or demonised widely. After the Cold War ceased, and without this frame through which to classify international stories, American news media changed the way stories were prioritised and classified: instead of focusing on war, civil unrest, and military rivalries, post-Cold War themes shifted

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towards storied that promoted international relations. Where economic cooperation, development of trade agreements, and security were the main narratives, these stories appeared on the Westernised news agenda (see Chap. 5 for a detailed discussion of this term). These stereotypes and narratives became recognised as news values, and in Chap. 5, I detail these values in the context of South African election coverage. News values are one of the key drivers in story gathering, selection, development, and broadcasting on Westernised news channels, and in the post-Cold War world, these values are changing. Similarly, Westernised news media often relied on binarised and stereotyped representations of African elections in the 1990s and early 2000s. Nyamnjoh reiterates that Western news values are so entrenched in stories about Africa—from both local African and international news—that these stories often result in “talking without listening” (2005, p.  57). Reductionist frames of villains and victims, crises and miracles, saviours and sufferers leave little room for evaluation and complex understanding of the story of democracy. In his report on the Burundian post-election violence in 2015, Hall notes that “[s]uch traumas are covered by the world press with the type of breathless excitement of a boxing match shorn of context and personality, with anonymous combatants temporarily given names for the duration of an event” (2015). While a pessimistic argument on the global media’s attention on African elections and crises, this statement is a reflection of global political journalism’s push towards mediatisation combined with a complicated history of colonialism in Africa. Chapters 6 and 7 highlight how international (and occasionally South African) news channels fall back on these binaries and stereotypes during election coverage. International media perspectives of African elections also tend to reflect the “failed state” binary, which Spurr (1994, p.  19) and Nay (2013, pp. 7–8) refer to as a binary of progress: if an African state does not demonstrate Western democratic values such as regime change, then it automatically falls on the “failure” side of the binary. If democratic values are in place—even problematically—then the nation “progresses” correctly. By framing democracy as an “either-or” concept, the Western perspective thus ignores democracy’s “package deal”—democracy is a complex concept and should not be reduced to election wins and losses only. Binarising African experiences of democracy in this way trivialises issues and negates context, and Chaps. 7 and 8 show the damage that this binary can cause to a burgeoning democracy.

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Who Studies South African Elections? The first democratic election in 1994 was no romance story, nor did it have a fairy-tale ending, despite what you may have heard. A negotiated settlement won out in the end but at a high cost to human life and many of the ANC’s Freedom Charter ideals. Since 1994, the ANC government has consistently won around 60% of the popular vote but turnout has decreased since 2009. With protest action and conflict against the ruling party increasing over the last two decades, critical media coverage under threat of censorship, and political strife tearing the ANC apart internally, understanding the relationship between the media and its coverage of the South African elections is complicated. There are some preeminent studies of international media coverage of South African elections, particularly about the media frenzy of the 1994 election, but the majority of available research in later years comes from local South African scholars looking at local South African media coverage. These books are mostly year-specific—that is, they focus on a particular general election (e.g. 1999 or 2014)—and are predominantly political science-based with a quantitative focus on voting patterns, statistics, turnout, and political manifestos. These compendiums, as I call them, are invaluable in understanding the politics of a democracy and how the election runs in each year. The downfall occurs when attempting to view the elections across years, interlinked, and as a progression. There are a few examples of the “decade of democracy” (e.g. Piombo & Nijzink, 2005) or the era of presidents (Calland, 2013, or Jacobs & Calland, 2002). But, still, these compendiums lack a detailed discussion on the media during South African elections. Where there are a few chapters or, at worst, a few paragraphs dedicated to media narratives, print is often lumped together with broadcast, radio with social media. This does a serious disservice to the important study of media narratives during elections. We therefore need to look to other articles and books to find a discussion of the role of the local South African media and draw a link to the election period ourselves. This book advocates dedicated research and analysis for a specific media platform, separated from others, during the South African elections. But Why Television News? Television is often described a political hype-maker’s dream because the visual-ness, movement, urgency, immediacy, and persuasiveness make for

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an information vehicle that is easily digestible and simplified. This “televisualisation” (Louw, 2005, p. 33) of politics could also be termed “mediatisation” (Strömbäck, 2008), where sound bites are forever shrinking and political information is specifically designed for television audiences. Although much of the Western world is solidly in political communication phase three, defined by Blumler and Kavanagh (1999, p. 213) as a multi-­ media hydra-headed beast with media ubiquity and celerity, South Africa still relies heavily on television and radio for political communication in phase two. This book focuses on broadcast news because, throughout the 25-year period of South Africa’s democracy, television was an emergent media and increasingly influential. Yet, despite this influence, television news is notoriously difficult to analyse. I recognise that the age of traditional, legacy media (like television news) is on the way out, but it is worth defining what we mean by television news from the outset. It is increasingly rare that viewers access news via television news on a television set at a scheduled time. Legacy news media (like the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera English) increasingly broadcast their news online, accessible on smart phones accessed via a dedicated app, and shared on social media like Twitter. So, if it’s not “television news on a television”, what is it? Much of what we see online resembles the cultural and signifying codes of that legacy media—studio addresses, the ticker tape, cuts to outside broadcasts, vox  pops. The format seems similar, although we could and will argue about the content and value, but the technology has changed. Television news relies on visuals to tell stories, and digital, online news employs this familiar signifying practice across formats and networks. So, what do we call it, if not television news? For the purposes of this book, it is worth keeping the definition because we track over 25  years of news broadcasts, but a working definition going forward might be “digital video news” or “live feed journalism”, as Gutsche (2019) recently suggested. Despite the many studies about reporting elections and the political process, only a few analysts refer to both content and context as paramount (such as Woo’s, 1996 dedicated broadcast analysis and Nyamnjoh’s, 2005 overview). Research instead tends to focus on “airtime” or “sound/ image bites” or “space” (such as in Lough and MacIntyre’s 2019 analysis of Constructive Journalism visuals) which often ignores the visual framing of the media message, the context of production, and temporal-spatial variables. Taking into account only the length of time a political party is on air when considering bias and favourability of media is extraordinarily

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limiting—Grabe argues that “a stop watch cannot entirely measure matters of judgement, and counting words omits nuance” (1996, p. 7). This book therefore uses a different methodological approach to analysing South African elections and the media, and focuses specifically on the visual-ness of the news broadcasts as detailed below.

Research Methods Sample The periods of analysis were the voting dates of the six general elections: 1994 (26–29 April), 1999 (2 June), 2004 (14 April), 2009 (22 April), 2014 (7 May), and 2019 (8 May). Broadcasts were selected from the voting day(s) as well as week of the election—a few days before and after the vote itself. These dates were chosen as the culmination of the election, where journalists would focus on the vote and the events surrounding it, to ensure some kind of homogeneity to the topics covered. The type of narrative analysis used in this study is qualitative and based on grounded theory developed from literature and observation of empirical data. Open sampling was most appropriate for this inductive study and the sample of broadcasts was nonspecific, purposive, and accessible in style—the time period was of more importance than the channels, and so I collected as many broadcasts as possible from a range of available channels during the timeframe. I used a variety of search and retrieval methods including search engines and news archives, starting with YouTube, Vimeo, ITN Source, and AP Archive to search for free broadcasts, but moved to paid-for access once these sources were exhausted. I contacted Getty Images, BBC Motion Gallery, the Internet Archive at Vanderbilt University, and the SABC and eTV archives to gather broadcasts during the sample periods. Media Tenor and Media Monitoring Africa were unhelpful in this regard despite numerous attempts to gather data. Any broadcasts that mentioned the election, political parties, prominent campaign issues in South Africa, voting, or the electorate were included in the sample. Broadcasts that were not finalised (i.e. raw footage), that had no semiotic data (i.e. talking heads of journalists, only studio interviews with no visuals or package), that were from news wires or had no journalistic mediation, or fell too far outside of the time frame (i.e. the week of the election) were excluded from the final sample. The final tally was 278

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broadcasts from 29 channels across six periods of South African general elections. Because television news is a multi-layered rhetoric inclusive of audio (discourse, language, speech acts), visual (semiotics, visual rhetoric, gestures), and the context of production (media ownership, journalistic practice, political economy), using a single research methodology on such a medium would be limiting and would negate much of what makes television news an intricate meaning-making vehicle. Therefore, I wanted the instrumentation of analysing these broadcasts to meet the following criteria: it should allow for both audio and visual denotative and connotative values; it should allow for these two tracks’ oppositions or juxtapositions to one another; it should consider the context of production of the broadcasts; and it should be coherent, efficient, systematic, and detailed. I therefore started with accurate and straightforward transcriptions of the broadcasts, while the analysis that follows draws heavily on these transcriptions and readings of oppositions or juxtapositions decoded through social semiotics. Finally, I considered the production context of every broadcast while analysing the content. Characteristics of the Multimodal Instrument To conduct this study, I adapted various sources of multimodal analysis to design an original instrument. I drew on Sandra Dueck’s (1995) Master’s thesis on the rhetoric of television news provided the model of transcription for discourse, while Montgomery (2007) and Chandler (1994) provided the knowledge to unite the visual with the audio transcriptions. The inherent rhetoric of a television news broadcast is multi-layered with three potential levels to the broadcast: the audio, the visual, and decisions made in the production. Each level was examined with a separate research approach. Each level also relates to how the stories of South African elections are told on television news: the semiotic (visual) and discourse (audio) levels give an indication of the news narratives about the elections. The third level, production context, shows temporal-spatial variables of journalism practice. Throughout the analysis of the broadcasts, I used a triadic multimodal approach (also see Jones, 2016 for a detailed discussion of this). The triadic approach starts with the discourse, moves on to the semiotic analysis of visuals, looks for juxtapositions between the two, and then considers the external pressures of media production on the news texts.

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Juxtaposition A crucial step in this triadic multimodal methodology is in drawing meaning from juxtaposition and difference, framed against the context of media production. Through a method of paradigmatic substitution (Chandler, 1994), some of the numerous possible visible and hidden meanings of the news broadcast can be inferred. Differences between the audio and the visual narratives may show ideological meanings: for example, a journalist speaking of the government’s plan for economic stability post-apartheid while showing visuals of the Marikana massacre at the same time (What issues face the ANC after South African elections, BBC, 2014) creates a brutal juxtaposition that frames the government unsympathetically and suggests the ANC represses protests for the control of the economy. Contrasts between audio and visual cannot be overstated for importance. Juxtaposition also takes place at a second level of data analysis: the channel, year, journalist, and participant. Channels reporting on the same event (e.g. the car bombing in 1994) could evaluate the events differently, presumably based on the assumed ideology of that channel. Possible perspectives of the channel are informed partly through other studies as well as through investigation into the channel’s political economy. The juxtaposition between channel and event (CNN’s Bloody Sunday at High Noon reporting of the car bomb in 1994 vs. Sky News’s reporting on the same car bombing  in Sky News Sunrise is very different), year and participant (Thabo Mbeki’s profile as candidate in 1999 vs. his representation as president in 2004), and journalist and event (Emma Hurd’s Zuma profile on Sky News’s ANC’s Jacob Zuma divides South Africa vs. Nkepile Mabuse’s Zuma profile on CNN’s Inside Africa: South African election, both from 2009) form further analyses of this data set. Analysis Multiple phased data analysis started at the broad observation of themes to focusing down on individual words and signs. Overarching themes and narratives of the election broadcasts per year comprised the broad, top level of investigation; juxtapositions between discourse and audio and between variables such as years or channels were noted at the middle level; and individual discourse and semiotic data, such as words and signs, were noted at the micro level. A further discussion of this original

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instrumentation and triadic methodology can be found in Jones (2016) where I operationalise the method using part of the data set of this book.

Structure of the Book The overall structure of the book is based on the themes from a deep analysis of the South African election coverage. Three parts separate nine chapters, with this introductory chapter mirrored by a conclusion (Chap. 9) at the end. Each chapter has a particular focus and argument, but links together to form an overall discussion about mediatised news reporting and political journalism. Part I tells the story of South Africa’s politics and media. Chapter 2 “Political Parties over 25  Years” and Chap. 3 “Story of South Africa’s Democracy, 1994–2019” hold an overview of election results and the changing political environment before accounting each presidency in sequence. From the pre-1994 autocracy, through Mandela’s “Rainbow Nation” and the favourite son Mbeki, to Zuma’s conservative, corrupt government and Ramaphosa as “Mr Fix It”, this second chapter sets the scene for the analysis. Chapter 4 “South Africa’s TV News Landscape” explains the news media environment in the country, from the inception of television news under the National Party’s strict control, to the digitalisation of news and access amongst South Africa’s rural and poor population. Part II starts the analysis of television news broadcasts during the six election years. These four middle chapters follow predominant themes and concepts, building to an overarching argument of mediatised reporting and problematic political journalism that flattens experiences. Chapter 5 “News Values and Frames of Election” outlines geo-political production values that drive the election coverage across years. Chapter 6 “The ANC Has No Clothes” is the story of the ANC’s struggle with the free media. From its roots as a Struggle party and suddenly thrust into the spotlight as government-in-waiting, to ageing disgracefully, the ANC has a problematic relationship with the media in attempting to control its narrative. This chapter spotlights key moments during the election coverage where the ANC and the media’s relationship has deteriorated, and the chapter explores ramifications of this acrimonious connection. Chapter 7 “Power and Populism” speaks directly to the media narratives about the elections in South Africa. This chapter asks how people, pundits, and politics were represented on both global and local news channels throughout the six elections and finds that local media were hesitant to criticise ruling parties

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while international news tended to ignore the view from the ground. This lack of listening and overall disengagement leads to an entanglement of democracy narratives that do not fully inform, but instead entertain. The final analysis chapter, Chap. 8 “Visuals and Violence”, is dedicated to the visual representation of the elections on television news. Through multimodal discourse analysis, this chapter spotlights key moments during the elections, almost always centred around violence. This chapter suggests that layers of interpretation, visualised by camera proxemics, keep the viewers and the participants apart, which further entangles the story of elections in South Africa. Part III holds the conclusion to this book, entitled Chap. 9 “Desperately Seeking Depth”. Three overall narratives show that, firstly, election coverage was driven by increasingly mediatised political communication. Secondly, local channels avoided controversial narratives in an attempt to normalise democracy, while global narratives were predominantly visualised and dramatic, but often confused and contradictory. Thirdly, journalists disengaged with political leaders and citizen voices over time and instead relied on pundits, which increased the distance between the audience and politics. Ultimately, narratives were far more entertaining than enlightening. The chapter gives three applications for scholars and journalists to improve visual framing during elections to provide a deeper understanding of democracy. This book shows how local and international television news represented six democratic South African general elections, 1994–2019, and reveals the shifting and congruent narratives and journalism practices along the way. While academic in nature, this book goes beyond a discussion of the elections themselves and also considers the many factors that drive news narratives from both a global and local perspective. It underlines the important role of the media during the South African elections, from freedom and diversity of media to journalistic ethics and practices. At its heart, this book shows how South African democracy is represented to both local and international audiences over the course of 25  years. A nuanced form of mediatisation framed the elections on international channels, even though journalists sought narrative depth to explain the complex South African voting patterns and democracy. Locally, the liberation narrative from the ruling government and its desire to maintain this hegemony restricted news narratives, resulting in avoidance of important and controversial stories that could have developed a broader picture of the elections. Citizen voices and political leaders as sources were missing from

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the later election years in favour of pundits on all channels, a symptom of the swing towards media logic forming journalistic practice. Ultimately, this book shows how the visual representation of the elections on television news kept viewers apart from South African politics, inserting levels of detachment via camera proxemics, evaluative voices, and mediatised news frames. Over the next three parts, we will explore how these news frames and values show the South African elections on television news.

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CHAPTER 2

Political Parties Over 25 Years

How Democracy Works in South Africa With a voting eligible population of some 37  million (Bartlett, 2019), South African voters are divided, not just by race and economy but also by geography. The African National Congress (ANC) still has strong loyalty in rural sections of the population who vote almost entirely based on identity politics (which is not unique to South Africa), and most people who register to vote in the elections in South Africa still vote for the ANC. They have the lion’s share of the votes with general election results rarely dropping below 60%. The ANC are the self-proclaimed “Struggle” party and much of their branding has centred on their fight against apartheid and racial division. Their official opposition for the last 25 years has been the Democratic Alliance (DA), known unofficially as the “white” party because, until recently, most of the people who vote for them are of European descent. They never get more than 25% of the vote. Whereas the ANC follow a form of socialism (some consider this ‘talking left and walking right’), the DA are unabashedly capitalist in form and policy. The newcomers to political scene are the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), resplendent in their Sankara-inspired red overalls and berets and led by the charismatic yet controversial Julius Malema. The EFF fight for workers’ rights, are Fanon/Marxist radicals, and agitate parliament with performative populist rhetoric. While never achieving more than about 10% of the national vote, they do control some areas through coalitions and are a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Jones, Elections and TV News in South Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71792-6_2

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visible and audible presence in parliament. Of the many other parties that make up the general election ballots (a total of 48 parties contested the 2019 election), the most notable is the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), representing the largest ethnic party in South Africa. The IFP are the Zulu party, led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi until 2019, and promote the sovereignty of the Zulu peoples, particularly in the KwaZulu-Natal province. Since 1994, however, their vote share has dropped significantly and the party now rarely achieves more than 4% of the national vote. South African politics, and the media coverage thereof, is increasingly a “three-and-a-half horse race” (Duncan, 2009). Four main political parties dominate politics in South Africa, with the fourth usually the dish du jour. The “horse race” features the ANC, DA, the IFP, and, variably COPE, the EFF, or the NP, depending on the election. Duncan shows that in 2009 four parties achieved 79% of the media coverage (2009, p. 211) despite a total of 27 parties on the ballot paper. But because of the vote share falling heavily on the ANC, South Africa’s democracy is often seen as a one-party dominant state. Voting for a general election occurs every five years through a system of Proportional Representation, where the electorate (those South African citizens aged 18 or over) vote for a political party on a secret ballot. National and provincial ballots are cast on the same day. Voting usually takes place over two or more days, with the first day assigned for Special Votes (hospitals, prisons, and the elderly who need special assistance to cast ballots) and the general populace voting nation-wide on the second day. The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) conducts voter education, registers citizens, erects and furnishes balloting stations, and runs the election. At the end of the election, the IEC counts the votes at the National Results Operations Centre (NROC), which is also where local media houses base their journalists. The last six elections have been deemed free and fair by both the IEC and international observers and monitors.

Political Parties Over the Years National Party/NNP In 1994, the National Party had been in control of the country for 46 years and was still driven by conservative Afrikaner politics. Yet by the early 1990s the ruling party was riddled with paranoia, secret societies, and corruption. PW Botha led the NP from 1978 to 1989 until a debilitating

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stroke meant younger, cautious centrist FW de Klerk took over and led the party until his resignation in 1996. It was ultimately de Klerk’s pragmatism that ended apartheid because he saw the continuation of the system as a cul-de-sac for the nation. The NP’s campaign leading up to the 1994 election consisted of successes (freedom and the end of apartheid assured, a free and fair secret ballot), warnings (of the ANC as a dangerous party, of the ANC’s policy costs, and of black squatters in Coloured houses), and promises (reconciliation through job creation, home building, universal healthcare, and free enterprise). In the intervening five years, as one-third of the Government of National Unity (GNU), the NP was in an invidious position, holding at once a position in opposition and in government. As a result of this bipolar approach to politics, de Klerk resigned as deputy president in 1996 and retired from politics altogether in mid-1997. By 1999 the party was unrecognisable. The New National Party (NNP), as it was subsequently known, had a new look and a new candidate— Marthinus Van Schalkwyk—but even this reimagining was unable to arrest the decline. The party was forever “tainted with the fatal apartheid brush” (Welsh, 1999, p. 90) and the numerous skeletons uncovered during the TRC damaged the party’s reputation further. The NNP also had no experience in being in outright opposition and so policies and campaigns were ultimately poorly conceived and executed. The NNP in 2004 was mostly out of the contention for the third poll. Shortly after the 2004 election, NNP leader Marthinus Van Schalkwyk announced the end of the party and a merger with the ruling ANC government. This was not their only attempt at collaboration: after the 1999 election the NNP and DP combined forces, elbowing the ANC out of the Western Cape thanks to a coalition government for the province. This backfired in 2001 due to differences in ideologies. The biggest challenge for the NNP in the 2004 election was to convince the South African populace there was room for consensual opposition, especially as this message came from the “former apartheid party”. It seems this message was unclear or unpopular to voters, as the party only gained 1.64% in 2004, a staggering 94% loss of its 1994 support. Democratic Party/Alliance The Democratic Party was formed in 1959, originally titled as the Progressive Party, and was a major player in the pre-democracy negotiation process. The DP’s 1994 campaign focused on promoting

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liberal-­democratic values among a new electorate, adopting the moniker “true liberal conscience”. The DP’s poor showing in the first poll (at only 1.73% of the national vote) was probably due to its failure to secure the black and Coloured vote nationally. The party found it hard to shake off the urban, English, white, middle-class image of liberalism. The DP was almost crushed in 1994 but, in the subsequent years, party leader Tony Leon significantly improved appearance and performance. Leon, a lawyer by training and involved in the CODESA processes, was intelligent, adept at debate, sharp, cutting, and gutsy. The party became the single biggest host to white Afrikaners, effectively swallowing up the NNP and the Freedom Front electorate. With a new campaigning style and message, the DP electorate in 1999 was more racially mixed but still three-quarters white. After a brief merger with the NNP that backfired in 2001, the DP became the DA, the Democratic Alliance, in 2004, where it was at unforeseen crossroads. Firstly, the DA fashioned itself as the primary party-­ political watchdog, highlighting scandals, wrongdoings, and poor policy choices. This watchdogism caused chirps from the ANC, which tended to perceive any kind of robust opposition as unpatriotic (see Chap. 6: The ANC Has No Clothes for more on this). Secondly, the DA tried to gather votes from the decimated NNP while still pleasing its liberal heart, and at the same time make inroads into the “black voter market”. Despite spinning so many plates, the party did reasonably well in the 2004 election as the only opposition party to register significant growth—1.9% in 1994 to 12.4% in 2004. The DA’s 2009 campaign effectively consolidated their position as the official opposition. Former investigative journalist and anti-apartheid activist Helen Zille took over from Tony Leon as party leader in 2007 and eventually became Premier of the Western Cape in 2009. For the first time, the DA gained an absolute majority in the Western Cape. Their prominence in the Western Cape significantly contributed to keeping the ANC below the two-thirds parliamentary majority. However, the party was still unable to increase their Coloured or black votes in any great number. The DA’s manifesto in 2009 focused on the eradication of poverty, the establishment of a quality education system, improving the fight against HIV/AIDS, and ultimately promoting their Open Opportunity Society.1 A major weakness of the DA’s campaign strategy was the linger1  This system meant that outcomes were linked to opportunities, effort, and ability, rather than race based.

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ing perception that the DA was a white, wealthy, middle-class party and therefore not “for” black or  Coloured people. The DA’s ventures into uncharted (black) territories in 2009 unsettled the old guard of the ANC, yet the party still struggled with the ANC’s dismissal of the party as a “party for the whites”. Seemingly in an act to counter this stigma, the DA appointed two new young black members to its ranks: Lindiwe Mazibuko, the “upper middle class, Johnny-come-lately” (Calland, 2013, p. 224) yet astute and passionate DA parliamentary leader, became the DA’s parliamentary spokesperson, while Soweto-born Mmusi Maimane became the DA’s Gauteng chairperson. The party’s 2014 election campaign centred on three strategic changes: the new narrative focused on the impact Helen Suzman contributed to the Struggle, ergo increasing the party’s Struggle credentials; highlighting the DA’s commitment to service delivery in the Western Cape; and aggressive social media and television campaigns that considerably raised Maimane’s profile. The DA finally had multi-racial leadership, but at the same time had to manage the competing interests of its core group of supporters as well as its new racially diverse group. The DA faced its first decline in history in the 2019 election after a series of high-profile and image-damaging scandals. Many assume the decline was in part due to leader Mmusi Maimane’s weak leadership, but others attribute the loses to the newly awakened Freedom Front Plus, a competitor for conservative white votes. Whatever the reason, the DA left the 2019 election with its tail between its legs and, shortly afterwards, without a leader as Maimane resigned as party leader. John Steenhuisen took up interim leadership on 17 November 2019. African National Congress Oliver Tambo led the ANC until 1991 when the recently released Nelson Mandela took over. Entering into the 1994 election, the ANC had effectively become mythologised on local and international media. The ANC capitalised on the new-found popularity, with their 1994 campaign almost exclusively using Mandela’s smiling face as iconography on posters. The party divided their campaign strategy between “hearing” at people’s forums and “telling” at mass rallies, a technique that proved effective throughout the six elections and originated from the advice from Bill Clinton’s 1992 advisor Stanley Greenberg. The ANC’s core message of the 1994 campaign centred on hopes and aspirations of the party to provide a “Better Life for All”, manifested through job creation, land redistribution, low-cost

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housing, and better living standards. While the ANC’s campaign manifesto was not particularly radical, it was in turn easily plausible. At the end of the 1999 election, and in a break from the African norm that sees liberation leaders as president-for-life, Nelson Mandela stepped down after only one term in office, despite the Constitution allowing him a second. The ANC therefore fought the second election with a new candidate, Thabo Mbeki. The ANC’s slogan during the 1999 election was, as in 1994, “A Better Life for All”, but the party floated on its credibility as the liberation movement rather than its service delivery over the previous five years. The major campaign promises for 1999 included a reduction in crime and stabilising the economy, but in the Western Cape the ANC attacked white privilege and focused on Coloured-­African solidarity. The ANC’s 2004 campaign approach differed little from previous strategies, and the campaign message centred on refining services, giving more but improving on the same, as well as “celebrating freedom”. The sophisticated election campaign combined with old-fashioned “listening” gatherings ensured the party reflected the electorate’s needs and concerns, at least during election time. The result was a third term in office, secured with nearly 70% of the popular vote. The 2004 election was also a good example of consolidated democracy: “boring”, commonplace, and normalised. But this was not to last. As we see in the next chapter, Thabo Mbeki was ousted after the 2007 Polokwane assembly. Some of the ANC national executive members who voted for Mbeki at Polokwane subsequently agonised over whether to leave the movement to which they had devoted most of their lives. When Mbeki was recalled (some say removed) from the presidency in September 2008, their thinking was cemented. On 16 December 2008, South Africa’s Day of Reconciliation, and in a deliberate echo of the Freedom Charter launch that met in 1955 under the same name, the Congress of the People (or COPE) was launched. This was the first “splitting of the rock” that had occurred since democracy, an indication that all was not well in the ANC camp. The success of the ANC in election campaigns is usually accredited to voter loyalty and identification with the party’s Struggle history, as well as the weakness of the opposition, which is not incorrect. An often-overlooked reason for the ANC’s success is their organisational strength and adaptability in the face of challenges. No more so is this evident than in the 2014 election. The 2014 manifesto centred on the idea that life was better in 2014 than it was in 1994 thanks to the ANC.  The party also targeted groups in key constituencies, including religious leaders, black professionals, traditional leaders, and young people. Zuma proved an asset

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here as he could easily court both traditional leaders as well as young black businessmen. Ultimately, the party’s ability to overcome the tumultuous years before the election was testament to its ability to adapt to its challenges by successful organisational innovations. Despite a drop in voter registration and vote share, the ANC still flew past the winning mark to become government for the fifth straight election in a row. To understand why the ANC retains its power amongst a tumultuous scandal-infested environment, we must know two things: first, the liberation narrative is a through line for everything the party does, and second, the opposition is split and increasingly directionless. Under Zuma, the liberation narrative (explored further in Chap. 6), a recital that the ANC and no other party is the sole liberator of South Africa, became sloganised repetition where all ANC members towed the line for fear of being blacklisted. Yet in the 2019 election campaign, competing candidate Cyril Ramaphosa promised to soften this, both in the way the ANC dealt with the media and how the party represented itself to citizens. Relationships were repaired. A New Dawn was promised. The course-correction plan was laid out. Ramaphosa promised to rectify the “nine wasted years” under Zuma. Despite this, confidence in the ANC as the liberation party has waned, especially amongst the rural populous, and so the second reason is of utmost importance now more than ever. The opposition to the 2019 election turned out to be fractioned, directionless, and rife with infighting and scandals. A record number of political parties (48) registered for the election but, as usual, only three parties gathered most of the vote share. The opposition is still fractured and directionless, allowing the ANC by proxy to remain in power. Any significant power change will have to come from internal ANC structures, rather than without. Inkatha Freedom Party The IFP, led by its originator Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi since its inception as a nationalist movement,2 is the ethnic and political home of the Zulu nation. Initially, the IFP refused the negotiation process and 2  “Inkatha” means “crown” in isiZulu. Buthelezi began the Inkatha National Cultural Liberation Movement in 1975 but based the structure of the movement on the earlier Inkatha cultural organisation, started in 1920 by Zulu King Solomon kaDinuzulu. The movement laid claim to the Zulu region with traditional power structures in loyalty to tribal chiefs, Buthelezi, King Goodwill Zwelethini kaBhekuzulu, and was ethnically exclusive, limited to Zulu people (Hamilton & Marè, 1994, p. 74).

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bilateral agreements in 1992. While this is often reduced to mere “brinkmanship”, the IFP were actually concerned that Zulu national interests would not be protected in the negotiations and refused to join until this was ratified. Eventually, with a week left before the election, the IFP formally joined the process, initialising a hasty process of adding the party to already-­printed ballot papers by means of a sticker. The IFP joined the ANC and NP as the remaining third of the GNU for the next five years. But, by 1999, the IFP support had been practically decimated, not least because of Mbeki’s charm: the deputy president wooed Buthelezi so well that the IFP leader spoke in glowing terms of a party he once loathed, although this was to be a one-off statement: “I hold him in high esteem”, Buthelezi said of Mbeki, “I would say the country will be in good hands if he becomes president” (cited in McGreal, 1999). As with most opposition parties in the 1999 election, the IFP’s campaign manifesto was mediocre and reliant on ethnic voting patterns, while policies differed only slightly from the ANC. Scholars often find it difficult to talk about the Inkatha Freedom Party without mentioning violence, but in 2004 there was an absence of strong-­ arm tactics in the IFP’s campaign trail. Politically motivated murders, a characteristic of the hotly contested KwaZulu-Natal region during election season, dropped from over 1000 people in 1994 to just 15 in 2004. The IFP had also jettisoned the militant nationalism of the 1980s and 1990s to instead embrace more liberal-democratic policies. This process was not complete by 2004, however, which ultimately placed the party in a no-mans-land between traditional Zulu nationalism and liberal-­ democratic policies that were comparable to the ANC. The party’s campaign rallies were, like its policy shift, divergent. Gatherings differed in style from a mix of a charismatic church meeting and a rave to a more menacing assembly with amabutho (Zulu warriors) mock fighting with weapons drawn. With an invasive and successful ANC canvassing strategy in rural KwaZulu-Natal, the IFP’s showing at the 2004 election was dismal at less than 7% of the vote. Another part of the IFP’s problem is, sadly, the structure of South African rural societies. Albert Mncwango, national election committee chair, implied in 2004 that a lack of resources and costs of transporting people to the voting stations played a majority role in the IFP’s poor election results. Rural townships simply did not have adequate voting stations, and the costs of transport were seemingly too high or not appropriately considered in the 2004 election. For the first time in its

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existence, the IFP found itself out of power in KwaZulu-Natal. This eradication continued well into the 2009 election as the ANC embarked on a dedicated “Zulufication”3 process. By 2019, the party was entirely out of the running order and up to its early tactics of political assassinations, requiring a strong military presence in the KwaZulu-Natal “hot spots”. Economic Freedom Fighters As one of the “three-and-a-half” horses in the race, the EFF is a major new black-led party, with charismatic “commander-in-chief”, and former ANC Youth League president, Julius Malema at the helm. Malema was ejected from the ANC ranks in 2012, but this did not end his political career. He was heavily involved with the platinum miners before, during, and after the Marikana massacre in 2012 and used the event as a lightning rod for the ANC’s moral degeneration. Then, in 2013, Malema and an assortment of political figures met in Soweto to form the EFF. The party was officially launched in September 2013 and has been a vocal thorn in the ANC’s side ever since. The party belongs to a Marxist-Leninist tradition and ascribes to the Fanonist school of thought. Their manifesto promotes radical nationalism, land nationalising with no compensation, 60% government ownership, nationalised banks, and aggressive BEE policies. The party draws members from diverse backgrounds including COPE, the ANCYL, Black Consciousness movements, unionists, academics, and student activists. It appeals mostly to young black men who haven’t benefitted from BEE or more general ANC policies. Malema’s awareness of the mass-mediated politics and use of visually stunning material drove the pre-­ election news agenda in 2014. For all the EFF’s bluster, the red berets, so evocative of socialist Thomas Sankara, acquired only a small percentage of the vote nationally. Even so, Marikana had opened up the potential for new political configurations on the left, and the EFF’s “people assembly” tactic was a sign of the dissatisfaction with and a critique of existing forms of democracy in South Africa. Their second showing at the national polls continued to be the performative thorn for the ANC.  The party gained the support of disaffected black middle class and the youth with their radical economic policies (mostly hinging on land redistribution). Progressively tense 3  This refers to the ANC’s programme of placing Zulu cabinet ministers inside the party structures, particularly in the main security cluster. In 2013, 28% of Zuma’s cabinet was Zulu.

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relationships with coalitions formed after the 2014 election and racialised rhetoric alienated many of its new supporters, however. Without Zuma as a bullseye for their catchy slogans (e.g. “Pay Back the Money”), the party lost its direction. Then, in 2018, the Daily Maverick’s investigative journalism section Scorpio uncovered a vast illicit bank heist between the EFF and the Venda Banking Society (VBS) Mutual Bank, amounting to some R2mil in cash, a property in Sandown, Johannesburg, fraudulent and corrupt tenders, and funds for an EFF anniversary party. What makes this scandal even more insipid is that the Venda Banking Society (VBS) was set up as a burial society and stokvel saving scheme for rural and poor workers. In June 2020, the South African police finally made arrests in connection to the scandal, including the Gupta buddies KPMG.  How deep the Gupta tentacles wind over South Africa may take decades to decipher (see Chap. 3 for an overview of this state capture disgrace). For a political party that purports to be the vanguard of vulnerable workers, anti-capitalist, and radical, this was a crushing blow. Nonetheless, and evidence of the complex voting mechanisms in South Africa, the EFF still enjoyed third place on the podium in the 2019 election results, in some provinces taking second place over the DA. Congress of the People Formed in 2008 and headed by Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota and Mbhazima “Sam” Shilowa, both former ANC senior members and Struggle activists, COPE was launched in December 2008 after a catastrophic split divided ANC supporters post-Polokwane. COPE appealed to the black middle class, who were wary of the left-wing and populist rhetoric of Zuma’s allies, as well as dispirited Mbekiites from the Polokwane divisions. Some hoped that the party would break the explosion-fizzle mould of start-up rival parties, and COPE comprised different attributes that previous start-­ ups did not have: cash, ANC veterans, and decent leadership translating to a strong mobilising capacity from the ground up. Major problems plagued the new party right from the start, however. The three main leaders, Lekota, Shilowa, and the party’s eventual presidential candidate Mvume Dandala, competed endlessly. The campaign also lacked visibility, strategy, and funding, and the ANC countered COPE on all levels, resisting the use of the name, disrupting meetings, and opposing by-elections. The party’s manifesto was also not that dissimilar to the DA’s in that their core ideology consisted of progressivism, a belief in human rights, social justice,

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sustainable democracy, human development, and the rule of law and equity. As a result, voters had little distinction between the two. News media, ever-hungry for a black-led alternative to the ANC, created a storm in a teacup over COPE in 2009. Despite these high hopes for COPE, the party fizzled. Leadership struggles between Lekota and Shilowa were disastrous and the party’s ideology so closely mirrored their competitors that the parties blurred. The ANC eventually welcomed the defected COPE members back one by one until by 2019, the party had all but ceased to exist with 0.27% of the vote share. AGANG Launched in February 2014, AGANG SA (or simply AGANG, roughly translated from the Nguni as “Build South Africa”) drew black professionals to its ranks including Vanessa Hani, daughter of slain ANC activist leader Chris Hani. AGANG was supposed to be, essentially, the DA for black people: “it was designed to appeal to black constituencies reluctant to vote for the DA with its reputation of representing the interests of whites” (Jolobe, 2014, p. 61). AGANG was led by former partner of Steve Biko, Black Consciousness activist, and razor-sharp businesswoman Dr Ramphele Mamphele. A botched attempt at a coalition between AGANG and the DA immediately prior to the 2014 election meant that both parties suffered greatly. Zille and Mamphele attempted to coalesce their parties yet never received the backing of their respective groups, and Mamphele withdrew from the merger within hours of the public announcement. The confusing and disappointing disappearance of such a promising woman-led black opposition party proved one of the great miseries of the 2014 election. Despite running for the 2019 election, AGANG received a dismal 0.08% of the vote share. White Right/Black Left The White Right in 1994, so named because of the racial and ideological composition of the parties, consisted of three political parties: the Conservative Party (CP) was the official opposition to the National Party from 1982 to 1994, led by Andries Treurnicht; the Afrikaner Volksfront (AVF), founded amidst the violence and tension after Chris Hani’s assassination in 1993 and consisted of 21 right-wing groups; and the Freedom Front (FF), a breakaway party from the AVF, headed by General Constand

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Viljoen. The separatist neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) was headed by former Special Guard Warrant Officer Eugene Terre’blanche and is often linked with the White Right, even though it did not participate in the negotiation process. While the political frames of the parties were diverse, the drive for racial separation and a Volkstad4 for Afrikaners, based on racial purity, linked them all. While the White Right fizzled into near non-existence after 1994, in 2019 the resurgence of the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) grew from 0.9% in 2014 to an astounding 2.38%, its highest vote share since forming in 1994. To further fracture the opposition, the 2019 election saw the start of many small parties linked to the evangelical churches in South Africa. Some of these manifold parties included the African Covenant Movement, the Christian Political Movement, the Economic Emancipation Forum, and the African Transformation Movement. These parties tended to adopt the controversial rhetoric of Zuma-era politics and garnered support from Zuma-ites who may have been shunted from Ramaphosa’s “self-­ correction” campaign promise. Black First Land First (BLF) is the most notable of the smaller new parties not tied to a church, founded by vocal expelled EFF member Andile Mngxitama.

Election Results, 1994–2019 Ultimately, only two parties competed with any significance for the position of government in the 1994 election: the ruling NP and the ANC, the leading liberation party. There was a major computer error or hacking conspiracy during the 1994 counting process, so the true numbers of voters who chose the IFP in KwaZulu and nationally may never be known (see the 2010 book Birth by Peter Harris for a captivating observation of the 1994 election process). The 89.3% turnout for the 1999 election seen in Table 2.1 seems to indicate that the IEC polling administration was far more efficient than in 1994. Politically motivated violence was almost non-existent in keeping voters from the polls. Instead, emotions ran high with euphoria, enthusiasm, and civic pride. Although the election was plagued by some problems, Reynolds (1999, p. 173) admits 4  The Volkstad, or People’s State, describes proposals to establish an Afrikaner homeland or land based on federal principals for self-determination. For a detailed explanation of what the Volkstad means to far-right Afrikaners, Du Toit (1991) and Schönteich & Boschoff (2003) are recommended.

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Table 2.1  Election results 1994–2019 of 11 predominant parties Party

1994a

1999b

2004c

2009d

2014e

2019f

ANC NP/NNP IFP FF/FF+ DA/DP UDM PAC COPE AGANG EFF BLF Total valid votes Turnout percentage Voting eligible population turnoutg

62.7 20.4 10.6 2.2 1.8 – 1.3 – – – – 19.5 mil 86.9 86

66.4 6.9 8.6 0.8 9.6 3.4 0.7 – – – – 16.2 mil 89.3 72.2

69.7 1.7 7.0 0.9 12.4 2.3 0.7 – – – – 15.6 mil 76.7 58

65.9 – 4.6 0.8 16.6 0.9 0.3 7.4 – – – 17.6 mil 77.3 60

62.2 – 2.4 0.9 22.2 1.0 0.2 0.7 0.2 6.4 – 18.4 mil 73.5 57

57.5 – 3.4 2.4 20.8 0.5 0.2 0.3 0.1 10.8 0.1 17.4 mil 66.0 49

Statistics gathered from Reynolds (1994)

a

b

Statistics gathered from Reynolds (1999)

Statistics gathered from Piombo and Nijzink (2005)

c

d

Statistics gathered from Southall and Daniel (2009)

Statistics gathered from Schulz-Herzenberg and Southall (2014)

e

Statistics gathered from elections.co.za/NPEDashboard/app/hybrid.html

f

For a detailed explanation of how this calculation was drawn, see Prof Bartlett’s webpage: https://math. sun.ac.za/bbartlett/assets/voter-­turnout-­long.html g

[t]here was a beauty in the boredom, hope in the uneventfulness, pride in the lack of attention. In 1994 the eyes of the world watched South Africa to see if the fragile child would survive its traumatic birth, but five years on far fewer friends attended the youthful democracy’s birthday party.

In 2004, South Africa held another calm, free, and fair multi-party election and thus took a step closer to democratic consolidation. And so, by 2019, political leaders were more concerned about voter apathy than political violence and the campaigns across the years reflected this shift. The European Union, United Nations, Commonwealth, and Carter Centre also refrained from sending any election monitors to South Africa during the two decades of democracy. Calland exclaims that, “actually, there is not a lot to say” about opposition parties (2013, p. 239). With the exception of the DA up to

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2019, the opposition has struggled in leadership, access to resources, and ultimately in competing with the ANC’s Struggle credentials. The IFP membership has been mostly amalgamated into the ANC thanks to Zuma’s reflection of Zulu ideals, while other smaller parties had been unceremoniously wiped off the parliamentary representation bill over the years. Calland believes that new parties are eventually “welcomed into, and smothered by, the warm embrace of the ANC’s commodious bosom” (2013, p. 161), while Heyn suggests a less cosy embrace as smaller parties are “squeezed into oblivion” (2009, p. 163). The UDM, Freedom Front Plus, AGANG, and COPE all found attracting attention difficult because the spotlight was on the ANC and the DA the majority of the time. The standout exception to this is, of course, the EFF, which has increased its vote share in both elections competed. Ultimately, citizens tend to see a vote for the smaller parties as a “waste”, perceiving only the three big parties capable of delivering on promises. If voters did not support the ruling party in government, then their vote often went to the most effective opposition grouping. As it happened, the 2019 election was the ANC’s worst performance (at 58% in Table 2.1) since competing in elections. Even worse, the turnout of voters also slipped to only 49% of the voting eligible population. More people voted against the ANC or did not vote at all than actually voted for the party. Despite the normalisation and consolidation of democracy, the turnout of the voting eligible population decreased from 86% in 1994 to 72% in 1999 and only 49% in 2019 (see Table 2.1). The voting eligible population (also known as VEP) is the number of citizens legally allowed to register and vote. The turnout of an election in South Africa only counts the percentage of people who registered and then voted. The VEP counts the number of people who are eligible to vote, who then turned out to vote. This number is lower across the board and shows that South Africans aren’t registering to begin with, let alone turning out to vote, signalling a slow disengagement with the voting process over time. The reduced participation in 2014 and 2019 for example was probably due to an inactive youth group, a lack of opposition campaigning and strategy, and limited palpable choices on the ballot paper. Disillusionment with the ANC or with politics in general does not always mean a growing opposition. Instead, disaffected voters simply move into the non-­ participatory electorate, staying away from the polls. This peculiar South African issue is explored further in Chap. 6.

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References Bartlett, B. (2019). South Africa’s voter turnout: a mathematician runs the numbers. [O]. Retrieved May 7, 2020, from https://theconversation.com/ south-­africas-­voter-­turnout-­a-­mathematician-­runs-­the-­numbers-­117199 Calland, R. (2013). The Zuma years: South Africa’s changing face of power. Zebra Press. Duncan, J. (2009). Desperately seeking depth: The media and the 2009 elections. In R. Southall & J. Daniel (Eds.), Zunami! The South African elections of 2009 (pp. 215–231). Jacana. Du Toit, B. M. (1991). The far right in current South African politics. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 29(4), 627–667. Hamilton, G., & Marè, G. (1994). The Inkatha freedom party. In A. Reynolds (Ed.), Election 94: The campaigns, results, and future prospects. David Phillips. Harris, P. (2010). Birth. The conspiracy to stop the ‘94 election. Umuzi. Heyn, H.  M. (2009). South Africa’s smaller parties [UDM, ACDP, ID, FF+]: Searching for a role and fighting for survival. In R. Southall (Ed.), Zunami! The 2009 South African elections (pp. 162–179). Jacana. Jolobe, Z. (2014). The democratic alliance’s election campaign: ‘Ayisafani’? In C. Schulz-Herzenberg & R. Southall (Eds.), Election 2014: The campaigns, results, & future prospects (pp. 57–71). Auckland Park: Jacana. McGreal, C. (1999). The great persuader. [O]. Retrieved May 10, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/may/29/southafrica Piombo, J., & Nijzink, L. (2005). Electoral politics in South Africa: Assessing the first democratic decade. HSRC Press. Reynolds, A. (Ed.). (1994). Election 94: The campaigns, results, and future prospects. David Phillips. Reynolds, A. (Ed.). (1999). Election 99 South Africa. From Mandela to Mbeki. David Phillips. Schönteich, M., & Boschoff, H. (2003). ‘Volk’, faith, and fatherland. The security threat posed by the white right. South Africa: Institute for Security Studies. Schulz-Herzenberg, C., & Southall, R. (2014). Election 2014 South Africa: The campaigns, results, and future prospects. Jacana. Southall, R., & Daniel, J. (Eds.). (2009). Zunami! The 2009 South African elections. Jacana Media. Welsh, D. (1999). The DP. In A. Reynolds (Ed.), Election 99 South Africa. From Mandela to Mbeki. David Phillips.

CHAPTER 3

Story of South Africa’s Democracy, 1994–2019

Introduction In thinking about South Africa’s democracy, most of the world is familiar with the country’s transition from autocratic apartheid to multi-party democracy. From the rainbow nationalism of Mandela’s presidency, through Mbeki’s elitist “African Renaissance” decade, to Zuma’s incumbency beset by scandals and corruption, and ending in Ramaphosa’s New Dawn self-correction agenda, South Africa’s 25-year democracy culminated in the 2019 general election in May. For the last six elections, the ANC has campaigned on the memory of the Struggle, with it as the sole party of the liberation of South Africa. And yet over time this narrative has become increasingly difficult to coalesce with the reality that many South Africans face. Protests against the government increased from 2004 onwards, but even outright anger at the government does not translate into disenchantment with the ANC or a vote against it in the elections. The reasons for this are complex. Scholars often agree that voters continue to select the ANC because they view the party as manifest entity of the victory over apartheid and as the party that most represents the voter. This form of identity politics is not unique to South Africa but has determined the voting structures of the country for at least the last two decades. A splintered and often directionless opposition and reliance on the liberation narrative have helped keep the ruling ANC in power over 25 years, but change is on the horizon. The changing face of the electorate and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Jones, Elections and TV News in South Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71792-6_3

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strengthening opposition parties means that the ANC was on shaky ground in the last elections. And yet any significant shift in power will have to come from inside the ANC rather than without, and the ANC is fractured. This “splitting of the rock” involves factionalism that grows from within and across presidencies: Those who support Mbeki, those who support Zuma. Those who were Exiles (those who fought apartheid outside of South Africa) and those who were Inziles (those who remained and fought from within). Those who are Zuma-clones, those who follow the New Dawn of Ramaphosa. These struggles within the government rarely reflect the struggle in South Africans’ daily lives, and this may, in the end, be the ANC’s undoing. This chapter weaves the complex, nuanced tale of South Africa’s democracy, focusing on the presidencies as pivotal points in this history. It tracks the last 25 years of democracy, starting with Mandela’s election as president in 1994 and ending with Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency in 2019. Along the way, the trials of South Africa muddy the waters of the Rainbow Nation. The country has suffered an AIDS epidemic, a large-scale influence operation by a British PR firm, state capture by a mega-rich Indian family, multiple scandals and corruption charges of presidents, xenophobic and crime waves, and widespread community protests. To make sense of the long and involved history of democracy, this chapter starts with an overview of the main political parties from 1994 until 2019. Next, a summary of the election results shows just how much voter turnout has dropped since the heady days of 1994, where the ANC was a “sure bet”. Last, the chapter dedicates a large section to the story of democracy, focusing on the intervening five years of each election. Reading these events in this chronological order may be news to those who have not lived through the decades in South Africa, but understanding the story of democracy is essential to understanding how television news represents these events, and why some news channels chose to highlight or relegate these events during the coverage. This chapter serves as a historical overview of the lived experiences of the South African electorate in order to contextualise the television news representation during the elections. What follows is a narrative of the 25 democratic years in South Africa, with each presidency as a new era and point of focus. These events may constitute known history to many readers or may instead be shocking

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revelations. A clear history story of democracy in the country is essential to understanding how television news represents these events, and so the following section tracks each presidential era documenting the prominent events.

1994: Getting to This Point An election of similar proportions in a developing country would normally take between 18 months and two years to arrange. But in South Africa, we do it our normal way, at the last minute and on a wing and a prayer. (Harris, 2010, p. 50)

Long queues of people snake into the distance. The rising sun provides some warmth to the voters who had stood in single file for many hours. Mielies braai on open trashcan fires and singing spontaneously erupts amongst the crowds. On dusty roads, on manicured lawns, inside well-­ kept schools, inside flimsy tarpaulin tents, out in the freezing morning air, South Africans of all races stand patiently and, without fear, wait for the voting booths to open at 7 am. “The queues assume their own hierarchy”, Peter Harris remembers, “with the elderly and infirm being pushed to the front, followed by women with babies … the atmosphere is almost one of devotion” (2010, p. 209). These scenes in April 1994 signified South Africa’s first democratic general election. Reaching this point had not been easy—for the politicians, many sleepless worrisome nights were spent around the negotiating table. For the citizens, fear of the low-level civil war brewing in the townships and in the city centres caused widespread panic. But over four days in late April, 86% of the South African voting-age population turned out to cast their ballots in a chaotic, clumsy, crisis-ridden first election. In the weeks and months before the election date, South Africa was under siege. Widespread violence between warring factions—spurred by political unrest, brinkmanship, a deeply unequal society, and systemic racism—made everyone think that a democratic election would never come to pass. In December 1991 and again in May 1992, political parties and leaders, including then president FW de Klerk of the ruling National Party and recently released African National Congress president Nelson Mandela, attempted a negotiated settlement to end apartheid: the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) laid the path for multi-racial discussions. CODESA II attempted further negotiation, only

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to fail in a deadlock after the opposing ANC could not agree with the NP on the constitution and governing process. This deadlock became the lynchpin of the unresolved revolution in the decades to come. With political parties failing a vital compromise, civil society exploded in anger and frustration. Groups of young men aligning to the various factions, often along ethnic lines, took to the streets with homemade bombs and weapons, chanting slogans and Struggle songs. Zulu men residing in townships attacked Xhosa families. Xhosa youth fought a guerrilla war within the alleyways of Thokoza township in Johannesburg. Families lost their children to bloody gunfights. Schools were burnt, homes demolished, caches of weapons and ammunitions found in buried locations across the country. Ill-trained and racist police could not keep up with the violence, and some accounts put the death toll at over 20,000 people in the decade before 1994 (Jeffery, 2009). In the weeks and days prior to the election, bombs exploded in Ventersdorp at the NP offices, in Johannesburg outside the ANC headquarters, and at a taxi rank in Germiston filled with commuters. Rich Mkhondo recalls that, “mass mobilization had become a permanent, structurally ingrained feature of South African political life” (1993, p. 5). It Would Have Been a Miracle Against this backdrop of a low-level civil war, the very idea of having a free and fair, peaceful election seemed far-fetched. The subsequent transition from autocratic racist rule to multi-racial democracy appeared, on the surface at least, like a miracle. But calling a negotiation and a hard-fought victory a “miracle” removes the real process and action of many thousands of South Africans. A miracle simply is. It is a divine intervention above critique. If one assumes the transition is like a “miracle”, then the process no longer requires discussion. Tensions between ethnicities, races, and political parties divided South African society, and it took considerable negotiations and compromises to quell the unrest. A miracle, this was not. The divisions in apartheid South Africa started with official racial categorisation in 1950 but eventually affected the infrastructure available to races too—rural, predominantly black people lived without running water, electricity, or other basic amenities afforded to the urban, predominantly white populace. Holding an election in areas where there was no census data, no electoral register, no telephone system, no electricity, where illiteracy was 65%, “where whole swathes of the country are simply not in a

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position to run a bath, never mind an election” (Harris, 2010, p.  55), meant that the IEC had their hands full attempting to orchestrate this difficult process. Despite some almost-catastrophic glitches in the system (see Harris’ 2010 first-hand account), the IEC pulled off the monumental task with little visible upheaval. Crucial to this process was the harmonising ability of the ANC’s presidential candidate, Nelson Mandela. Qunu Cattle Herder to Freedom Fighter Rolihlahla Mandela was born in July 1918 in a small village in Mvezo, in what is now the Eastern Cape. His chieftain father bestowed upon him the name that translates roughly as “troublemaker”, but Mandela denies any prophesising on his father’s part. After a few formative years as a cattle herder, instilling in the future president a sense of belonging, humility, and respect for ancient Xhosa traditions, Mandela was removed from the village to the Great Place, Mqhekezweni, after his father died. It was here that he was schooled in British culture, tradition, and language, and where he gained the English name “Nelson”. At age 16, he underwent the traditional initiation process of circumcision that transformed the boy into the man, and conferred a third name, “Dalibunga”. At the Great Place, he was introduced to what he calls the “purest form” of democracy, where people were able to openly criticise Chief Jongintaba Dalinyebo in an informal setting. Eventually, Mandela took his Xhosa traditionalism to Johannesburg where he spent years as an advocate, and where he was introduced first to the Communist Party and later the African National Congress. He notes (1994, p. 95) that there was no defining moment in which he became politicised. I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people.

When the National Party won the 1948 election, Mandela’s life was turned upside down. “I was more certain in those days of what I was against than what I was for”, he proclaims (1994, p. 119). As the National Party became more zealous in its implementation of racial purity and separation, the young advocate threw himself into the resistance movement, sacrificing his marriage to Evelyn for his strength of belief.

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He was active in the ANC’s long-running Defiance Campaign but strongly disagreed with the party’s multi-racial policy and non-violent protest methods. Mandela later regretted his pugnaciousness, noting that he “was a young man who attempted to make up his ignorance with militancy” (1994, p. 159). As Mandela matured, his views softened but the Africanist ideal of an “African government for Africans run by Africans” still held sway among many—in 1957, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) was born under the leadership of Robert Sobukwe. The PAC rejected multiculturalism and communism outright, making the movement an unlikely ally with both the NP and the Western press, which “hailed its birth as a dagger to the heart of the African left” (Mandela, 1994, p. 229). The PAC was a driving force in mobilising sections of the black population, particularly around resistance to pass laws and the Bantu Education Act. The PAC organised a peaceful demonstration in the Sharpeville Township in Johannesburg in 1960 that ended in one of South Africa’s bloodiest massacres. Sharpeville was a turning point in the country’s history and thrust the apartheid state into the minds of global audiences. There are not many more harrowing images than that of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the fatally wounded Hector Pieterson, followed by Hector’s distraught sister Antoinette Sithole. By 1960, South Africa was under a state of emergency, with the military in control of structures of governance. Here, Mandela, Sisulu, and 100 other ANC members were arrested under various pretences—high treason and conspiracy to overthrow the government being paramount. In an atmosphere of increasing paranoia, under a racist government petrified of loss of control, Mandela was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island at the end of the Rivonia Trials in 1963. He was to remain imprisoned until 1990, when he emerged a changed man walking into a radically different South Africa. At the helm of a struggle-movement-cum-­ government-in-waiting and after years of having his photograph banned in the South African press, Mandela was suddenly the global icon of the first democratic election in 1994.

1994–1999: The Rainbow Nation Although Mandela and his leadership are often venerated in culture and the academy, the first five years of South Africa’s new democracy were turbulent. Richard Calland calls Mandela’s government “one big laboratory” (1999, p.  1) of experiments: the Government of National Unity

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(GNU),1 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC),2 the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP),3 the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) project,4 and the new Constitution were all implemented during Mandela’s presidency. Delivering these policies was the responsibility of the deputy presidents and, when joint-deputy FW de Klerk resigned from parliament in 1996, that fell squarely on the shoulders of Thabo Mbeki. Meanwhile, the charismatic and iconic Mandela set about improving the global image of South Africa and ensured nation-building was a top priority for the country, which Du Preez calls “Project Rainbow Nation” (2013, p. 25). His thrust towards unification of the divided country came at a price, however. Mandela was a far better liberator and nation-builder than a governor. Saul (2002, p. 48) too notes that Mandela’s “mythos of consensus” and the narrative of a unified nation muffled growing and deepening societal contradictions and tensions. The Outgoing King Politician Van Zyl Slabbert (1999, p.  212) describes Mandela’s era in office as “the politics of charisma” and hints that spectacle and image came at the expense of effective governance. Mandela could often float above these politics because of his mythic status, unencumbered by the realpolitik within the ANC. He was a modern politician yet in touch with traditional and tribal structures, and he embodied whiteness and blackness, privilege and deprivation simultaneously. However, it seems that his endeavour to straddle two contrasting worlds and the desire to promote 1  The GNU consisted of 12 ANC officials, six NP, and three IFP, with Mbeki (ANC) and de Klerk (NP) as Deputy Presidents. The GNU was hardly a match made in heaven: slanging matches between Mandela and de Klerk in 1995 highlighted the tempestuous relationship. 2  The TRC was a transitional justice body that gave victims of past conflict a chance to tell their stories of gross human rights violations and offered amnesty to perpetrators who fulfilled certain criteria. 3  The RDP attempted to address the socio-economic consequences of apartheid through alleviating poverty and addressing social services shortfalls, which were seen as mutually supporting objectives. 4  GEAR replaced the RDP and was adopted in June 1996  in order to cut expenditure, reduce budget deficit, and rationalise the public sector. Habib (2013) argues that sanctioning GEAR was probably because of intense international pressure from investors. See Saul (2002, pp. 33–39) and Klein (2007) for examples of how the ANC adopted neoliberal policies that were radically different to the movement’s proclaimed socialist ideology.

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an international image meant sacrificing the depth of political analysis required in order to “hold the centre”: divergent thrusts within the ANC during the first term of government threatened to pull the party apart. For many South Africans, the heady promises of 1994 had not come to fruition by 1999. The dream of rapid change, promised in the ANC’s Freedom Charter and 1994 manifesto, seemed eternally deferred. Foreign governments (the UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the US) drew the ANC away from its socio-economic policies—including nationalisation—and persuaded the party to embrace Western-style free market principals in 1994. Mandela’s evolving fiscal responsibility was due to these pressures from investors and governments, rather than an organic internal decision from the ANC NEC.  Saul’s essay on the “post-apartheid denouement” (2002, pp. 27–33) outlines the ANC’s withdrawal from any form of genuine class struggle that might directly help the vast impoverished masses, while appeasing the smirking wielders of corporate power. This “precipitous rush to the right” (ibid.) perplexed many critics; the ANC’s almost total capitulation to market forces begged the question whether it was pushed into capitalism or jumped in with both feet. The ANC may have had genuine misgivings about socialism based on the recent Soviet history and that the institutions the ANC inherited were weak and broken, which precluded the implementation of some of the founding principals in the Freedom Charter. Whatever the underlying reasons, the electorate were given a raw deal in the first five years of the democracy. Fixing the broken institutions inherited from the brutal apartheid system necessitated a capitulation to capitalism but doing so meant that many of the hopes and promises from the ANC’s socialist 1994 campaign were necessarily sacrificed. Problems in Paradise Important achievements during the presidency occurred through the hard work and realpolitik of the ANC and the GNU. A democratic and innovative constitution was lauded as one of the most progressive in the world; economic infrastructure was stabilised rapidly; service delivery occurred in critical areas; a trouble-free 1999 election ran smoothly thanks to the IEC’s coordination; and the country witnessed a dignified changeover between presidents, from Mandela to Mbeki. Despite these improvements, cracks began to appear in the Rainbow Nation: the inheritance of an anachronistic and shambolic National

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Executive set the scene for a turbulent presidency, while the increasing HIV/AIDS epidemic meant that as many as 25% of pregnant South African women had contracted the virus by the end of 1999, and the government was slow to respond.5 Mandela’s disintegrating marriage to Winnie Mandela grabbed local headlines. A burgeoning crime wave tormenting the country led one writer to conclude that South Africa is “a country at war with itself” (Altbeker, 2007). Inequality deepened among South Africans (Padayachee & Desai, 2008),6 the education system— especially in rural areas—crumbled, and promises were first extended and then broken, leading to criticisms of Mandela’s leadership skills. Additionally, the innovative GNU was at best schizophrenic: the IFP and the NP found themselves in opposition and in cabinet simultaneously. Although the new Constitution is internationally lauded, it is also vilified as a document designed to protect capital interests at the expense of transformation—in part due to the “sunset clauses” that allowed certain privileges to the white minority for a certain period. The Freedom Charter was given little consideration in the draft, leaving a sour taste in the mouth of activists and revolutionaries decades hence. While these issues may have faded from public memory, the first five years were challenging. Saul (ibid., p.  41) writes that the best point of reference for analysing the liberation movement’s acclimatisation to government might be Franz Fanon’s notion of “false decolonisation”. The ANC gradually adopted their position as “intermediaries” of the global empire through capitalist policies rather than conducting true revolution, but this is an extreme interpretation.

1999–2004: African Pride, Renaissance There is a view that postcolonies with racist legacies experience the transition to democracy with difficulty, but in South Africa this transition seemed painless. By 2004, the ANC had achieved 10 years of majority rule in the country. Mbeki took over from Mandela as president, winning the second democratic election in June 1999. But all was not well in the ANC 5  Mandela later acknowledged that the ANC’s early response to the epidemic was one of the major oversights of his administration (Sampson, 2013). 6  Padayachee and Desai  (2008) give a detailed explanation of the deepening inequality, including a critical discussion of the Black Economic Empowerment and GEAR programmes. In 1995, 28% of households lived below the poverty line while in 2000 the figure was roughly 33%.

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camp: deep divisions split the party up the middle and an increasingly paranoid leadership created animosity between government and media. At the time, Steven Friedman (2005, p. 19) acknowledged that much of the voting since 1994 had followed identity politics, and that any threat to the ANC dominance would have to come from a vibrant opposition party made up from splinters from within the ANC itself. Deputy President to Favourite Son Although Thabo Mbeki finally won the position of deputy president in 1994, Mandela was initially reluctant to nominate another Xhosa politician to the upper echelons of the ANC cabinet as he was concerned the ANC would otherwise be seen as a “tribal” party (Calland, 1999, p. 5). He favoured Cyril Ramaphosa, a Venda, for the position instead. While second in charge, Mbeki ensured that there would be no further threat from Ramaphosa or any others to his quest for presidency. Russell (2009, p. 64) remarks that Mbeki’s series of coups split the ANC into the Exiles and the Inziles, with the Mbeki camp being almost exclusively Exiles. This hierarchical split continued in the ANC for decades. In the run-up to the 1999 election, Mbeki ensured that he had elbowed out any perceived threat to his position as the favourite son—the chosen one. While Mbeki’s international and academic allure was strong, the deputy president lacked the common touch for his electorate and had something of a political tin ear. Mandela was able to straddle the traditional and modern with ease, acknowledging tribal leaders and Western democrats with the same easy demeanour. Mbeki, however, was “enigmatic” at best to his electorate: the arcane, besuited man was visibly out of place in the rural enclaves of South Africa and in the run-up to the 1999 election, the dichotomy became more perceptible. The American powerhouse in Washington loved Mbeki; he was seen as “urbane and brainy” as the “West’s best hope for a continent mired in poverty, corruption and disease” (Masland & King, 2000, cited in Jacobs & Calland, 2002, p. 5). In South Africa, however, the story was quite different. From the outset, Mbeki was reluctant, almost allergic, to play the mediatised political communication game so favoured by the wider media. He refused to speak in soundbites, and barely tolerated any rebellion in the mainstream press. And there was much to speak about to South African journalists, for underneath the calming blanket of the Rainbow Nation was turmoil.

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The Dissipating Froth of the Miracle Having followed Madiba, the icon of the nation, Mbeki had large shoes to fill. Mandela’s presidency was mainly concerned with uniting the disparate South African society, and it was up to the pragmatic Mbeki to make this inheritance work economically. But there is no easy road to true freedom. Giliomee observes sardonically that by 2004 “the froth of the miracle had disappeared” (quoted in Russell, 2009, p. 147), with sections of society pulling in different directions. Crime, inequality, an ailing economy, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic haunted the start of Mbeki’s presidency. An estimated 25% of all pregnant women in the country were already HIV-positive in 1999 and this statistic had risen to 30% by the start  of 2004. Almost 10% of South Africans were HIV-positive at the time, reducing the life expectancy for South Africans to 48.5 years for men and 52.7 years for women (Donnington et  al., 2004). AIDS orphans totalled a heart-breaking 1.1 million. Russell (2009, p. 216) reveals that in order “to understand Mbeki’s stance on AIDS, you had to appreciate that he was an intellectual president who raises questions”, and he approached the issue as an academic, rather than a president. Therefore, Mbeki’s sin during the first five years of his presidency was that he raised the question first rather than dealing with the problem. Despite allowing antiretroviral (ARV) drugs in 2003, Mbeki’s cabinet still implied that people had a choice between nutrition and medicine to cure the disease, indirectly questioning the effectiveness of ARVs. Yet again, it was the poor black masses who bore the brunt of the government’s procrastination in providing adequate healthcare. Like a dirty thread weaving through tapestry, South Africa’s crime statistics were extraordinary in 2004. The murder ratio was at 43 per 100,000 people, one of the highest in the world. Worse, these statistics often centre only on murder, failing to take account of all other crimes committed—of which there are scores. The cycles of violence in the country affected all races but significantly more poor black Africans than others. According to polls, a third of black Africans felt personally unsafe most days (Roberts, 2009); roughly 1.8 million South Africans sought medical assistance due to assault; and 18,000 South Africans were murdered per year. These statistics brought shame to the country, yet the government often decried the outrage as “white angst”, failing to realise the complaints originated from all sectors of society.

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The distribution of income is exceptionally unequal in South Africa. In 2008, the Gini Coefficient7 ranked South Africa at 0.8, possibly the worst in the world, and the gap had widened 0.2 points between 1995 and 2005 (StatsSA, 2008). While social grants implemented during these years narrowed the gap slightly, the nature of this inequality is still alarmingly racial—the wealthy are overwhelmingly white, and the desperately poor are almost exclusively black. Wealthier households benefitted disproportionately from the economic upturn in the early 2000s, while poorer families struggled to make ends meet. The implementation of the ANC’s economic policies (such as RDP and GEAR) did little to rectify the structural inequality existent in the country and only highlighted the disparity between leadership and societal issues. Having a president with a “tin ear” didn’t help matters much, either. The Beguiling Academic with Rural Beginnings Mbeki’s well-documented awkwardness in straddling the urban and the rural—a technique that Mandela seemingly mastered and that is necessary in a divided society—appears to have originated in the Mbeki household in a rural village in the Transkei. Thabo’s parents, Govan Mbeki, an accomplished academic, and Epainette Mbeki, a similarly educated egalitarian, left Johannesburg to start a small village shop in the hills of Mbewuleni, the threshold of Western civilisation and traditional Xhosa culture. While Mbeki was born, raised, and educated in this tiny village, he always felt an outsider, most at ease when engulfed in a mess of literature. The “African Pride” narrative, so distinctive of Mbeki’s presidency, was rooted in his upbringing in both the small village in the Transkei hills and the education instilled through his scholarly parents. It was through this education that he embraced the 1930’s ideal of the New African, a mission for redemption through an envisioned African Renaissance: Autonomy, pride, and self-sufficiency for the African continent that combined urbanity and nationalism in a golden realisation of potential. Mbeki tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to have one foot in each world despite being born of the educated and urbane elite.

7  The Gini Coefficient measures inequality, with zero (0) representing complete equality (all people have equal income) and one (1) being complete inequality (one person owns all the country’s wealth).

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Mbeki was forever torn between these two worlds. The traditional village surrounding conflicted with his parental progressive ideology, and Mbeki was never really suited to the rural setting. After an education at the private Lovedale College, Mbeki, now in exile from South Africa’s oppressive apartheid regime, joined his mentor Oliver Tambo to study economics at Sussex University in England. After completing a Master’s degree, Mbeki joined other Struggle icons including Walter Sisulu’s son Max, Albert Dhlomo, Jacob Zuma, Essop Pahad, and Oliver Tambo in multiple African nations to bolster the anti-apartheid movement from outside the borders. Tambo, now president of the still-banned ANC, appointed Mbeki to conduct private (some say secret) talks with the NP government in the early 1980s. It was here that Mbeki made his name as the “seducer”. Charming, self-assured, a joker, and able to smooth ridges between disparate parties with tact and diplomacy, the Mbeki of the transition era is held high on plinths by all who met him: Gevisser (2007), Du Preez (2004, p. 148, 2013, pp. 51–52), and Russell (2009) write nostalgically for this charismatic Mbeki, rather than the overly paranoid out-of-touch academic in 2004. By this time, Mbeki relied heavily on his African Renaissance concept to plaster over the many misgivings of an optimistic but unworkable policy. It was this narrative that drove his overriding policy for governance in the first five years as president. African Renaissance Throughout South Africa’s history, politicians have suggested the country should play a larger role in Africa’s modernisation and development. Mbeki’s notion of an “African Renaissance” was just one such instance in a long line of leaders promoting South Africa as hegemonic across the continent. In a way, Mbeki’s idealistic concept was similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. The concept was meant to promote science, technology, and globalisation in Africa’s thrust towards development but was ultimately mysterious and obtuse from the outset with no real plans for implementation. Mbeki’s fascination with new technologies, globalisation, education, and African identity was strongly evident in the African Renaissance agenda. Importantly, his comprehension of Africanism is not racial, but regional: Africans are those who are born on the continent, rather than delineated by race. The idea of an African Renaissance does not draw a line between the traditional and the modern but is driven by economic development through modernisation.

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Mbeki’s use of an African identity in an anti-colonialist framework is problematic, however. The concept does not challenge existing power structures and the regeneration encompasses competitive global capitalist systems rather than socialist communitarian methods. The discourse around the role of South Africa in relation to the rest of the continent is ambiguous at best. Not all African countries agreed that Mbeki’s African Renaissance was fit for purpose: what is good for South Africa was not necessarily good for all of Africa, and there does not exist a “final identity that is African” (Appiah, 1992, p. 117). Too much difference, too many fractures, and too much oppression existed on the continent to enable a single thrust towards “modernisation”. Mbeki’s concept mirrored his own tension between the traditional and the modern: his political “tin ear” and austere demeanour rendered him unapproachable by the majority of the rural poor in South Africa, yet that very disposition was enchanting to the Western leaders. Loyalty Above All Else During Mbeki’s first term in office, his paranoia was palpable. He seemed obsessed with an overarching plot to harm him, and the president’s hostility towards the media caused ructions throughout the government. His demand for absolute loyalty within party structures and an overarching paranoia is also characteristic of ANC members who remained a long time in exile, seemingly because of the long guerrilla warfare fought with and amongst ANC and MK members. This hostility only increased when the media appeared to turn against the government in the 2000s, demanding the ANC be held to account for its policies and promises. In typical ANC fashion, the government attacked anti-Mbeki depictions in the press (Chaps. 3 and 5 explore this acrimonious relationship further). Mbeki demanded absolute loyalty to him, to his policies, and to the ANC narrative as liberator. Any discord from the party line was punishable by exile from the insider group. As would become a normalised state of affairs, the ANC was defined from this moment as a party for loyalists. And it was from this standpoint that the ANC entered the election to re-elect Mbeki for a second term.

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Profile of the Electorate Young post-apartheid voters made up a third of the electorate in 2004, which had a demography of 83% African, 8% Coloured, 7% white, and 3% Indian. By 2004 a low birth rate and high emigration reduced the potential white electorate, while the accelerated growth of the black middle classes and the elite was dramatic. However, despite this rise in the elite classes, unemployment rose from 30% in 1994 to over 40% in 2004. The electorate in the third election was predominantly made up of the young, poor, and unemployed. Between 1999 and 2004, public approval for Mbeki had slipped to between 50% and 65%, while Mandela was still widely acclaimed with an 80% approval rating in 2004. These numbers do not reflect the massive dissatisfaction you might expect from a country with such wide-ranging issues such as an AIDS epidemic and crime tsunami. But this was not because South Africans “played Pollyanna” and ignored the problems in society. Instead, citizens tended to balance disappointments with impressive achievements elsewhere, of which there were many. South Africans vote for the ANC not just because of their record in office but because of the signification inherent within the party and their history. The ANC are the self-termed Struggle party, the liberators and saviours of South Africans. As Chap. 6 explores, this liberation narrative is damaging for democracy in the country but has forcefully increased since 2004.

2004–2009: Ousting of a Would-be King South Africa had had the liberation saint. It had then had the African intellectual. In 2009 it looked set to embark on rule by a charismatic populist. (Russell, 2009, p. 259)

Mbeki’s nine-year presidency was turbulent. His denialist attitude towards HIV/AIDS and hesitancy to implement health policy caused an explosion in the disease, resulting in an epidemic that killed 18.5% of the country’s adult population by 2007. Mbeki negotiated the global financial crisis towards the end of 2007 and, in May 2008, a period of xenophobic violence that left 62 dead, thousands displaced, and an ill taste in the mouths of South Africans and investors alike. Citizens no longer trusted national institutions because of continued mismanagement and corruption, and the increase in community protest campaigns pointed to

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amplified intolerance at the local level. At the same time, the ANC was on the verge of a catastrophic split in ideologies, resulting in the Mbeki camp and the Zuma camp. What had originally been Mbeki’s plan for future-­ proofing his leadership ideals turned into a ruinous backfire. Back in 1999, Mbeki had insisted that Jacob Zuma be his deputy president: the two had a long history and they often operated as a team, but they were extremely different men. Mbeki, the austere, urbane intellectual fashioned himself as a modern African leader yet conservative Western politician, a diplomat. Zuma meanwhile takes pride in his traditional Zulu roots, is a practising polygamist, an anti-intellectual, and a former ANC intelligence chief. When Mbeki appointed Zuma as deputy president, he was aware that Zuma’s traditional identity would prove popular with the Zulu electorate in KwaZulu-Natal. Mbeki chose Zuma as his deputy because no one, “not even Zuma himself, thought he had what it took to be president” and what better sidekick “than a man who could never have presidential ambitions and thus could never become a threat” (Du Preez, 2013, p. 98)? This decision backfired abysmally. Polokwane 2007 When Mbeki attempted to run for a third term as ANC president in 2007, it was his ultimate undoing. As one of South Africa’s most surprising political outcomes post-1994, the ANC’s National Elective Conference (NEC) in Polokwane in December 2007 was touted as a “spectacle of a lifetime” (Du Preez, 2013, p. 102). Political leaders shouted each other down during planned speeches, with some professing allegiance to the newcomer Jacob Zuma and others remaining aggressively loyal to the incumbent Thabo Mbeki. “Looking back now”, veteran journalist Max Du Preez admits, “Polokwane 2007 signalled the moment when cheap populist politics, the culture of insults and threats, started flourishing in South Africa” (2013, p. 103). Jacob Zuma, the charismatic Zulu politician with the loud, rambunctious support of the ANC Youth League, won the ANC election in Polokwane to the humiliating defeat of Mbeki. This moment signalled a shift in South African politics towards Stalingrad tactics that would eventually create a split in the ANC not seen for 40 years.8 In September 2008, 8  In 1959, a group of Africanists broke away from the ANC as they opposed the party’s collaboration with white and Asian people. They formed the rival liberation movement, the

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the long-running corruption trial against Zuma suddenly floundered as high court judge Chris Nicholson declared, inter alia, that “undue political interference in Zuma’s prosecution” was at the hands of Mbeki. The Zuma camp moved quickly—on 22 September, ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe and deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe demanded Mbeki resign, visiting his official residence late at night. The next morning, Mbeki announced his resignation with dignity but rejected Judge Nicholson’s report. The country was briefly without a president until Motlanthe was sworn into office on 25 September. This recalling was close to a coup d’état and in violation of the constitution: the president is elected by parliament and cannot be “recalled” by a political party. The National Prosecuting Agency (NPA) shortly afterwards served Zuma with an indictment for corruption, fraud, and racketeering. Nevertheless, the Zuma camp had got what they wanted—Mbeki was officially out of the picture and Zuma was free to run for president in the general election in 2009. The new, fresh start was about to begin, supporters declared, as Zuma’s touted progressiveness heralded a significant step to the left. They were eventually proved wrong on both counts. A Push Towards Populism A strange hand gesture was often seen during the Polokwane conference: the “wheeling hands that football managers use when they wish to signal a substitution” (Calland, 2013, p. 159). These were the hands of Julius Malema, president of the ANC Youth League, a position once occupied by Nelson Mandela in the 1940s, and his many Youth League followers. Calland is particularly indurate when describing the “neo-fascist” Malema, his followers, and the rising populism within the ANC, which is apparently “denuded of political principle or any ideology, driven only by the politics of voracious self-enrichment” (2013, p. 187). Malema, Calland suggests, relies on military rhetoric and populist demagoguery politics to stir emotions of disgruntled working classes in order to mobilise the masses and to acquire power. The push towards populism was iconic of Malema’s style of politicking during this period. Malema famously stated that he would “kill for Zuma”, and frequently led rousing renditions of Zuma’s campaign theme song

Pan Africanist Congress, which later organised the ill-fated Sharpeville march.

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“Umshini Wami”.9 Zuma very clearly had the support of the rowdy Youth League, which helped the “Zunami” sweep away all opposition. This populism marked the beginning of a period of extravagant incendiary rhetoric, directed not only at opposition parties but also the NPA and the judiciary. Broedertwis Zuma inherited a delicate political position as president of the ANC. He faced the challenge of keeping the party together as well as his winning alliance in the aftermath of Polokwane. The party had, at that point, “no real ideological underpinning. [The ANC] are together in opposition to something, not in promotion of something. All experience of political science suggests that, unless you are together for something, you stand the risk of being pulled in all directions at once” (Saki Macozoma, Mbeki confidant, quoted in Russell, 2009, p. 256). The ANC’s election manifesto for 2009 was thus wide-ranging, detailed, relatively boring, and subtle, with unemployment, health, education, rural development, and a reduction in crime and corruption as top priorities. Their campaign also revolved around Zuma’s personality, his Zulu identity, and popularity with the masses. Zuma visited the many disparate sections of South African society and courted both the rich white suburbanites and the rural black Zulus. A “Big Man” personality cult followed Zuma around during the campaign trail, masking the growing social and economic problems. Flamboyant rallies and mass meetings held in stadia packed to the brim with chanting and swaying loyalists included brief sightings of the frail, mute Nelson Mandela wheeled onto the stage and through the crowds in a golf buggy. Despite the ANC’s use of symbolism that promoted unity and using Mandela to appeal to ANC loyalty, Zuma’s ongoing controversy caused an irreversible rift not only between Mbeki and Zuma, which Hamill calls the “Broedertwis” (2009, p. 4), or fight among brothers, but also the ANC itself: those who were loyal to Mbeki and those who followed the new blood, Zuma.

9  Umshini Wami translates as “Bring me my machine”. The song originated from MK soldiers during the Struggle. The implication is that “machine” refers to “machine gun” and the armed struggle against apartheid, but Zuma’s use of the song post-apartheid is misplaced; firstly because of the sexual connotation and Zuma’s repugnant rape trial, and secondly for inciting violence during the xenophobic attacks in 2008.

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Splitting of the Rock Some of the ANC National Executive members who voted for Mbeki at Polokwane in 2007 agonised over whether to leave the movement to which they had devoted most of their lives. When Mbeki was recalled in September 2008, their thinking was cemented. On 16 December 2008, South Africa’s Day of Reconciliation, and in a deliberate echo of the Freedom Charter launch that met in 1955 under the same name, the Congress of the People (or COPE) was launched. Headed by Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota and Mbhazima “Sam” Shilowa, former ANC senior members and Struggle activists, the party appealed to the black middle class, who were wary of the left-wing and populist rhetoric of Zuma’s allies, as well as dispirited Mbekiites.

2009–2014: 100% Zulu Boy Zuma represented a refreshing gasp of air after Mbeki’s austere presidency. His Zuluness and traditional identity set him apart in the rising feeling amongst South Africans that the rural poor were not represented in government. Zuma has the populist trait of saying what his audiences want to hear and when he speaks to his followers in Zulu, he is not seen as a tribalist but as an authentic African leader. His heritage also ensured that the book was ultimately closed on IFP nationhood in KwaZulu-Natal. During Zuma’s high-profile rape trial, swarms of loyal supporters wore shirts depicting Zuma’s smiling face with the words “100% Zulu boy” emblazoned below.10 As a child, Zuma was a cattle herder in the rural hills of Nkandla. He had no formal education, learned to read and write only as an adult, and was arrested in June 1963 while conspiring with MK to overthrow the government. He spent a decade on Robben Island and as soon as he was released back to Nkandla, resumed his political activities as recruiter and transporter of soldiers for MK under Harry Gwala. In 1975, Zuma fled into exile following Gwala’s arrest. In 1987, he was appointed as the ANC’s Chief of Intelligence at the movement’s exile base in Lusaka, Zambia, and commanded the Mandla Judson Kuzwayo (MJK) regiment, 10  The use of “Zulu boy” in connection with Zuma’s rape trial has always been problematic. Supporters of the then-deputy president accused the media and the courts of being “anti-Zulu” in their depiction of the trial, and that Zuma was simply being true to his Zulu heritage.

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an underground counter-intelligence unit. In early 1990, Zuma re-entered South Africa to work with the ANC steering committee on the negotiation process in KwaZulu-Natal. Zuma was elected as Chairperson of the ANC in the province as well as national Chairperson of the ANC  in December 1994. From 1999 to 2005, he served as Mbeki’s deputy president. His Zulu name, Gedleyihlekisa, is constructed from the Zulu phrase that reads, “I cannot keep quiet when someone pretends to love me with a deceitful smile”. More frequently, it is translated as, “the one who smiles in your face while causing you harm”. His political career has certainly followed that aptronym. Zuma’s rise to power had not been easy, nor without controversy, yet he always managed to return to office smiling. In 2005, he was sacked as deputy president over allegations of corruption with his disgraced financial adviser Schabir Shaik, yet remained deputy president of the ANC. This divided the party, with a groundswell of support for Zuma rising within the ranks of the ANC.  The Schabir Shaik court case led to further investigations of Zuma’s financial records. On top of these mounting problems, in October 2005 he was accused of raping Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, known as Khwezi, but denied the charges. The matter went to court in February 2006 and Zuma stated he knowingly had unprotected sex with HIV-positive Khwezi but had a shower afterwards “to protect himself” from the disease.11 He was acquitted of rape in May 2006 after an extensively publicised trial and subsequently reinstated as ANC deputy president. The NPA finally withdrew the corruption charges in May 2009, two weeks before the general election. State institutional misuse was rife in the security sector during Zuma’s presidency, with top-level ANC party politics entangled in wide-ranging scandals. Those who helped Zuma rise to power were placed in high-level cabinet spots and received due benefits from these positions. This orgy of power did not leave much time to consider accountability from the public. As it turns out, this state mismanagement was symptomatic of a larger conspiracy of state capture, which only came to light through reports by investigative journalists in 2016.

11  This statement has been the focus of many mockeries of Zuma, including local cartoonist Zapiro’s caricature of the president with a shower on top of his head. In 2017, South African journalist Redi Thlabi wrote a biography of Khwezi titled the same.

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Zuma’s Damoclean Issues At this tumultuous centre of power grappling was Zuma’s chequered past. It hung over him as a sword of Damocles, and Zuma did everything he could to surround himself with friends. Yet no matter what he did, how he governed, or the decisions he made, Zuma could not shake off the corruption charges and rape trial that haunted and informed his every move. It was despite Jacob Zuma, rather than because of him, that the presidency still exerted significant power in the country. Zuma had little decisive leadership; instead he employed fear, patronage, and control of the security establishment to exert his power. He fell into the pockets of would-be state capturers that promised wealth and security and were seemingly untouchable by courts or civilians, earning him the colloquial name “Mr Teflon”: nothing sticks to him. The litany of complaints against Zuma was endless. Yet by far the greatest damage to Zuma’s popularity was the exposure of the “security” upgrades made at his palatial homestead in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal. In November 2009, Mail and Guardian journalists accidentally stumbled on the Nkandla homestead building work and broke the story in December (Roper, 2013). At least R200mil of the taxpayers’ money was spent on an underground bunker, two Astroturf soccer pitches, a “firepool”, hospital facilities, a cattle enclosure that cost R1mil, and a tuckshop.12 In a country with crippling poverty, a failing basic education system, and an exceptionally high unemployment rate, the Nkandla issue highlighted the divergence between state and population and how little the majority of South Africans had benefitted from the ANC’s rule. Du Preez (2013, p. 272) remarks that Zuma is often caught between his instincts as a Zulu traditionalist, an MK soldier, a security and intelligence operative, and a political street fighter on the one hand, and the restrictions and challenges of heading a modern constitutional state, a sophisticated market economy and an open, diverse society on the other.

To find a middle ground on the president is difficult because on one side his administration has delivered workable policies and maintained a 12  In 2016 the Constitutional Court found Zuma guilty of violating the constitution for ignoring the Public Protector’s remedial action to pay back some of the money.  On 29 June 2021, Zuma was sentenced to 15 months in jail for contempt of court, after failing to appear before the Zondo Commission inquiry related to the multiple corruption charges. 

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functioning democracy, but on the other his presidency will be remembered for some of the biggest scandals in two decades. Nkandla, the corruption charges, the rape trial, and the massacre at Marikana. Marikana On a late winter’s day in 2012 in Rustenburg, the platinum mining belt in northern South Africa, a tragedy was about to unfold. Tensions between the ANC-aligned National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the relatively new Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) had been brewing for weeks. In numerous wildcat strikes, thousands of mineworkers downed tools to demand a better living wage from Lonmin, the mine owners, and to protest the terrible working conditions. Mineworkers were not local to Rustenburg: most were from the Eastern Cape where they sent their minimal wages back every month to their rural families. Workers were tired of living in apartheid-style conditions under the ANC government that had promised so much. In the days leading up to the massacre, 10 police officers and miners were killed in clashes. Then, on 16 August 2012, the watershed event occurred. It was Zuma’s “9/11 moment” (Calland, 2013, p.  25) and the South African Police Services’ first postapartheid massacre. Journalists descended on Wonderkop Hill and streamed worldwide the brutal images that harked back to pre-­democracy in South Africa. Disorganised, petrified, aggressive, and predominantly black policemen mowed down advancing mineworkers with live ammunition on live television. Journalist Greg Marinovich revealed that 34 protesters were killed, some in the gunfire, some at point-blank range, some in the back, some crushed by police vehicles, and some in a second “kill site”, possibly in revenge for the police killings earlier in the week. The ANC’s reaction to the Marikana strike and the resultant massacre was cold and half-hearted. The lack of empathy the former liberation movement showed the families of the Marikana victims is startling to this day. The ANC was slow to respond to the massacre, with Zuma concluding his business in Mozambique before travelling to the site. As non-­ executive director of Lonmin, future president Cyril Ramaphosa’s inaction haunts him to this day.13 The Marikana massacre was a symptom of the 13  See the Farlam Commission’s findings from 2015. Ramaphosa, fourth president of South Africa, was non-executive director of Lonmin, and sent a series of emails to the Lonmin board. His language asking for “concomitant action” and describing the miners as

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failure of governance: the ANC, Lonmin management, police and the police commissioner, the government in controlling and listening to people. The depths of the Marikana tragedy are still being felt years later, but in 2012 and 2013, the massacre became synonymous with the state’s willingness to use brutal force against its citizens when protecting capital interests. Protest action in South Africa has increased rapidly since 2004 as frustration bubbles over and citizens visibly and loudly pronounce their disapproval. Marikana was at the time the zenith of frustration against a government that ignored its citizens. The first political representative on the scene at Marikana was not even a politician—it was the ousted, banned, former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, who had been working with the striking mineworkers on the platinum belt for some time prior to the massacre. Marikana represented the catalyst for Malema’s instigation of his new political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). To view Malema’s presence at Marikana as “opportunistic” is too simplistic—he may have used the tragedy as a stepping-stone for his own political manifesto, but those people were crying out for leadership that they lacked from government and found this leadership in the red overall-clad figure of Malema. Zuma’s catastrophic personal issues did not dampen his party’s approval rating, however. With a religious following of supporters, identity voting that ensured a large ANC electorate, and a splintered opposition, the Zuma camp went into the 2014 election with guns blazing. However, the increasing protest action amongst previous ANC stalwart communities and the changing face of the electorate meant that the ANC was actually on shaky ground. Changing Electorate A considerable challenge the ANC faced in 2014 was the rapidly changing electorate, which was larger, younger, and more urbanised than ever before. This shifting electorate impacted the ANC’s traditional hold over the rural populace that remembered the party’s Struggle credentials. The decline in ANC rural support bases and the disillusionment with politics in general meant that many voters simply stayed away from the ballot. “plain dastardly criminals” invokes anger in the Marikana victim’s families. The commission largely exonerated Ramaphosa, but the current president continues to be heckled with campaigners asking for restitution and justice.

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Although the voting-age population had increased to 31.4 million people and the registration figures are contested, around 7 million people were left unregistered, the majority from the 18–19-year-old or “Born Free” category. The term “Born Free” refers to South Africans born after the end of apartheid, in 1994 or later, and eligible to vote in the 2014 and subsequent general elections. The “Born Free theory” suggests that those born after apartheid hold no, or very little, party allegiance because they were not subject to the apartheid regime. Born Frees theoretically also have had free access to non-partisan information, rather than rely on the party’s Struggle credentials when voting. While a compelling argument, Friedman (2013) argues that the Born Free theory had already been proven false in 2009 because those newly eligible to vote in that election did not change voting patterns significantly. To suggest that a few years’ difference in age would suddenly wipe away the long-lasting effects of apartheid is thinly disguised prejudice, not voting analysis. ANC on the Defence The ruling party entered the fifth democratic election on the defence, beleaguered by widespread labour disputes, mining sector problems, mismanaged parastatals (state-owned enterprises), as well as mishandled crises and scandals ranging from violent protests to allegations of corruption. Additionally, the death of Nelson Mandela in December 2013 and the accompanying national mourning was the symbolic end of an era, heralding a new style of politics. Although scholars often speak at length about the rifts and predicaments attending the ANC’s governance, in many respects the ANC had done a fair job governing the country in two decades. The most pronounced in the decade under Zuma was the reduction of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The infection rate and AIDS deaths dropped steadily from 2012, while the number of patients receiving antiretroviral drugs increased by 16% between 2012 and 2015. The media is also now far more diverse, freer from legal restriction than most societies, and protected by policies and NGOs that act as watchdogs to this freedom. The IEC is efficient, reliable, and reputable worldwide. However, as Mattes (2014, p.  186) observes, the ANC has all too often tolerated incompetence, corruption, and ineffective policies, and had not been sufficiently punished for its inadequacies at the ballot box. In the run-up to the 2014 election, the coalition of forces that thrust Zuma to the

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presidency had all but imploded, and the president himself had become an election liability. The Economist placed South Africa’s “black hole in the economy” (Rainbow stagnation, 2016) squarely at the feet of Jacob Zuma, as business confidence and currency had both plummeted since the start of his presidency.

2014–2019: Pin Pricks of Light in a Tunnel Despite the ANC’s fair management of the country for the first 15 years, there is no good story to tell of South African society under Jacob Zuma. The meagre flecks of light in an otherwise dark tunnel do not go far enough to illuminate the country but instead highlight how troubled the Rainbow Nation had actually become. Extending the social grants did not save the many millions plunged into poverty during the state capture of South Africa. Re-envisioning the National Health policy did not come to fruition. Instead, the second tenure of Jacob Zuma’s presidency were some of South Africa’s darkest years post-apartheid. As Steven Friedman notes in 2019, the damage done to South Africa started decades earlier when Broederbond members captured the country’s coffers. In what Friedman calls a prime example of “path dependence” (2019, p.  283), Zuma simply moved into the space already created for such a delirious storming of state assets. This is not a good story nor an easy one to tell, but a necessary one to get us to the New Dawn of Cyril Ramaphosa’s incumbency. The Wheels Are Coming Off the Vehicle of Our State South Africa was left in a spiralling economy, dire in both breadth and depth, in 2014. Jacob Zuma, since his implantation as party president in 2007, had surrounded himself with party loyalists. When South Africans speak of Mbeki’s cohort being “loyal above all else”, we could never have known what was in store for parliament under Zuma. The National Congress of Provinces, parastatals, and the law itself, were all branches that could be bent and twisted to the will of the Zuma brigade. To the soundtrack of uMkhonto we Sizwe’s “Umshini Wami”, Zuma ran through the state coffers like a child in a candy store, chased half-heartedly by the increasingly toothless police. While Thuli Madonsela, the role model Wonder Woman public protector, attempted to redress some of the chaos instilled during this frenzy of greed, she was ultimately frustrated. Zuma’s

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loyalists wreaked havoc in parliament and the push to populism that rendered watchdogs nothing more than a loud bump in a seemingly unending night. While Zuma campaigned under the auspices of a “new” and “better” life in 2014, this new government portrayed entrenched legacies. Zuma continued with the strong grip on his security factions in parliament and in the party, and the camp demanded absolute loyalty. Because of the factionalism, state capture, and general mismanagement of the country, the spiralling economy was an added nail in the coffin of Zuma’s reign. At the 2017 Polokwane leadership contest, Zuma resigned, and Cyril Ramaphosa became the 14th leader of the ANC. Rise of the ANC Party-State Politics in South Africa is really not for the faint-hearted, especially when opposing the ANC. (Calland, 2013, p. 222)

Since the re-election in 1999 and subsequent metamorphosis to powerful majoritarian government, the ANC had succumbed to increasing arrogance at the polls. It seemed almost inevitable that the ruling party would win again, and this led many top-level politicians to assume little difference between the ANC as a party and the ANC as state. This party-state synthesis had grown in leaps and bounds from the time of Mbeki. The party has over the years broadly rendered itself unaccountable. Despite regular successes at the polls and opposition that can at times be lively, the current shape of the ANC as a dominant party is a threat to democracy. Southall (2014, p. 332) recalls that prolonged concentration of power leads to abuse, and the split opposition without direction can only enhance this absorption. Under Zuma, the party saw state institutions as personal fiefdoms, leading some to suggest South Africa was not a “party state” but a “mafia state” consumed in a frenzy of greed. This may be an unnecessary diatribe, but power indeed corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Single dominant party states give leaders two instruments of rule: the party and the policies. The party must be unified, disciplined, and aligned to a single narrative. The policies, or the government, are populated by loyalists that owe their legitimacy to the leader. The government includes only insiders, and outsiders are not welcome into this enclave. This “inside/outside” split is heightened even more in South Africa’s case because of the history of apartheid. Both Zuma and

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Mbeki served on the frontline of the apartheid struggle, with Mbeki supporters almost entirely Exiles (those who fought apartheid outside of South Africa), while Zuma and his supporters Inziles (those who remained and fought from within). This split of inside/outside was well known and accustomed in parliament from the days of Mbeki, and under Zuma this “insider” control became an iron grip. The Iron Grip of Umshini Wami: State Capture The pattern [of state capture] is a simple one. You remove management, and put in compliant management. You remove boards, and put in boards that are compliant. The rest is very easy. That has been the scenario at state-­ owned enterprises. (Mcebisi Jonas, 2017)

By 2014, the ANC was rife with securocrats loyal to Zuma and his camp. The three Damoclean swords following Zuma around (the arms deal, corruption charges, and Nkandla) meant his presidency was beset by paranoia. The president deployed cadres close by in his cabinet, meaning that top-level ministers were absolutely devoted to the president and either made him or were made by him. These mutually beneficial relationship ensured absolute loyalty. Deployments in the security sector were conducted more surreptitiously. The National Prosecuting Agency was in the direct line of fire because the tightrope Zuma walked between freedom and jail thinned rapidly. If Zuma lost control of the presidency, then he the charges against him would almost certainly be reinstated. Securocrats— those government officials who are also members of the police or military—are dangerous to democracy. Mixing state security with governance under Zuma’s presidency became both a technique of rule and also a practice of repression (see both Duncan, 2014; Booysen, 2015). Increasingly militarised language amongst politicians and election campaigns heightened the feeling that this rhetoric was a response to paranoia. Deploying loyalists into parliament and state-owned enterprises was the first step in ensuring Zuma’s camp was forever secure, from opposition but also from the Damoclean swords. A compliant state is the most powerful tool. It is this tool that helped the ANC protect its interests within the hegemonic state structure, both to block opposition parties from gaining footholds but also to protect power and the creation of that power. Ideal placements are those who are sympathetic to the ruling elite. Those who are upset by this hegemony are subdued or subverted, such as

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Madonsela’s public protectorate and much of the mainstream media. Vivacious denials of any manipulation or deployment followed, yet Zuma cast the die from the early 2000s of using legal processes to “delay, defuse, defer, obfuscate, and escape” (Booysen, 2015, p.  102). The compliant state was so effective that it was reflected in Zuma’s nickname (“Mr Teflon”, that is, nothing sticks to him). Managing the media needs the omnipresent ANC cohesive voice but also includes steering, manipulation, influence, and ownership. The Zuma-era influence of broadcast media used a sophisticated strategy to influence public opinion, explored further in Chap. 4. Part of this influence included repetition of key phrases, utilising “key moments” in the public awareness, and speaking with one voice to dominate media narratives of and about Zuma and the ANC.  One example implemented early in Zuma’s second tenure as president was “White Monopoly Capital” and “Radical Economic Transformation”. RET and White Monopoly Capital When leaders are also gatekeepers to populist rhetoric and lucrative business deals, damage to public institutions is nearly always guaranteed. Deployment of cadres to top-level cabinet positions protected the president against any corruption charges or scandals, and this protection required absolute loyalty to the president combined with visible attacks on any criticism, real or imagined. Booysen (2015, p.  97) shows how the public protector, elements of civil society, opposition parties, mainstream media, news media, and the high court and Constitutional Court were so often lined up against the wall. Because these institutions are seen as liberal forms of the constitutional state, they are often attacked as “Western”, “anti-majoritarian”, and “un-African” by the party-state ANC machine. This zealous protection of Jacob Zuma continued until virtually his last days in office. In order to deflect attention from any mismanagement or scandalous governance, these attacks increasingly took the form of empty rhetoric, espoused across social media and in press conferences. Facing a black hole in the Treasury and a ratings downgrade in 2014, “Radical Economic Transformation”, or RET, became a watchword of the Zuma camp and gospel in the ANC. There was little clarity of its implementation, but the rhetoric of transformation rather than reformation caused a buzz amongst business and politicians alike. During the drafting of the Constitution in the early 1990s, parties often skated around the issue of social change and justice, particularly in terms of land

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redistribution and business ownership. The logic of RET, it seems, was to address racial balance in business and reignite the economy at the same time. Economic experts were widely critical of the concept stating, amongst other things, that you simply cannot redistribute what isn’t there, referring to the downgrading of South Africa to junk status14 in April 2017. Transformation and redistribution in a shrinking economy in junk status was impossible and politicians seemed to claw at RET as the solution to all ills ahead of the party election conference in December 2017. Proclamations of RET were also accompanied by robust shrieks of “White Monopoly Capital” in 2016. A controversial phrase, White Monopoly Capital described the unequal bias of white ownership in the South African economy, which ultimately blocks the way for transformation. Members of the EFF and Black First Land First parties spoke of this phrase at length, and it was used to attack and threaten anyone who criticised the ANC or Zuma-ites, from journalists to business to scholars. Whatever acumen the concept of RET originally had was effectively wiped out when it suddenly transpired South Africa had been captured by the Gupta family. In under three years, the Guptas, along with a British PR company, destroyed the many decades of social coherence built up after 1994. This reads like a parable, but it is, unbelievably and painfully, true. The capture of South Africa was so complete that the revelations of the Gupta’s involvement finally give an explanation to the frenzy of greed and apparent mafia state apparent in the years between 2014 and 2017.15 GuptaGate and GuptaLeaks The mega-rich Gupta family originate from India, arriving in the hopeful burgeoning South Africa in 1993. Black elites rushed to make their millions in the new-found wealth of the new democracy, and people like the Guptas, outsiders who were willing to inject much-needed money into the sanction-starved economy, were welcomed. Striking up a friendship with ANC stalwart, Essop Pahad, and the Guptas’ inroads to politics were 14  Junk status, also known as “non-investment grade speculative”, signals to potential investors that the risk of the country’s debt has increased because the government might not have enough money to pay back what it borrows. This status leads to increased premiums for ordinary citizens including the cost of mortgages, short term loans, and day to day living expenditure. 15  See the outstanding film “Influence” by Diana Neille and Richard Poplak (2020) for more on Bell Pottinger’s insidious track record.

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paved. Sponsoring cricket stadiums with their Sahara computer brand, socialising with the new black elite, and making money cemented the Gupta brothers in the fabric of post-apartheid South Africa. Brothers Ajay, Atul, and Rajesh (also called Tony), first met then-Deputy President Jacob Zuma in 2002, and soon put Zuma’s son Duduzane on Sahara’s payroll. Duduzane Zuma soon became director of various Gupta companies, displaying these as “black owned” and able to enjoy from BBBEE16 benefits including winning lucrative business contracts. The two families became as thick as, well, thieves. The plunder of South Africa’s business coffers once Zuma was president was unmitigated and unmatched. The Guptas cut deals, moved money, bribed officials, and distorted government policy at a hitherto unseen level, all behind closed doors. Media influence was one large, oversized arm of the Gupta empire, with a new news channel (Africa News Network 7) and newspaper (The New Age) launched to disseminate the Zuma-Gupta (unconvincingly called Zupta) propaganda. The brazenness took a leap forward in 2013 when Vrede Dairy Farm, designed as a black empowerment project controlled by the Guptas, siphoned R30mil earmarked for the dairy for a family wedding. This wedding extravaganza was ultimately their undoing. Barry Bateman, veteran news reporter for Radio 702, was tipped off about arriving guests and found that the Guptas used a military air force base to rush family through, unchecked, into the country. Finally, thanks to the scoop and the hashtag #GuptaWedding on Twitter, ordinary South Africans finally saw who the Guptas were. A flurry of exposés, cartoons, and skits followed, embarrassing the Gupta brothers and the Zuma family and shedding light on the deceit. Meanwhile, and despite this sudden spotlight, the kickbacks and corruption went on unheeded, with billions of Rands being siphoned from parastatals (Transnet, Eskom, coal mines). With media attention suddenly and unrelentingly hyper-focused on closed doors, the Guptas needed help. Cue propaganda overdrive. In 2015 the Guptas hired London-based PR firm Bell Pottinger to help with deflection at an eye-watering £100,000 per month for their services. Fake news sites, Botnets, fake Twitter 16  Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment policies favour those businesses with black ownership or majority black staff. This policy, introduced in 2004, is designed to redress the economic imbalanced caused by colonialism and apartheid in the country. While contested, “black” in this term means those people who are previously disadvantaged—black African, Indian, or Coloured.

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accounts, editing Wikipedia sites related to the Guptas, developing blogs and news articles in favour of the family, implanting keywords in political speeches, and employing influencers and mouthpieces to further the campaign were characteristics of Bell Pottinger’s dirty PR campaign, led by Victoria Geoghegan. These elements played on the racial animosity in the country, fanning the embers of an unresolved past, and spread the idea that it was “White Monopoly Capital” blocking transformation, creating an “economic apartheid”. Key moments in the ANC Youth League speeches that mentioned civil war between races can also be tracked back to the Bell Pottinger campaign. If any opposition or negative press towards the Guptas occurred, it could easily be framed as a conspiracy and the opposition voices part of “White Monopoly Capital”. These key phrases spread to the majority of the country until ordinary citizens took it up, and then ran with it. With controlled and manipulated key moments in the public sphere, the country became restless. Young people, frustrated by the collapsing economy and stuck in an unreformed country, grew impatient and reacted. In 2015 and 2016 student protests, originating at the University of Cape Town, pushed the boundaries of this complacency. In 2015, outside my office window overlooking the Jameson/ Baartman  quadrangle, the Rhodes Must Fall movement began with Chumani Maxwele’s protest and slowly morphed into Fees Must Fall, ShackVillle, and EndOutsourcing. Frustrated by the lack of listening from politicians and authorities, students marched on parliament in the centre of Cape Town to be met with rubber bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas. The fight had come to the doors of Zuma’s securocrats and they fought back. All the while, the Guptas continued their unprecedented looting unchecked. Much of the rhetoric around this unrest in South Africa between 2014 and 2017 can be attributed to the work of the Guptas and Bell Pottinger in a concentrated effort to hide, distract, manipulate, and create discord amongst South Africans. Importantly, the campaign undermined the true, organic protest action, such as the student protests, and steps designed to revolutionise South African society, sowing distrust in any further protest. The dirty PR campaign to spread discord and intensify divisions was breathtakingly successful, and the Guptas almost got away with it. In March 2016, the Zupta brigade tried to bend the finance ministry to their will, attempting a bribe on the deputy finance minister to join their team, but failed. Mcebisi Jonas decided to go public. The Guptas could no longer brush off the allegations and fled to Dubai in April 2016 and that was seemingly the end of it. Thankfully, investigative journalism in South

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Africa is robust and powerful, and amaBhungane and Daily Maverick uncovered thousands of damning emails implicating Zuma, all of the Gupta family, Bell Pottinger, and KPMG. The story broke on 1 July 2017 and a hard-hitting documentary, “Influence”, was released in 2020. The UK authority for PR companies, PRCA, barred Bell Pottinger from licensing. The CEO of PRCA said at the time that “it’s the worst work I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen nothing worse than it. … Bell Pottinger may have set back race relations in South Africa as much as 10 years.” On 12 September 2017, the company filed for bankruptcy. In October 2019, the US Treasury placed sanctions on the Gupta family for engaging in widespread corruption and bribery, but the family still live in relative wealth and luxury in Dubai, as of the time of writing. Polokwane 2017: By a Whisker Because the GuptaLeaks blew open the once-sealed doors of his relations with the family, Zuma could no longer avoid the complaints and charges against him. Zuma resigned as president on 14 February 2017 facing a vote of no confidence in parliament. Cyril Ramaphosa succeeded him the next day. It was a consequence of this chaotic nosedive of the ANC’s party-state that Ramaphosa finally took the reins of the country. The businessman-­ freedom-­fighter promised to “self-correct” the ANC and campaigned to be party president elect of at the Polokwane meeting in December 2017. Despite Zuma’s plans to supplant the leadership position with one of his loyalists (his ex-wife Nkosozana Dlamini-Zuma ran alongside), Ramaphosa’s gentle yet firm personality and low-key campaign won by a whisker. Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa was the second child born to Samuel and Erdmuthe in Soweto just four years after the National Party’s 1948 victory. His upbringing solidified in him the confidence and kindness he was to show as an adult, and his mother’s proclamation of this is reminiscent in his given name, Matamela, meaning “one who evokes speechless wonderment”. When his eldest son turned to political activism, Samuel was stoic but struggled to combine the Christian principles he instilled in his family with the “dangerous world of politics” (Butler, 2019). Erdmuthe too prayed that Cyril would denounce his political aspirations, especially after an assassination attempt on his life in 1993. Indeed, Cyril’s experience with the Lutheran church was to be a driving force behind his

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political and business aspirations throughout his life. Lutherans, Anthony Butler (2019, p.  19) explains, find it impossible to compartmentalise a human being into separate religious and political components—they are simply two sides of the same coin. And so, taking a conservative reading of Luther’s teachings, Cyril’s parents instilled within their activist child a deep respect for the government and rulers of society. As Zuma’s deputy from 2014, Ramaphosa was often silent about the many abuses of power—Guptas, Nkandla, Marikana, the Treasury—leading many of his critics to wonder if he had the moral backbone to criticise the security cluster. The undercurrent of respect for the rule of law was the driving factor in Ramaphosa’s silence. Despite the differences in values between Zuma and his deputy, Butler notes that “Cyril waded through Zuma’s moral swampland wearing a fixed grin” (2019, p.  404). Zuma armed his cabinet with double-barrelled shotguns and any misstep would be to step into their sights. Ramaphosa quietly gained support and finally, when popular finance minister Pravin Gordhan was unceremoniously fired in 2017, Ramaphosa found the gap to campaign for the presidency in earnest. The New Dawn for the country, and for the ANC as a party, was to be led by a man that journalists called “South Africa’s best bet”, an “honest reformer”, a “skilful negotiator”, and the “man who could save South Africa”. Yet Ramaphosa was an “invitee” into the insider world of Zuma’s old cabinet. Despite being elected as the ANC president in Polokwane in 2017, Ramaphosa still had to manage the many Zuma-clones and Zuma-­ ites in his cabinet. He had to tread carefully around the securocrats and make sure RET was still a watchword—it was awkward to oppose it, given the rhetoric supposed transformation the country yearned for. A Mask for the Elections Ramaphosa’s election campaign to be the fourth president of South Africa existed on his idea for “A New Dawn”. He acknowledged, to his strength, that the ANC was dishevelled and a weak husk of its 1994 self, commenting on the “nine wasted years” of the Zuma presidency. The moment Ramaphosa took control of the ANC, he launched the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture (more commonly known as the Zondo Commission of Inquiry or simply Zondo, after its head, the Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo). The Zondo Commission’s final report deadline was extended due to the volume of testimonies but also

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the coronavirus pandemic and is now due to be heard in September 2021. By instigating this Commission so early in his ANC presidency, Ramaphosa started out with “course correction” in mind—bringing the ANC back to its roots. The campaign slogans for the 2019 election thus also echoed those of 1994, intending to drum up enthusiasm for the party as negotiator, struggle leader, and trustworthy governor. “Ready to Govern”, “Deliver a better life for all”, the posters promised. Ramaphosa’s personality on the campaign trail was robust and forthright, a world away from the bloated canvassing of 2014. And yet the population had been stung so many times in five years that the campaign mostly fell on deaf ears. Those who were not disillusioned to the point of abstaining often felt that power was ultimately unaccountable. Elections seemed irrelevant, especially amongst the youth. While South Africa has a “youth bulge” (i.e. more young people than older people), this does not translate into youth votes. This absence of participation may lead to a “trickle up” phenomenon where they continue to disengage with voting as they age. Ramaphosa therefore entered the 2019 election juggling a deeply divided ANC as well as a disillusioned and disengaged voting-age population.

Ending the Illusions Ramaphosa’s first step as president of South Africa was to slim down the inherited bloated cabinet. From 45 ministers, he kept 28, 12 of whom are women in a shake up from the Zuma patriarchy years. Much of his parliamentary alignment is political—he must juggle the Zuma-clones as well as the ANC’s ideology with his own desire for “self-correction”. He dances with the kings and queens of industry but must be careful not to step on the toes of the Tripartite Alliance, as small as it has become these decades hence. Questions remain, then: is Ramaphosa’s “New Dawn” designed to hold the ANC together as a party-state, rather than tackle the issues of an increasingly disillusioned and desperate society? Reinstating Tito Mboweni and Pravin Gordhan to cabinet may seem like a step back to Mbeki’s neoliberal style of governance. Ramaphosa searches for the soul of the ANC, but where do the citizens of South Africa factor into that search? Shortly after the election, “Ramaphoria” swept the nation as citizens were grateful of an approachable, accessible president who jogged with the suburbanites, laughed with the businessmen, sang Struggle songs with the masses, and seemed to listen intently on social media. Was this delight in the president a sign of the end of Zuma’s paranoid iron grip on the presidency?

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Time will tell, but at the start of 2020, during an apocalyptic pandemic crisis, Ramaphosa’s leadership hinged on his ability to listen to and communicate with the population. Initially, he seemed to do well during televised “Family Meetings”, those  press briefings during the coronavirus lockdown, but as Howard Feldman (2021) observes, ordinary  South Africans often do not have a place at Ramaphosa’s table. Despite the drop in support for the ANC (and the electoral system as a whole) in 2019, some conclusions can be drawn about these two and a half decades of democracy. Firstly, the election of 2019 brought an end to the illusions of an enthusiastic, engaged, loyal electorate that had shades of the 1994 euphoria in simply casting their vote. These illusions were whipped away as fool’s fire, useful for both political party and media to encourage registration and turnout. In 2019, more South Africans boycotted the election than cast votes. Many more young people did not register, despite the great calls of Born Frees challenging the status quo back in 2014. While the queues to vote in the early mornings to late evenings are still joyful, filled with song and the smells of braaiing meat and mielies, the lines are noticeably shorter as fewer people actually turn out to cast their vote. The challenge for Ramaphosa and those who follow him is primarily to engage voters, re-enliven democracy, and create community. Secondly, although contestation was unhindered in all elections (characteristics of “freeness” and “fairness”), voters tended to be unwilling to consider parties outside of their traditional “field”, or simply stayed away from the polls altogether. Identity voting is still extremely high in South Africa. Southall and Schultz-Herzenberg rightly note that “democracy in South Africa is being hollowed out” (2019, p. 220). The alienation of the young electorate, declining levels of voter registration, and voter apathy and distrust over time have resulted in a citizenry that simply stays in its lane. However, just because voters distrust or even protest against the government, this does not automatically mean a vote for the opposition. Voting for another party instead of the “liberation” party is unthinkable to many South Africans, seen as a betrayal of the ANC’s Struggle legacy (and the ANC plays this up during campaign messages too). These people often move into the non-participatory electorate, which has been growing since 2004, while protesting against government. Referring to these protests against the ANC and government in a monolithic fashion misses the nuances and complexities of how South Africans vote. Giving the ANC “one more chance” has been a voter narrative since at least 2004, and perhaps Ramaphosa can finally deliver on this dream, rather than defer it. Finally, opposition parties are steadily forming a confusing and disorientated horse race, where all horses look the same, have no teeth, and

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fight continuously with each other. In 1994, 19 political parties contested, up to 33 in 2014, and a record 48 in 2019. Despite the growing number of parties, the Big Three (ANC, DA, and variably the EFF or IFP) always draw the most votes from a dwindling support base. The split opposition parties, combined with directionless campaign manifestos that closely mirror each other, leads to further disillusionment amongst citizens. What is the point in voting for a tiny opposition party when the ANC always wins anyway? Staying away from the polls, spoiling your vote, or simply voting for one of the bigger three parties (perhaps the “least worst choice”), seems a better option. Standing in the queue for your chance to vote in South Africa’s general elections feels like a carnival. Fellow South Africans of all races join together in the shared experience that what we are doing is special, is hard won, is reminiscent of those awkward, effervescent days in 1994. Yet this feeling has dampened after the successive, brutal failures of government to listen, engage, and respect its voters over two and a half decades. Only time will tell if the current voting system in South Africa burns out, like a preeminent musician once said, or fades away.

References Altbeker, A. (2007). A country at war with itself: South Africa’s crisis of crime. South Africa: Jonathan Ball Publishers. Appiah, K. A. (1992). In my father’s house: Africa in the philosophy of culture. Oxford University Press. Booysen, S. (2015). Dominance and decline: The ANC in the Time of Zuma. Wits University Press. Butler, A. (2019). Cyril Ramaphosa. The path to presidential power. James Currey. Cairns, P. (12 October 2017). “Jonas: All institutions in SA are under threat”. Moneyweb.co.za. Accessed 26 June 2021. Calland, R. (1999). Democratic government South African style 1994–1999. In A. Reynolds (Ed.), Election 1999. From Mandela to Mbeki (pp. 1–15). David Philip. Calland, R. (2013). The Zuma Years: South Africa’s changing face of power. Zebra Press. Donnington, R., Bradshaw, D., Johnson, L., & Budlender, D. (2004). The demographic impact of HIV/AIDS in South Africa: National indicators for 2004. Cape Town: Centre for Actuarial Research, South African Medical Research Council and Actuarial Society of South Africa. [O]. Retrieved May 15, 2020, from http://catalogue.safaids.net/publications/ demographic-­impact-­hivaids-­south-­africa-­national-­indicators-­2004 Du Preez, M. (2004). Pale Native. Zebra.

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Du Preez, M. (2013). A rumour of spring: South Africa after 20 years of democracy. Zebra. Duncan, J. (2014). The rise of the Securocrats: The case of South Africa. Jacana Media. Feldman, H. (2021). South Africans no longer have a place at Ramaphosa’s table. IOLNews. 2 June 2021. [O]. Retrieved July 2, 2021, from https://www. news24.com/news24/columnists/howardfeldman/howard-feldman-southafricans-no-longer-have-­a-­place-at-ramaphosas-table-20210602 Friedman, S. (2005). South Africa’s ten years of democracy. In J.  Piombo & L. Nijzink (Eds.), Electoral politics in South Africa: assessing the first democratic decade (pp. 3–22). HSRC Press. Friedman, S. (2013). Theory of born frees rests on many falsehoods. [O]. Retrieved May 2, 2014, from https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/ columnists/2013-­11-­20-­theory-­of-­born-­frees-­rests-­on-­many-­falsehoods/ Friedman, S. (2019). The more things change… South Africa’s democracy and the burden of the past. Social Research, 86(1), 279–303. Gevisser, M. (2007). Thabo Mbeki. A dream deferred. Jonathan Ball. Habib, A. (2013). South Africa’s suspended revolution. Hopes and prospects. Wits University Press. Hamill, J. (2009). A (qualified) reaffirmation of ANC hegemony: Assessing South Africa’s 2009 election. Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 37(1), 3–23. Harris, P. (2010). Birth. The conspiracy to stop the ’94 election. Umuzi. Jacobs, S., & Calland, R. (Eds.). (2002). Thabo Mbeki’s world. University of Natal Press. Jeffery, A. (2009). People’s War: new light on the struggle for South Africa. Jonathan Ball. Klein, N. (2007). Shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. Picador. Mandela, N. (1994). Long walk to Freedom Volume I: 1918–1962. Little, Brown & Company. Mattes, R. (2014). The 2014 election and South African democracy. In C. Schulz-­ Herzenberg & R.  Southall (Eds.), Election 2014: the campaigns, results, & future prospects (pp. 169–187). Jacana. Mkhondo, R. (1993). Reporting South Africa. Claremont: Heinemann Neille, D., & Poplak, R. (2020). Influence. [Film]. StoryScope and EyeSteelFilm. Padayachee, A., & Desai, A. (2008). Post-Apartheid South Africa and the crisis of expectation—DPRN Four. [O]. Retrieved January 20, 2020, from http://rozenbergquarterly.com/post-­apartheid-­south-­africa-­and-­the-­crisis­of-­expectation-­dprn-­four/ Rainbow stagnation: how corruption and bad policies are strangling South Africa. (2016, November 26). Economist [O]. Retrieved May 21, 2020, from http:// www.economist.com/news/middle-­east-­and-­africa/21710824-­business-­and-­ government-­are-­pulling-­opposite-­directions-­growth-­how?zid=309&ah=80dcf 288b8561b012f603b9fd9577f0e

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Roberts, B. (2009). Age of hope or anxiety? Dynamics of the fear of crime in South Africa, HSRC policy brief (March), Pretoria. Roper, C. (2013). The day we broke Nkandla [O]. Retrieved August 1, 2017, from https://mg.co.za/article/2013-­12-­04-­the-­day-­we-­broke-­nkandla Russell, A. (2009). After Mandela: the battle for the soul of South Africa. Hutchinson. Sampson, A. (2013). Mandela at 85. [O]. Retrieved December 10, 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/06/nelsonmandela. southafrica Saul, J. (2002). Cry for the beloved country: the post-apartheid denouement. In S. Jacobs & R. Calland (Eds.), Thabo Mbeki’s world (pp. 27–49). University of Natal Press. Schulz-Herzenberg, C., & Southall, R. (Eds.). (2019). Election 2019: Change and stability in South Africa’s democracy. Jacana Media. Southall, R. (2014). The context of the South African election of 2014: Prologue to change? In C. Schulz-Herzenberg & R. Southall (Eds.), Election 2014: the campaigns, results, & future prospects (pp. 1–19). Jacana. StatsSA. (2008). Income & expenditures of households, 2005/2006. Statistical release P0100, Pretoria [O]. Retrieved October 16, 2020, from http://www. statssa.gov.za/publications/P0100/P01002005.pdf Van Zyl Slabbert, F. (1999). South Africa under Thabo Mbeki—the challenge of democratic stability. In S.  Jacobs & R.  Calland (Eds.), Thabo Mbeki’s World (pp. 210–213). University of Natal Press.

CHAPTER 4

South Africa’s TV News Landscape

Introduction Throughout the twentieth century, the media were recognised kingmakers of politicians. If you have the support of the media, you have the support of the people. Liberal democracy requires political parties to acquire the support of vast groups of people to win elections, and politicians need help from specialists to cross this particular Rubicon. Politicians understand that pleasing the media wins them space and time on the news and enter a game of image management with PR agents and journalists. Politicians and groups who do not work within the hype-machine lag behind significantly in their campaigns. Effective image management involves experts who know how both politics and the media work to grab attention, maintain that attention, and deliver effective messages through news media channels. This is the modern “hype-ocracy” in which we live. Politics and the news media are braided within a symbiotic relationship. South Africa’s history of news media is no different. Ever since the start of the independent press in the country, politics and media have been entwined. The first Afrikaans newspaper, Die Burger, established by DF Malan in 1915, served as a major cog in the wheel of Afrikaner Nationalism. The paper promoted the Volk identity and was the public sphere of apartheid policy in later years. Malan was soon to be prime minister in 1948 and became first leader of the apartheid regime. Also in 1915, media-savvy Afrikaner Nationalists started the National Press agency, or Naspers © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Jones, Elections and TV News in South Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71792-6_4

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(De Nasionale Pers Beperkt). The agency would become South Africa’s largest newspaper consortium for decades and of which Die Burger was a crucial part. At the very start of the mass media wave in South Africa, the National Party learnt to use the media for its own purposes. Its brand of Afrikaner Nationalism worked hand in glove with the Afrikaner press and together were unmatched in promoting this rhetoric. Naspers was effectively the apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism mouthpiece for over 80 years until the transformation and emancipation process (“ontvoonding”) took hold in the early 1990s. Before Western scholars truly understood modern political-journalistic symbiosis, Afrikaner Nationalists were practicing it in the south. Press and its role in the apartheid regime and anti-apartheid struggle has been well documented. Journalists such as Max Du Preez, Helen Zille, Greg Marinovich, Allister Sparks, Zwelakhe Sisulu, and Raymond Suttner played a significant role in uncovering apartheid atrocities. Investigative journalists from Vrye Weekblad and Rand Daily Mail uncovered some of the worst apartheid cover-ups, effectively shining a bright spotlight on hitherto closed doors (I am thinking here most notably of Jacques Pauw’s exposé of the Vlakplaas killing grounds). South Africa’s press has always been held in high regard, and rightly so. Yet little has been spoken about television news as an entity. We read about the nature of television news in the democratisation process, that the majority of adults still receive their political information from this medium, yet there are few studies about South Africa’s visual news by itself. This chapter acknowledges the history of the press in South Africa as a forceful entity and ultimately that the press and television news cannot be spoken about in solitude. Its focus, however, is instead on the role that the SABC television news channels have had on democracy in the country. There are not many more impactful moments than watching an historic moment unfold (or unravel) live on air. Television news has the immediacy, visualness, and liveness that press or radio simply cannot produce. Although the media landscape in South Africa is still dominated by two monolithic enterprises (the SABC and MultiChoice), the increase in digital penetration in the country means that a third of South Africans prefer to come across news via social media, ahead of direct access via the website or dedicated app. Following a shakeup of the SABC’s editorial guidelines in 2019, television news saw a resurgence in viewership in the country. Offline consumption sees 68% of the population watching news on a television set, predominantly the SABC news service (Newman, 2020,

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p.  106). Online, News24 dominates the space followed by the SABC’s online provision and eNCA’s digital channel. I recognise that the age of traditional, legacy media (like television news on an actual television set) is probably on the way out, but it is worth defining what we mean by television news from the outset. As I outlined in the introduction chapter of this book, television news no longer means a news broadcast only on a television set. TV news can happen online (like SABC News on YouTube), on smart phones via a dedicated app from legacy media (like the BBC News app), or re-broadcast on other social media sides (like Twitter accounts sharing a one-minute video summary). Because of the low level of literacy in the country and expensive data costs for streaming video news, television news on the television set is still an important and popular way South Africans get their political information. This is often overlooked when scholars speak about the “dying art form” of TV news, and it is important to recognise regional and societal divides in digital access. This chapter therefore explores four sections of South Africa’s television news media landscape—the SABC, MultiChoice, diversification of news media, and how journalism works in the country. Finally, the concluding section looks at the damaged relationship between politicians and journalists, and what this means for the democratisation process. First, though, it is the SABC under scrutiny from its beginnings as an imagined public service broadcaster mirrored on the BBC, to travelling a parallel road of government ideology, to its mutation of an Ugly Monster, a puppet in the pocket of the ruling government.

SABC: Views, Not News South Africa’s news media is knitted tightly with politics. Various nationalist parties played a major role in both the inception and maintenance of news over the past century. The South African Broadcasting Corporation was first established in 1936 as a mirror of the BBC—public service radio broadcasting began in English/Afrikaans before introducing isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, and Tswana language broadcasts in 1940. It was only after the National Party’s election victory in 1948 that the SABC steadily became a propaganda machine for the Afrikaner Nationalism rhetoric. By 1948, Afrikaner journalism in the country had had a long time symbiotic relationship with the government. De Beer and Steyn (1993) suggest that the press and subsequently the SABC were not so much obedient servants of their master’s voice but more of a “parallel road” to the

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government. Ideologies aligned and the dual support between journalists and government ensured Afrikaner Nationalism had a loud and all-­ encompassing voice. Fiery nationalism burned in many Afrikaner editors, which tended to obscure their objectivity and cloud their judgement: having close personal relationships with prime ministers, and later state presidents, had a strong influence on editorial decision-making right from the start. Despite the Afrikaans press turning into a fourth-estate watchdog in the post-1948 period, the ruling NP learnt quickly how to clamp down on independent media and news. It was thus that the NP came to have complete control over the news narratives—first through the Afrikaans press and later through the SABC radio and television news broadcasts. By the 1980s, the SABC had been captured by an elite group of white Afrikaner men who pulled the news narratives and media policy to their nationalistic will. That Evil Black Box A proposal to introduce television into South Africa made its first appearance in 1953 when British industrialist J.  Arthur Rank’s organisation approached the National Party. This was swiftly rejected as an obscene threat to Afrikaner Nationalism in the country. Albert Hertzog, broadcasting services minister in the 1960s, famously described television as “that evil black box; sickly, mawkish, sentimentalist, and leading the dangerous liberalistic tendencies” (Jacobs, 2019, p.  18). For the NP, who were consumed by the idea of Afrikaner exceptionalism and purity of the Volk, television represented the ultimate threat to their protected rhetoric. It symbolised integration, normalised sameness, and equality, and promoted competition against the monolithic Afrikaans press that steadfastly supported Afrikaner Nationalism. Piet Meyer, Broederbond1 leader and Chair of the SABC from 1959 until his retirement in 1980, simply could not conceive of objective journalism or the notion of balanced reporting. 1  Broederbond literally means band of brothers. It was, and some say still is, a secret society dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Afrikanerdom in South Africa. It was formed out of fear that the Afrikaner culture was on the brink of extinction in 1918. It started as a semi-religious organisation but spread to all aspects concerning Afrikaner life. After the National Party win in 1948, Broederbond members became high ranking officials in all walks of society: banks, politics, the SABC, and the press had chief operating officers that ascribed to the Broederbond ideals. See David Harrison’s “White Tribe of Africa” for an insightful view of the early Broederbond activities.

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The inception of television into apartheid South Africa therefore formed a direct threat to staunchly held Afrikaner ideals. Yet, in the years to come, television eventually became apartheid’s most powerful weapon. South Africa was television’s final frontier, the last holdout against popular media. Most broadcasting until the 1970s, via radio, was of state parades, heavily (self) censored news bulletins, disparaging comments on any kind of resistance, demonised protest action, and all served up with a hefty dose of Calvinistic Christianity, the chosen doctrine of the Afrikaner Nationalist peoples. Stern scripture readings bookended early SABC radio transmissions. By the 1970s, the SABC had become less of a “parallel road” to the National Party ideals and more of an “Ugly Monster” (Malala, 2015): a puppet controlled by the propaganda wing of the government, populated with government loyalists, and journalists engaged in heavy self-censorship under stringent news policy. A common story about the inception of television in the country is that in 1975, the National Party bowed to pressure groups and allowed the first test transmissions. But this is not the whole story. By 1975, the apartheid regime was going gangbusters: the economy was booming, whites were more or less on board with apartheid ideology, policies had high obedience, liberation movements were banned, and black people mostly controlled. There was also the quiet Western media support of the National Party thanks to the Cold War logics that despised oppositional politics and communism (see Chap. 5 for more on this). Television was introduced not just because of the pressure from the South African population, but because Piet Meyer and his band of brothers thought they were in sufficient control of society to allow this competition into the country. And so, on 5 January 1976, the first nation-wide SABC television broadcast was transmitted, in Afrikaans of course. Presenters Dorianne Berry and Heinrich Marnitz welcomed viewers to the “opening night” of TV in the country, with the first broadcast entitled “Die eerste televisiebeeldsending van die Suid-Afrikaanse Uitsaalkorporasie” (The first television broadcast from the South African Broadcasting Corporation) with associated fanfare. Only one channel (TV1) was available at first with news programming split evenly between English and Afrikaans. Two more television channels were added in 1982. These two new channels were aimed at black audiences, broadcasting in Zulu and Xhosa for TV2 and Sesotho and Tswana for TV3. General programming centred on tribal separatism and idealism, the lack of integration of black people in white lives, and with limited international programming allowed, often dubbed.

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Things remained fairly constant until the transformation of the SABC in the early 1990s. The first major television news story occurred in 1976, shortly after the first broadcast was aired—the Sharpeville massacre was touched upon lightly in a “sober and unemotional” report so as not to create unnecessary “excitement and unrest” (De Beer & Steyn, 1993, p. 214). This was to become the template for apartheid-era news programming. During the crisis years of the 1980s, stringent news editorial policy repressed reporting of societal upheaval. Although journalists tried to get a full picture of the events from the ground, news directors at the SABC often relied on police reports to rather reassure the public that everything was under control. While we know differently now, with hindsight and the provision of full facts, at the time the police service was promoted on local news as “bringers of law and order” (Fair & Astroff, 1991), rather than seen as a repressive regime. In this way, overseas audiences often saw more about protests and unrest than South Africans living just a few kilometres away, so stringent was the NP’s control of the news narratives. If you are never shown another life, you cannot imagine another life is possible. This is the power of popular media and the danger of a government with an iron grip. Shake Up and Shake Down While life in the country appeared calm, controlled, and content for most white South Africans, the absolute opposite were the real experiences of black South Africans. The 1980s were violent, paranoid, starved of justice, and overseen by an increasingly paranoid and heavy-handed military system. The armed wing of the ANC, uMkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation), clashed with IFP members, a fire fuelled by apparent National Party and White Right “third force” agents. These agents of chaos spurred on riots, supplied arms to both sides, and deliberately created mayhem.2 All the while, the news narratives on the SABC promoted good news and harmony amongst segregated South Africans. The SABC’s Auckland Park headquarters, after 40 years of Broederbond control, resembled a war room. The building was an entanglement of winding tunnels, secret 2  For more on the Third Force, I recommend the 2014 documentary “1994 The Bloody Miracle” by Meg Rickards. The Goldstone Commission of Inquiry detailed military involvement and complacency in the 1994 violence.

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bunkers, staircases arranged for hand-to-hand combat, underground recesses, and concrete bomb-proof shelters, all designed to provide protection against the imagined “Swart en Rooi Gewaar”, the black communist revolutionaries coming over the hill to attack Afrikanerdom. The SABC policies had instilled in them a Taliban-like fear of the cultural, where the Western popular media infected youth with modern ideologies and must be prevented at all costs. It was up to independent political parties (like the United Democratic Front), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and the English and independent Afrikaans press (e.g. Rand Daily Mail and Vrye Weekblad) to lead campaigns for democratising South African media. But their task was a bumpy road. The National Party in 1989 was headed by cautious centrist FW de Klerk, who desired the end of apartheid not for altruistic concerns but because its continuation would prove a cul-de-sac for the nation. The Viljoen Task Group, set up by SABC chairman Christo Viljoen in 1990, was the first coherent attempt to influence the NP to adopt liberal (i.e. de-politicise) media policy. The Task Group galvanised media activists but was also widely criticised: the makeup of the Task team was “unrepresentative” of South African society (meaning the team was too NP-aligned and white, side-lining ANC and black activists), and the Task Group deliberations happened in secret. On 25 August 1990, the Campaign for Open Media and the Film and Media Workers Organisation marched on the SABC’s Auckland Park headquarters. Despite the Task Group’s aim of “de-politicising” the SABC, it effectively put news broadcasting squarely in the political arena for debate and deliberation. Both the Right (the NP) and the Left (the ANC) wanted an overhaul of the SABC, from news editorial policy to staff demographics. But there the similarity ended. The Right wanted this to come from inside, a reform rather than transformation, with very little (new) government involvement in the process, and to secure their own interests by keeping the existing board of governors. The Left wanted fundamental transformation from outside in, with moderate state intervention to rectify imbalances. Louw in 1993 sees this shift as ironic—the ANC’s desire for state intervention in the SABC was similar to the old-style NP policy of the 1950s and 1960s. He wondered if this Afrikaner Nationalist rhetoric would eventually  be replaced by an African Nationalist rhetoric. Almost three decades later, he seems to have prophesied correctly (see Chaps. 5 and 7 for a discussion of this).

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The Long Walk to Transformation And it was into this skirmish for media control that Nelson Mandela arrived. The SABC at the time of his release held all licensing and all broadcast feeds, so Mandela’s walk from Victor Vester prison in Paarl was experienced solely through the SABC’s feeds. Unless you were lucky enough to watch an international live feed, you were, like six-year-old me, destined to watch an awkward Clarence Keyter struggle to describe the release of Mandela on a summery February morning in 1990. “There is a warm wind blowing in Paarl”, he comments as an ANC flag flaps victoriously. “The sun is not just for the growing of grapes, but the sun is shining on South Africa. This is a historic moment in the history of South Africa.” Transformation, like freedom, is a long walk in South Africa. Liberation movements are naturally suspicious of mainstream news media: controlled by the previous regimes, acting as propaganda mouthpieces, and with repressive policies designed to distort revolution stories. It is no wonder that the ANC as government-in-waiting approached the SABC with caution. During CODESA I, the ANC was unwilling to negotiate the democratic transition process while the SABC was still under the control of Broederbond members, and so the struggle for the broadcaster mirrored the political struggle taking place for the country. A new board of directors was then suggested in 1994, with 12 black Africans, 10 whites, two Coloured, and one Indian. Astonishingly for the time, eight of these members were women, with Ivy Matsepe-Cassaburri as the new Chair. What followed was an intense clash of cultures. The Broederbond still controlled news values and these collided with the appointment of the new editor, Zwelakhe Sisulu, eldest son of ANC Deputy President Walter Sisulu. Sisulu’s appointment ignited both black hopes for immediate and rapid change at the SABC as well as intense Afrikaner fears of ideological bias. Sisulu had grand ideals for the SABC, desiring a return to its original public service broadcasting format based on the BBC.  He wanted to implement local content, provincial broadcasting, African language news, current affairs, and educational programming. For a time, it worked. During the 1994 election, the SABC was instrumental in providing voter education to the most rural of populaces—it was the only broadcaster to have the technology to reach rural enclaves for both radio and television news. The SABC was also under a harsh spotlight from the United Nations Observation Mission in South Africa (UNOMSA) network and the Independent Media Commission to ensure balanced and fair reporting of

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the election process. Due to the SABC’s lack of objectivity in the forerunning decades, “balanced” reporting during the elections resulted in some boring and bland coverage, ignoring controversial or difficult stories, which instead focused on superficial coverage of flags and parties (see Chap. 8). Power Struggles and the Parallel Road While things were good for a time, internal power struggles became the SABC’s ultimate undoing. By the time Sisulu left in 1997, the SABC was in a funding crisis. It had had no competition under apartheid and was funded through commercial radio stations. Even so, it had been running into the red for nearly a decade before transformation started. British consultant firm McKinsey and Associates was called in to help fix the deepening black hole in the 1990s and saw cost-cutting opportunities in Sisulu’s public broadcasting ideals. Local content was scrapped, education was diluted, cheap international films and soap operas purchased, and the public service vision was lost. The SABC has never really recovered from this bottom-line mission. Sisulu’s departure also left a vacuum at the top and a disengaged board of directors, making space for fierce power struggles and turf wars. Replacing Sisulu was a team of ANC loyalists including Snuki Zikalala as managing director of news and current affairs. As part of a cost-cutting exercise, television and radio broadcasting were integrated, and Zikalala was woefully underprepared for the job. He was heavy-handed in his political support and began blacklisting journalists for making anti-ANC comments. For almost a decade under Mbeki, the SABC floundered. Television news editorial policy prized loyalty to the ANC over journalistic balance. Yet, instead of direct censorship and control, news editors often delivered what they thought the government wanted, rather than what they were told to do. Similar to the National Party and Afrikaner journalists of the 1950s, the SABC during the Mbeki years ran like a parallel road of ideologies and support. In the early 2000s, the SABC adopted a procedure ensuring that, during any news agenda, the president and his ministers should appear at least four times as promotion of the government voice. Part of this intervention was rooted in Mbeki’s African Renaissance concept: positive news about the government was supposed to counteract the negative media perception of African governance. More mechanisms appeared in 2003, designed

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to further strengthen ANC control over the editorial process. Most influential was the dominance of ANC members on the board and in upper management as this often resulted in news coverage that favoured the party and government. The ANC effectively captured the SABC through three waves of purging independence and populating the upper echelons of board members with government supporters, not unlike the secretive Broederbond capture in the early 1960s. By 1999, three loyalists ruled the news channel: Enoch Sithole, chief executive of news; Phil Molefe, head of television news; and Snuki Zikalala, deputy editor-in-chief. By 2004, the board was packed with Mbeki stalwarts. So began the post-apartheid jarring contradiction between the broadcaster’s ideals for ANC loyalty and an expectation of fair and objective news reporting. An Ugly Monster Under Jacob Zuma, internal power struggles at the SABC were finally clamped out of existence, but in no way for the better. From 2009 onwards, Zuma engaged in what Justice Malala calls the “Zimbabwe” style of media control: own and control the news media, squeeze out all independent journalism, starve newspapers of all government advertising via the GCIS,3 ensure that all news media take their orders from the top. The result? A “yes sir” media landscape that is dead to debate. Malala pulls no punches in describing the SABC news environment under Zuma: “it is an insult to spaza4 shops to say the place is run like a spaza shop. It is worse: it is run like the piggy bank of a tin-pot dictator” (2015, p. 77). As we saw in Chap. 3, Zuma obtains power via intelligence and security sectors and uses their ability to control the flow of information. In this respect, he is a very smart man with a keen eye for how the media runs in South Africa and the power it can exert on democracy. Zuma employed politics of persuasion, appeals to nationalism, and patriotic rhetoric and positivity to ensure his power remained constant. This technique was most noticeable in the SABC’s board appointment of Hlaudi Motsoeneng in 2012 as Chief Operating Officer of news, 3   Government Communication and Information System, a government department charged with managing government communications, is the official spokesperson of the government. All government advertising revenue comes from this department. 4  A spaza shop is an informal convenience store, usually run from home in the township areas of South Africa.

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television, radio, and sport. Indicative of Motsoeneng’s unending loyalty to his close personal ANC friends, in one of his first press conferences he stated that whenever the ANC was mentioned on SABC news, a spokesperson from the ANC had to be present. Motsoeneng’s policies (detailed later in Chap. 6) ensured Sunshine Journalism5 was rampant at the SABC. In 2016 he dictated that, similar to the SABC in the crisis years of the 1980s, television news must not show protest action where property was damaged (which it invariably was). Journalists who rebelled were blacklisted and expelled. The Hlaudi era was when the SABC slipped further into its old shoes as a propaganda tool. Far from being a parallel road, the SABC news was now firmly in the ANC’s pocket riding together on the same freeway. It could not move unless the ANC told it too. It could not fund itself properly as all income revenues were strangled. Loyalty was required, not just prized, and disobedience carried a harsh penalty. Part of Zuma’s control of the news media entailed the advancement of the ANC’s liberation narrative (see Chap. 6). This narrative presents the party as the only legitimate claimant of the 1994 liberation and that it continues to be the Struggle heroes of ordinary citizens. For its election success at the polls, the ANC regularly employs the violent history of the country as a moral virtue, that it and no one else is the saviour of South Africa from the repression of apartheid. Any other dissenting views against this narrative must be strangled and silenced. Under Mbeki, news media policy took the form of Sunshine Journalism, where journalists were encouraged to promote a good story (while ignoring the negative stories). Under Zuma, this encouragement became hegemony. Policy banned protest action in the run-up to the 2016 local election. Media briefings from Gupta-owned The New Age newspaper were given prime time and extended slots on SABC television news. The only stories allowed were good stories (good for the ANC, at least). During coverage of the 2014 5  Kuper and Kuper define “Sunshine Journalism” as a news story that “amplifies the extent of social cohesion and development” (2001, p.  357). While some (Versfeld et  al., 1996; Saidykhan, 2011) suggest that favouring positive aspects in reporting South Africa may balance the previously negative representations of Africa in Western public opinion, Sunshine Journalism is essentially a “false positive” and not without faults. Kuper and Kuper argue that if journalists focus on positive news at the expense of the negative, “people are presented with a perspective that falsifies their daily realities and wider experiences” (2001, p. 358). Just as Afropessimism damages narratives about the continent (Nothias, 2012; Jones, 2014), Sunshine Journalism flattens experiences and reduces complex issues to easily grasped stereotypes.

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general election, the SABC actively ignored the Nkandla scandal and the widespread community protest action when other news channels reported extensively on both stories. The Ugly Monster was toothless, cavernous, and weak, and this has serious misgivings for the nature of democracy in South Africa. The SABC remains the majority broadcaster in South Africa with the greatest reach across provinces and the deepest penetration into rural areas. The 18 radio stations draw over 25 million weekly listeners, and the three television stations attempt to broadcast in all 11 official languages. The three television channels currently cover 89% of the population (SABC1), 91% (SABC2), and 77% (SABC3), respectively (see the SABC’s FAQ page on their website as language and local content is a high priority for the broadcaster). This high proportion of reach across South Africa shows just how devastating political influence and control can be on the national broadcaster. If a population theoretically only has the SABC as their main source of information—political or otherwise—then plurality does not exist. Streaming services (such as Netflix) are almost non-existent in the country due to high data costs and unreliable internet provision, while international news channels (such as CNN, BBC World) are only available on the DSTV platform or the channels’ own websites. Again, the high cost of internet in the country prohibits much of the population accessing this plurality of news and information (see Wasserman, 2020; Roper et  al., 2019). Therefore, most rural South Africans rely on the SABC. When the SABC turned into the Ugly Monster, the only information broadcast was that which the ANC deemed appropriate. The lack of narrative multiplicity and complexity could significantly affect the population’s perspective of their world under the ANC government. Freedom of the news media to present challenging and controversial narratives is imperative for a free and informed democracy, yet this was not the Monster of the SABC under Zuma. There is, however, hope on the horizon. In late 2016, Motsoeneng was removed from office. The 2019 elections saw the SABC actively represent critical voices against the government. In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020, the SABC returned briefly to its public service broadcast ideals and launched SABC Education along with an increased local content quota. While financial woes still beleaguer the broadcaster, there may be hope for Sisulu’s original dream of the public service on television. Yet the “symbiotic relationship” between SABC and government still exists. In 2019, the SABC suspended three journalists over allegations

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of sabotage during Ramaphosa’s televised speech to the nation. An incorrect version of the speech was broadcast, leading the SABC News and Current Affairs Group executive Phathiswa Magopeni to jump on the overreaction bandwagon: “Any employee found to be involved in clandestine activities aimed at undoing the ongoing work to restore the credibility of the public news service, will be dealt with accordingly within the confines of the SABC’s human resources and disciplinary policies”  (SABC Press Release, 2019). The words “sabotage”, “gross negligence”, and “collusion” were thrown around, and three journalists were suspended immediately. The SABC subsequently faced a R12mil lawsuit in 2020 from journalists who accused the broadcaster of defamation and slander. The story continues, but this example shows how carefully the ANC controls its media image and news narratives and how close it keeps its Monster. It may be that the SABC’s golden years of news are steadfastly over. The broadcaster faces increasingly stiff competition from the digital satellite provision (DSTV) that streams international news to at least half of South Africa’s news viewers. MultiChoice owns DSTV, and access to this multi-channel platform has increased recently thanks to a free-access downloadable app. While still hindered by the high cost of internet data and access to streaming-enabled devices, a large section of South Africa now also uses the DSTV news bouquet for their political information. The diversity of international news networks finally allows South Africans to see how the rest of the world sees them.

MultiChoice: A Global Empire During the apartheid era and quite far into the transformation period of the 1990s, the competition for identity formation, cultural politics, and political representation was fought between mass media and mass party politics. Now, facing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, these concepts are dispersed amongst newer forms of mediated communication that individuates: social media allows further (but not absolute) diversification of voices, global news networks disseminate messages to scattered audiences, and crucially for elections in South Africa the fractured diaspora can vote in general elections in their country of residence. These scatterings of South Africa get most of their televised political information not via the SABC news (which has limited international provision) but through their local news channels that report on South Africa. These international news channels that report on South Africa are important for the voting diaspora

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but also for the internal voters too. With new arenas for public debate and popular culture narratives, South Africans finally got outsider representations of their own country. Pluralism of media through digital satellite television news enhances democracy because there is more choice for substantive and deliberative information in the public sphere. And this is where the multinational conglomerate, broadcast and managed from Ferndale, Johannesburg, enters the scene. MultiChoice owns the Digital Satellite Television (DSTV) service that hosts a number of international news channels—12 at the time of writing—including CNN International, BBC World, Sky News, Al Jazeera English, RT, CGTN, Bloomberg TV, CNBC Africa, Business Day TV, EuroNews, africanews, and NDTV24x7. But who are MultiChoice? Some consider the conglomerate a cultural imperialist on the African continent, promoting the “South African way or the highway” in terms of technological and entertainment formats. For the purposes of this chapter and book, I am mostly concerned with how MultiChoice and DSTV have broadened the scope for news networks and television news broadcasting in the country, although the cultural imperialistic concerns are important to acknowledge. DSTV: Shaping Mass Culture on the Continent The degradation of the SABC’s public service broadcasting ideals due to cost-cutting exercises in the late 1990s echoed a dearth of this type of broadcasting on the continent. The Naspers print newspaper consortium recognised this weakness early on and took advantage of burgeoning technology to fill that gap. With globalised television networks in mind, Naspers had already formed a partnership with a range of media companies in 1986 to launch the first paid television service in South Africa, called M-Net. MultiChoice, the ownership company, controls subscriber management and signal operations. By 1992, its television services were present in 20 African countries and in 1996 the switch to digital satellite services expanded MultiChoice’s reach as the first direct-to-home digital paid service outside of the United States. The power that MultiChoice has had on shaping mass culture on the continent cannot be underestimated. MultiChoice broadcasts to 50 African countries with content available in some 15 languages, with its parent company Naspers diversifying the MultiChoice Group to list independently on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

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But all is not rosy in MultiChoice’s expansive garden in Ferndale, Johannesburg. Exporting South Africa’s culture across the continent has raised the eyebrows of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA). Dominance over the Pay-TV market means that new entrants to the market find traction extremely difficult, and streaming services (like Netflix, Hulu, and AppleTV) have mostly been kept at bay. The cultural imperialism of South African culture means formats such as Big Brother Africa, SABC News, and eNCA, and South African soap operas (Isidingo, Scandal, Generations) are a form of “satellite invasion of foreign images” (Fourie & Oosthuizen, 2001, p. 436). Readers from outside Africa may find it strange to hear South African media considered imperialists, but it is worth remembering that cultures and identities differ across the 54 African countries, and South Africa is but one. The majority of local programming broadcast across the African continent promotes South African language, cultural idiosyncrasies, and hegemonic norms and values, and therefore other African nations do not often see themselves represented in the DSTV bouquet of programming. Plurality of voices and images, including those that represent the nation itself, is one of the most important roles the media can play in the democratisation process. DSTV and MultiChoice have been accused of cultural imperialism across the continent due to the homogeneity of “South Africanness” rather than “Africanness” on the platform, but, equally, importing foreign channels and voices is important for diversity and challenging dominant narratives. A constant balancing act is necessary between promoting homogeneity and encouraging plurality. Plurality of News Choice DSTV continues to be the largest Pay-TV service in South Africa, with multiple catalogues of channels available at various price ranges. Included in these catalogues are the SABC news channels, local South African news (eNCA, Newsroom Afrika, CNBC Africa), continental African channels (africanews and localised programming for the resident country such as TBC 1 in Tanzania and ZNBC1 in Zambia), and international news channels (BBC News, Sky, Al Jazeera English, RT, NDTV24x7). In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the DSTVNow app was released allowing those without a subscription access to international and local news channels.

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Developing this app to increase access to international and local news networks has been instrumental in enhancing democracy in the country. Those who were previously unable to access international news narratives about the country are now presented with a wide choice of broadcasts from 24-hour networks. But there still exists a divide in digital access in South Africa, with smartphones rather than computers used to access digital television news (Newman, 2020, p. 106). Internet data costs are also exorbitant, one of the highest in the world, which effectively prices the majority of South Africans out of the video streaming market. DSTVNow would require stable and high-speed internet to watch digital video news, and so the people most in need of the free-access app are those least likely to be able to afford the data costs necessary to run it. Digital diversification of the news landscape continues, but some South Africans are simply being left behind as others steam ahead with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Diversification and Digitalisation Although the media landscape in South Africa is still dominated by two monolithic enterprises (the SABC and MultiChoice), the increase in digital penetration in the country means that a third of South Africans who are able to access it prefer to come across digital news via social media, ahead of direct access on a website or dedicated app. The term “television news” has changed significantly since its inception in South Africa in 1976, as we learnt in the introduction to this book, and digital video broadcasting on apps and websites now tend to fall under both “social media” and “television news” consumption analyses. For the purposes of this book, however, television news channels in South Africa include channels that present broadcast news via a format that looks similar to legacy media. An overview of some of the developing news channels follows, as the diversification of the television news environment in South Africa is now more pluralistic than ever before. However, the diversity of voices and content tend to be limited to mostly authority-elite sources, rather than reflecting citizen’s concerns, creating what Stephen Friedman terms the “view from the suburbs” (2011, p.  109). Friedman writes that South African media has traditionally been biased towards a middle-class, white understanding of the world. Here, he suggests that the evidence of this bias is “derived less from what the mainstream press writes, than what it ignores” (ibid., p. 110). The neglect of grassroots or citizen voices, issues

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of concern, or events therefore points to a “view from the suburbs” rather than a “view from the ground”. The inclusion of grassroots media (such as GroundUp news or AmandlaTV) supplements mainstream media, but high data costs and the lack of internet-capable devices to actually consume these channels is still a predominant concern in the democratisation role of the media in South Africa. 24-Hour Rolling News Africanews: The first incarnation of the new look africanews channel launched in 2013. The pan-African channel is broadcast from the Congo and is a subsidiary of EuroNews. Its tagline in 2019 was “The largest network of African reporters”. eNews/eNCA: eTV is a free-to-air entertainment and news channel broadcast out of Johannesburg and Cape Town and launched in 1998 with live scheduled news bulletins throughout the day. Since 2013 the channel has streamed content online. eNCA (eNews Channel Africa, previously called eNews) is South Africa’s flagship 24-hour rolling news channel, launched in 2008 and managed by black economic empowerment company HCI Holdings. Since 2013 eNCA has archived news reports online, especially on YouTube. Like the SABC’s news division, eNCA also cuts to live studio news6 in English on its parent channel eTV at scheduled time slots at 8 am, 1 pm, and 8 pm. Newzroom Afrika: Born out of the failed and controversial Gupta-­ owned ANN7 channel in 2018, Newzroom Afrika is owned by Eclipse TV director Thokozani Nkosi and former news anchor at the SABC Thabile Ngwato. NA is 100% black owned and was launched in May 2019 during the general elections. The channel prides itself on a modern, slick provision including the Virtual Reality news suite. SABC News: Launched in 2013, SABC News is confusingly the name of both the SABC’s news division and the broadcaster’s 24-hour rolling news channel. The channel replaced both the 1998 channel SABC Africa, which closed in 2008 after its contract with DSTV was not renewed, and the 2007 24-hour channel SABC News International, which closed in 2010. SABC News broadcasts in 4 of the 11 official languages (English, Tsonga, Venda, and Sotho) and is a mix of current affairs programming and rolling news. The channel has an excellent free-to-access archive of 6

 Correct at time of writing, July 2021.

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broadcasts on YouTube from its inception in 2013 to the present day. The SABC’s news division also has scheduled news across its three channels.7 SABC 1 has children’s news at 6  am, English lunchtime news at 1  pm, Seswati/Ndebele news at 5:30  pm, and Xhosa/Zulu news at 7:30  pm. SABC 2 runs Morning Live, a current affairs and news programme from 6  am until 9  am, Venda/Tsonga news at 5:30  pm, Afrikaans news at 6:30  pm, and Setswana/Sesotho news at 8  pm. SABC 3 gives English news at 9 pm. GroundUp Grassroots News AmandlaTV: Broadcast briefly in 2009 by the left-wing South African media project Amandla, the AmandlaTV broadcasts are available on YouTube. Amandla was initiated in 2006/7 by leftist activists to promote community voices. CTV (Cape Town TV): A non-profit community television network that launched in 2008 under a temporary licence, the channel now broadcasts 24  hours a day with a variety of programming to the Cape Town region. Most programmes are produced in-house using university or college campus studios. The channel re-broadcasts news from both Al Jazeera English and RT. Other regional networks replicate this community television format, the largest being SowetoTV, although this channel came under pressure from ICASA in January 2020 for policy non-compliance. Politically Aweh: “Aweh” is a placeholder South African slang term, commonly used as an exclamation to greet someone, of shock, of vague disappointment, or in agreement. It is similarly pronounced to “aware”, hence the title of this “new(s) kind of show”. PA launched in 2017, directed and produced by UCT graduate Stephen Horn, and aims to bring political news to young South Africans in a mixture of news, commentary, and entertainment. The show works closely with investigative journalists at the Daily Maverick and broadcasts on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Young South African vox pops are a regular feature, and the channel was particularly active in presenting youth voices during the 2019 election.

7

 Correct at time of writing, July 2021.

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Gupta News ANN7: The Africa News Network 7 (ANN7) was a 24-hour rolling news network broadcast on the DSTV platform. Launched in 2013, the numerous technical and factual mistakes led to widespread mockery. The journalists and producers were clearly undertrained, and the production quality was shameful. In 2017, the channel’s name changed to Afro Worldview but DSTV did not renew its contract in 2018. ANN7 had disastrous links to the Gupta family through Oakbay Investments and Duduzane Zuma, with aggressive propaganda and frequent pro-Zuma coverage. The ongoing Zondo Commission of Inquiry found early in its investigation that Jacob Zuma was actively involved in dictating the content of the news channel.

Journalism in South Africa Generic problems facing international newsrooms also affect South African journalists: declining viewing figures for legacy media like television news; declining ad revenues; increased interference from political agents; general decline in people willing to be informed about news, especially young people; and the tabloidisation or mediatisation of news media where entertainment dominates information. Local challenges arise too, mirroring the struggle to overcome South Africa’s legacy of divided nationhood. Overall poor access to digital media and a low literacy rate means South Africans are still reliant on broadcast news, but this media is often under attack from authorities who are uncomfortable with the fourth-estate ethics of independent journalism. For a view of political journalism as practice in South Africa, Chap. 5 has a section on how South African journalists work to report elections, including a discussion on partisanship and the tension between African and “universal” media ethics. Newsroom Challenges Unequal funding and access to information hamper the media’s coverage of elections, and Nyamnjoh (2005, p.  74, 82) suggests the profession across the continent but particularly in South Africa is underpaid, where job insecurity is rife and diversity is hampered when elite black journalists are often pilfered by the business sector. The poor professionalisation of journalists across the continent further damages democracy when junior

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journalists feel they cannot criticise oligarchs or the government, while donor funding means the alternative press often flounders. Rao and RodnyGumede (2020), investigating female journalists working in India and South Africa, find that women in the newsroom are still hampered by detrimental patriarchal stereotypes. Female journalists are increasingly attacked on online platforms, facing doxxing, where male voices are prioritised, and by-line withdrawal. Angela Quintal (2019) of the CPJ Africa programme finds the same, that female journalists at the time of the 2019 election were routinely harassed, attacked, and intimidated by South African political parties (the EFF are a standout case) and citizens alike. Female journalists are not the only workers to be harangued in this manner, but frequently face more gender-based violence or threats of violence during elections. Social media too has already changed the face of journalism practice in many ways, including improved access to sources and information but also brings with it the unprecedented challenges of verification and copyright. The internet in South Africa has opened these avenues and challenges, and traditional gatekeepers and agendas are revolutionised, circumvented, and adapted. Similar threats to the independent verification of news stories exist in local newsrooms, exacerbated by the lack of resources to actually conduct this verification. Top-Down and View of the Suburbs Mainstream South African media is often angled “top down”, looking at authorities and overlooking citizens. Wasserman et al. (2016) investigated the ramifications of this, finding that the voices of the poor are often missing coverage about protests, where the razzmatazz of visually rich imagery is prioritised over context and thereby ignoring citizen perspectives. The top-down organisation of South Africa’s media is not unique to the country—many Western and non-Western news media highlight authorities and relegate unknown voices/vox pops due to ease of access, for one. The focus on authorities, elite voices, and neoliberal narratives creates what Steven Friedman in 2011 called a “view from the suburbs” rather than a view from the ground—this bias towards elite voices represents only some realities that fit with the hegemony. While South Africa’s news media is mostly robust, rich, and diverse, much of this diversity has little to do with the mainstream media itself. Alternative news sources vie for competition amongst legacy news media, mostly on digital channels and social media. Enhancing the plurality of news media is a slow process in South Africa.

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Duncan (2014a, 2014b) writes extensively about the lack of protester perspectives in journalism about protests, focusing on the Marikana massacre. Journalists reporting on the massacre often focused on authorities, such as the police and mine owners, rather than voices from strikers and miners themselves. Ignoring or side-lining these voices skewed understanding about the strikers’ and authorities’ actions. This top-down organisation of media that focuses on voices of authorities yet neglects people on the ground “has serious implications, as it fosters a society that is unable to see itself, and respond to its most pressing problems” (Duncan, 2014a, p.  92). Journalist Greg Marinovich’s (2012) Marikana investigation for example changed the way many news agencies viewed and reported on the tragedy. In terms of elections, where community protests are on the rise before voting days, community media create spaces that allow for the free flow of information and ideas (such as GroundUp News, Politically Aweh, or the Daily Vox). Independent news sites talk about issues that mainstream media, such as the SABC, cannot or will not talk about (see Chap. 7 where non-mainstream local news does the heavy lifting). Trust in Journalism Trust is a strong tradition in South African journalism, especially amongst independent media. From the dark days of apartheid oppression to the transformation of media organisations, South Africans are broadly confident that journalists reflect their lived experiences and are trustworthy in telling accurate stories. Despite this tradition, Roper et al. (2019) find that trust in the major news brands has eroded in recent years due to the Gupta scandal and associated fake social media accounts. Added to this, the lack of top-down organisations “listening” to grassroots voices during moments of unrest has serious implications for democracy, fostering a society unable to see itself or trust the representations on mass media. In order for news to provide substantive information necessary to democracy, journalists need to create an inclusive public sphere that promotes an equality of information of both listening and speaking. The importance of “listening” to the view from the ground is imperative to this role, especially during elections. When the populace feel they are no longer taken seriously or, worse, no longer trust the representation they are given by an unsympathetic and uncaring media, citizens distrust journalists. Freedom of expression, of criticism, and of representation is crucial to the media’s role in democratisation.

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Freedom of the Media and Expression In South Africa, and despite the increasing government involvement in the national broadcaster, journalism is relatively and predominantly free, and the freedom of expression is enshrined in the Constitution. The South African National Editors Forum (SANEF) is a vocal critic of incursions into media freedoms, invigorated by the legislation in recent years that impacts negatively on media freedoms. The draft law Protection of State Information Bill, the so-called Secrecy Bill enacted in 2011, provoked concern from civil society groups as its main objective to create a code of classification for visual content posed serious threats to the freedom of expression and citizen journalism. The Bill called for online video content and social media to be “pre-classified” before publication, which would effectively censor and delay eyewitness accounts of public violence, authority brutality, and other public interest issues. A further criticism about journalistic freedom is the 2010 ANC discussion paper, the Media Appeals Tribunal (see Thomas & Sookrajowa, 2017). Although the Secrecy Bill is often conflated with the Tribunal, the two are independent from each other. The basic premise of the Tribunal is that the freedom of the media is not an absolute right and must be balanced against the individual’s right to privacy and human dignity. Calls for transformation of this kind are often legitimate but can also be driven by politicians’ discomfort with a vigorous fourth-estate journalism in the country (Finlay, 2017). At the time of writing the Tribunal is still on the cards, a shadow hovering over journalists as it gets passed from ANC conference to conference. Part of the reason this Tribunal came about is due to the notion of developmental journalism, further explored in Chap. 4. Ogdan (1980) noted that journalists in post-liberation nations were often pressured by the government to ally with political forces. This alliance produced purely supportive journalism that was uncritical of the government. Now, however, there is a tension between the Western ideal of the press as a fourth estate, holding power to account and criticising government with impunity, and developmental or African media ethics where liberation-movementsturned-governments demand privacy, dignity, and respect. The ANC’s struggle with the independent news media is reminiscent of this tension, played out through the Secrecy Bill and the Media Appeals Tribunal. Thankfully, neither have quashed the robust investigative journalism in South Africa, but a chilling effect amongst South African news media has occurred due to political influence in controlling news

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narratives over the years. The ANC’s demand for government-friendly narratives has led to a “paranoid self-awareness” (Malila, 2014) not unlike the self-censoring SABC journalists under the NP’s control. This chilling effect has grown alongside the deteriorating relationship between media and the ANC over the years.

Deteriorating Relationship Liberation movements that become governments are often deeply suspicious of mainstream media. Attempting to coalesce the two sides of watchdog journalism and developmental journalism often leads to a deteriorating relationship between government and news media. The first inclination of this damaged partnership in South Africa occurred under Mbeki where the presidency insinuated traitors amongst the media and demanded absolute loyalty from journalists. His African Pride agenda demanded that journalists should be an African first, a journalist second, and to avoid negative typecasting of Africa (i.e. the ANC too). As Mbeki became steadily more suspicious of the media and protective over his carefully crafted reputation, a chilling effect began. The SABC self-censored its news, portraying only positive narratives about the ANC for fear of retribution. Enter Jacob Zuma and his vicelike grip on media. Head of ANC communications Lindiwe Zulu asked in 2015, “How do you continue to pay people who insult you? Something needs to give”. Squashed, strangled, poked, prodded, and blanketed by Gupta propaganda, the SABC was a shadow of its former self under the Zuma years. Yet the journalists and editors who work at the broadcaster continue to do a tremendous job under trying circumstances. They should be commended in their efforts to continue the public service broadcasting ideals set out by Zwelakhe Sisulu so many years ago. There is light in this tunnel. The independent, grassroots news environment is burgeoning, as is access to alternative news channels on the DSTV platform. Plurality of news broadcasts, from international channels and alternative grassroots media, about South African politics can only enhance democracy. The more voices that criticise, disseminate, provoke, and promote, the more chance there is of developing a robust democracy in the country. Research, too, shows that a new type of media ethics forms where watchdog journalism and developmental journalism are not binary opposites but can work together (De Beer et al., 2016; Walulya, 2018). The next chapter examines the changing ideologies driving journalism practice

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and thus the representations of South African elections over the decades. The international channels that report on South Africa’s elections are just as important as local South African channels, due in part to the increased access and availability of these networks but also the influence global news networks have on outsider understanding of the elections. Chapter 5 is split into three areas of analysis: the profession of political journalism, reporting (South) Africa, and (South) African reporting.

References De Beer, A. S., Malala, V., Beckett, S., & Wasserman, H. (2016). Binary opposites: can South African journalists be watchdogs and developmental journalists? Journal of African Media Studies, 8(1), 35–53. De Beer, A. S., & Steyn, E. F. (1993). The National Party and the media: a special kind of symbiosis. In P. E. Louw (Ed.), South African Media Policy. Debates of the 1990s. Van Schaik. Duncan, J. (2014a). ‘It’s not just the unions that are cut off from people, but the media too’: reconstituting South Africa’s mediated public sphere. Acta Academica 2014, 46(1), 73–97. Duncan, J. (2014b). Are South Africa’s protests really driven by rising expectations? South African Civil Society Information Service [O]. Retrieved June 10, 2016, from http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/2156 Fair, J. E., & Astroff, R. J. (1991). Constructing race and violence: U.S news coverage and the signifying practices of apartheid. Journal of Communication, 41(4), 58–74. Finlay, A. (2017). State of the newsroom, South Africa Inside/Outside 2015–2016. Wits Journalism Project. [O]. Retrieved June 8, 2020, from https://journalism.co.za/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2018/04/State-­o f-­t he-­N ewsroom-­ report_2015_2016.pdf Fourie, P.  J., & Oosthuizen, L. (2001). Media imperialism, the NWICO.  In P.  J. Fourie (Ed.), Media Studies Volume One: Institutions, theories, and issues. Juta. Friedman, S. (2011). Whose freedom? South Africa’s press, middle-class bias and the threat of control. Equid Novi: African Journalism Studies, 32(2), 106–121. Jacobs, S. (2019). Media in post apartheid South Africa. Postcolonial politics in the age of globalisation. Indiana University Press. Jones, B. (2014). Of sunsets, savages, and soccer: Framing Africa during the last days of the FIFA 2010 World Cup. In T. Chari & N. Mphiripiri (Eds.), African football, identity politics, and global media narratives. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kuper, A., & Kuper, J. (2001). Serving the new democracy: Must the media ‘speak softly’? Learning from South Africa. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 13(4), 355—376. Louw, P. E. (1993). South African media policy. Debates of the 1990s. Van Schaik. Malala, J. (2015). We have now begun our descent. How to stop South Africa losing its way. Jonathan Ball. Malila, V. (2014). Tracing the ANC’s criticism of South African media. RJR, 34(August), 13–15. Marinovich, G. (2012). Marikana’s small koppie: 14 dead, 300 meters away from Wonderkop. Why? Daily Maverick, 8 September. Newman, N. (2020). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020. [O]. Retrieved June 17, 2020, from https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/ files/2020-­06/DNR_2020_FINAL.pdf Nothias, T. (2012). Definition and scope of Afro-pessimism: Mapping the concept and its usefulness for analysing news media coverage of Africa. African Studies Bulletin, 74(December 2012), 54–62. Nyamnjoh, F. M. (2005). Africa’s media, democracy, and politics of belonging. Pretoria: UNISA. Ogdan, C.  L. (1980). Development journalism/communication: the status of the concept. Working paper presented at the Journalism Annual Convention, Massachusetts, August. Quintal, A. (2019). Discredited, threatened, attacked: challenges of covering South Africa’s elections in the digital age. [O]. Retrieved July 30, 2020, from https:// cpj.org/2019/07/south-­a frica-­e lection-­j ournalists-­o nline-­h arassment-­ threats-­doxx/ Rao, S., & Rodny-Gumede, Y. (2020). Gazing past the glass ceiling: Indian and South African female journalists’ perceptions of their role and power in the newsroom. Global Media and Communication., 16(1), 57–74. Roper, C; Newman, N, & Schulz A. (2019). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019: South Africa supplementary report. [O]. Retrieved June 5, 2020, from https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2019-­0 6/ South_Africa_DNR_FINAL.pdf SABC Press Release. (2019). Ramaphosa’s speech was sabotaged  – SABC. 10 September. Politics Web. [O]. Retrieved July 1, 2021, from https://www.politicsweb.co.za/politics/presidents-speech-was-sabotaged--sabc Saidykhan, M. (2011). “Avoid negative typecasting of Africa”. [O]. Retrieved June 26, 2021, from http://www.afrol.com/articles/25622 Thomas, M. K. T., & Sookrajowa, S. (2017).The media appeals tribunal and the protection of information bill as challenges to freedom of expression and good governance in South Africa. Afrika focus, 30(2), 29–50.

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Versfeld, J., Kruger, T., & Smith, G. (1996). Walking on sunshine. Stellenbosch Journalism Insight. [O] Retrieved June 26, 2021, from http://academic.sun. ac.za/journalism/sji/1996/sunshine.htm Walulya, F. G. (2018). Hybrid journalism: an investigation into press coverage of elections in East Africa’s one-party dominant states of Tanzania and Uganda. PhD thesis, University of Oslo. Wasserman, H. (2020). The state of South African media: a space to contest democracy. Publizistik, 65, 451–465. Wasserman, H., Bosch, T., & Chuma, W. (2016). The voices from the poor are missing from South Africa’s media. [O]. Retrieved October 16, 2016, from https://theconversation.com/voices-­of-­the-­poor-­are-­missing-­from-­south-­africas-­media-­53068

PART II

South African Elections on Television News

CHAPTER 5

News Values and Frames of Elections

Introduction As the focus of this book narrows from broad overviews of South African democracy and the media landscape in Part I, Part II is dedicated to the analysis of television news representations of the six general elections. To do this, we must first look at the driving forces behind such representations, and this is no small feat. Taking into account two and a half decades of journalistic practice and six general elections means that the field is broad and deep in places. This chapter therefore organises the vast area of universal news values and ideologies into a narrow focus on reporting South African elections. The challenges facing political journalists across the globe are myriad. News values stemming from the end of the Cold War, the thirst to be first in breaking news, social media and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and an overall reluctance to dig deeper into complex issues often result in entangled and confusing news stories about South African elections. The representations that South Africans see about their country and democracy, whether from local or international news channels, should reflect their lived experiences. A society that can see itself can respond to its most pressing problems and a free and diverse news media plays an important role in this democratisation process. Access to a kaleidoscope of international and local news broadcasts can paint a full and varied picture about South African society. Yet, as media scholars, we know that news values, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Jones, Elections and TV News in South Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71792-6_5

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practices, and ideologies control what is shown and how events are presented. When these invariably change over time, the picture of South African elections changes with them. Therefore, it is important to note from the outset that juxtapositions and relationships between channels, years of broadcasts, journalists, and participants can affect the meaning of the representation. How news channels represent the elections depends very much on this professionalisation of journalism during that specific year, in that specific country, and with those values specific to the channel and geographic location. For example, channels reporting on the same event (the 1994 car bombing before the first election) could evaluate it differently: CNN’s “Bloody Sunday at High Noon” and Sky News’ “Sunrise” are distinct in tone and angle despite reporting on exactly the same event with similar images. The year of broadcast also makes a difference in how a participant is represented: Thabo Mbeki’s profile as presidential candidate on the SABC in 1999 is notably contrastive from his veneration on the same channel in 2004, for example. So too different journalists from the same year and channel present events differently: Fahmida Miller from AJE in 2019 represents South African democracy from the ground up, contrasting Malcolm Webb’s depiction of a noisy, chaotic electorate on the same channel during the same election. This book represents a combination of broadcast analysis of the elections and commentary on the changing journalism profession over two and a half decades, and the one cannot exist independent from the other. This chapter therefore looks at these modern challenges to reporting South African elections in three different layers: first, global political journalism challenges (those news values and frames common to both international and local journalism); second, reporting (South) African elections and democracy to Western audiences; and third, local (South) African reporting challenges. The word South is in parentheses because much of the existing scholarship groups African journalism together, whereas this book looks specifically at South Africa and this differentiation is worth pointing out.

Political Journalism The media’s role in democracy is to ensure a maximised flow of information that creates informed citizenry. However, this role has become overshadowed in the era of “hype-ocracy” (Louw, 2005, p. 50)—that is, where

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the media is a vehicle for circulating hype rather than information in order to maximise ratings and audiences for political parties. And increasingly, this vehicle for hype is television and digital video news. Turning political news into spectacle has also invariably altered the journalism profession. Public relation agents (also known by the somewhat pejorative term “spin doctors”) often use journalists to garner publics, distract and delight rather than inform. Eric Louw, Jesper Strömbäck, and W. Lance Bennett call these trends in late twentieth-century political journalism “mediatisation”, where the televisualisation of Western elections favours episodic, dramatic, fragmented, and event-driven reporting. These global challenges of television newsrooms quicken stories rather than deepen them. Throughout the late twentieth century, no other vehicle for political information has been as impactful as the multi-layered “television”— images, audio, writing, and meaning slide across the analytical plate, juxtaposing and interacting to produce complex and emotive signification. Political journalism, acting in this hype-ocracy, has turned into “image bite” (Bucy & Grabe, 2009, p. 74) politics—the visual nature of modern political journalism has irrevocably changed how politicians are represented. Candidates are shown but not heard on the news for longer periods, politicians have armies of style gurus and speech writers, and political messaging is structured to the logic of media including scheduling practices, headline writing, the inverted pyramid, and social media management. Yet Bucy and Grabe maintain that these “image bites”, despite being widespread, are the least scrutinised and understood aspects of modern political journalism. Part II of this book examines the prevalence of these “image bites” and the impact this has on the representation of South African democracy. Image bite politics affects Westernised media coverage in both the West and Africa negatively. Nyamnjoh (2005, pp.  47–53) observes that Americanised programming for African audiences replicates fast, shallow, unsubstantial news that does not perform an adequate role in democratisation. Nyamnjoh makes a good point here: although we talk about American news dominating the media landscape in political journalism, it is actually American-ised news that uses these news values and frames. These values are so often entrenched in stories about Africa that they become replicated by African news networks too. So, while most of this section looks at American news (because that’s where the majority of studies about news values have occurred), it is worth pointing out that Americanised forms of political journalism that face these challenges

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actually occur worldwide. Throughout the analysis section of this book, Part II, I use the term “Westernised political journalism”, taken from Nyamnjoh’s point about Americanisation of news media. Nyamnjoh notes that these thrusts towards a PR-ised form of journalism result in too many cases of “talking without listening” (2005, p. 57) and prevents the media from performing their role adequately in the democratisation process. Politicians are presented as media stars, with hype saturating news agendas rather than issues offered for deliberation and debate. This is not the journalists’ fault—it is instead the developing profession that prefers fast news to full news. This section details how this has happened over the past three decades. Two predominant forces drive the political reporting of South African elections: the post-Cold War news frames and subsequent mediatised political reportage, and the debates around objectivity of the news media including sourcing elites or pundits. These are global challenges to political journalism, particularly in the West, but play out significantly in shaping and crafting election stories about South Africa, especially when the spotlight is so fierce on the country—such as the 1994 and 2009 elections. Post-Cold War News Values At the end of the Cold War, democracy emerged as the most favoured political system with elections as the key component for legitimacy. In her analysis of the post-Cold War news era in America, Pippa Norris argues that the Cold War effectively divided the world into “friends” and “enemies” (1995, p. 359) based on American foreign policy. The red thread of Cold War news frames, centred on anti-communism and pro-conflict, dominated American representations of Africa. News that provided clear certainties about who were friends and who were enemies was prioritised and favoured on Americanised channels. Anti-communistic narratives pervaded news about South Africa, meaning the ANC’s early struggle against apartheid was often relegated to minor news or framed in such a way so as to demonise the party and the conflict. Cold War stereotypes placed oppositional politics and communism in the “enemy” camp, and prioritised stories of war, civil unrest, and military rivalries as these had very clear “us” and “them” binaries. After the sudden collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1991, and without this frame through which to classify international stories, Americanised news media changed the way stories were prioritised and crafted: instead of the

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enemy/friend binary, themes shifted towards international relations through economic cooperation, the development of trade agreements, and security rather than military investments. These are the post-Cold War news values, helpfully defined by Norris (1997, p. 14), Windrich (1994), and Hawk (2002, p. 168): conflict resolution attained through negotiated settlement; a focus on neoliberal interests such as economics; trade agreements; social order as defined by Anglo-American normative values; and the security of Western democratic values such as multi-party democracy and competition. These values can be called either post-Cold War news values or, more simply, neoliberal values. The South African 1994 election therefore happened at the perfect time for international political journalists—a panacea for the war-weary world, the triumph of logic, reason, and negotiation over the savagely violent past of a divided society. South Africa had also suddenly become an “acceptable” news story in the early 1990s because most of the enduring conflicts could be easily represented through the “negotiated settlement” frame. Negotiated settlement was the ideal outcome for the Clinton administration in America and warranted the pro-democracy rhetoric during the post-Cold War period. Much of this rhetoric took the form of a “morality play”, in which the American media played moral judger, where facts articulated and promoted normative Western agendas, and where South Africa had finally “come to its senses” (Rassool & Witz, 1996, p. 339). South Africa now appeared as a stable ally for the Americans, ratifying the power-sharing model that US policymakers had long thought a viable means of conflict resolution in Africa. Journalists leapt on the government-­in-waiting ANC, who fitted neatly into the news frames by playing their role in participatory democracy. Of course, these post-Cold War framing priorities meant that stories were often contradictory and entangled. Societies do not always follow a neat pattern of negotiation and clear-cut trajectories that these new news values demand. For example, the Zulu IFP and the Afrikaner-ethnic party the Freedom Front (FF) both campaigned for cultural and ethnic homelands in South Africa in the 1994 election, but the framing of these issues could not have been more different on Americanised news media. The IFP was often depicted as a war-band of chaotic, violent members, tribalistic and engaged in bloody warfare. Led by their war-leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the IFP war-band project a frightening figure on international news. Whatever concerns the IFP may have over their heritage, land, and kingdom under the Xhosa-led ANC is lost in a vignette of violence. The

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Freedom Front, however, are diametrically opposite to the IFP on the same news channels in 1994. Led by the calm and softly spoken Constand Viljoen, presented as a farmer with a deep connection to his land, the FF on international news channels seemed to have legitimate and comprehensive concerns about Afrikaner heritage under the new government. As members of the so-called White Right, the FF had blood on their hands too, but this was never fully explored on these channels. Reta (2000) suggests that because the IFP used violence, intimidation, and brinkmanship during the election campaign, American newspapers (the Washington Post and the New York Times) provided harsh representation of Buthelezi and the IFP. Conversely, the papers framed the Freedom Front much more sympathetically seemingly because the party applied democratic values that fitted neatly against the post-Cold War frames (negotiation, joining the election, canvassing the electorate, using media to promote materials). Chapters 6 and 7 compare the IFP’s war-band signification to the Freedom Front and ANC imagery in further detail, but ultimately the conclusion here is the same—the IFP did not fit into the post-Cold War news values that drive election reporting, whereas the FF did. Unfortunately, without reflexivity from journalists about the news frames to which they are beholden, news coverage becomes shallow and confusing rather than full and explanatory. The IFP’s desire for land and ethnic autonomy, and their concerns about ANC/Xhosa bias under the new government, were side-lined in favour of stories about electoral brinkmanship and bloody pre-election violence. As media scholars, we know that news stories are crafted and framed using news values that help journalists and readers make sense of the complex world. But as political communication scholars, we also know that news framing events such as elections can have a lasting impact on how citizens see themselves and their leaders. Post-Cold War news frames affected how international, especially Americanised, political journalists told the early stories of South Africa’s democracy. Media Logic and Mediatisation Developing from the early 1990s’ fixation on post-Cold War news frames, global political journalism now faces a new challenge. The increase in visualised politics on a vehicle perfect for this “hype-ocracy” meant that mediatised political reporting happened rapidly. Media logic demands that political stories are told with a view to capture space and time on mass

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media channels, and it was a quick jump from the post-Cold War frames that favoured neoliberal values to mediatised reporting on television news. At its worst, this reporting style plays fast and loose with narratives, favouring visuals and razzmatazz over policy speeches and consequences. Iyengar in 1991 termed the early version of this reporting style “episodic news”. This type of news is shallow, personalised, dramatic, heavily visualised, and fragmented, with a focus on social order and its disordered opposite. The majority of news-as-spectacle political journalism uses this type of framing because it is more dramatic, but this is inherently problematic. Episodic framing fragments news and simplifies events, to the extent that news fails to offer a base for learning and understanding. Employing media logic and episodic framing can damage the role news media has in democracy because it limits the inclusive public sphere where citizens and politicians speak and listen equally. Substantive information necessary to democracy is relegated in favour of highly visualised, simplistic narratives that entertain, rather than explain. It is still possible to present substantive information while also employing media logic. The performative political sphere of the EFF during the 2014 elections is one such example—the EFF transformed the South African political landscape through their bombastic appearance on the scene, a constant and vocal thorn in the side of the ruling ANC. Highly crafted media events meant the party was mostly successful in presenting political information while still holding the attention of both international and local journalists. However, the way in which a political party uses media logic and how the news itself uses media logic to portray these parties can in fact have different consequences. While the EFF were successful in generating a media buzz around them during the election, the fixation of mediatisation and episodic news values often meant that journalists simplified the EFF to a caricature of intimidation, rather than contextualising the radical left-wing party. Chapter 7 investigates the EFF’s visual representation further, but it is worth noting that mediatised reporting and generated media buzz about the new black-led party did not translate into a landslide win in the 2014 elections: the EFF achieved a meagre 6% at the polls, but still became the third largest political party (the DA had 22% of the vote and the ANC 62%). This is a deeper discussion about the impact news has on voting patterns, outside the scope of this book.1 The point 1  Further reading on how media buzz does not translate into votes can be found in Jakob Ohme’s, 2019 Danish election analysis.

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here is that the EFF knows the logics that the media works with and uses this logic to their advantage to gain media time and space. Media logic dominating politics and the prevalence of mediatised political reporting is not inherently problematic. But when news media focus overtly on the shallow, dramatic, and scandalous, then this is not full news, but fast news. We are fed an empty calorific diet of flashy images and intriguing sounds, rather than a balanced diet of emotionally and intellectually challenging information, critical for the democratisation role of the media. Excessively mediatised reporting creates shallow news narratives. Deep considerations with substantive information are not possible when reporting frames focus on the glitz and glamour of elections. Shallow news is episodic news, and this is a global political journalism trend driven by economics and neoliberal interests. These are global challenges with local implications and reporting on South African elections with shallow news frames comes with its own challenges.

Reporting (South) Africa Mediatised reporting that stems from post-Cold War news frames is a global challenge to political journalists, and reporting (South) African elections has not escaped this pressure. Since journalism started representing the continent, in what scholars call the “colonial library” of news narratives, stories about Africa and its politics have fallen into numerous stereotypes. Great Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once famously proclaimed in a TedTalk that stereotypes are not necessarily untrue, but they are incomplete (2009). Telling incomplete and single-­ sided stories about a large and diverse continent flattens the lived experiences of Africans into easily digested narratives. Stories like these speak about Africans rather than to or with them. Journalists who employ “parachute journalism” (i.e. arriving suddenly at a situation without contextualising it, reporting it with fast news, and running back out once the broadcast has aired) are most at fault of this single-story flattening. And it is damaging. This section examines the reporting of (South) African elections and democracy, focusing on a few specific aspects: the rhetoric of empire and how this transfers to visual news in recent years; some of the common binaries and stereotypes journalists use to represent (South) African stories; and finally how these narrow stereotypes present democracy on the continent as an entangled narrative full of contradictions and

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inconsistencies. Here is an important point: this is by no means a full and complete account of democracy stereotypes by all journalists. There are millions of stories across hundreds of years, many outstanding examples that bring the reality of Africans to international audiences. This is not a diatribe railing against Western political journalism—far from it. Excellent journalists regularly present a myriad of superb and deep investigations of democracy and politics on the continent. But these representations are not the concern here. This section gives an overview of the most damaging reporting methods in order to understand and learn from the common challenges to the practice. The Rhetoric of Empire Journalism about African politics often centres on the validity and process of democracy for the continent, and this stems from the tendency of Western political theorists to measure democracy against the level of progress of Westernisation. As Mbembe describes the struggles of governance on the postcolonial continent, he mentions the binary oppositions of Western powers: the “hope” of African democracy that “reduce[s] the range of historical choices gestating in Africa to a stark alternative of either ‘transition’ to democracy and the shift to a market economy, or descent into the shadows of war” (2015, p. 77). This binary is visible in the journalistic representations of nascent democracies. For example, if an African state does not demonstrate universal American democratic values, such as peaceful regime change and participatory democracy, then it automatically falls on the “failure” side of the binary. That country has “failed” in its burgeoning democracy, regardless of the many economic, social, and cultural hurdles that may prevent efficient transformation. Writing in the early 1990s, David Spurr (1994) examines the journalistic rhetoric of empire-builders and colonisers and he calls this binarisation of democracy one of the facets of the “rhetoric of empire”. When journalists replicate this binary in framing democracy as an “either-or” concept, the news reporting trivialises complex political issues and negates context. Reporting on African politics in this way limits the audience’s ability to learn about issues, therefore obscuring solutions. Mediatised “fast news” political journalism is most at fault here: it is difficult to construct a sincere, informative report with heavily symbolic, flattened, stereotyped journalism. David Spurr argues that during the postcolonial representation of Africa, “literary journalism” saw writers

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become both investigator and prominent figure in the story, inserting a Western gaze into an African story to interpret narratives for audiences. Instead of allowing the story to unfold naturally, giving agency to story participants, digging into the nuances and acknowledging inherent contradictions, these literary journalists became prominent figures of explainers and guides for audiences hungry for fast news. Africans are no longer agents in their own stories. They do not explain their own story. They are merely background actors with a Western(ised) journalist or pundit doing the explaining, the guiding, the unfolding. “Gazed upon”, Spurr continues, “they are denied the power of the gaze; spoken to, they are denied the power to speak freely” (1994, p. 13). By relegating Africans as background actors in their own stories, this style of political journalism dictates how democracy “should” unfold on the continent, rather than show how it “does” unfold. Mbembe’s statement at the start of this book is worth repeating: “we now feel we know nearly everything that African states, societies, and economies are not, we still know absolutely nothing about what they actually are” (2015, p. 9). The inherent judgement of failure or promise of democracy runs through many news stories about African politics, and South Africa is no different. The 1994 election was shown repeatedly via American value-driven narratives, driven by the post-Cold War news frames. The negotiated settlement was so highly prized that deep-seated factional violence from the IFP and ANC seemed swept away in one moment as citizens queued to vote. In an early example of mediatised, episodic news, ITN’s Michael Nicholson (South Africa Elections) reports that “most welcome, considering the bombings elsewhere, is the discipline, especially amongst the people in the black townships”. He walks towards the camera, past a queue of black voters in an open field, and explains, A week ago, this simply would not have been possible. This piece of open ground was then no-man’s land and to be seen here was to invite sniper fire from both sides. And yet this morning, here they are standing peacefully, queuing, waiting to vote. So, our report this morning is that from KwaZulu, so far, so good.

Calming a deep running rift between ethnic and ideological factions with one day of voting is, well, a miracle. The reality of course was more complex—IEC officials risked their lives to educate residents in KwaZulu under the suspicious scrutiny of IFP members. The ANC/IFP/NP

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prolonged negotiation process brought a halt to much of the intimidation and violence. Nicholson’s report mentions none of this, but rather emphasises the event-based nature of the election rather than the process. When journalists focus on events rather than process and use themselves as ultimate guide and explainer, this “fast news” style obstructs the view of African life and flattens the real lived experiences. Africans are background actors to the Western negotiated settlement value, and the free and fair election came about as a “surprise”, or a miracle. A better reporting method here starts with the journalist’s agency over the story—acknowledging that framing democracy as an either/or concept trivialises complex issues or that it is impossible to tell the whole story in a short broadcast. Accepting responsibility for the story’s consequences should be a basic training exercise for journalists. Employing more precise language, voicing citizens, doing away with simple flattening binaries, and allowing Africans to tell their own story through vox pops and sources can improve these representations of democracy in South Africa. Fighting against decades-old entrenched reporting methods and editorial ideologies is not an easy road, but for the media to continue its imperative role in the democratisation process, this is a noble and necessary fight. As I suggest in the last chapter of this book, Constructive Journalism is a way to approach this better practice. Binaries and Stereotypes The binaries of representing democracy on international channels are driven in part by the switch from Cold War to post-Cold War or neoliberal news frames and values. The negotiated settlement narrative, so paramount in these values, played out in the portrayal of two sides competing in a kind of “morality play”: land ownership in South Africa where white and black people had equal but contradictory claims; factional violence between the IFP and ANC where peace ran neck and neck with war; rural South Africans hamstrung by tribalist culture faced dire need for modernisation that the election promised; and overarching black hopes and white fears of the period immediately post-election. Broadcasters played prophet in commentating on how these conflicts would develop. The horse race frame so common in Western political journalism was visible during the coverage of South Africa’s democracy throughout six general elections, not necessarily between two parties but between two stories. Journalists from international and local channels binarised coverage by presenting

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two competing sides: the promised peace followed the threat of war in 1994; the rural competed with the urban in 1999 and 2004; traditional rituals and modern policies collided in 1994 and 2009; and the chaos of protesters and control of the police clashed in 2014 and 2019. The “race” that involved the ANC was not whether the party would win against another, but whether the ANC would reach a much-feared two-thirds majority in parliament. Reaching this majority would mean South Africa could become “perilously” close to a one-party dominant state and veer away from the Western value of multi-party democracy. Reimagining this horse race frame into narrative binaries indicates the strength of post-Cold War news values, including mediatisation, in controlling the stories about the South African elections. International news broadcasters in particular used framing devices that flattened the experience of the elections to a few already-known stereotypes: the threat of a failed state, a prized negotiated settlement, the intimidating tribalist movements, a moral military and police force that controlled chaotic protests, and the unknowable, othered poor. In recalling the first general election on television news, Beverly Hawk scathingly calls international coverage “a composite of images from fictional entertainment [rather] than the result of personal experience in Africa or with Africans” (2002, p. 160). This style of journalism, reliant on post-Cold War news frames and mediatised reporting styles, damages the representation of South African elections. The push towards simplified binaries means that neoliberal concerns are often foregrounded at the expense of adequate explanation of the South African reality. White fears foreground stories while black hopes and realities are pushed to the background and kept ambiguous, especially during the 1994 election. Between 1999 and 2004, international broadcasters avoided covering the election comprehensively at all, preferring instead to focus on long, exasperated queues (on ITN in 1999) and the stark contrast between “black diamond” Haves and the poor urban Have Nots (on AP broadcasts in 2004). In 2009, the fixation on Jacob Zuma’s controversies and symbolism of his followers ensured that the context of Zuma’s campaign, an investigation into the vehement loyalty the ANC commanded, and voting patterns were all but ignored (especially on CNN and Sky). Any kind of substantive analysis was lost in the sea of swaying black bodies and piercing singing that drowned out the journalist’s piece to camera. In 2014 and 2019, the fascination with visually rich protests, represented through neoliberal frames of property destruction, kept

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poverty and protest at a safe distance from the viewer. Grassroots voices that could have contextualised and deepened these stories were overlooked in favour of burning tyres and the red tide of the media-savvy and mildly threatening EFF.  Journalists repeatedly contradicted themselves when confronted with a complex, inconsistent electorate that, despite all evidence that they should not be, remained loyal to and enthusiastic for the ANC. The profession’s preference for fast news reporting meant that deeper narratives could not appear. When visuals of burning tyres and demolished buildings litter the screens, there is not much time left to interview protesters with legitimate economic and political concerns. The journalists who tend to focus on the shocking and the bizarre cannot see the wood for the trees. Entangled Narratives Achille Mbembe once described perspectives about Africa’s attempts at democracy as an “entanglement” (2015, p. 67). Indeed, Africa’s conflict with traditional territory governance and the demands of democracy placed upon it by the straight lines of colonialism has resulted in a struggling and often chaotic approach to governance. Yet entanglement does not just pertain to the nation’s experience with democracy. Simplistic binaries from political journalists can also result in contradictory, entangled reporting because these one-dimensional dramatic, episodic stories, fixated on the visualisation of conflict and trauma, leave little room to explore deeper consequences. Acknowledging these inherent contradictions requires contextualised reporting, but this seemingly goes against the driving news values of Westernised reporting mandates. The binarised and stereotyped television news representation of South African elections means the reality is flattened, where the promise of development, democracy as dignity, is pitted against the disappointment of a violent, chaotic, fragile process. With less time to spend on developing these narratives and fewer embedded journalists across African bureaux, journalists could not hope to get the full picture of these emerging democracies. Overall, international journalists covering (South) African elections tended to speak about rather than to or with South Africans. These shallow news frames of binaries and stereotypes create contradictory, confused narratives during the elections which, using Mbembe’s terminology, I call “entanglement”.

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These entangled stories were most evident in the international representation of South Africa’s 1994 election, when journalists often represented two contradictory narratives in the same broadcast. The cure-all for South African society was often posited as a free and fair election (in that poverty, racial inequality, unequal land ownership, education imbalance, and violent crime and factionalism would begin to disappear the moment the election occurred) but, simultaneously, journalists from the same channels said that deep-seated societal problems could not be swept away in one election (South Africa voter education, ITN and again in South Africa’s first free elections, ABC). Later, journalists reported that black living conditions may improve by gaining access to wealth and land through suffrage, but that would mean handing over white capital to an unknown future (this binary exists in both Mugabe reassures white South Africans, CBS and FF and IFP have common ideals, CBS). Democracy seemed to be a panacea for what ails South Africa, but at the same time journalists acknowledged that this cure-all is fundamentally impossible (explored in Laurie, South Africa’s first free election, ABC; Mattingly, Earth Matters, CNN; Rather, Mugabe reassures white South Africans, CBS; Crowe, Sky News report on South Africa, Sky News). White landowners “belong” on the land they purchased and therefore deserve rights to it but, equally and on the same broadcasts, so do black tribes who were forced off the land by these same white settlers (visible on the broadcasts FF and IFP have common ideals, CBS and CNN’s Earth Matters2). These powerful juxtapositions between black desires, white fears, and the inequality of the two existences are realities of South African society. Instead of admitting these contradictions and exploring deeper consequences and reasons, journalists pitted one side against the other in a confusing and entangled reporting style that relied on the “horse race” framing. Where these simplistic binaries exist in the election coverage, the stories do not inform viewers of a complex post-apartheid society but instead entertain through shallow yet 2  The inclusion of Earth Matters in the sample deserves some discussion here. While not a traditional news broadcast, the 1994 long-form piece was dedicated to South Africa’s first election and hosted by CNN journalists. The four-part episode covered land rights and debates, voter education in rural areas, conservation and tourism post-democracy, all common campaign manifesto issues, as well as tribal lives versus modernisation. The inclusion of this episode into the sample therefore made sense because of the topics discussed, rather than the strict format delineation. Availability for the 1994 sample was also very much smash-and-­ grab because of the lack of digitalisation methods (YouTube is a boon for the avid TV news researcher).

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contradictory narratives. Seeking depth—that is, avoiding “fast news” episodic reporting and attempting to explore consequences, solutions, and reasons—is a way to avoid this shallowness. The fixation on neoliberal news values are most prevalent in international, Westernised news channels. But South African television news did not escape entangled news in becoming progressively more hesitant to investigate controversial topics or criticise the ruling party. The SABC in particular avoided mentioning anything about the pre-election violence in 1994, ignored the AIDS crisis in 2004, sidestepped the Nkandla fiasco in 2014, and promoted authorities during the community protests of 2014 and 2019. Independent news channels including non-mainstream broadcasters attempted to seek depth during elections, but most local and international journalists fell headfirst into the challenges of political journalism: mediatisation, post-Cold War news frames, and neoliberal binaries born from an underlying rhetoric of empire.

(South) African Reporting This chapter started out by examining global challenges that affect the wide scope of political journalism in general, before narrowing down to how these challenges impact reporting South African elections. Now, it narrows even further and looks at how South African journalists frame and report the elections in their own country. Again, this is a wide area to discuss, but I’ll draw on two concepts that directly affect South African political journalism during election coverage: a nuanced form of partisanship firstly and secondly how this interacts with the tension between assumed “universal” journalism norms and the practice in post-apartheid South Africa. A broad overview of newsroom challenges in South Africa can be found in Chap. 4: South Africa’s TV news landscape. Partisanship Josephi (2009, p. 52) suggests that African media is largely characterised by partisanship and is more closely aligned with the ideology of loyalty than objectivity, a view shared by many theorists and scholars of African news. While not wholly incorrect, the conclusion is problematic mostly because it rests on the homogeneity of the continent’s media. Conflating all African media as “partisan” neglects the very real paths blazed by opposition media in a convoluted and controlled media system. Suggesting a

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blanket partisanship amongst all African news media is a simplistic, narrow accusation that is both insulting and damaging. Far from a single-minded “praise-singing” of the ruling elite, mainstream African media are often polarised along ethnic and party lines affected by the economics and politics of the time. Layers of nuance differentiate news channels over time (such as the SABC in 1999 and in 2019) and in space (such as the SABC and the independent leftist AmandlaTV) and type (SABC TV news and the Daily Maverick investigative press). A good example of this complex media/government relationship of African news media can be seen in the study of SABC broadcasts during the elections. From Chap. 4, we know that the SABC had turned into a puppet for ANC propaganda by 2019, hesitant to criticise the government or comment on controversial stories. But things were not always this way. In 1999, as I detailed in a previous study (Jones, 2019), ANC members dominated senior management and editorial staff positions and the hold over media narratives was in its infancy. And yet SABC broadcasts still criticised the ANC by including critical vox pops in news stories during the 1999 election, particularly visible in a broadcast entitled Election 99 Sowetan Youth. Journalist Linda van Tilburg hosts a focus group with various Sowetan youth who openly criticise the outgoing president Mandela. “I don’t believe the present government has done much and nobody has impressed me yet” “If they mess up a second time then they aren’t good enough” “But you don’t chow R14-million when people’s health is at stake. Oh, our dear minister of health. I am bitter.” [Referring to the scandalous Sarafina II AIDS play in 1996.] “People are dying of AIDS and she chows the money. That money could have been used to make the AIDS drug.”

Critical voices about Mandela’s government are generally rare on mainstream media, and to hear these comments on the SABC in 1999 was unexpected. The youth in the focus group also have this to say of the president-in-waiting Thabo Mbeki: “Somehow I think he’ll do a better job [than Mandela]. He seems like somebody who has a better hold, so to speak, on the politicians.” “Mr Mbeki has to get out there and pull his weight. And out of all the politicians I know now, I think he’s got the weight.”

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“Thabo Mbeki, he’s a suitable candidate. I wouldn’t have anyone else fill Mandela’s shoes.”3

By keeping these critical voices in the edited broadcast, the SABC here implies that Mbeki might be more effective than Nelson Mandela. The transformation so heavily promised and desired under Mandela’s government had not come to fruition, in society at least. The one gold star event of his presidency was the transformation of the SABC—the former apartheid mouthpiece had suddenly become a critical voice of government, a watch dog that included critical voices by citizens able to vote. While this broadcast is one of many local reports from the 1999 election period, it is a standout moment of the SABC taking hold of the fourth-estate reins and galloping through the idea of inherent and absolute partisanship. Of course, this critical voice did not last long, with the increased paranoia and ANC control of the board and editorial policies. The SABC eventually became the Ugly Monster under Jacob Zuma, but its partisanship is a culmination of points over the years: the 1994 UNOMSA spotlight ensured SABC’s election coverage turned out balanced and neutral, and enhanced the type of objective and critical broadcast as we see above. Under Mbeki, coverage became more pro-government due to the African Renaissance concept pervading government structures. The 2009 SABC coverage was uncritical but also neutral—stories were neither here nor there, banal and dull, deliberately ignoring controversial but important stories of the time. By 2014, the SABC was a political puppet, avoiding stories that painted the ANC in a bad light like the plague. SABC 3’s Prime Time 1 began in much the same way as global broadcasts that mention Nkandla  (see Chap. 3 for a discussion on Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla homestead and mismanagement of public funds), with a wide sweeping shot across the green rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal. The zoom from the Nkandla homestead to the voting location foregrounds a school and a queue of elderly black people outside the local voting station. The journalist then conducts euphemistic acrobatics in order to avoid the elephant in the room: “In a remote area with breath-taking scenery, rolling green hills and villages, it was here that the president arrived to cast his ballot. Residents here live simple lives, but their most famous resident has 3  Gevisser observes the tension between Mandela and Mbeki as a would-be Napoleon filling King Lear’s “ugly shoes” (2007, p. 697). In a classic misstep, Mbeki spoke at the official conference of the ANC presidency in December 1999. “Madiba,” Mbeki proclaimed to the ANC assemblage, “members of the press have been asking me how it feels to step into your shoes. I’ve been saying I would never be seen dead in such shoes. You wear such ugly shoes!” (ibid.). Far from filling Mandela’s shoes, the favourite son desired new shoes all of his own.

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thrust them into the international spotlight.” This was the only allusion to the controversial issue on any of the South African channels, and the avoidance of the issue was palpable. Between 2004 and 2014, the SABC did show signs of partisanship but it is important to recognise this was not always the case, and that under Ramaphosa the broadcaster is reinvigorating its public service roots. A combination of state interferences in the public broadcaster’s newsroom had affected its coverage during the elections. Far from being an inherent attribute of African media, this partisanship was driven by a fierce tension between media and government that changes over time. Nuance is therefore required amidst a discussion of African news partisanship. “Universal” and “African” Professional Ideals The South African case is a good example of how normative theories are linked to their social, political, and historical contexts. The media ethics landscape in South Africa has been a terrain of much debate since the democratisation of the country. … In substantive terms, there is still much negotiation, contestation, and disagreement about what the role of the media in post-apartheid society should look like, how media should contribute to the deepening of democracy, and how the media should contribute to overcoming of continued marginalisation of a large part of its citizenry. (Wasserman, 2020, p. 464)

As we know from Chap. 4, an acrimonious relationship between the ANC and news media boils just below the surface in South Africa. Increasingly, ANC politicians show reluctancy to work with journalists from denying access to conferences to spitting outright vitriol. As the quote from Wasserman above illustrates, this animosity stems from a tension between the political journalist’s attempt at a fourth-estate role and the conception of journalism practice in Africa. While South African media generally assumes a Western, and an assumed “universal”, framework of media ethics (i.e. critical, free, and independent reporting with plural channels of communication), the incumbent government regularly assumes the media should work within a developmental framework, promoting government-friendly angles. This antipathy is not South African-­ specific and is reflected in the struggles that many African liberation movements have with the media (see Levitsky & Way, 2002; Berger, 2007; Frère, 2011). It is an unease that often leads to libel and insult laws

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imposed on political cartoonists, artists, journalists, and opposition political parties.4 Journalism practice in Africa has shifted in definition from the period immediately post-liberation to the modern-day Africa. Once considered purely supportive journalism that was uncritical of the government, the framework has now shifted to a more adversarial style, a concept that clashes with liberation movements now in power across Africa. Incumbent postcolonial governments often see this style as “unpatriotic” or, as in ANC discourse, “anti-majoritarian” or “anti-liberation”. To understand why the ANC sees fourth-estate journalism as anti-liberation, we must understand that the ANC considers itself as the single entity of bringing liberation to South Africa. Any adversarial journalism that criticises government or calls into question the validity of the ANC as liberator and Struggle hero becomes an attack on the liberation movement itself and democracy as a whole—this is the topic of Chap. 6. Walulya (2018), as a topic for his PhD, investigated this tension in what he calls “hybrid journalism”—a mixture of professional and unprofessional journalism, with a strained relationship between universal professional ideals such as objectivity and the activism of local reality. He suggests that African realities do not really seem to fit the instruments developed elsewhere, and there is a debate to be had about the role journalists have in balancing adversarial watchdog reporting with a developmental framework of practice. De Beer et  al. (2016) believe that instead of viewing development/watchdog reporting as a binary opposite, a nuanced model of South African journalistic practice could be developed. Walulya’s hybrid journalism investigation goes some way to producing this model but more work needs to be done in this regard.

Listening to the Ground The challenges facing political journalists covering elections are myriad. Restricted by a culture of mediatised news values that favour episodic reporting, journalists can get entangled in trying to explain complex stories that demand depth, not stereotypes. The result is contradictory framing that focuses on dramatic imagery rather than explanatory substantive information, crucial during the reporting of elections. The push towards 4  See the various struggles between political commentators and the ANC in De Vos (2008), Bauer (2012), Nicholson (2017), Butler (2013, p. 62), Munusamy (2013).

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mediatised reporting, driven by the switch to post-Cold War news narratives, is a comprehensive, global problem but affects South African reporting too. As journalists talk about rather than to or with citizens, the represented society cannot see itself, independently assess the political landscape, or respond to its most pressing concerns. News that does not listen to the ground is common in stories that are driven by mediatisation and is particularly damaging to representations of South African democracy.

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Josephi, B. (2009). Journalism education. In K. Wahl-Jorgensen & T. Hanitzsch (Eds.), The handbook of journalism studies (pp. 42–58). Routledge. Levitsky, S., & Way, L. (2002). The rise of competitive authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 51–65. Louw, P. E. (2005). The media and political process. Sage. Mbembe, A. (2015). On the postcolony. University of California. Munusamy, R. (2013, January 21). The ANC’s imagined and real enemies: ‘creeping counter-revolution’ vs creeping scandals. Daily Maverick. https://www. dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013-­0 1-­2 1-­t he-­a ncs-­i magined-­a nd-­r eal-­ enemies-­creeping-­counter-­revolution-­vs-­creeping-­scandals/#gsc.tab=0 Nicholson, G. (2017), December 20. #ANCdecides2017 Analysis. Daily Maverick. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-­1 2-­2 0-­a ncdecides2017-­ analysis-­media-­isolation-­a-­symbol-­of-­anc-­paranoia/ Norris, P. (1995). The restless searchlight: Network news framing of the post-cold war world. Political Communication, 12(4), 357–370. Norris, P. (Ed.). (1997). Introduction, the rise of postmodern political communication. In Politics and the press: The news media and their influences (pp. 1–17). LPR. Nyamnjoh, F.  M. (2005). Africa’s media, democracy, and politics of belonging. UNISA. Ohme, J. (2019). When digital natives enter the electorate: Political social media use among first-time voters and its effects on campaign participation. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 16(2), 119–136. Rassool, C., & Witz, L. (1996). South Africa: A world in one country: Moments in international tourist encounters with wildlife, the primitive and the modern. Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 36(143), 335–371. Reta, M.  C. (2000). US media coverage of the 1994 elections in South Africa. International Communication Gazette, 62(6), 523–536. South Africa elections. (1994). [News broadcast]. ITN: Michael Nicholson. Spurr, D. (1994). The rhetoric of empire. Duke University Press. Strömbäck, J. (2008). Four phases of mediatisation. Press/Politics, 13(3), 228–246. Walulya, F. G. (2018). Hybrid journalism: An investigation into press coverage of elections in East Africa’s one-party dominant states of Tanzania and Uganda. PhD thesis, University of Oslo. Wasserman, H. (2020). The state of south African media: A space to contest democracy. Publizistik, 65(2020), 451–465. Windrich, E. (1994). Media coverage of the Angolan elections. A Journal of Opinion, 1(22), 19–23.

CHAPTER 6

The ANC Has No Clothes

Introduction This chapter’s heading is a play on a famous German fairy-tale where an Emperor’s collective cannot criticise a widely held belief for fear of repercussions. In the tale, weavers create an impossible suit for the vain Emperor that is invisible to those who are hopelessly stupid and incompetent. Of course, the Emperor has in reality no new suit at all—the weavers are conmen and the ruler walks around naked. No one dares point out that the Emperor wears no clothes for fear of being seen as stupid, incompetent, or critical of a vain ruler. So, the Emperor is in reality naked while everyone tells him his clothes are divine, thereby perpetuating the fiction. The ANC often behaves in much the same way as this fairy-tale Emperor. The narrative it weaves about itself tells the story of a movement that is the sole liberator, the exclusive bringer of dignity, and the saviour of South Africa. ANC officials often campaign under the auspices of being “divine rulers”, with the party’s logo demonstrating “South Africa’s liberation party”. Through symbolic signification, the ANC purports that it, and no other, is responsible for the end of apartheid suffering. Those who disagree or dissent (such as journalists, political cartoonists, party members, or the opposition) are frequently punished—either through removal from ranks, government flak, libel judgements, or simple and very public vitriol. The ANC is determined to control narratives about it and within its ranks that hide the reality: South Africa’s freedom and the liberation © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Jones, Elections and TV News in South Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71792-6_6

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from suffering is not yet complete and does not (and never did) rest solely on the party’s shoulders, and the ANC itself faces irrevocable splits through corruption and factionalism. The narrative it weaves to conceal this reality is not necessarily an untruth, but it is incomplete. Control over narratives is the predominant method with which the ANC reshapes itself. I call this mythology of stories, and the ANC’s desire for it to become hegemony, the “liberation narrative”. This chapter examines how the ANC’s struggle to be seen as the sole liberator, saviour from suffering, and deliverer of dignity relies on developing a narrative hegemony in South Africa. The journalists who emulate this mythology, confirming that the ANC is indeed the sole liberator and deliverer of dignity, become a cog in the party machine. This chapter argues that uncritical reproduction of the liberation narrative is damaging for democracy in the country and the perception of South African democracy abroad. Re-telling of the liberation narrative obliterates smaller opposition movements in the ANC’s history and reducing the complexity of the Struggle to a single-­ facet liberation movement ultimately squashes interpretation into a few easily grasped stereotypes. Journalistic responsibility requires uncomfortable truths to be sought out and aired, even if it means exposing a naked Emperor for the good of the collective.

The Liberation Narrative Under Apartheid Skies To understand the methods by which the ANC controls narratives about its history and how this invokes an increasing tension between government and media, we must look back to 1948—the year in which the National Party won South Africa’s general election. Prior to this victory, while still in opposition, the NP could rely on the mostly unequivocal support of the Afrikaans press. However, almost immediately after their 1948 victory, Afrikaans press editorials began to take a critical view of the newly incumbent NP, questioning their motives and holding the government to account for their actions. The press was merely working as a fourth-estate watchdog, but this action rankled the NP. The party could not understand why some elements of the Afrikaans press were suddenly prepared to challenge the leadership of the party it had once supported without question. The apartheid-era government’s solution to this criticism was to clamp down on freedom of the press and of expression in order to bring what

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they termed an “authentic” government/Afrikaner voice (Tomaselli et al., 1987, p. 132) to the public. And so began the apartheid-era struggle for a free and critical press. As we saw in Chap. 4, the South African media landscape was for a long time organised along racial and language strata. The English liberal press generally opposed apartheid government and policy while the Afrikaans press often promoted apartheid ideology, with the black masses significantly underrepresented. Access to stories was difficult because journalists were continuously harassed and coerced by an increasingly paranoid and autocratic government. Later into the apartheid system, many journalists self-censored their stories due to a fiery Afrikaner nationalism that burned amongst editors and board members. During the crisis years of the 1980s, the Afrikaans media devolved into Sunshine Journalism by promoting a “good news” narrative. It banned news images of the widespread protest action and dissent against the government, leading to a skewed image of the repression in Southern Africa. As seen in Chap. 4, the Afrikaans press was not only the government’s voice of “authentic Afrikanerdom”, it was also the primary information vehicle for most South Africans. The English press generally took an adversarial role to apartheid, and the black masses were significantly underrepresented during the later apartheid era (despite such excellent journalism in Drum, Grassroots, City Press, and The World). As Lizette Rabe notes, “it was impossible for any independent African newspaper to survive the competitive power of the white-controlled Bantu Press, and indeed, this was the intention” (2020, p. 147). Thanks to the stranglehold of the apartheid government in the late 1970s and 1980s, the press in South Africa was a traumatic place to work. The English press was continually harangued by the not-so-secret Secret Police, the black press was squashed into near non-existence, and the Afrikaans press, headed by editors with fierce Afrikaner nationalism burning in their pens, dominated the landscape. The free exchange of ideas came from underground, hidden journalists in the resistance press rather than through any mainstream newspaper. The 1980s saw many of the independent newspapers fold, including Grassroots, South, New African, and New Nation. As Kolbe suggests, over 25 million people lived in a “news vacuum” (2005, p. 49) during the 1970s and 1980s. The development of any kind of meaningful resistant press was fettered by widespread illiteracy in the black population, resources and education elsewhere, and the near-constant surveillance by the apartheid government. During the state of emergency in 1985, the national Afrikaans newspaper Rapport continued as if there was nothing wrong in South Africa that

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“a better ‘media image’ couldn’t put right, [thus] blaming all of South Africa’s ills on communists, agitators, and misinformed international opinion” (Tomaselli et  al., 1987, p. 97). Sunshine Journalism, Kuper and Kuper suggest, “amplifies the extent of social cohesion and development” (2001, p. 357) but at the expense of acknowledging issues that need public debate. It gives a “false positive” during times of crisis and leads to inaccurate representation of society because all the audience sees is the good news, not the full news. The correlation between the reporting style of loyal Afrikaans journalists under apartheid and the ANC’s recent “good story to tell” agenda is chillingly similar. There are other similarities too. Post-Apartheid Struggle with the Free Press During the pre-democracy period, the ANC enjoyed unrivalled support from the local English press. As a government-in-waiting, the ANC received excellent international news coverage as the spotlight shone brightly on South Africa’s negotiated settlement, which fitted neatly into neoliberal news values. Once in power, however, the new ANC government had to very quickly come to terms with being on the wrong side of the news media in South Africa—an independent and critical fourth-estate press now demanded the party be held to account on promises and decisions. Editors and journalists that the ANC had once considered part of the liberation alliance were now suddenly holding the party and government to account, with vigorous political debate at the centre. To say that the party was “not impressed” with the criticism is putting it lightly. Just as the newly elected NP experienced in the 1950s, the ANC learnt the hard way just how fickle the mob and the media appeared. There was little love lost between the two and the relationship continues to be, as we saw in Chap. 4, acrimonious. ANC MPs often assume that the news media attack the party on a personal level, rather than simply upholding fourth-­ estate media ethics. South African journalist Stephen Grootes opines that the ANC government tends to view any criticism of their party as “anti-­ majoritarian” and “anti-liberation” (2013, p. 29). Malila too suggests that the “paranoid self-awareness” (2014, p. 15) of South Africa’s journalists has grown along with the ANC’s control of the media, indicating a chilling effect. One of the ANC’s main vexations with mainstream journalism is the portrayal of dissent and protest, particularly during election time. To understand where this antipathy comes from, we need to understand the ANC’s liberation narrative and its quest for hegemony.

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The ANC’s Liberation Narrative A common misconception about the ANC is its identity as the sole “liberation party”. Although the ANC was unquestionably a formidable force in opposing apartheid, the organisation as an official “liberation movement” didn’t start until the late 1970s. The inception of the ANC’s armed wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (“The Spear of the Nation”, or “MK”) in 1960, with Nelson Mandela as its first commander-in-chief, was a key mobiliser of ANC support throughout the 1970s. Prior to this, the ANC comprised predominantly African elite: chieftains, lawyers, preachers, and doctors, and seen as aloof in the face of mass mobilisation efforts by other Africanist movements. Only when the ANC adopted significant communist policies, such as those from the competing CPSA (the Communist Party of South Africa) and PAC (Pan Africanist Congress), could it create a significant protest to the dehumanising system of apartheid. However, MK was a considerable drain on resources and leadership and often hampered these goals. So, although the ANC was a genuine and significant force in opposing apartheid, it did not start out this way in 1912 at its inception. Once the ban on liberation movements was lifted in the late 1980s, the ANC swallowed up and delegitimised many opposing movements (such as the Pan African Congress, the United Democratic Force, the Black Sash, and the CPSA). To this day, the ANC continues to present itself as the only legitimate “liberation movement” in South Africa. Discrediting other anti-apartheid activist groups and movements has resulted in what Graham calls a “self-entered heroic narrative” that “distorted the historical picture and created a distinct sense of ’us’ and ‘them’ which has since been ingrained into the modern political process” (2014, p. 177). Instead of a united, allied movement with a shared history of dismantling apartheid, the ANC claims legitimacy as the only force that overthrew the autocratic regime. Other organisations (such as the UDF or PAC) are simply “fellow travellers” along with the ANC.  In reality, anti-apartheid groups often warred with each other during the Struggle: the ANC and PAC in particular were often in outright combat for members and ideologies. The ANC controls the type of narratives and histories in order to maintain this identity as the “liberator of South Africa”, and over time has become very successful in this regard. By quashing alternative opinions— such as dissent from rural voting populations, imposing libel or insult judgements against political cartoonists, and calling critical journalists “anti-democracy” or “anti-majoritarian”—the ANC takes an important step in maintaining hegemony as the sole liberator of South Africa.

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Alec Russell (2009, p. 62) suggests that the history of the ANC’s exile had a significant impact on the way the party maintained its image as a liberation movement: once in government, the party was determined to maintain its power and control, an obsession rooted in its long years underground. When in exile in the 1970s, the ANC was often convinced its enemies hid behind every corner, constantly trying to undermine its power by peeling off potential defectors. Current criticism of the ANC government (by the media, by opposition parties, by citizens) is also often seen through this lens, as “counter-revolutionary thinking” (Butler, 2013, p. 62; Essop, 2016), where opposition parties are “anti-majoritarian”, “racist and fascist”, and where loyalty to the party and to its internal identity as sole liberator is prized above all else. The impact of exile on liberation movements across the globe is an important point to understand, and Roger Southall’s (2013) book on liberation movements in Africa is particularly noteworthy. This hegemonic liberation narrative is not necessarily an outright falsehood but is instead based on the “acceptable” version of past events that the ANC wishes to tell. The problem is that this version of the ANC’s history obliterates smaller opposition movements and their role in the anti-apartheid history. Unquestioned re-telling of this liberation narrative means the ANC is in danger of becoming a synecdoche for the entire anti-­ apartheid and anti-colonisation struggle: leaving out the many facets of resistance essentially squashes 300 years of opposition into one. If the story is told often enough, and opposing stories quashed hard enough, then the actual history is forgotten. This has terrible implications for democracy, especially during election time. The Liberation Narrative and Elections In more recent elections, the ruling party relies on voter’s perception of the ANC as being the singular liberation movement that conquered apartheid. The election campaign rhetoric centres on the ANC as the sole liberator, with slogans such as “A Better Life for All” and “Fighting for Change” speaking back to this revolutionary history. And yet a slow pace of change, poor levels of service delivery, and a continued socio-economic inequality confront the ANC with every passing election. The party is progressively forced to turn to history as a justification for the retention of its power rather than its record in office, and it does this by making broad appeals to citizens that it and no other organisation is the face of the

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anti-­apartheid struggle. The ANC is the deliverer of dignity, saviour from suffering, and revolutionary anti-apartheid hero in this imagined hegemony. Establishing this image has worked well for the ANC over the course of six general elections and the party has assumed a kind of automatic “heritage” vote from much of its electorate who identify with the liberation movement. But the escalation in community and political protests, particularly during elections, rebels against this very ideal. These protests intensify against a government perceived as no longer adequately serving the community and protesters boycott the vote entirely. This act weakens the ANC’s hegemonic mythology of being the sole “liberator” and “saviour” of South Africa. So, what does the ANC, a party educated in exile and emulating the NP’s iron grip control of the media, do when faced with such dissent? Instead of looking inward, listening to the ground, and patching the many cracks and splits in the ANC rock, it employs party loyalists to populate mainstream media boards so as to stamp out this rebellion via news media. The relationship between the ruling government and the country’s media further deteriorates, and the liberation narrative continues to hide the Emperor’s nakedness. In June 2016, controversial COO of the SABC Hlaudi Motsoeneng ordered that the broadcaster no longer show news images of protest action where property is damaged. Motsoeneng’s rationale was that banning protest action on television news “prevented copycat protests”—if communities see or hear protests, they may be encouraged to do the same thing and damage property to get the attention of the media. In a blatant misunderstanding of media effects theory, Motsoeneng fell into the old shoes of the NP’s SABC editors and made Sunshine Journalism news policy. Dissent and protests occur whether or not video cameras are pointed in that direction. Censoring news in this way creates a false sense of optimism in a developing crisis. Journalists, too scared to promote the public interest or dissent against the government, are liable to slip into a Sunshine Journalism role—presenting the good news only, rather than the full news. If news is censored at election time, the voting population does not get a full and critical perspective of the political landscape, creating an ever-­ increasing gap between citizens and politicians. Even after Motsoeneng was finally removed from the SABC in 2017 and Ramaphosa started on his “course correction” New Dawn agenda, the damage continues through the ANC’s communication department. It often silences contradicting views by accusing the speaker of being

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“anti-­majoritarian” and “racist”, rather than opening the discussion for debate and contestation. While South Africa’s identity is very much an amalgamation of difference, the ANC’s appropriation of their own struggle history and liberation narrative is not an amalgamation but a devouring of opposing identities. One of the greatest concerns for scholars of news media is the freedom of expression in South Africa, and the ANC’s attempt to control the dominant narratives about and within the party. Liberation Movements Tend to Age Disgracefully Absorbing all opposing forces, delegitimising other claims to the liberation, and blurring the lines between party and state are factors not unique to the ANC. Liberation movements across Africa, once in office, tend to mark the end of history, writing themselves into the chronicles as saviours of the populous with no distinction between party and government. Newly liberated African politicians also often find themselves on the side of “them” (the enemy) rather than “us” (the persecuted) in fourth-estate media. Even the National Party back in 1950—after campaigning for the “liberation” of the Afrikaner from British rule—had this surprise when fourth-estate Afrikaner press held the new government to account. The ANC’s problem with the free and critical press is therefore not unique, nor is their response to clamping down on oppositional narratives that go against its desired hegemony. Promoting slogans, narratives, and ideas that position the ruling government, and no other, as liberator and saviour of the country is common practice amongst post-liberation nations. Achille Mbembe (2015, p. 105) explores how the Togolese state party demanded the unity of liberty, democracy, and statehood rolled into one. All resistance to this ideal was wiped out through verbal control or violence. Being in opposition to the ruling power, the liberator of the people, is therefore being an enemy to the people (see, e.g. Sékou Touré of Guinea, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Gumede 2017 writes extensively about this liberation narrative across Africa). This section detailed the liberation narrative that the ANC wants to become hegemony: that is, the unquestioned reality for South Africans. For journalists covering the increasingly complicated elections in South Africa, the liberation narrative proposed a clear way to negotiate the contradictions. Supporters seemed to follow the ANC not just because of policies (such as in 1999) or Zuma’s personality (as in 2009) but because

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the party is imagined as sole liberator, saviour, and provider of a “better life for all”. This mythology provided an easy way to explain how voters, faced with the inconsistencies of supporting the ANC, continued to vote for “the old man” (World News Today with Zeinab Badawi, BBC, 2014)— Mandela. Journalists, in unquestioningly following this narrative, therefore ratified the ANC’s liberation hegemony by repeating slogans and imagery that the ANC itself promoted. The neutralisation of controversial frames on local South African broadcasts created the same effect: by ignoring controversy over the years (such as the impact  that Marikana, the AIDS epidemic, and protester voices have on the voting population), the status quo of the ANC as sole liberator was thus supported.

Journalists Emulate ANC Hegemony Journalists only used the liberation narrative explicitly in their broadcasts from 2014 onwards. Although the ANC promoted this as mythology from the start of its incumbency, it was under Jacob Zuma that unquestioning loyalty to this narrative was demanded and disobedience punished. It seems journalists picked up on this hard sell from Zuma’s government because broadcasts from 2014 reflect this narrative in both discourse and visuals. The death of Mandela in December 2013 also provided journalists with a frame of reference to explain the absolute loyalty South Africans had for the ANC, despite the party repeatedly disappointing them through corruption and scandal. In 2019, the narrative continued: “Mandela’s party of liberation” and “the liberator of South Africa” continued to be the anchorage of the ruling political party. Intriguingly, despite the ANC promoting the liberation narrative within the country, South African journalists did not mention this liberation narrative in the broadcasts—the only journalists who referred to it were international journalists from Western channels (e.g. BBC, CNN, F24, Sky). Almost all of the broadcasts from these channels referred to the ANC as sole liberator of South Africa, and outliers that presented a different perspective were rare. For example, AJE and the Voice of America (VOA) in both 2014 and 2019 acknowledged that the ANC is only perceived as being the liberation party. In 2014, AJE’s Haru Mutasa notes, “For many black South Africans, it’s the party that ended apartheid” (SA opposition taps into discontent, AJE, 2014), and is “seen by many here as the party that liberated the black majority” (Jacob Zuma wins landslide victory, AJE, 2014). VOA’s Emily Jaab remarks the ANC only “contributed to ending

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white minority rule” (SA elections protest vote, VOA, 2014). In 2019, Malcolm Webb from AJE says that the ANC “has been in power ever since it was credited with ending white minority rule” (South Africa: years of economic inequality is leaving citizens frustrated, AJE, 2019), and Fahmida Miller, again on AJE, says “the party seen as responsible for liberating black South Africans from apartheid” (South Africa votes: few youth expected to participate, AJE, 2019). These are the few outstanding remarks that moderated the liberation narrative on international news. The majority flatly stated that the ANC is the liberation party and remains the sole liberator of South Africa. Sole Liberator The BBC’s Zeinab Badawi says repeatedly in 2014 that the ANC was “the party that delivered liberation to the majority” (South Africa’s economic challenges; World News Today with Zeinab Badawi; World News Today; BBC, 2014). Andrew Harding, also of the BBC, states, “many [voters are] loyal to the party that liberated them” (World News Today, BBC, 2014). Meanwhile, CNN’s Robyn Curnow finds the same: “Loyalty to the liberation party remains strong, with a strong connection to its political past” (Millions head to polls in SA, CNN, 2014). Sky News’ Julie Hyde Mew repeats this sentiment: “The party that conquered apartheid still attracts voters, young and old” (Sunrise SA elections, Sky News, 2014). Reuters suggests that the ANC “remains popular with the black majority after dismantling the apartheid system in 1994” (SA police arrest 59, Reuters, 2014). In 2019, South Africa’s own Debora Patta, now reporting for CBS, said, “Remember, this is the party of Nelson Mandela that liberated this country” (South Africa’s ruling party set to win election with reduced majority, CBS, 2019). For the majority of broadcasts, the ANC is synonymous with the emancipation of South Africa and its sole liberator. As we saw earlier, the reality is far more complex than that. Associating the ANC as the sole liberator swallows up the rest of the liberation movement—the PAC, UDF, the Black Sash, the CPSA, who played considerable roles in the struggle against apartheid. This kind of framing from the journalists imagines the ANC as liberator, saviour, and sole provider of a “better life for all”, playing into the ANC’s own mythology. Changing the status quo should not be difficult—both AJE and VOA manage to do so with a few extra words. “Perceived as the liberation party” sounds and means something very different to “is the liberation

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party”. “Credited with bringing an end to suffering” moderates the claim, whereas “has bought an end to suffering” is far more determinate. Journalists must be more precise when presenting the ANC as sole liberator henceforth and consider the ramifications of these statements in the country. The “Mandela Effect” One of the key symbols of the liberation struggle that the ANC promotes is Nelson Mandela. In 2014, the ANC campaign strategy called for voters to “do it for Mandela” while posters and billboard emblazoned with his face reminded voters of the role he (and therefore the ANC) played in the first democratic election. The party is the man, and the man is the party. As Jacob Zuma campaigned for the presidency, Mandela was wheeled out, statue-like and silent, either in person or posthumously on tee-shirts and signs, in support of the charismatic Zulu populist. The ANC was widely denounced for employing a frail and silent Mandela for campaign propaganda in 2009 and again in 2013, shortly before his death. In an exceptionally distasteful show of power, Zuma and other top-level ANC officials visited Mandela at his home in April 2013, armed with flash bulbs and bulky cameras for the perfect shot. After nearly three weeks of an intensive hospital visit for a recurring lung infection, Mandela appeared blank faced and unresponsive as he was mobbed and jostled by eager ANC politicians. Ironically, just a few weeks before this episode, the ANC lashed out at the opposing DA for employing the iconic Helen Suzman1 for their 2014 election campaign. The video of Mandela in 2013 was an invasion of the old man’s privacy, when he was clearly sick and incapable of giving consent to the footage. He stared blankly, was non-communicative, and gripped the sides of the chair as a grinning Zuma tried to shake his hand. The whole wretched scene is embarrassing, indicating the lengths the ANC 2014 campaign trail went to grab Mandela’s support. Despite this criticism, international news channels during the 2009 to 2019 elections represented Mandela as actively and enthusiastically supporting not only the ANC as a whole but Jacob Zuma in particular. 1  Helen Suzman, founder of the Progressive Party, forerunner of the DA, was an outspoken opponent of apartheid and key negotiator in the 1994 democratic process. The DA employed her figure as their 2014 election campaign strategy to highlight the role the DA had in the “freedom election” of 1994.

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Prior to his death, journalists watched uncritically as Mandela was wheeled out at various vote-catch events in stadia, a statue poised for political gain. At the start of Sky News’ 2009 broadcast ANC’s Jacob Zuma divides South Africa, Zuma sings a loud rendition of “Umshini Wami” on stage at an ANC rally, as Emma Hurd narrates: “You’re looking at South Africa’s next president, a man whose Zulu anthem is Bring Me My Machine Gun … [Nelson Mandela] entrusting his legacy to the ANC’s most controversial leader yet”. Hurd’s narration suggests Zuma might harm Mandela’s legacy, the precious jewel of democracy in South Africa. Mandela, meanwhile, is said to endorse this controversial newcomer. The BBC’s Karen Allen says that Mandela’s attendance at Zuma’s rally is a “ringing endorsement” (Final election rallies, BBC, 2009) while CNN’s Nkepile Mabuse notes that “a public endorsement by the Nelson Mandela family is as precious as gold” (South Africa election: ANC under fire, CNN, 2009). Given that we know international journalists often fixated on Zuma’s unsavoury background (see Chap. 7), Mandela’s endorsement seems strange. These journalists are touching on the liberation narrative here—that the ANC employ Mandela’s image to rally supporters around the Struggle identity of the party—but they never truly critique it. Reflecting more on this narrative hegemony and spending more time investigating rather than entertaining might lead journalists to a deeper investigation of why South Africans continue to vote for the ANC and what this Mandela support actually means. As it stands the liberation narrative is merely emulated and remains unassessed in these broadcasts. Martha Evans writes about how Mandela’s image can be “bent (almost) to mean just about anything” (2013, p. 28) while Zuma, campaigning in 2009 and 2014, attempted to create continuity between the beloved first president and his much more divisive figure. Many South Africans were puzzled by Mandela’s appearance at the 2009 ANC  rally, held at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium (symbolic too, for this is the location where Mandela, in an iconic No. 6 rugby jersey, presented the Webb Ellis Cup to the victorious Springbok captain at the 1995 Rugby World Cup final). There was a resultant backlash from both South African media and the Nelson Mandela Foundation who criticised the ANC party for putting the 90-year-old’s life at risk. South African news media rarely uses the liberation narrative, and at times actively critique the blatant use of Struggle symbolism in election campaigns. However, international journalists acknowledged none of this controversy: in fact, Karen Allen repeats that Mandela “requested to be here” (Final election rallies, BBC).

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The ANC is often attributed directly to Mandela, as journalists call the party “Mandela’s party” or “the party of Mandela”. This is the “Mandela Effect”—the man is the party, the party is the man, and invoking his name is a ritualistic chant that summons impressions of 1994, consolidated democracy, victory of civilisation over savagery, negotiated settlement, and rings all those neoliberal bells. During the 2014 election, after his death, Mandela still appeared frequently on the broadcasts as an iconic sign in election posters and emblazoned on ANC tee-shirts at rallies. During 2014, both VOA’s Paul Cisco (Polls indicate ANC leads, VOA, 2014) and CBS’ Margaret Evans (South Africa votes—ANC favoured to win, CBS, 2014) both remark that Mandela was the “father of the nation”. Similarly, CNN’s Robyn Curnow says that Mandela “led South Africa out of apartheid” (First SA vote since Mandela died, CNN, 2014). In this way, Mandela is presented as the guardian of the Struggle, the founding father of democracy. In 2014 and 2019, the BBC’s Nomsa Masego, F24’s Ayesha Ismail, CBS’ Debora Patta, and VOA’s Emily Jaab all refer to the ANC as “Mandela’s party” or, more frequently, “Mandela’s liberation party”. These statements unwittingly play into the ANC’s liberation narrative and their campaign strategy that employed Mandela’s image. Martha Evans writes extensively about the mythologisation of Mandela and describes “the gradual iconisation of his image, which became a kind of logo for the Struggle movement, and later for post-apartheid South Africa” (2014, p. 83). What the “memory” and “spirit” of Mandela actually means for the South African voting populace is unclear in these broadcasts as citizens were silent on the matter: that is, journalists did not ask their opinions and instead described and explained.2 It appears that international journalists unthinkingly imitate the liberation narrative, buying into the stories told about and through the ANC party, and reproduce ANC slogans and catchphrases. The “Mandela Effect”, whereby invoking his name recalls images of the Struggle, democracy, and victory, is strong in the later international broadcasts. Yet the South African journalists did not frame Mandela in this way. For example, when Mandela was wheeled out into various vote-catch events in 2009, the only channels to criticise this stunt were the South African broadcasters SABC and eNCA. For eNCA, Mandela seemed “too frail” to 2  See Chap. 4 where I speak about the erasure of Africans from their own stories, relegating them to background actors while white journalists act as guides and explainers of the African existence.

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manage more than a “warm smile and a wave” (Leaders vote, eNCA, 2009) at these events—only South African channels commented on the former leader’s ill health at the time. Conversely on the international broadcasts, Mandela’s mere presence at a few ANC rallies was considered emphatic endorsement for the ANC and for Zuma. Mandela’s framing on international channels reduces him into a one-dimensional smiling, mute symbol, whose only contribution to these elections was as keeper of the kingdom. South African channels do not ordinarily represent Mandela in the same way international broadcasters do, perhaps because Mandela’s image is contested amongst many younger South Africans. There is no “Mandela Effect”, no blanket symbolism in the country. Some see the first president as a “sell out”, foregoing many of the ANC’s Freedom Charter ideals for a neoliberal future. Others still associate Mandela with his 1960s terrorism charges. The idea of Mandela as a “keeper of the nation” therefore sits uncomfortably with many South Africans. Further, South African broadcast media has a fairly controversial history with promoting or ignoring political parties during elections. The ICASA (Independent Communications Authority of South Africa) bans the use of political advertisements (PAs) and party electoral broadcasts (PEBs) during election time, and perhaps using or falling into the “Mandela Effect” could be construed as bias. While the SABC has had to juggle objective reporting with increased political influence over the years, there were no instances of the national broadcaster conflating the party with the man or the man with the party, as seen on other international channels. The “Mandela Effect” seems to be a problem relegated to international channels only. Yet, even though the local journalists did not outrightly use the “liberation narrative” and “Mandela Effect” to promote the ANC as the sole liberator of South Africa, these broadcasts still supported the status quo through other, more visual, framing. Protests and Dissent Against the Government Another way in which journalists emulated the liberation narrative was through the representation of protests and general dissent against the government, especially in later years. Community, political, and service delivery protests intensified in the decade between 2009 and 2019. These protests directly contradict the ANC’s liberation narrative that they, and no one else, provide a “better life for all”. When poor people resort to violence and destruction because the government has not delivered on

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promises like fixing access to running water and sanitation, then the ANC’s hegemony as saviour and representative of the poor is merely hollow rhetoric. These protests, Marais states, are highly complex and disparate: “Common to most [protests]  is indignation at the distant manner and scornful conduct of some local officials and the failure to involve residents meaningfully in decisions that shape their neighbourhoods and lives” (2011, p. 458). Local councils are often fiscally hamstrung and have little experience in appropriate management, so residents often protest for public service, rather than just delivery. Marais also notes that these protests are often romanticised in political analysis as a rolling rebellion against the ANC, but that reading them in this way, as some kind of index of opposition, misses inherent nuances and contradictions. These protests are in direct opposition to the ANC’s “good story to tell”, but even outright anger at the government, symbolised through destructive protests, does not necessarily translate to disenchantment with the ANC or a vote against it in the elections. We cannot conceive of motivations for protest action in South Africa as homogenous and rigid. The protests are a complex mix of the impact of the liberation narrative amongst rural voters, local government corruption, a hangover of apartheid mismanagement, and socio-economic issues that are deep-seated in the most impoverished areas of South Africa. Rural and impoverished voters form the ANC’s best asset at remaining in power, and it is for this reason the party promotes the liberation narrative—their desire to remind these populations of life under apartheid, how the ANC has changed it for the better, and how the ANC is the sole claimant of liberation is an underlying cause for the liberation narrative. When these populations protest, it is in direct contradiction to this narrative and must be controlled for the future good of the party’s power. But journalists rarely connect it like this. Instead, many arrive at the protest, focus on the destruction of property due to neoliberal news frames demanding such things, and appear confused when the protest against the government does not translate into a vote against the ANC. The result is a seemingly contradictory story about an ANC that “keeps winning” despite “rolling rebellion”. Broadcasters tend to lump “protest action” together in much the same way as they amalgamate “ANC support”. Mbembe warns against this: “The practices of ordinary citizens cannot always be read in terms of ‘opposition to the state’, ‘deconstructing power’, and ‘disengagement’. In the postcolony, an intimate tyranny links the rulers with the ruled” (2015, p. 128). Journalists, even those from

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AJE, the predominant channel that attempted any kind of complexity of coverage throughout the elections, failed to acknowledge this intimate relationship between the ANC and the electorate. Without voicing residents involved in the protests, digging deeper into the ramifications, and recognising and critiquing the liberation narrative, the full story cannot be considered. Instead, we get a view from a distance, burning tyres supplemented with voices of the authorities, and hardly any discussion of the liberation narrative and the inherent juxtapositions between the ANC and its electorate. Admitting confusion and contradictions is the first step in clear communication during elections, something very few journalists did. These few journalists who tried to dig deeper into these contradictions did so in an unusual visual convention. Broadcasts from AJE, the BBC, CCTV, and VOA employed camera techniques to show poverty in South Africa that underscored the service delivery protests. An establishing shot pans across the vast tin shack township glinting in the sunshine, followed by a zoom into the dusty township roads and a journalist walking amongst the shacks. The wide shot creeping into a closer angle shows firstly the scale of the sprawling township and secondly the intangible quality of township life to outsiders. The audience is positioned on the outside of the township while the journalist takes us on a journey inside it. This type of visual framing is common in stories about poverty, particularly in townships—see the “tourist gaze” in Dyson (2012) and the disorientation of slum mazes in Jones and Romola (2015), both investigations of Indian slum tourism. It keeps the audience and poor South Africans apart, mediated through a Western journalist, indicating that we somehow require a journalist to help guide us through the unknowable locale where other people, who are not like us and can never be like us, exist. Despite this problematic visual framing, the discourse that follows neutralises the imagery. As the journalists walk along the streets in 2014 and 2019, narrating the scenes, the discussion anchors the ANC’s failure to deliver basic services to the level of poverty experienced by these residents. The BBC’s Adrienne Murray says, “recent protests demand better basic services such as housing, schools, water, and electricity” (South Africa’s economic challenges, BBC, 2014), while the camera pans across an expansive tin-roofed township. CCTV’s Emily Jaab says, “ANC support is based on historical legacy” (SA elections, CCTV, 2014), as a wide shot over the tops of a township moves to a street lined with litter. These juxtapositions between discourse and image imply that the ANC has failed to provide services but instead relies on its history as liberators to garner support. This kind of

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reporting about the liberation narrative is the best example of journalists attempting to explore the contradictions in South Africa. Unfortunately, both local and international broadcasters did not adequately explore the citizen’s experience of protest action, despite a few notable examples. Instead, protests were often seen from a distance, juxtaposed between contradictory ANC support and service delivery failure, and through the frame of “control” and security (see Chap. 8 for a comment on control). Achille Mbembe describes postcolonial conflict in Togo, wherein the president and the country’s sole party symbolised liberty, democracy, and statehood rolled into one. The Togolese state party thus proclaimed, “the unity of the people, among whom no divisions could be allowed to exist” (2015, p. 105). Mbembe argues that in this context, all resistance was denied through verbal control or violence from the commandement. In South Africa, the ANC government insists on a type of unification of South Africans, a “Rainbow Nation”, of which the ANC is the sole liberator and saviour. The protests among the South African poor directly contradict this narrative, and journalists who focus on neoliberal frames such as destruction of property do not adequately hold the state to account.

Implications By late 2018, Zuma’s ANC had hoped South Africa would agree that its tailored clothes were beautiful. International journalists often fell into line and agreed that yes, the suit is divine. Perpetuating this myth means that, while the ANC walks around naked, the South African diaspora and international audiences nod that yes, they can see the clothes and they agree with the Emperor. The ANC promotes the liberation narrative, the journalists emulate it and become part of the machine, and the myth is perpetuated. People who protest against the government are “anti-democracy”, “counter-revolutionary”, the bad guys. They are the “stupid ones” who can’t see the special clothes. The spiral of silence created by Zuma’s strict control of media narratives meant journalists were even more unlikely to criticise, correct, or contradict the party line. Journalists who emulate the ANC’s mythology become part of the machine—the story is told, retold, and soon the actual history of the anti-­ apartheid alliance of movements becomes lost to old history books. Protest action, instead of being a legitimate voice of dissent, is squashed, ignored, and controlled for the sake of the liberation narrative. The role of the

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media in perpetuating this narrative damages the understanding of democracy in South Africa and abroad. One of the reasons for journalists simply mimicking the party line rather than critiquing it is down to commanding neoliberal news frames, of which mediatisation is one. A focus on the details of violence and poverty keep the audience apart from the citizens affected by these aspects of society. Sourcing authorities (police, security, political leaders) is often easier in time-limited, resource-starved newsrooms. Digging into confusing and contradictory stories is often not possible in modern journalism practice. Yet all is not lost—the way out of this fairy-tale is to acknowledge contradictions and the liberation narrative, and to employ inherent journalistic curiosity to communicate clearly and provide substantive information. Despite international journalists predominantly emulating the liberation narrative throughout later elections, some broadcasts managed to examine and critique this acutely. One of the few channels to balance creative journalism and neoliberal values with investigation into ANC delivery was the BBC in 2014. Andrew Harding’s What issues face the ANC after elections juxtaposes distressing footage from the Marikana massacre and audio from a government official that creates a damning indictment of both the police and ANC. Halfway through the broadcast, at the National Results Operation Centre (NROC), Home Affairs Minister Naledi Pandor touts the ANC’s neoliberal economic plans for the next five years: “There’s gonna be, I think, quite an exciting and robust development of the economy of South Africa as long as we stick to the plans that we have, that are very good plans”. After a brief pause and across Pandor’s smiling face, audio of booming guns signals a brutal incoming scene: police officers fire live ammunition into Marikana miners, a dust cloud masking the protesters. A large contingent of police shoot into the advancing group until the commanders give the signal to cease. This footage is eerily reminiscent of apartheid imagery: a large show of police force using live ammunition to control a group of black protesters asking for better living conditions and basic human rights, and I think the BBC editor is acutely aware of this. Because of the juxtaposition between scenes, Pandor’s “plans” seem to mean the police brutally controlling protesters and strikers. The broadcast is implicitly judgemental of the ANC’s Home Affairs minister by juxtaposing the Marikana massacre against her “plans” for the economy, and in this one superbly timed edit of one broadcast, the BBC casts judgement across the ANC’s heavy-handed control of narratives, protests, and society to retain power.

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A second broadcast from the BBC examines this apartheid similarity even further, this time through direct discourse. In Security tight ahead of SA poll from 2014, five brown military trucks roll down a dusty street as soldiers gaze impassively at bemused black schoolboys walking alongside. BBC’s Nomsa Masego observes, “a sign of force not seen since apartheid days, with the government sending a strong message to the youth: behave or face the consequences”. Masego then interviews two vox pops: “Stop intimidating us with these police cars, telling us to vote for the ANC”, one says, while another claims, “Today [the ANC] want the very same dirty votes with a barrel of a gun with a number of police to intimidate us to vote for them. We won’t!” Each time the BBC mentioned the protests or riots in 2014, journalists linked the military involvement with the ANC’s desire to “control” and “intimidate”. Achille Mbembe (2015, p. 111) states that one should not underestimate the violence that can be set in motion to protect the vocabulary used to denote or speak of the commandement, and to safeguard the official fictions that underwrite the apparatus of domination, since these are essential to keeping people under the commandement’s spell, within an enchanted forest of adulation.

It might not be possible to see this “enchanted forest” through the vistas of brown military tanks, but the BBC may have had a point. Although these broadcasts seem conspiratorial, that the ANC forced citizens to vote for them through intimidation and dirty tricks, David Bruce argues that in some areas of South Africa the police are perceived to operate directly as instruments of the ANC, while the ANC are widely acknowledged as the main perpetrator of this intimidation (2014, pp. 61, 82). The BBC does not pull punches in accusing the ANC as engaging in dirty tactics to undermine the quality of democracy, and in this way interrogates the ANC’s liberation narrative as saviour of South Africa. It was one of the only channels to do this outright in 2014, in such a clear manner, when most broadcasts from later years merely touched on surface issues of property destruction and visuals of violence. Local South African channels did not use the liberation narrative outright, and never referred to the ANC as the “liberation party”. The “Mandela Effect” was not visible in the local broadcasts, and no journalist from South African channels equated the man with the party and the party with the man. Yet local journalists still supported the status quo by

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avoiding controversial narratives that may paint the ANC in a bad light: by avoiding critical voices, and by supporting the military as bringers of “law and order”. This suggests some kind of chilling effect from increased governmental involvement in news agendas, or the lack of training and access to resources. Even mainstream independent South African channels like eNCA were progressively more hesitant to cover controversial topics or criticise the ruling party. An increasingly paranoid government policed South Africa’s primary broadcaster too, demanding loyalty and dishing out punishment (see Chap. 4 for a detailed overview of the SABC under the ANC). If news is censored or manipulated at election time, the voting populace is less likely to get a full and critical perspective of the political landscape. Whatever light was shed on representing the elections on the SABC was discernibly of the “sunshine” variety. In this way, the local journalism of the elections may not support the liberation narrative outright, as in international framing, but was still guilty by omission. Uncritical re-telling of the liberation narrative obliterates smaller opposition movements in the ANC’s history, and broadcasts across the years did just that. Reducing the complexity of the Struggle to a single-facet liberation movement squashes interpretation into a few easily grasped stereotypes. Even though journalists, like those from the BBC, VOA, AJE, and CCTV, in later years grasped at elements of depth, the lack of space and time to develop these ideas and explore context generates entangled narratives and perplexed journalists, as well as a flattened and superficial depiction of democracy in South Africa.

References Bruce, D. (2014). Just singing and dancing? Intimidation and the manipulation of voters and the electoral process in the build-up to the 2014 elections, for Community Agency for Social Enquiry. [O]. Retrieved June 23, 2017, from https://www.nelsonmandela.org/uploads/files/intimidation-­in-­elections.pdf Butler, A. (2013). The idea of the ANC. Ohio University Press. Dyson, P. (2012). Slum Tourism: Representing and Interpreting ‘Reality’ in Dharavi, Mumbai. Tourism Geographies, 14(2), 254–274. Essop, R. (2016). Zuma describes attempt to disrupt partly as counter-­revolutionary. [O]. Retrieved May 1, 2017, from http://ewn.co.za/2016/01/09/ Zuma-­describes-­attempts-­to-­disrupt-­Parly-­as-­counterrevolutionary Evans, M. (2013). Controlling the Mandela Image. Rhodes Journalism Review Alive 2 (November): 27–29.

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Evans, M. (2014). Broadcasting the end of apartheid: live television and the birth of the new South Africa. London: I.B. Tauris. First South African vote since Mandela died. (2014). [News broadcast]. CNN: Robyn Curnow. Graham, M. (2014). The ANC and the ‘myth’ of liberation solidarity: ‘Othering’ in post-apartheid South(ern) Africa. African Insight, 44(1), 176–190. Grootes, S. (2013). S.A. politics unspun. Kenilworth: Two Dogs Mercury Gumede, W. (2017). The democracy deficit of Africa’s liberation movements turned governments. Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 44(1), 27–48. Jones, G.A. & Romola, S. (2015). Spectacle and suffering: the Mumbai slum as a worlded space. Geoforum, 65, 431–439. Kolbe, H. R. (2005). The South African print media: From apartheid to transformation. PhD Thesis, School of Journalism and Creative Writing, University of Wollongong. [O]. Retrieved December 2, 2020, from http://ro.uow.edu.au/ theses/429 Kuper, A., & Kuper, J. (2001). Serving the new democracy: Must the media ‘speak softly’? Learning from South Africa. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 13(4), 355–376. Malila, V. (2014). Tracing the ANC’s criticism of South African media, in RJR 34 (August): 13–15. Marais, H. (2011). South Africa: Pushed to the limit. The political economy of change. UCT Press Mbembe, A. (2015). On the postcolony. University of California. Millions head to polls in South Africa. (2014). [News broadcast]. CNN: Robyn Curnow. Polls indicate ANC leads. (2014). [News broadcast]. VOA: Paul Cisco. Rabe, L. (2020). A Luta Continua. A history of media freedom in South Africa. African Sun Media. Russell, A. (2009). After Mandela: The battle for the soul of South Africa. Hutchinson. SA elections. (2014). [News broadcast]. VOA: Emily Jaab. SA elections protest vote. (2014). [News broadcast]. VOA: Emily Jaab. SA police arrest 59. (2014). [News broadcast]. Reuters, Unknown reporter. Security tight ahead of South African poll. (2014). [News broadcast]. BBC: Nomsa Masego. South Africa votes  – ANC favoured to win. (2014). [News broadcast]. CBC: Margaret Evans. South Africa’s economic challenges. (2014). [News broadcast]. BBC: Adrienne Murray. South Africa’s Jacob Zuma wins landslide victory. (2014). [News broadcast]. AJE: Haru Mutasa.

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Southall, R. (2013). Liberation movements in Power. Party and state in Southern Africa. James Currey. Sunrise SA elections 2014. (2014). [News broadcast]. Sky News: Julie Hyde Mew. Tomaselli, R., Tomaselli, K., & Muller, J. (1987). Narrating the crisis: Hegemony and the South African press. Richard Lyon. What issues face the ANC after South African elections. (2014). [News broadcast]. BBC. Andrew Harding. World News Today. (2014). [News broadcast]. BBC: Zeinab Badawi. World News Today with Zeinab Badawi. (2014). [News broadcast]. BBC: Zeinab Badawi, Andrew Harding.

CHAPTER 7

Power and Populism

Introduction When a car bomb exploded in downtown Johannesburg on the Sunday before the first all-race election, international journalists scrambled to report how this politically motivated violence was about to derail the miracle election. The 1994 violence seemed unending to international onlookers, not just because of the terror attacks and the bomb blasts but because of the IFP’s bloodthirsty warrior-like support. On CBS’ Evening News, ANC spokesperson Carl Niehaus states that the “best way to deal with this kind of political thuggery is to make sure democracy wins against intimidation and violence”, and on his words “intimidation and violence”, the scene cuts to a high angle of black hands of IFP supporters raised to the sky, each fist holding spears, knobkerries,1 axes, and guns. The editing here implies that the IFP are perpetrators of this violence, that the IFP caused the terror attacks in downtown Johannesburg. Later in the broadcast, a large group of black men march and dance quickly towards the camera, hands raised clutching spears, sticks, and shields. Bill Whitacker provokes in voiceover, “When you see this, it’s hard to believe that this week South Africa is to undergo a revolution. Not through the power of weapons, but through the power of the vote.” Whitaker’s statement and 1  A knobkerrie is a wooden stick with a large lump at the end, used more commonly now as a walking stick but traditionally as a weapon for Zulu warriors.

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the editing of the broadcast link the car bomb and terror attacks to the IFP’s seemingly “inherent” propensity for violence. This assumption was ultimately proved incorrect—the car bombs were carried out by a splinter group of AWB members. Although these facts were probably not known at the time of broadcast, the assumption that the IFP were at fault was the de facto commentary at the time. Journalists parachuting their way into the 1994 election in South Africa continued to frame the IFP as bloodthirsty, violent warriors. The IFP war band was at odds with the negotiated settlement so favoured by neoliberal news and were therefore deemed unthinkable as political candidates in the new democracy. From the start of election coverage, and particularly on international channels driven by these news frames, the black South African electorate was simultaneously blindly loyal in support of political leaders, a frightening show of muscle, an intimidating tide of support, and homogeneous in their relationship with politicians. This racial aspect complicates matters— black supporters were more likely to be shown as intimidating, while Indian, Coloured, or white supporters were frequently calm, conservative, and fearful. While South African journalists used these stereotypes too, it was far more often international journalists who grouped supporters in such ways. We know that the 1999 and 2004 elections were mostly forgotten on international news—neoliberal news frames, normalisation and consolidation of democracy in the country, and a political leader who had a “tin ear” to media representation and news values meant that these two elections slipped off the international news radar. Conversely, the attention returned during the remaining elections before fading again in 2019. It is in these pivotal elections, 1994, 2009, and 2014, that the most interesting yet problematic representations appear. Using a form of multimodal discourse analysis that highlights the visual as well as the discourse, this chapter shows key moments when journalists represented both political parties and their support. Over six elections, both local and international journalists tended to group the electorate into a homogeneous crowd. Local channels spotlighted and endorsed power and authorities while neatly hopping over controversial issues and topics. Meanwhile, international channels employed creative camera proxemics to represent a frightening brand of populism gripping the electorate. The politicians, however, were systematically de-voiced over the years as both sets of journalists preferred pundits and analysts than political and citizen voices. By 2009, we hardly heard from ANC leaders at all as journalists relied instead on scripted and pre-planned speeches. This lack of

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engagement is representative of the ANC’s disengagement with media and the tension bubbling beneath the surface, but that is not the end of the story. Combine the ANC’s reluctance to engage with journalism that prefers voicing pundits during election coverage, and you have coverage that focuses instead on business leaders, economists, think tank members, and academics. Political information is filtered through many layers before it gets to the audience, who are fed views more often than news. The gap between citizens and politics thus widens. Three sections make up this chapter. The first two explore how the news represented people and politics during the elections, with specific focus on multimodal discourse (i.e. the visual and the audio, and the juxtaposition between both). The final section considers how the news disengages with citizens and politicians over the years, in a manner which Francis Nyamnjoh calls “talking without listening”. I term this disengagement a lack of listening. Ultimately, this chapter is a challenge for journalists to do better in representing people and politics through showing the good and the problematic broadcasts of the elections. Voicing direct sources, rather than inserting layers of interpretation via pundits, is the first step in fixing the lack of listening. The second step is reflexive acknowledgement that contradictions and inconsistencies exist, rather than attempting to fuse disparities together awkwardly. The chapter begins with the moments in which journalists represent people during the elections, that is, the South African electorate.

Representing People: The South African Electorate It was primarily international journalists during the pivotal elections of 1994, 2009, and 2014 who portrayed the electorate as anything other than “voters”. South African channels, especially in the first three elections, used the electorate as vox pops about the voting process and campaign issues. Local journalists showed citizens voting, focusing on the process of democracy as a success story. There was very little creative imagery about the electorate in strong contrast with international channels, which is interesting. While South Africans got to see themselves as voters, citizens, people of the country on local channels, their representation on international channels was starkly different. This is important because an international audience would see South Africans very differently to how South Africans would see themselves. Visualisations of a society impacts the understanding of it, and using simplistic stereotypes to describe and

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depict a complex society narrows that interpretation and distances audiences from realities. Hence, the next sections focus on international journalistic representations and why they are problematic. The manner in which these journalists represented the South African electorate seems to form a kind of template. Using creative camera and audio techniques, international journalists placed newly enfranchised citizens into a number of categories, but always stemming from a binary of “us”, the knowable normative group, and “them”, the unknowable, homogeneous other. First, originating from the early depictions of the black populous in 1994, journalists positioned black political support as intimidating and frightening, a stereotype replicated especially in 2009 and 2014. The second representation homogenised the support as blindly loyal to their political parties—particularly the black ANC electorate in 2009. Finally, the third predominant representation was of the Born Free and youth vote in 2014. As with loyalty to the ANC, many journalists assumed a kind of homogeneous “youth” electorate that would turn the tide against the dominant party. These three depictions flattened the South African experience of democracy into simplistic stereotypes that followed this template of “us” and “them”. This kind of reporting resulted in tangled, confusing narratives about the elections. South African political support in reality is not homogeneous and is instead tied up with ethnicity, the liberation narrative, Proportional Representation, and political campaigns that do not speak back to societal issues. Journalists tended to ignore these complexities (due to time and space constraints, lack of resources, or poor local information) and instead relied on neoliberal news values that merged representations into stereotypes and binaries. Acknowledging complexities and contradictions, while creating a reflexive reporting style that interrogates news hegemonies, is a first step in avoiding reductionist and damaging news representations. As we will see in this and forthcoming sections, many journalists did not do this. Early Depictions of Rural People From the early days of the 1994 election coverage, journalists grappled with the complicated pre-democracy society. Rural people, many still practicing tribal rituals, needed modernisation but were denied this by a racist, autocratic government. White people who mostly bought into the

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apartheid government’s rhetoric of “die swart gevaar”2 feared the loss of civil liberties post-democracy. These fears contrasted black people’s hopes for immediate provision of basic human rights under the swift change to a black majority government. As we saw in previous chapters, negotiating these struggles on the news sometimes led to confusing and contradictory narratives. The shift from post-Cold War news values to the new neoliberal frames was a difficult transition for Westernised news reporters, and covering a complex and inherently contradictory society like South Africa was a steep hill to climb for many international journalists during the first election. Faced with the task of covering the edge of democracy, international journalists travelled to the homelands of the Eastern Transvaal and Venda to observe rural black South Africans. In trying to explain the dichotomy between traditional tribal existence and the “development” to civilised society trope so important to neoliberal news values, they fell headfirst into the traps of using racist stereotypes to depict rural electorates. The CNN long-form broadcast Earth Matters showed journalist David Mattingly venture into a rural village, describing the scenes: In the shade we pass adolescent males loitering and gambling for pocket change. All the while we can hear the beating of drums. Echoes of an older way of life. These traditional dances have lost a lot of their meaning in modern day, and that’s part of the problem here in the homelands. If you notice, there aren’t many young adult males participating. That’s because they’re more pre-occupied with the modern way of life and that includes playing football or playing politics. … Some stay, spending their time fighting political battles with graffiti and mocking the white government.

This description is problematic: first, the words “playing politics” undermines the black population’s struggle for independence, for equality, and for basic human rights. Second, Mattingly’s framing disconnects culture with modernisation, assuming that the two cannot coexist together 2  Die swart gevaar translates literally as “the black danger” but can also be understood as “the black peril” or “black menace”. Under the apartheid government, the strongest control of the population was that of fear—the ultimate mind killer—and the swart gevaar was a perceived security threat of the black populous to the white authoritarian government. The apartheid government promoted such racist and illogical statements as black men were animalistic, black families horded caches of weapons, and that all black people wanted to harm white people. Similar terms used by the National Party included die rooi gevaar or “the red (communist) danger”, a leading reason for the early beginnings of apartheid.

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and that rural black South Africans must forgo their culture, traditions, and rituals for development, politics, and democracy. Mattingly makes no attempt to explain which culture he observes—instead, he assumes some kind of immemorial homogeneous “black culture” that relies on gambling, meaningless dancing, and apathy. Instead of digging deeper, voicing citizens, and engaging with the local community, Mattingly speaks about them rather than to them, a characteristic of much of the reporting during these elections. This representation positions the black electorate as the “other”, unknowable and perpetually different to the audience. Black Hopes and White Fears White people were not depicted in this way. Despite some white South Africans also living off the land and ascribing to cultural rituals, these people were almost always depicted as farmers, concerned citizens, businessmen, and family orientated traditionalists. White people also had distinctive and understandable “fears”, whereas black people had vague, inarticulate “hopes”, and these two depictions were pitted against each other in a number of broadcasts in 1994. What exactly these black hopes constituted was indistinctly explored, however. Very few black people were interviewed in the same amount of detail than their white countrymen. Those who did receive airtime spoke about their desires for post-apartheid South Africa: Solly Mahule (Earth Matters, CNN) desired ancestral land returned to his family, Trophus Dlamini (South Africa’s youngest voters, CNN) wanted better education, and Musa Zondi and Lokswayo (Earth Matters, CNN) prayed for better living conditions, while other unnamed vox pops wanted “change”, that “I must be free” (South Africa—election voting, ITN), or simply “to vote” (Evening news, CBS). Because of the lack of black citizen voices on these international broadcasts, journalists were often forced to make assumptions on behalf of the black majority in explaining these desires. A change in government signalled, for journalists, alleviation of poverty, better education, and modernisation, all of which were expected to occur overnight with the election. Despite visiting rural enclaves of South Africa, journalists rarely interviewed villagers themselves and instead used the binaries of development and failure to show how change is so obviously required. The lack of citizen voices means that the “change” that black people assumedly desire is undefined in both quantity and time scale. Yet that desire was also presented as something to fear. James Maites suggests, “South Africa’s blacks

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are demanding reform. There’s clearly apprehension about just how much the blacks will want” (South Africa’s youngest voters, CNN). Accordingly, the fears of white people are much more clearly outlined with more detailed interviews and explanation: a destruction of civil liberties, minority rights, and Afrikaner culture; the faltering economy under black rule; and an escalation of ongoing violence. Consistent with Fair and Astroff’s (1991, p. 71) seminal study, international journalists legitimised moderate white Afrikaners in 1994, predominantly through elements of their own discourse: we hear their desires in their own voices, unlike the indistinct black hopes. On these international broadcasts, Afrikaners and Boer ancestry are implicitly connected with the land and their rights to own it. Afrikaners validate their rightful place in South Africa, on the land, and in cultural capital, and are given the space on the broadcasts to do so in their own voice. But what is the reason for this type of framing of white Afrikaners? Could it be because the Americans have a vested interest in legitimising the “White Tribe of Africa” (Harrison, 1981)? Louw identifies the foregrounding of Europeans in non-Western stories as the “voice of the Anglos” (2009, p. 170), where Western news relies on Western sources and voices when representing non-Western issues and problems. Westernised culture is thus often deemed “valid and incontestable” (Louw, 2009, p. 157), and anything that falls outside of those bounds is symbolically wrong and odd. Perhaps the moderate Afrikaner Boer was, to many international journalists, more similar to the “Anglo voice” than black politics in 1994. It could also partly be because the Freedom Front, the home of moderate Afrikanerdom, adhered to the Western ideal of democracy and was therefore treated with sympathy by a Westernised media that single-mindedly promoted Westernised democracy. More likely, however, is the cathartic nature of the 1994 narrative in Western news, and the rhetoric of the neoliberal news frames. Negotiated settlement as conflict resolution was the ideal outcome for the Clinton administration, for example, and allowing this peculiar White Tribe of Africa its place in the sun was perhaps part of the negotiation process for US journalists. From these early 1994 depictions, a kind of template emerges. Black culture is unknowable and homogeneous, white culture is specific and protected. These white fears about an unknowable black electorate creates a dichotomy of perspectives: white fears exist on the normative side, while black hopes and an unknowable existence occurs on the “other” side. Black hopes are othered, strange, and different, running neck and neck

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with a seemingly inherent propensity for threatening behaviour during elections. It is this template of “our” fears (for civil liberties, for the economy, for the future) and “their” hopes and attitudes (of the land, of savagery, of unknowable culture) that frames the rest of the elections on international channels from 1994 until 2019. The IFP’s Frightening War Band in 1994 Right up until the last possible moment, the IFP refused to join the 1994 election, engaging in what many scholars and journalists called “brinkmanship”. As a result, the KwaZulu area of Natal was a hotspot of ethnic and political violence. This tension boiled over into other areas of South Africa—ANC supporters warred with IFP members in Thokoza township in Johannesburg and weapons caches were found scattered throughout the Highveld. It was amongst this guerrilla warfare that the journalists found the IFP in 1994 a reluctant participant in the first all-race election. The representation of the IFP supporters was manifestly singular in these early broadcasts. While Chief Buthelezi was depicted as both a theatrical war-loving leader and tribal chief with legitimate claims to an ethnic homeland, the electorate was just an intimidating war band, bloodthirsty, violent, with improbable designs on politics. CNN’s Profile of a Zulu Nation is one of the most important depictions of the IFP in 1994. A six-minute-long broadcast, hosted by Bernard Shaw and journalist Brett Sadler, explores the “embattled” Natal region of South Africa. Brett Sadler follows a line of tanks “rolling into KwaZulu, a column of heavily armed South African troops. A hammerhead sent in to crack down on violence in the embattled province of Natal.” This priming section, coupled with low-angled shots of brown tanks and smiling soldiers, frames the upcoming broadcast with military as civil protector and IFP as violence perpetrator. Sadler calls the IFP supporters a “throng” of “Zulu power on the march”, “tribal regiments”, “tribal loyalists”, and that their “illegal weapons are beyond the control of the government”, where Buthelezi is the leader of this impi.3 A camera lies on the ground, pointed up at the advancing Zulu men, the audio a relentless drum

3  Impi means both war and combat in isiZulu, and any group of men that gather for war could be called an impi.

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banging to the sound of ngoma singing.4 The tight framing, rhythmic chanting, and low angle is claustrophobic. As the men5 advance, we see that one man holds a gun against his belly, his finger on the trigger. He advances until the gun fills the frame. Next, Zulu men dance towards the camera—each man holding an assegai spear or a knobkerrie6 high above his head. At all times, the camera focuses on the weapons rather than the men’s faces, indicating the importance and imminence of violence. This is one of the first instances of the “Hands Up” symbolism frequently used to depict the IFP, as the following section explores. This broadcast illustrates a dominant view of the IFP: high angles that focus on clutched weapons or pumping fists in the air; deep low angles as the men crush dusty roads beneath their feet; an advancing mass of marching men towards the camera; and loud ngoma chants that drown out journalists. Fisheye lenses accentuate sharp spears, the staring white eyes of the Zulu supporters, and the traditional dress of Zulu women. The emotive reporting of these international broadcasts in particular highlights the exoticism of the Zulu nation and the intimidating quality of the IFP supporters. As with Mattingly, Sadler speaks, both in visuals and in discourse, about the crowd, rather than to the participants. These early broadcasts depict the IFP electorate as unknowable, threatening, and intimidating in a formula that continues throughout the elections. But hope appears. In 2019, the IFP were a shadow of their former powerful party, gathering only half a per cent of the entire vote share. Yet AJE’s Fahmida Miller dedicated an entire broadcast to the IFP’s concerns over land in KwaZulu-Natal, where they pay rent to the Ingonyama Trust on land, they say, they already own. The broadcast (South Africa elections: land ownership dominates debate, AJE, 2019) depicts IFP supporters filling a stadium as Buthelezi greets them on stage. Impi holding spears and dancing to ngoma chants are reminiscent of the 1994 visuals, barring one important difference: the IFP are not threatening and are not 4  See the exploratory book “Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma aesthetics after apartheid” by Louise Meintjes (2017) for a deep discussion of IFP Zulu marches and chants. Ngoma is a style of traditional Zulu singing and dancing. 5  Consistent with Fair and Astroff’s 1991 analysis, the representation of the Zulu nation comprised almost entirely of young men. Women were depicted as mourners, cooks, dancers, and occasionally illiterate voters, but it was the men who were intimidating “tribal regiments” and “warriors”. 6  A knobkerrie is a wooden stick with a large ball handle at one end. The stick can also be used as a walking stick and a weapon for hunting or in combat.

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intimidating. There is no violence intimated here. The camera moves at eye level along a line of young men holding spears and dancing, yet the focus is on their faces, not the weapons. The crowd do not march towards the camera, but we follow them, alongside the crowd, part of them. The camera is wide, rather than close, and there is no claustrophobia. No chants drown out the journalist and the audio is of Miller’s explanation of the issue at hand, rather than othering the participants on screen. Miller’s 2019 broadcast, and all of AJE’s 2019 coverage in fact, is outstanding in its normalisation of politics in South Africa. It is important to note the difference here as compared to the early depictions of the IFP on international channels. The “Hands Up” Signification From the start of this broadcast analysis, I noticed a peculiar visual framing device reserved for black political support. This framing style began in 1994 where IFP members were shown in a crowd formation: the camera focused on their hands in the air holding weapons or forming a fist, silhouetted against the sky. The angle was often but not always low but, no matter what angle was used, the crowd’s faces were not the focus; instead it was their raised hands, prominent weapons, or expansiveness of the crowd itself. The effect is very intimidating. Individuals are indistinct, overbearing, and threatening, and the weapons or open hands are very clear and very near. The crowd dances, sings, marches, or toyi-toyis, but they are positioned in such a way that they appear inherently aggressive. Such visual framing disempowers the viewer. The viewer is in the low angle, and Gianetti (1990) describes this angle psychologically heightening the importance of the subject on screen. Gianetti explains that “the angle from which an object is photographed can often serve as an authorial commentary on the subject matter” (1990, p. 12). These extreme low angles visible in the election broadcasts emphasise the subject’s aggression where they hover menacingly over the viewer, who, in Gianetti’s words, “is made to feel insecure and dominated” (ibid., p. 16). This visual framing style projects the aggressive participant over the camera with only weapons and the sky visible in the frame. I term this visual framing the “Hands Up” signification, and saw this replicated throughout coverage of the six elections on both local and international channels. In 2004, the SABC’s Campaign Trail followed an IFP rally in Port Elizabeth and showed the supporters in a slight high angle with a focus on

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their raised hands. No other political party was framed this way in this broadcast. The PAC, AZAPO, the FF+, and ANC members were also present in the broadcast and danced in a similar fashion, but members were instead shown in medium close-ups on their faces. It was only the IFP that had this “Hands Up” signification. While in 1994 the IFP were usually framed in this fashion most likely because of their prominent weapons, in this particular shot the “Hands Up” framing does not include weapons, only open hands. So readily were the IFP shown clutching weapons in this “Hands Up” manner that it seems even when there are no weapons in the shot the visuals still focus on raised hands. It seems “natural” to see the IFP supporters in this manner because of the template of representing black South Africans. By 2009, this visual framing extended to the ANC support too. Both CNN’s Inside Africa, South Africa’s youth vote and Sky News’ Zuma’s ANC closing in on election victory include images of ANC supporters with their hands raised in the air. Although faces and individuals were available, both broadcasts chose to focus on raised fists. Low angles were even more pronounced in 2009, with the BBC’s Final election rallies and Sky News’ Zuma’s ANC closing in on election victory employing extreme low angles and tight camera framing to depict ANC supporter celebrations, along with the “Hands Up” signification. The effect is intimidating and threatening, enhanced by an overly loud audio that drowned out the words from journalists Emma Hurd and Andrew Harding. Black support, as in 1994, is intimidating, unknowable, and indistinct. White or Indian support is never shown in this way—“Hands Up” is reserved exclusively for black people during elections. ANC Fealty from 2009 By 2009, the IFP had fallen off the political radar, especially for international reporters. With a decimated support base and losing seats in parliament with every election, the IFP were a shadow of their former 1994 self. Yet their war-band signification was simply transferred to ANC supporters. After a gap of two elections, the international news spotlight shone brightly once more on the 2009 election. The ANC by this time was also a husk of its moralistic 1994 form—gripped by accusations of corruption, led by controversial populist Zuma, the party was accused of turning South Africa into an increasingly one-party state.

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Silhouetted against the sky, chanting and singing Struggle songs that drown out journalists on screen, and toyi-toying7 above the camera, black supporters form claustrophobic images on international news channels. Their flamboyant and emphatic political fealty threatens to overrun the journalists who attempt to report from the midst of the action. More than the claustrophobic and intimidating proxemics, the most standout characteristic of this support in 2009 was its loudness. The BBC’s Andrew Harding is drowned out twice while standing amongst singing children in Grassy Park and again in a stadium during a COPE rally in South Africa gets ready to vote. Crowds of boisterous ANC supporters routinely disrupt Emma Hurd’s pieces to camera for Sky News. In ANC awaits South African election result, Hurd interviews four young black men in red jackets about their first-time voting. “It could be another generation before the ANC electoral dominance is dented here, and it might take even longer for voter apathy to set in”, she says, as the young men’s recitation of Umshini Wami in the background almost drowns her out. The young men crash into her and push against the camera, the smile on Hurd’s face is strained as she tries to shout above them. The enthusiasm these young people show is presented as alarming and doesn’t stop in 2009. In 2019, a decade later, AJE’s Malcolm Webb reports from the EFF and ANC campaign trail inside stadia in Inside story: will South Africans vote for ANC? In two different scenes, ANC and EFF members jostle and scream around him, despite forming a very small crowd. The supporters make it almost impossible for Webb to continue with his broadcast, yet he could quite easily step away from them or choose to report from a calmer, less chaotic section of the large stadium. The intention seems to be that the supporters should “act up” for the cameras, rather than film an organic celebration that occurs naturally. The tight framing, low angles, extremely loud audio, and interruptions of journalist voices highlight the vehemence of black support throughout the election and present the patronage as something to be feared. The reactions from journalists during these moments also indicate that this fealty is discordant with expected normative election business. Representing the electorate in this singing, swaying, dancing, threatening manner is 7  To “toyi-toyi” means to dance the war dance of black South Africans, says Lisa Nevitt (2010), and the term dates back to the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. “Throngs of people charge forwards, stomping and chanting political slogans. Such energy struck fear into the hearts of the armed forces who tried to contain them” (ibid.).

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reminiscent of Achille Mbembe’s (2015, p. 129) proclamation about African political fealty. He states that in African politics, dance is a form of fealty to the political party. The “postcolonised subject” employs aesthetics of vulgarity to imitate the elites in power and “join in the madness” of devotion (ibid., p. 133). Vehement dancing, rowdy singing, and party regalia covering supporters’ bodies depict this African fealty for all to see, presented as quite different and strange to the Westernised eye. While local South African journalists also depict the electorate singing, swaying, regalia-covered people, the framing is not the same. Journalists are not drowned out. Angles are neutral or high, rather than extremely low and tight. With the exception of the occasional “Hands Up” signification, South African journalists did not ordinarily depict black political support as intimidating or frightening. When we look upon these subjects in international broadcasts, we see them as others, as strange, as odd. In South African broadcasts, they are simply supporters—a large gathering singing Struggle songs. Unwittingly, international journalists depict African political support in an age-old image of the aesthetics of the burlesque. Depicting the African support in this way is a subtle reinforcement of Western norms as universal norms. African fealty does not seem to fit in with the sophisticated, conservative Westernised democracy. The Red Tide of the EFF in 2014 The EFF in 2014 was a brand new black-led party, risen from the embers of Malema’s unceremonious banishment from the ANC in 2012 and the Marikana massacre in 2013. Representing the poor, the working class, and the young black man, the EFF fight for economic and radical transformation. The party emulates radical Pan-Africanist symbolism, from slogans such as “Our land and jobs, Now!”, “Son of the Soil”, and “Asijiki” (“We are not turning back”) to the red berets of Thomas Sankara, the Burkina Faso anti-Imperialist president. The EFF’s representation on international broadcasts in 2014 and 2019 was singular: fierce, frightening, and homogenous. Unlike the depictions of the ANC and their supporters who are distinct and hierarchical, and much like the IFP in 1994, the EFF in 2014 are simultaneously the supporters and the party. There was very little distinction either visually or in the discourse between the leaders and members, and leaders often march with the crowd. This makes the representation seem even more frightening when it happens. Whereas there is a distance

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between the intimidating support and the clumsy, voiceless leadership of the ANC, the EFF leadership actively participate in the “red tide” fealty. For example, a red sea of EFF supporters led by the “firebrand bad boy” (Maseko, Focus on Africa, BBC, 2014) Julius Malema swamps the camera in a 2014 march to parliament. Then, on AJE, four grimacing black women with red berets grip hands to hold back the tide of EFF members behind them and journalist Haru Mutasa narrates: “They want to seize land from whites without compensation and nationalise the mines and banks” (SA opposition taps into discontent, AJE). The group then advances steadily towards a low-angled camera. These EFF supporters don’t seem to show “fealty”, as Mbembe (2015, p. 129) suggests, so much as show strength. Although the DA are often represented as the competing “second party”, DA supporters and leaders do not grimace, but smile. EFF supporters and leaders only grimace. Instead of contextualising how the EFF changed the political landscape of South Africa, the party is a mere caricature of intimidation. Journalists symbolised rather than explained the new black-led party. This might be because of the EFF’s symbolic similarity to socialist movements around the world or the broadcasters’ hesitation to endorse radical leftist parties due to the fading post-Cold War news values. More likely, however, is the strength of mediatised reporting that demands a fixation on violence, which is inherently dramatic. The performative quality of the EFF falls neatly into this news value, resulting in shallow but frequent representation. As with the IFP in 1994, journalistic representation of the EFF support base is a singular story of intimidation and otherness. The stories are most often about how black politics exists differently to the audience rather than presenting deliberative information about the political party and their membership within wider society. The Blindly Loyal and Confusing Electorate In the midst of frightening and excessive jubilance during elections, international journalists often ask a follow-up question: how can rural and poor people still vote for the ANC when their failures are seemingly so plentiful? Expansive and litter-filled townships signify the deepening poverty in South Africa, yet these images clash with the vehement support the ANC garners from precisely these areas. During Sky News’ 2009 broadcast Growing anger as South Africa goes to the polls, Emma Hurd states this confusing loyalty openly as she walks

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around Alexandra township, just outside Johannesburg. She reveals the squalor and dangerous living conditions residents endure and lays the blame on the ANC’s failure to deliver. Hurd asks a young black man if “this is what you expected after the end of apartheid”, while standing in his cramped, damp, filthy tin shack barely bigger than a cupboard. In the next image, in a slow zoom from establishing to long shot over the tops of the tin shack roofs, Hurd states, 15 years after the end of apartheid, the squatter camps are actually expanding instead of shrinking. Unemployment is running between 30% and 40%, and for those who do have jobs the minimum wage is about 100 pounds a month. This is not the life the ANC promised its people.

As she finishes the broadcast, she asserts that despite this failure, “the ANC will win this election, in part because of its successes but also because it can count on the loyalty of those it liberated8—for now”. This juxtaposition between hopes and reality highlights the intense lack of service delivery in the townships, perpetuating the confusing idea that that even though the ANC has failed “its people”, these same people will still vote for it. Similarly, an international media circus covered Zuma’s corruption and rape trials in 2009, juxtaposed with the intimidating and loud support filmed in low angles and tight frames. When journalists speak about Zuma’s court appearances and the deepening poverty in South Africa, the next sequence is almost always a wide shot of jubilant supporters filling stadia at ANC rallies. Even though Zuma may be “controversial” and “corrupt”, the juxtaposed images suggest that supporters simply “don’t care about any of that”. In fact, journalists in 2009 actually say those exact words when referring to the support Zuma and the ANC accumulates (Huge turnout in South Africa election, BBC; Election promises for South Africa, BBC; ANC’s Jacob Zuma divides South Africa, Sky News; Zuma’s ANC closing in on election victory, Sky News; Inside Africa: South Africa election, CNN; South Africa Today, CNN). South African journalists do not employ this frame, choosing to ignore the controversial and complex topic altogether. Local news does not bracket together ANC failures with a seemingly illogical yet persistent vote for the party. It is only 8  See Chap. 6 for a discussion on this problematic phrase—equating the ANC as the sole liberator of South Africa is damaging to democracy.

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international news that equates ANC votes with a “devil may care” attitude, which, as Mattes (2005, p. 52) and Schulz-Herzenberg (2014, p. 36) argue, is far from the case in reality. Hurd and other journalists do not seek the “why” in these stories. They simply state the confusing contradiction between political support and realities of South African life, and suggest black supporters vote for the ANC regardless of how badly the government treats them. Suggesting the electorate “don’t care about any of that” oversimplifies the issue—the ANC still holds support in the country not just because the electorate turn a blind eye to the critical issues. South Africans are astutely aware of problematic issues in politics and balance the disappointments in some areas against the impressive achievements in others. ANC supporters consider the liberation narrative and also the corruption charges in the same breath. A fractured opposition prevents a true change in leadership. The Exiles war with the Inziles and split the ANC internally, resulting in a strenuous steering of the South African ship. While this may be the reality, journalists delve neither deeply nor broadly enough to gauge this for their audiences. Even though the South African journalists do not employ this frame to discuss ANC support, they too are complicit in ignoring and avoiding a controversial topic. Ultimately, a story about the black African voter blindly following a cult-like leader in populist political theatre wins out on news channels, with little to no deeper discussion of the realities of democracy in the country. Journalists, including local South African broadcasters, do not speak to the citizens frequently enough, preferring instead to speak about them, if they are mentioned at all. This widens the gap between the audience and politics and hides substantive information from a society that is eventually blind to its most pressing issues. Born Frees and the Youth While black political support seems frightening and blindly loyal, other voices during the election broadcasts were not presented in this way. In 1999, journalists focused on the youth as an important swing vote. Both South African and international journalists during this year interviewed young people in focus groups about their decisions and concerns, whether or not they would vote, and what they thought of the ANC in general. From 2014, the narrative changed. Both local and international journalists assumed that Born Free voters had little or no allegiance with the ANC simply because they were too young to remember apartheid. In 2019, the

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overriding story amongst all journalists was that the Born Frees simply did not turn out to vote. The term “Born Free” refers to those South Africans who were born shortly before or after 1994 and who are now eligible to vote. The Born Free theory suggest that those born after apartheid hold little or no party loyalty (implicitly meaning the ANC) because they were not subject to the racist regime, were not directly involved in the Struggle, and have had (supposedly) free access to education and information. Professor Stephen Friedman (2013) argues that this theory had already been proven false since 2009 because those born near the end of apartheid rarely change voting patterns significantly. To suggest that a few year’s difference in age would suddenly wipe away the long-lasting effects of apartheid is, as Friedman says, “either hopelessly naïve or based on a very strong desire to avoid unpleasant realities. It is not an explanation of voting behaviour.” For all the speculation and hype surrounding the Born Free vote in 2014, only a third of 18–19-year-olds registered to vote in this election. Young people abstained because firstly the habit had not been formed and secondly the youth have less embedded traditional networks that enforce voter participation (Schulz-Herzenberg, 2014, p. 32; 2019, p. 370). It is unfair and inaccurate to discuss the group as any kind of homogeneous mass as their expectations reflect the diversity of post-apartheid South Africa: Malema’s “young supporters” and the DA’s “youth” are, for example, incomparable. Despite these concerns from political theorists, the representation of Born Frees and the youth on election broadcasts9 was disappointingly homogeneous and prophetic. In 2014, Margaret Evans from CBC suggests, “The generation born after the end of apartheid [has] no living memory of it” (South Africa votes—ANC favoured to win, CBC) and CNN’s Robyn Curnow concurs, “First time voters who never knew apartheid [have] no memory of living under it. This is the generation that could have had an impact with ANC majority” (NewsCentre South Africa spot, CNN). Mpho Lakaje (First time South African voters, BBC) notes, “A new generation of voters are likely to have less emotional attachments to 9  Born Frees were only described once as such in South African broadcasts: the SABC reported that the “speculation that many of the Born Free generation would stay away from polls today because of apathy proved to be unfounded” (SABC 3 Prime Time 3). Of course, this comment misses the point—the turnout of the youth might have been high, but the registration levels for the voting-age population were still very low: 30% of 18–19-year-olds registered in 2014.

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the ANC than their parents”. This kind of framing suggests that the ANC has a strong hold over older people who “remember” the dark days of apartheid, which apparently the youth do not. Having “no memory of apartheid” seems to equal a lack of loyalty to any party, but particularly the “liberation” ANC party. Journalists generally position the youth as potential swing voters, away from the ANC and therefore towards the opposition. International journalists also tripped over their framing regularly, contradicting their statements and stories from one moment to the next. The BBC and CNN in particular portray the Born Frees as a homogeneous, apathetic group that was not loyal to the ANC, yet packages on the same channel contradicted this predominant narrative. For example, the BBC’s Zeinab Badawi insists, “[The Born Frees are] not encumbered with loyalty to the ANC and the liberation: they don’t remember they years of apartheid” (World News Today with Zeinab Badawi) and they “never experienced apartheid and have no attachment to the ANC as the liberation party” (World News Today). Yet on the same channel, Nomsa Masego’s Security tight ahead of SA poll shows a young black Born Free woman dressed in the ANC colours at a campaign rally. I think we’ve come a long way since 1994, and I believe in the leadership core. I believe in what it stands for, I’m very familiar with the policies and I like the agenda. So, for me personally, and for the majority, I think it speaks to us. And therefore, I will be voting ANC.

Her support of the ANC was surprising, given the previous narratives positioning the Born Frees as potential “swing voters”. These two narratives do not interact with each other: The Born Frees are either homogeneous and disenchanted with the ANC in Badawi’s pieces, or astute, loyal to the ANC, and enthusiastic as in Masego’s package. Instead of exploring this and acknowledging contradictions and inconsistencies, the framing ends up being confusing. An insertion into the discourse, that this is a complex situation and it’s not simple to explain, would have made all the difference. Schulz-Herzenberg (2014, p. 33) finds that the youth seem less likely to vote but are still interested in politics. CNN’s Robyn Curnow is the only journalist to touch on this point in 2014: she notes in CNN NewsCentre South Africa spot that the small percentage of Born Free voter registration is in fact proof of the “normalisation of South African politics because 18–19-year-olds are disenchanted with politics no matter where

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in the world you are”. Curnow determines that the low youth turnout might be an indication of a shift and new cycle of politics in South Africa, where the young generation have fewer reasons to automatically vote for the ANC. Yet in another broadcast from 2014, Curnow contradicts this statement almost entirely. In Millions head to the polls in South Africa she explains, “In the rural hills of Nkandla, the political allegations and denials matter very little”, especially to young Nonkululeko Zuma (who is “unrelated” to Nkandla’s famous resident). Nonkululeko, dressed in ANC regalia emblazoned with Jacob Zuma’s face, is a Born Free who was unable to vote in the 2014 election because of an apparent lack of documentation— a common problem in South Africa, Curnow explains. Despite living in the shadow of the sprawling, controversial Nkandla homestead in rural poverty, and without a birth certificate or any identification documents, Nonkululeko campaigned tirelessly for Jacob Zuma and is typical of the youth, Curnow says, as “loyalty to the liberation party and its leader remains strong” (Millions head to the polls in South Africa, CNN). This statement homogenises the youth vote to all South African Born Frees, when it might just be that particular village in Nkandla that remains loyal to the ANC. A simple “here” in Curnow’s last sentence would make the difference between homogenising the whole Zulu nation and Born Free youth and explaining complex voting patterns amongst rural enclaves in South Africa. More care is needed when representing these people. As with the BBC, these two narratives of a “swing vote” generation and the “loyal youth” coexist awkwardly and contradict each other. Instead of exploring the inherent inconsistencies in South Africa’s new democracy, admitting that some youth are loyal and some are disenchanted for a variety of reasons, international channels, and the BBC and CNN in particular, seem insistent on framing the Born Frees as a binary—they are either homogeneously disaffected or fervently loyal to the ANC, often in the same breath. Journalists may juxtapose two competing or contradicting frames in order to give the illusion of depth, but the resultant narrative here comes across as confusing and contradictory rather than enlightening. But all is not lost. There are some exceptional broadcasts that drift away from this binarising template, and two of these are from AJE and VOA in 2014. In South Africa heads to the polls, AJE’s Haru Mutasa explains, “young people don’t like the term [Born Free] because it implies that they are a cohesive group, when they have different experiences in a divided South Africa”. A young white man seated in his middle-class kitchen

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complains about the lack of jobs, and a young black man complains about the lack of privacy in his tiny room that he shares with his sister and parents. Both are disenchanted with the ANC and democracy in general and apathetic about the outcome of the election, yet both have very different complaints and backgrounds. Mutasa takes care to show the differences between Born Frees, and AJE in general avoids using the term “Born Free” as a catch-all term. Similarly, on VOA’s SA Elections Emily Jaab presents three Born Frees from different walks of life: a black university student is disenchanted with the process of democracy and is tired of ANC scandals; a young township resident doesn’t hesitate to pronounce her loyalty to Jacob Zuma and believes that 20 years is simply not enough time to fix all problems; while her neighbour, also a Born Free, will not vote in the elections as a “way of protesting” his parent’s insistence that the ANC still stands for liberation. Both Mutasa and Jaab explore the contradictions inherent in the young South African electorate, and these broadcasts are a good example of comprehensive, contextual, and investigative journalism that is still constrained by neoliberal values and time restraints. These broadcasts are the same length in time, have similar creative visuals, yet hold none of the templated stereotypes and damaging neoliberal binaries, indicating that taking more care in representation while still employing creative journalism is possible. Despite these few examples of clear journalism, the majority story about the Born Frees on international broadcasts relied on repeated clichéd phrases: “Born after the end of white rule” and “with no memory of apartheid” leads to “no party loyalty”. These broadcasts did not summarise the stories for a better understanding of the electorate in a short period of time, but rather blended the Born Frees into one indistinguishable group without context. Binarising the youth vote and reducing the group to a simple stereotype is unhelpful in understanding voting patterns and the process of democracy in South Africa. Because journalists rely on binaries of either/or and stereotypes that homogenise the youth, nuances cannot exist. Disengaging with Realities The reality of the ANC’s support, in rural and urban enclaves, amongst black, white, young, and old, is complex and cannot be spoken of in any kind of monolithic way. But international journalists, driven and constrained by time and neoliberal news values, flattened the perplexing ANC

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fealty into simplistic binaries: the electorate are either young and potential swing votes, or blindly loyal to the ANC and form a frightening populist movement, which is at odds with the norms of Westernised democracy. Part of the problem here is the lack of context afforded to political parties in South Africa—the ongoing confusion as to why the ANC keeps its loyal support is because journalists fail to dig deep enough into the intricacy of South African politics and society during elections, which would necessitate uncovering the liberation narrative (seen in Chap. 6). A template, formed at the edge of democracy in 1994, seems to drive the representation of people during South African elections. The binary of “us” versus “them” splits this representation into normative expectations and otherness. This is damaging during election time, as a society that only sees caricatures of itself cannot hope to respond to its most pressing issues because those issues are simply not represented.

Representing Politics: Leaders and Speakers The representation of politics is entwined with the depiction of the supporters, as the anti-colonial struggle for liberation would not have been possible without the participation of “the people”. Populism in the global south is not a spectre that haunts, denuded of action, but a real power that speaks, acts, and determines. The very real populist movements in Africa march with a determined beat and sing with a singular voice. As we saw in the previous chapters, many journalists are driven by neoliberal news values that prefer scandal, fragmented stories, and easily digested information in a push towards mediatisation. This push also meant that populism in South Africa was often framed in Western lenses of understanding: frightening and intimidating masses, socialism that was a threat to neoliberal ideals, and politics at odds with the Westernised norms of democracy. Four predominant frames represent the politics of South Africa. First, the problematic brand of populism sweeping the nation dominated depictions of ANC leadership and painted a picture of a tribalist, controversial political scene. Second, a peculiar manner of voicing politicians meant that political leaders were seen much more frequently than heard on television news. Third, the South African perspective of representing politics is vastly different from international depictions. Lastly, the new breed of video news on non-mainstream news represented realities far more clearly than traditional news channels. These frames on mainstream news intensify the

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distance felt between audiences and South African politics on television news because layers of interpretation diminish deliberative information. The Jacob Zuma Show Zuma blasted onto the international scene in 2009 as the “controversial man of the people”, absorbing journalistic attention for a decade. Mandela occasionally made an appearance—in 1994 as a sage but from 2009 onwards as a ghostly figure of the liberation struggle. Mbeki hardly appeared—South Africa had fallen off the international news radar between 1999 and 2009, which consigned Mbeki’s representation to local journalism only. Ramaphosa, constantly mispronounced, was hesitantly introduced as a would-be saviour of the South African ship. Due to the international spotlight fading once again, his 2019 representation was diluted, and the South African elections fell down the news agenda once again. For a decade, then, politics on international channels consisted of the Zuma Show, an all-singing, all-dancing brand of populism of which journalists seemingly could not get enough. South African and indeed African channels did not focus on Zuma in the same fashion, however, choosing instead to show a variety of political leaders casting votes, at rallies, and explaining manifestos. Zuma was simply another candidate casting his vote, and his controversial background—so important to international journalists—was ignored or merely skimmed over. The coverage locally was quite bland, filled with pundits speaking over politicians, and shallow depictions of a leader casting a ballot. Hence, the majority of portrayals of Zuma and his brand of populism came from international, Westernised channels. For these international journalists, Zuma was a “populist” and a “man of the people” (Mabuse, Inside Africa: South African election, CNN, 2009). His “carefully cultivated” working class image (Challenges await South Africa’s future leader, AFP, 2009) could “reinvigorate the grassroots electorate” (South African election day, CBC, 2009), and his traditional roots as a practicing polygamist (South Africa today, CNN, 2009) spoke to the majority of the black electorate. These references hint at an attempt to explain Zuma’s cult-like status among black South Africans, but journalists never quite go far enough to explore why Zuma holds such sway with the majority. The reason is of course complex, tied up with ethnicity, the liberation narrative, ANC campaign strategies, and Proportional

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Representation. International journalists rarely touch on any of these points, preferring to emphasise stereotypes and binaries. Offer and Demand As the global spotlight shifted away from the country in 1999 and 2004, it was up to local channels to represent these polls to the populace, which they did with the African Renaissance agenda and amidst increasing animosity from the government. In 2009, the Zuma Show dragged international attention back to the election with added luminosity as the cult-like leader fulfilled many neoliberal news values. The lack of context afforded to Zuma’s presidency in 2009, 2014, and its symbolic end in 2019 gave the impression of a distant and unknowable body politic and their populist leader. When analysing these images of the last three elections, a pattern appeared. As viewers, we are kept apart from the populace because of a particular type of signifying practice called “offer” and “demand”. When analysing images and the participants therein, Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006, p. 126) remark that two forms of contact with the audience are commonplace in assisting the narrative reading of the image. A person who is presented in an “offer” stance appears as if they do not know they are being looked at (by the camera and the viewers). A “demand” image, conversely, positions the person directly addressing the viewer, aware of the camera and of being in the shot. Offer shots suggest a coyness, shyness, a passivity. Demand shots give power to the participant. A person in a position of power is quickly stripped of agency and leadership qualities when framed with “offer” positioning in the visuals. Compare a first president looking directly at the camera or the journalist, speaking in their own voice, and aware of the audience, to a second president looking off-screen, dubbed by a journalist interpreting their words, and unaware of the camera or being filmed. The visual rhetoric is different. We are kept apart from the second president because there are layers of distance inserted. The president is unaware of us, cannot speak directly to us, is separate from us. In later election years, political leaders were increasingly framed in “offer” positioning and appeared as distant unknown characters. Instead, broadcasts foregrounded experts, journalists, and pundits who interpreted political actions and spoke over the leaders. In Zuma’s representation, the viewer’s gaze was often on an abstract, passive participant in “offer” stance, rather than on an active leader engaged with the television audience. In 2014, hardly any political leaders

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spoke directly to journalists and were rarely seen. Journalists therefore had to speak about the leaders rather than to them. This is in direct contrast to the 1994 election where Constand Viljoen, Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk, and Mangosuthu Buthelezi had dedicated broadcasts and in-depth interviews directly with journalists. The “offer” positioning in 2014 may be due to the politician’s reluctance to engage with the media but framing leaders in “offer” stance is damaging for agency. When communicating pivotal moments, like elections, clear and determined leadership is required. Framing presidents in an “offer” stance does not deliver this. So, this is a message to both journalists and political communication experts: by positioning leaders in “demand” shots, communication is more powerful and gives agency to the participant. Framing politicians in this manner or speaking directly to politicians offers clearer communication and should be implemented more often where possible. Mediatised reporting that requires dramatic and neoliberal news values necessitates short, deadline-driven stories with easy to understand narratives. The fault does not lie with the journalists, but with the deteriorating issues in the profession. So, it seems that both local/African journalists, in their shallow and tedious depictions of the democracy process, and international journalists, in mediatised dramatic frames, do not adequately investigate issues and consequences. Removing Mbeki This focus on Zuma’s profile as a “man of the people” hints at the ideological differences between Mbeki’s austere presidential style and Zuma’s traditionalism, yet CNN’s Nkepile Mabuse is the only reporter in the Zuma elections to go into detail about the 2008 split between Mbeki and Zuma. “Zuma also enjoys the support of those who loathe his predecessor in the ANC, Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki was seen as aloof, and disconnected, an intellectual, while Zuma, who rose to the top despite being born into poverty, is regarded as a man of the people” (Mbuse, South Africa Today, CNN, 2009). Yet not all broadcasters were this pedantic with their fact-­ checking. In Sky News’ ANC’s Jacob Zuma divides South Africa, Emma Hurd describes Zuma as a tyrant, surrounded by bodyguards, who is silent on controversial issues such as HIV/AIDS and Zimbabwe. Interestingly, Hurd appears to have made a spectacular mix-up here. It was Mbeki who was “silent” on these issues, not Zuma. For all his faults, Zuma made mighty steps to diminish the impact of HIV/AIDS in the country and

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removed the “quiet diplomacy” agenda towards Zimbabwe by frequently and outrightly criticising Mugabe. This kind of inaccurate reporting might be a simple oversight, but these kinds of instances effectively wipe out Mbeki’s presidency. International journalists in 2009, particularly CNN, Sky News, and AFP, simply refuse to acknowledge Mbeki’s decade of presidency. These channels continually referred to the ruling party as “Mandela’s ANC” (Results from Wednesday’s election, AFP) and South Africa as “Mandela’s Rainbow Nation” (Inside Africa: South African election, CNN; ANC awaits South African election result, Sky News; ANC’s Jacob Zuma divides South Africa, Sky News), which is under threat from Zuma’s populism. Throughout the 2009 election, Mandela appears to symbolically hand over the reins directly to Zuma, but this wipes out Mbeki’s presidency. The transition between cabinets seems to pass from “Mandela’s Rainbow Nation” directly to the turbulent Zuma administration, even when speaking about this retrospectively in 2014 and 2019. What this narrative fails to mention is that the transition was not from Mandela to Zuma but from Mbeki to Zuma. By framing the transition in this way, Mbeki’s nine-year presidency and his controversial recalling in 2008 is written out of the narrative across various international broadcasts. Why could this be? It remains a mystifying decision. Did international journalists ignore Mbeki’s leadership in 1999 and 2004 because he was difficult to approach, or that he loathed the mediatised political journalism style and refused to submit to sound bites? Zuma’s populist leadership style may have simply drawn more of the spotlight and naturally overshadowed Mbeki’s more austere and reserved personality. At the very least, then, the avoidance of speaking about Mbeki, when the scandalous ousting occurred just months before the 2009 election, is a symptom of mediatisation. South Africa’s biggest political scandal in the first two decades of democracy was effectively erased on the news because, presumably, Zuma’s cult-like personality was a far greater draw card. Regardless of the underlying reason of removing Mbeki from the news narrative, the fixation on the visually appealing Zuma at the expense of dry and dull Mbeki is neglectful, reductionist, and inaccurate. South African Perspective: Mbeki Is Popular While international journalists climbed aboard the Zuma Show bandwagon and ignored the Mbeki presidency in its entirety, South African

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channels took a different road in personalising the presidencies. Because international broadcasters shied away from covering the 1999 and 2004 elections, it was up to the local South African news channels to represent the elections alone. Mbeki became the popular one in  local coverage. Mbeki, therefore, had a very different representation on local news channels than international ones (in that international journalists hardly mentioned him at all). Local channels—that is, only the SABC and eTV until 2009—personalised the ANC leadership, asking citizens to evaluate Mbeki’s leadership capabilities in 1999 and suggesting his prodigious intervention had alleviated poverty that affected voter registration in 2004. In 2004, eTV evening news showed Mbeki cracking jokes as he cast his vote, while IEC officials stood “laughing at his Afro hairstyle” in his old ID book (Titus, Election 2004 2, eTV, 2004). The SABC also created personality-driven coverage as journalists followed Mbeki during vote-catch events in the run-up to the election. We see him at intimate distance at an ANC rally in KwaZulu-Natal (Campaign Trail), smiling and laughing with people at the Rand Easter Show in Gauteng (Thabo Mbeki visits the Rand Show), and as a guiding spirit in ID Books, whereby his representative hand-delivers a new ID book to an elderly woman. Throughout these broadcasts, journalists film Mbeki in medium close-up shots, tightly focused on his smiling face. Edward T Hall referred to the close-up shot as a “personal proxemic” (1982, p. 118) while Gianetti (1990, p. 64) maintains that the distance between the camera and the subject on screen mirrors the emotional distance between the subject and the viewer. Close-ups promote the illusion of face-to-face contact with the candidate, and so the closer Mbeki appears to the audience on screen, the greater the viewer’s supposed emotional attachment to him. Unlike Zuma’s low-angle and long-shot representation from 2009, or even Mandela’s mid- to long shot in 1994, Mbeki was most frequently seen in a medium close-up, smiling, and at eye level. The propensity of medium close-up shots of Mbeki in the South African broadcasts presents him at a conversational distance, emphasising emotion and relation to the viewer—Mbeki appears here as a “man of the people”, just like you and I, popular and in good humour. While the SABC and eTV frame Mbeki in this “personal distance” and emphasise his emotional attachment to the populous, public opinion actually dropped 20% between Mandela’s presidency and Mbeki’s in 2004. Along with having a “political tin ear” and being aloof and academic, Mbeki was hopelessly detached from his electorate by 2004. The SABC’s

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“man of the people” visual rhetoric might be part of the demand on the public broadcaster to present the government in a positive light. So, it seems that neither the international nor local broadcasters get it quite right here, predominantly because the journalists deal in binaries. Mbeki for South African journalists has to be represented positively, which negates the problematic governance in reality. For international journalists, Mbeki simply doesn’t exist. The 20-Year Mark The 2014 election year was heavily symbolic of 1994—the auspicious 20-year anniversary date was emblazoned on flags in major cities, celebrations on Freedom Day (27 April) included lavish concerts and events, while the death of Mandela only five months earlier added further emotional impact to the election. International channels frequently referred to 1994 and the 20-year anniversary while also presenting the election year as a synecdoche for the ANC’s failure to deliver. AJE notes, “Despite this [anniversary], people still live in tin shacks” (Page, OB 2) and questions “why do they still live like this” (Mutasa, OB 3), as the tin township zooms into focus on screen. The BBC concurs—“the optimism of 20 years ago has now evaporated, replaced by cynicism, frustration and, increasingly, violence” (Badawi, World News Today). Other global journalists highlighted the emotional connection of the election: CBC’s Margaret Evans noted that voters approached the election with “a lot of resonance” and the event “pulled at the heart strings” (South Africa votes—ANC favoured to win, CBC). The 20-year anniversary for international journalists therefore appeared two-fold: the two decades had offered the ANC ample time to rectify basic living conditions for the poorest citizens but the government had not fulfilled their promises, and the resonance of the date was auspicious for an emotional populace. These journalists determined that 20 years of democracy was presumably enough time for the ANC to deliver on the promises of 1994, and the very existence of poverty in the townships was evidence that the party had failed on this promise. Of course, the reality is far more complex than these stories present: the ANC’s RDP and GEAR policies attempted to redress the inequalities and have significantly improved the lives of millions, but the neoliberal focus of these policies coupled with the global economic downturn has resulted in the inequality gap widening over the years. These stories mention none of this background, but instead

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present the 20-year benchmark as somehow “time enough” to redress the ills of apartheid, including racially divisive living conditions such as townships. Interestingly, South African channels did not mention the anniversary of 1994  in this way, with the only references coming from two vox pops on eNCA and the SABC reminiscing about the voting queues. Local channels seemed more interested in keeping the focus on the present election and normalising democracy than looking to the past. For South African channels, the 2014 election was just another vote, with some emotional connection to the past. International news channels seemed instead fixated on the “development/failure” binary set out in the template of post-Cold War news values. Voicing Politicians in a Lip Flap Deciphering how journalists depicted political leaders on television news is more complex than simply counting frequency or coding language. To say that Mandela “spoke” 12 times in 10 broadcasts does not give an adequate picture of how this source was used. Instead, the multimodal approach of this analysis meant that the juxtaposition between audio and image was of most interest. Hence, an interesting variable appeared in the later broadcasts. Political leaders were continuously “re-voiced”, that is, interpreted by pundits and journalists. The leaders would appear on screen but would not be heard. This peculiarity is called a “lip flap”, coined by Bucy and Grabe (2009, p. 202), and is considered unflattering and generally discouraged in political journalism: Lip flap is a type of audiovisual incongruency, which has been shown experimentally to prompt tune-out of the verbal channel (the reporter’s voice) and tune-in of the visual channel. Visual scenarios where attention is drawn to a candidate who appears voiceless but is awkwardly mouthing words cannot be taken as neutral coverage.

Despite the lip flap being an unfavourable technique, Jacob Zuma, the EFF’s Malema, and Cyril Ramaphosa all “spoke” in this manner during the 2009, 2014, and 2019 broadcast samples. Zuma “spoke” more frequently than any other political leader across all years in both local and international broadcasts, but we rarely actually hear him. Instead, journalists talk over him and political analysts interpret his actions, words, and policies. We can see the politician attempting to speak, but we cannot hear

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or understand their words. A lip flap inserts layers of interpretation between the audience and the politician. Framing the politician in this way renders them distant, awkward, and unknown. The 2009 election was also the first time that political analysts or “pundits” spoke more than other people in the South African news broadcasts. Previous election broadcasts voiced political leaders directly, either in interviews or when they spoke at rallies, and journalists interviewed citizens to give voice to their concerns. Yet, by 2009, this technique of measuring citizen and political information had faded. Instead, business analysts, political analysts, think tank members, academics, other journalists, and researchers explain the political situation in small “bite-sized” quotes specifically designed for television news. The lack of first-hand sources from the ANC leadership indicates the party’s ongoing disdain for the media and deterioration of the journalist-politician relationship (discussed at length in Chaps. 3 and 5) but this is not the end of the story. The use of pundits in place of first-hand sources intensifies the distance between the politicians and the viewers, adding layers of interpretation of policy, politics, and power. Political leaders, especially those from the media-­ resistant ANC, are unlikely to prescribe to bite-sized quotes designed for fast news. Much more favourable in a deadline-heavy newsroom is the political journalist or business analyst well versed in the ways of the media. In 2019, more ANC leaders were finally voiced as Ramaphosa’s New Dawn attempted to redress the relationship between government and media but, still and despite this improved rapport, pundits dominated coverage. Non-mainstream News Does the Heavy Lifting A key difference in coverage should be mentioned at this point. While traditional television news was the predominant method of visual news until 2014, the later election years had a much more diverse array of video news. The non-mainstream digital video news broadcasts of AmandlaTV and africanews in 2014 and ViceNews and Politically Aweh10 in 2019 depicted far more diversity in citizen voices and issues of concern during the election than mainstream, traditional television news. Along with personalising and normalising the presidencies, local South African news during the last five elections was narrow and uncontroversial, a polar opposite  See Chap. 4 for a description of Politically Aweh, AmandlaTV, and africanews.

10

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to the intense mediatised style on international channels. Avoiding controversial topics was not a sudden decision, but a culmination of points over the years. By 2019, a decade of state capture and a strangulation hold on media resources meant that local coverage was predominantly pundit-­ driven and shallow. Yet non-mainstream channels during the elections were far more investigative and grassroots-focused than traditional television news channels during the election years. Non-mainstream video news journalists interviewed citizens about the housing crisis and unemployment figures in the Western Cape, as well as what they thought about the new parties COPE, EFF, and GOOD. ViceNews in particular held the ANC to account better than any other journalist has done over six election years. The journalist in Redistributing private land was a key issue in South Africa’s elections (ViceNews, 2019) made ANC spokesperson Jesse Duarte visibly uncomfortable when asking direct questions about land redistribution and consistently refused to back down. No other journalist received that kind of access or broadcast that kind of interrogation. This style of broadcast gives me hope for the international profession where creative literary journalism can successfully combine with fourth-estate watchdogism. These non-­ mainstream broadcasts attempted to seek the “why” far more often than mainstream journalists, who appeared to be quite puzzled by the ANC’s continued victories at the polls. Friedman’s (2011, p. 109) observations about the “view from the suburbs” come into play here: the non-­ mainstream media are far less biased towards a middle-class or neoliberal narrative than the mainstream media, which, he argues, has a “propensity to ignore the experiences and perspectives of people outside its suburban world” (ibid., p. 110). Without the neoliberal news values restraining coverage and no limitation on time or context-driven stories, non-mainstream news was free to cover grassroots voices without demand for elite sources or objective “balance”. The non-mainstream media from 2009 onwards seek out poor, rural, black voices more often than white, middle-class pundits, although these too are used sparingly.

Talking Without Listening Nyamnjoh notices that neoliberal, Western news values are often so entrenched in stories about Africa that journalists often fall into a trap of “talking without listening” (2005, p. 57). Journalists talk about citizens and politicians rather than to or with them. Westernised news, Nyamnjoh

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proclaims, relies increasingly on reductionist frames of villains and victims, crises and miracles, saviours and sufferers, and these subsequently leave little room for evaluation and complex understanding of the story of democracy. These thrusts towards a PR-ised form of journalism prevent the media on performing their role adequately in the democratisation process. This problem of “talking without listening” was particularly visible in later election broadcasts from both local South African channels and international channels alike. Political Drop-off Mediatised journalism is news as a spectacle rather than news as information, caused in part by economic and neoliberal drives. The way journalists present sources during the elections highlights this problem. If you happen to watch election coverage, you might find that the people speaking most often are not political leaders themselves, but business leaders or economists, political experts from university think tanks, celebrities and thought leaders, or political editors from newspapers. These voices are pundits—those smooth-talking prophets who try to make sense of politics without actually being a politician. Pundits offer “cultural fast-food—pre-­ digested and pre-thought” (Louw, 2005, p. 81) for an audience that is ravenous for “fast news” (i.e. mediatised episodic reporting). By sourcing these multiple pundit voices, journalists can give the impression of objectivity and balance while still using common framing techniques and news values. Pundits who are trained in the art of media logic (other journalists, political editors, media specialists) are more preferable in the world of fast news. During the six South African general elections, punditry increased dramatically between 2009 and 2014, while the drop-off from political sources was equally significant. For example, in 1994 71% of the sources were political leaders and 29% were other elite sources (journalists, celebrities, analysts). In 2014, 21% of sources were political leaders and 79% were other elite sources (see Jones, 2019 for a deeper analysis of these sources). The reason for this preference for punditry and avoidance of political voices appears to be two-fold. Firstly, the deteriorating relationship between journalists and politicians intensified the push towards pundits, as ANC leaders in particular were difficult to contact and reluctant to speak. Secondly, mediatised political reporting was partly due to underfunded newsrooms and poorly trained journalists multitasking in the quest to

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break news first with pundits, rather than sources who are difficult to acquire. The decrease in citizen voices post-1994 also indicates a focus on authorities and, later, pundits at the expense of grassroots information. Despite some profound coverage at times (particularly AJE, the SABC in 2019, and non-mainstream news like ViceNews and AmandlaTV), the depth that journalists attempted to present was lost over the years in the mediatised, top-down, and polarised coverage. Both local and international journalists disengaged with political leaders in later election years, selecting analysts, celebrities, and thought leaders rather than political party sources. Yet there is a problem in using sources like this. I’ve written elsewhere about punditry during the South African election coverage (Jones, 2016,  2019) and the crux of it is this: when journalists disengage with political leaders and citizen voices, relying instead on pundits and already-­ known voices of the elite, they create a distance between the audience and politics. The preference for punditry adds layers of interpretation between the audience and knowledge about the society in which they live. The interpretation creates an invisible barrier between the viewer and the politician, enhancing the sense of disengagement. The audience get “pre-­ digested” fast news rather than information for substantive deliberation direct from political leaders or the citizens themselves. If audiences are only ever presented with pundits, prophets, and proclaimers, it becomes increasingly unlikely they are able to independently assess the political landscape for themselves. Re-voicing, interpreting, and employing the “lip flap” when representing politicians positions them as passive participants rather than active agents. This positioning weakens the information and intensifies the distance between viewer and policy discussion. A key tenet of journalism practice is that news should provide substantive information necessary to enable democracy, creating an inclusive public sphere that provides the opportunity to receive information, to listen, and to speak. The importance of “listening” to the view from the ground can therefore not be overstated, especially in volatile situations, when presenting controversial issues, and during rising unrest. When the population no longer feels they are taken seriously or, worse, no longer trust their representation on the news, citizens distrust journalists. Despite this well-­ known role of the media in the democratisation process, modern political journalism prefers drama to depth, pundits over people, and personalities over policies. This is the “hype-ocracy” to which Louw (2005, p. 50)

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refers. Modern political journalism values experts, celebrities, and smooth talkers over inherently complex and often contradictory unfiltered information from politicians and citizens. Descriptive, Rather than Seeking the “why” By failing to investigate elections beyond a brief and superficial portrayal of parties and voters, journalists tended to simplify and flatten issues and the experience of democracy in South Africa. The “who, what, where, when” were prioritised on stories, resulting in a paucity of the “why” (Duncan, 2009, p. 219) on both local and international broadcasts. While local news avoided controversial representations almost entirely, international journalists relied on binaries and stereotypes that homogenised political support and disengaged with the realities of democracy. Both local and international journalists favoured punditry over politicians and citizen voices. The problem is not that these journalists mentioned the intense support, the inherent contradictions, or the Zuma Show, but that they framed these issues as simplified stereotypes without depth or context. Intense support becomes unthinking intimidating fealty, at odds with Westernised norms. Inherent contradictions become entangled, messy narratives that do not inform but rather confuse and entertain. The highly visual “Zuma show” others the ANC leadership and wipes out nuance and democratic realities. Journalists simply do not seek the “why” deeply enough, glossing over issues and avoiding reflexivity of their own reporting. Most predominantly, disengaging with voices over the years (both political and citizen sources) leads to a detachment of realities of democracy in South Africa. This reporting style of simplistic “fast news” that focuses on the spectacle rather than the issue is symptomatic of the thrust towards mediatised reporting. None of this is the fault of individual journalists but rather the system in which they live and work, a profession that increasingly favours fastness over fullness, the hype-ocracy designed to entertain, rather than inform.

The Challenge to Do Better This chapter may read to some as a harangue of all journalists, local and international, across two and a half decades. But it is not. Journalists are seldom at fault when they fall into representation traps. The system and professionalisation of journalism dictates, more often than not, that

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neoliberal news values sell stories. The economics of modern political journalism is mixed up in power, interference, training, funding, digitalisation, and geopolitics. To ask that journalists step out of this ideological imbroglio and report the elections with depth and empathy in one movement is a tall order. So, what do journalists do? How do we demand that representations of South African elections reflect reality while also understanding that stories sell best when they focus on news values? The balance is not easy. As I outline in Chap. 9, the first step in reflecting reality is voicing from the source. That is, avoiding pundits, the easy interview, and rather seeking the “view from the ground” instead of the suburbs. This act allows societies to see themselves. The second step is to be reflexive in one’s own practice. Acknowledge inconsistencies, contradictions, dichotomies. Binarising stories into “friends” and “enemies” is a hangover from the post-Cold War news frames and it is time we moved on. Mediatisation makes this difficult, but it is possible. Take for instance the broadcasts from Haru Mutasa (AJE, South Africa heads to the polls, 2014) and Emily Jaab (VOA, SA Elections, 2014). Both broadcasts discuss the “Born Free” electorate but neither homogenise the youth vote as an indistinguishable group. Instead, the journalists take care to show contradictions, explore realities and context, and voice the citizens in their own words (albeit dubbed occasionally). Both Mutasa and Jaab present comprehensive and contextual journalism in a short space of time. There are still camera proxemics that highlight binaries (poor and rich, black and white), produce creative and dramatic scenes (fading sunlight glinting off township roofs), but this only adds to the emotion of the broadcast, rather than drives it. In 2019, Fahmida Miller’s visuals of the IFP do not other the political party or its members, but instead show African fealty for an ethnic party as ordinary and expected. There is deep investigation in Miller’s broadcast, presented with empathy and care. While still creative and employing camera proxemics, it informs rather than entertains. When journalism is funded properly and resourced adequately, when journalists are trained and protected, and when the profession is taken seriously, magic happens. Chapter 9 outlines three steps, utilising Constructive Journalism, to improve visual framing and rhetoric, enhance clear communication, and challenge the status quo. Through Constructive Journalism practice could be improved and the story of South Africa’s democracy deepened.

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Methods Change Meanings Analysing both imagery and audio, and the resulting juxtaposition between both, showed local South African journalists adopting a cautious approach. This is not represented in many of the most prevalent pieces of research about these elections on television news (such as Duncan, 2009, 2014), but I assume this is because of the difference in the methodology employed in the analyses. Other researchers of these elections on television news used content analysis that looked at discourse and tone, a method that Bucy and Grabe (2009, pp. 70, 77) say ignores the single most distinguishing feature of television, the stream of images, and is therefore insufficient in deciphering how representations of power and politics occurred on the news. The method I use here (outlined in Jones, 2016) puts specific emphasis on image rhetoric and notes key juxtapositions between the audio and visual, and so I have found additional layers to coverage, rather than just discourse and tone. This is not to say previous studies are “incorrect”, they are not, but different methods create different results. A further recommendation here is to consider semiotic data when analysing visual news.

References ANC awaits South African election result. (2009). [News broadcast]. Sky News: Emma Hurd. ANC’s Jacob Zuma divides South Africa. (2009). [News broadcast]. Sky News: Emma Hurd. Bucy, E. P., & Grabe, M. E. (2009). Image bite politics. News and the visual framing of elections. Oxford University Press. Campaign trail. (2004). [News broadcast]. SABC: Denzyl Janneker. Challenges await South Africa’s future leader. (2009). [News broadcast]. AFP: Unknown reporter. Duncan, J. (2009). Desperately seeking depth: The media and the 2009 elections. In R. Southall & J. Daniel (Eds.), Zunami! The South African elections of 2009 (pp. 215–231). Jacana. Duncan, J. (2014). The media and the elections: Competition without diversity. In C. Schulz-Herzenberg & R. Southall (Eds.), Election 2014: The campaigns, results, & future prospects (pp. 133–154). Auckland Park. Earth Matters. (1994). [News broadcast]. CNN: David Mattingly, Sharon Collins, Joe Oliver. Election 2004. (2004). [News broadcast]. eTV: Debora Patta, Hope Mokgatle, Natasha Landman, Akash Bramdeo.

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Evening news. (1994). [News broadcast]. CBS: Bill Whitaker. Fair, J. E., & Astroff, R. J. (1991). Constructing race and violence: U.S news coverage and the signifying practices of apartheid. Journal of Communication, 41(4), 58–74. Final election rallies. (2009). [News broadcast]. BBC: Peter Biles. Friedman, S. (2011). Whose freedom? South Africa’s press, middle-class bias and the threat of control. Equid Novi: African Journalism Studies, 32(2), 106–121. Friedman, S. (2013). Theory of born frees rests on many falsehoods. [O]. Retrieved May 2, 2014, from https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/ columnists/2013-­11-­20-­theory-­of-­born-­frees-­rests-­on-­many-­falsehoods/ Gianetti, L. (1990). Understanding movies (5th ed.). Prentice Hall. Hall, E. T. (1982). The hidden dimension. Random House. Harrison, D. (1981). The White Tribe of Africa. California Press Huge turnout in South Africa election. (2009). [News broadcast]. BBC: John Simpson. ID Books. (2004). [News broadcast]. SABC: Mahendra Raghnuath. Inside Africa: South African election. (2009). [News broadcast]. CNN: Isha Sesay, Nkepile Mabuse. Jones, B. (2016). Television news and the digital environment: A triadic multimodal approach for analysing moving image media. African Journalism Studies, 37(2), 116–137. Jones, B. (2019). The lack of listening: News sources in South Africa’s five general elections, 1994–2014. Journalism, 20(8), 1014–1034. https://doi. org/10.1177/1464884919845455 Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. L. (2006). Reading images: the grammar of visual design. London: Hodder and Arnold. Leaders Voting. (2009). [News broadcast]. eTV: Deborah Patta. Louw, P. E. (2005). The media and political process. Sage. Louw, P. E. (2009). Reporting foreign places, in Global journalism: Topical issues and media systems. In De Beer & JC Merrill (Eds.) (153–164). London: Pearson Education. Mattes, R. (2005). Public opinion since 1994. In J. Piombo & L. Nijzink (Eds.), Electoral politics in South Africa: Assessing the first democratic decade (pp. 40–63). HSRC Press. Mbeki visits the Rand Show. (2004). [News broadcast]. SABC: Unknown reporter. Mbembe, A. (2015). On the postcolony. University of California. Meintjes, L. (2017). Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma aesthetics after apartheid. Duke University Press. Nevitt, L. (2010). What’s the deal with Toyi-Toyi? [O]. Retrieved July 20, 2017, from http://www.capetownmagazine.com/whats-­the-­deal-­with/Whats-­the-­ Deal-­With-­Toyitoyi/125_22_17384

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Nyamnjoh, F. M. (2005). Africa’s media, democracy, and politics of belonging. Pretoria: UNISA OB2. (2014). [News broadcast]. AJE: Haru Mutasa. OB3. (2014). [News broadcast]. AJE: Haru Mutasa, Tania Page. Profile of a Zulu nation. (1994). [News broadcast]. CNN: Brett Sadler. Results from Wednesday’s poll. (2009). [News broadcast]. AFP: Unknown reporter. SA Elections. (2014). [News broadcast]. VOA: Emily Jaab. SABC 3 Prime Time 3. (2014). [News broadcast]. SABC 3: Unknown reporter. Schulz-Herzenberg, C. (2014). The 2014 national and provincial results. In C.  Schulz-Herzenberg & R.  Southall (Eds.), Election 2014. The campaigns, results, and future prospects (pp. 188–227). Jacana. Schulz-Herzenberg, C., & Southall, R. (Eds.). (2019). Election 2019: Change and stability in South Africa’s democracy. Jacana Media. South Africa heads to the polls. (2014). [News broadcast]. AJE: Haru Mutasa. South Africa today. (2009). [News broadcast]. CNN: Isha Sesay, Nkepile Mabuse, Robyn Curnow. South Africa voter education. (1994). [News broadcast]. ITN: Judy Aslett. South Africa votes  – ANC favoured to win. (2014). [News broadcast]. CBC: Margaret Evans. South African election day. (2009). [News broadcast]. CBC: David McGuffin. South African election: ANC under fire. (2009). [News broadcast]. CNN: Nkepile Mabuse. World News Today. (2014). [News broadcast]. BBC: Zeinab Badawi.

CHAPTER 8

Visuals and Violence

Introduction In the run-up to the 1994 election, news pounced upon the IFP clashes with the ANC in hotspots around the Highveld, and the car bomb explosion, orchestrated by a splinter cell of the AWB, in downtown Johannesburg. In 1999 and 2004 things were remarkably calm, with just a whisper on the wind of a long-forgotten past. Aerial journalists in helicopters reported from the previous no-man’s land, commenting that “we have been flying over the East Rand area, Katlehong, Thokoza, and Vosloorus, and there have been tremendous queues there”. A form of peace journalism occurred, or perhaps it was Sunshine Journalism. Instead of fixating on the visuals of violence, local journalists looked to authorities (police, military, and their symbols) for confirmation that the election was peaceful and controlled. By 2009, violence was back on the menu: the previous year’s widespread xenophobic violence left 62 people dead, thousands displaced, and ill tastes in the mouths of South Africans and investors alike. The international representation of the 2009 election drew on this tense environment and relied upon symbols of violence, rather than actual violence. Extreme low angles, tight framing, overly loud audio, and people charging the camera came to represent the threat of savagery, rather than any kind of violent action. In 2014, “violence” had once again shifted in meaning from damage to people to damage of property. The community protests in 2014 drew the camera lens to the debris, as journalists employed visual techniques to focus on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Jones, Elections and TV News in South Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71792-6_8

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imminent threats to the democratic process. Citizen voices were missing throughout the 2014 coverage. Using visually rich images, focusing on fires and rubble, journalists showed the impact of the protests not through citizen experiences but through the destruction of property. This signifying practice reduces the context of the protests to concerns of property ownership and individual rights, which Mutua (2002, p. 12), Norris (1997, p. 14), and Hawk (2002, p. 168) suggest is a neoliberal frame. By 2019, ethnic and political violence was mostly a thing of the past. ANC squabbles in KwaZulu-Natal continued with some high-profile political assassinations, but ultimately citizens voted in a consolidated democracy, free from the fear of intimidation or violence. Yet journalists, especially those trained in neoliberal news values from Westernised channels, couldn’t let go of this violence/control frame. “Violence” now became equated with “property damage”. Protesters continued to be unknowable and indistinct while police and authorities were the knowable bringers of law and order, there to rectify an apparently chaotic and savage situation. In visual evidence of mediatised, neoliberal news, Westernised journalists fixated on the details of violence rather than exploring the meaning and consequences of protests in the country. This practice negates context and trivialises the very real struggles of the community against the government. This chapter investigates, via social semiotic and multimodal discourse analyses, the visual representation of two significant themes throughout the election coverage: violence and its control. Many scholars of African elections have noted the propensity of pre- and post-election violence across postcolonial African states and its coverage by international media. Hall, for example, analysed the Burundian post-election violence in 2015 and explained that global media “acted like a mayfly” and reported on the “crisis de jour”, taking little time to explore context or evaluate consequences. “Such traumas are covered by the world press with the type of breathless excitement of a boxing match shorn of context and personality, with anonymous combatants temporarily given names for the duration of an event” (Hall, 2015). While a pessimistic argument on the international media’s attention on African election violence, this statement is a reflection of political journalism’s push towards mediatisation combined with a complicated history of colonialism in Africa. Election violence is often seen through the lens of binaries too, specifically the “failed state” and “development” binary. If an African state does not demonstrate Western

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democratic values, such as regime change, then it automatically falls on the “failure” side. Conversely, if democratic values are in place—even problematically—then the nation “progresses” correctly. Framing democracy as an “either/or” concept ignores democracy’s package deal. Democracy is a complex concept, hard won, and strenuously maintained. Binarising African experiences of democracy in this way trivialises issues and negates context. In analysing the visual moments of six elections on television news, two predominant themes became apparent. First, the classification of violence changed from “damage to people” to “damage to property” in a journalistic drive towards neoliberal news values in later years. Second, authorities who control the violence (police, military, security) are presented as bringers of law and order, reminiscent of Fair and Astroff’s (1991) analysis. Using camera proxemics that foreground authorities over citizens, journalists highlight the control of the protests and violence rather than the causes or consequences. This chapter argues that distance and hesitation in reporting moments of unrest during the election damages the representation of democracy in the country, and binaries trivialise the hard won and strenuously maintained democratic principles. Finally, the chapter ends with a suggestion for better framing methods, via camera proxemics, in moments of crisis.

Violence Portraying the unsettled nature of South Africa’s democracy on television news took one of two paths. Journalists either fixated on the details of unrest or ignored it completely. There was a sparse area in the middle, where few journalists dared to tread. While South Africa’s democracy consolidated and normalised over the years, the 1994 election was by far the most “violent” in terms of actual harm to human life. Car bombs in downtown Johannesburg, instigated by the AWB, highlighted in vivid colours the civil war threatening to engulf the country in its flames. A further bomb explosion at Jan Smuts airport (now OR Tambo International) in Johannesburg on the evening before the voting day caught the attention of journalists who had probably arrived via that location just days before. The pre-democracy 1990s were fraught. These two explosions on the eve of the elections hinted at an iceberg of violence drifting beneath the surface. I remember practicing frequent “duck and cover” routines as a

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seven-­year-­old. In Colin Mann Primary School on the edges of Germiston, Johannesburg, we would regularly drop our worksheets, climb onto the laminate floor under the desks, and cover our heads with our hands. Teachers, trained in emergency protocol, would listen for the all-clear. Once, in 1990, we had a legitimate bomb scare. A supposed AWB Ystergarde member had phoned our primary school to warn of an explosive placed in the sleepy suburb of Lambton, and the entire school went into panic mode. We were led to the large soccer field at the end of the school and sat in our class lines for over an hour. Seven-year-olds do not know the importance of bomb drills, so we played in the dead winter grass of the field while security personnel swept the school for the non-existent bomb. Frequent bomb scares and drills occurred in our privileged suburb but, as a youngster from a white family, I rarely understood or experienced the danger that my fellow South Africans faced daily. The 1994 election did not wipe away this tension. It was the long negotiation process leading up to it that called a halt to the guerrilla tactics and brinkmanship of the three biggest political instigators of the violence. Yet hardly any of this arrived at the television news screens inside or outside of the country, which tended to focus on event-based coverage rather than issues, causes, and consequences. Election Violence Bookended the 1994 Election Fair and Astroff’s seminal 1991 analysis of US media coverage of South Africa suggests reporters often focused on “black-on-black” violence. Very rarely did any kind of white terrorism make the news, despite the AWB Afrikaner neo-Nazi movement a strong force of terror throughout the 1980s and 1990s. My own analysis ratifies their argument, as international journalists frequently regarded the IFP as perpetrators of pre-­ election violence, even when it was the AWB to blame, as in the car bomb attacks in Johannesburg pre-election. Presumably this misplaced blame was due to the IFP’s more visually dramatic and intimidating image than that of the white Afrikaner (legitimised, as we saw in Chap. 7, as the “White Tribe of Africa”). Perhaps the terrifying IFP impi could more easily fit into already-known stereotypes of black violence and savagery. Two-thirds of all 1994 international broadcasts that I analysed depicted visible acts of violence. Tangible bloodshed, bombing campaigns, heightened tensions between police and protesters, and weapons firing on scattering black people filled the screens. Three categories of violence

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significations included threats of violent action (weapons drawn, intimidating marching, camera movements to suggest violence is imminent), the aftermath (debris, injuries, blood, traumatised people, and dead bodies), and direct discourse (commentary from journalists or vox pops indicating “violence” or “bloodshed”). This low-level civil war was manifestly visible and broadcast in high-resolution technicolour for the global audience to scrutinise. Interestingly, the US and UK broadcasts described the 1994 violence differently, indicating a contrast in ideology. US journalists implied that the pre-election factional violence directly threatened the election outcome and was a fundamental feature of South African culture. Joe Oliver from CNN reports, “if the last few weeks are any indication, democracy will come with more violence, in the homelands, in the cities, and in the townships” (Earth Matters, CNN, 1994). Black people run across a field in a low angle, fired upon by advancing police, and the aftermath of the bomb blasts fill the screen as Mark Watts from CNN admits, “mass action has often been used to settle disputes in South Africa”. In a short spot for CNN’s Electing the Future (1994), an ominous voiceover questions, “South Africa’s violent road to democracy. As the nation gets ready for a history-making election, which will prevail? The bullet or the ballot box?” The images on screen show white police officers fire at unseen targets, protesters spear Mandela’s face with assegais, and white police assault black protesters with sticks and leather straps. The segment ends as Mandela and de Klerk shake hands and walk across a stage to the podium. This seemingly unending culture of violence of two opposing sides (IFP spears and ANC aspirations, black protesters and white police) juxtaposes the hope of peace through negotiation. These broadcasts depict an “all or nothing” approach, where factional and ethnic violence directly threaten the road to democracy. Meanwhile, UK broadcasts also mention the bombing campaign and factional violence but treat it differently. Journalists from UK channels focused more on the bombing campaign than factional violence, for example, and mentioned it as a one-off event in the grander story of democracy. “Nine people were killed today. … With tension mounting in the last few hours before the elections, four members of the ANC were shot” (Werge, South Africa report, BBC, 1994). “This attack marks the deliberate change of tactics by the terrorists, with this strike at an international target. … But millions of blacks were up at sunrise, queuing at the polls, undeterred by the spate of bombings, and relishing the opportunity to vote for change”

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(Austin, South Africa elections bombing, ITN, 1994). Both ITN and the BBC foreground the bombing but mention that the election will happen “regardless” of the violence. The violence appears to exist in the same space and time as the election but does not directly threaten it. Neither the UK nor the US broadcasts attempted to investigate the cause or ramifications of the violence any further than debris, destruction, and military control. Violence at the edge of democracy was therefore portrayed, to international audiences at least, in a visible, manifest image of danger and bloodshed without cause or end. This representation only occurred on international channels, however, as the SABC ignored or neatly hopped over any mention of violence. Peace Journalism or Simply a Lack of Violence? Confirming Silke and Schrire’s (1994, p. 140) initial findings of American news coverage of the 1994 election, I found that narratives on US/UK broadcasts were also shallow, removed of any sense of context, and prioritised the razzmatazz at the expense of policy discussions and analysis. The SABC, as the only local television broadcaster at the time and which controlled all local newswires, did not produce the same drama that was present in the international news broadcasts. Instead, in the broadcasts I looked at,1 SABC journalists conducted live outside broadcasts from calm polling booths in the early morning, reported on the newly designed flag, and provided brief mentions of the voter turnout. SABC journalists appeared apprehensive to show any kind of opinion or bias during the first election coverage, which fits with other research of the time (Silke & Schrire, 1994, p. 141; Anglin, 1995, p. 540; Jacobs, 1999, p. 154; Berger, 2002, p. 5; Sparks, 2009, p. 208). The SABC was under a harsh international spotlight from UNOMSA and the IMC, which may have contributed to the apparent neutrality of the local broadcasts. 1  There is a problem with the SABC TV News archives, which are in disarray. Two decades of underfunding, political interference, poor maintenance, and a substandard organisation system means that retrieving any archival footage is a “smash and grab” exercise reliant on hopes, prayers, and the tenacity of the archivists working in difficult circumstances. Therefore, the 1994 broadcasts I acquired for this study (see Jones, 2018) were extremely limited. I am engaged in an ongoing research project to determine the needs of the SABC TV News to improve archival organisation and practice, but the issues are wide-ranging and not easily fixed. The continued support of archivists Duma-Sandile Mboni and now-retired Sias Scott deserve a particular mention.

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Importantly, and this goes beyond neutral coverage, the SABC did not refer at all to the pre-election violence during the 1994 coverage. I only saw two passing signifiers of the pre-election violence so prominent on other international channels. Karen Mugglestone-Melville, journalist for the SABC, stands in the dark early morning outside Vosloorus Community Hall (Election 94, 1994), her beige flak jacket with the word “MEDIA” emblazoned on it conspicuous. She very clearly wears this jacket for protection and the scene is indicative of embedded war reporters, yet she never mentions violence or the reason for wearing such a conspicuous item of clothing. Second, in the same broadcast, an unnamed journalist reported from the Ciskei homeland on the south east coast of South Africa. He says that the “previous area of unrest” now had a “calm, relaxed atmosphere”. He refers of course to the earlier bloodshed at Bisho. These two signifiers do not directly mention the violence but leave it up to the audience to decode this narrative. Most South Africans watching at the time would understand what the journalists referred to, but importantly the SABC never made this overt connection. Vosloorus, where Mugglestone-Melville stands, was one of the most prolific areas for township violence in the run-up to the 1994 election. In one year, over 1800 people were killed in the Vosloorus and neighbouring Thokoza townships. The ANC declared the area a National Disaster Zone in 1994. Bisho, from where the second journalist calls, was the scene of an infamous bloody massacre on 7 September 1992, when the Ciskei Defence Force killed 29 people and injured more than 200. The journalists were positioned in these areas for specific reasons—neither area faced the same violence and bloodshed on the election day and that seems to be the point. Yet neither journalist mentions this outright. Instead, it is a fleeting comment or an indexical sign of war and violence that leads the audience to remember the violent history, rather than the SABC risking an opinion-­ based broadcast or deviating from its objective mandate of the time. The SABC was the dominant broadcaster in the second democratic election, after the international media frenzy had died down. SABC journalists in 1999 again merely hinted at the previous election violence, through discourse only this time. Mbeki hoped for a “peaceful” and “trouble-free” election three times in the SABC’s Election 99 Elites Voting broadcast, and his government was on “standby for any emergencies that might arise” on the voting day. Journalist Collen Lemawana observed “a visible presence of the South African National Defence Force troops together with the police dog unit” (Election 99 Journalist Recap, 1999).

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Later in the same broadcast, a journalist in the aerial unit observed, “we have been flying over the East Rand area, Katlehong, Thokoza, and Vosloorus, and there have been tremendous queues there”. These three areas witnessed some of the worst factional violence in the run-up to the first election, but the aerial journalist avoided mentioning this outright again—the focus was on “queues” despite grouping the three areas together seemingly intentionally. Local journalists seemed to deliberately avoid mentioning the violence or showing previous instances of unrest, as if embarrassed yet recognising the importance of peaceful democracy. This could be a form of “peace journalism” (Onyebadi & Oyediji, 2011, p. 219), a style of reportage that highlights peace and avoids war terminology and themes. But the focus on these South African broadcasts is actually on the lack of violence, rather than just peace. There are throw-away comments about previous areas of unrest and indexical symbols that hint at violent events, rather than simply highlighting the peace that now prevails. The disregard of mentioning previous violence yet positioning journalists in symbolic areas (like Vosloorus and Thokoza) is a tacit acknowledgement of the pre-democracy violence. The hesitation to report on these controversial and negative stories is rather a form of Sunshine Journalism, pushed by Mbeki’s African Renaissance agenda and, later, Motsoeneng’s soft censorship of the SABC.  This type of coverage does not tell the full story of the elections, giving context and clarity, but instead creates a very obvious void that is hopped over or ignored. Protest Action Reduced to Neoliberal Values Fast forward to the 2014 “Born Free” election and the “Ramaphoria” election of 2019, and the “violence” peppering so many early broadcasts had transmuted in meaning. Whereas violence was previously understood as visible bloodshed, terrorism, and death, in these later elections it came to represent the destruction of property and boycotting the election altogether. While South Africa’s elections are generally calm and relaxed, protest action in the run-up to these later elections was steadily on the rise. Fed up with a lack of service delivery and general corruption from their ward councillors, citizens in Bekkersdal, De Doorns, Vuwani, and Sterkfontein resorted to damaging property, stoning ANC minister vehicles, blockading roads, and burning rubbish bins, and faced the wrath of

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the authorities as the police moved in with Nyalas2 and tanks. As we found out in Chaps. 3 and 6, protesting against the government does not always translate into a vote against it, but nonetheless in 2014 protesters took their anger and frustration out on the voting booths and polling stations directly. By 2019, citizens were fed up with being ignored and protested the actual election itself. Journalists from both local and international channels termed these instances “areas of violence” or “violent demonstrations” or “violence hot-spots”. As with the 1994 coverage, journalists from Westernised channels tended to focus on the visualisation of this so-­ called violence (debris, burning tyres, distant protesters) rather than figure out the reasons and complaints from citizens themselves. Sensationalising the images of violence occurred predominantly on international broadcasts via packages, rather than in the live outside broadcasts that dominated South African coverage. Fires, rubble, debris, smoke billowing in aerial shots, and other visually rich images showed the impact of protests not through citizen experiences but through the destruction of property. This signifying practice reduces the context of the protests to the concern of property ownership and individual rights, thereby excluding context. In CCTV’s SA poverty 20 years later in 2014, for example, a protester throws a burning trashcan around while dancing in the smoke. Journalist Rachelle Akuffo narrates over the top of the image: “Soweto, home to some of the most violent political clashes. … People try to get the government’s attention, sometimes through violence.” On a different CCTV broadcast, Guy Hendersen narrates over close-up shots of burnt rubble blocking a street: “By dawn, only the debris remained. To be heard here, many still prefer other means” (Ruling SA party wins its fifth successive election, CCTV, 2014). On a Reuters’ spot, SA police arrest 59 in 2014, we see a burning EFF poster in close-up as the journalists says, “Fires burn in a South African township as post-election protests turn violent”. Brightly burning buildings blaze on the horizon, shrouded in the night sky. The fire is bright orange against the blue-black of the night, and debris is closely scrutinised in shallow depth of focus. We cannot see any further than these significations of “violence”. International journalists continuously focused on debris and burning rubble instead of contextualising the widespread protests in 2014 and 2  The RG-12 Nyala Armoured Personnel Carrier, or just Nyala, is specifically designed for the South African Police Service for riot control. The vehicle can carry six crew and has mesh-covered, bullet-resistant windows.

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2019. As Maserumule (2016) noted during media coverage of local election protests, “the razzmatazz is deafening”. While the protests are often multifarious, journalists rarely investigated motivations for any of them. Researchers (Duncan, 2014; Wasserman, 2014; Wasserman et al., 2016) have already acknowledged that the voices of the poor are missing from mainstream media, especially during protests, and my study of the election coverage found precisely the same. International and local South African media disregarded citizen voices during protest action. For example, only 17% of all 128 speakers in 2014 were citizens, and only two speakers were actually involved in the protests, despite the protests making up a third of the events covered in the 2014 broadcasts (see Jones, 2018 for more on these results). When Journalists Listen to Citizens Yet there is hope. Journalists from AJE in 2014 and the SABC in 2019 give excellent examples of the magic that happens when citizens are interviewed, sourced, and voiced directly. When the audience can hear consequences, reasons, context, and explanations directly from the citizens involved in “hot spots” or protest areas, a deeper understanding of democracy occurs. South Africans get to see themselves as voters, citizens, people of the country on these channels. Visualisations of a society impacts the understanding of it, and in voicing protesters and citizens in their own words and on their own terms, Africans are no longer relegated to background actors in their own stories. In 2014, AJE’s Haru Mutasa attempted to contextualise the Bekkersdal unrest by interviewing people who were directly affected and engaged in protests. In South Africans vote in general election, citizens complain that the only way to get the government’s attention is through “violence”, and they say they are “tired of waiting”. They bemoan the lack of electricity and water, and commonplace crime and rape. Mutasa takes care to voice the citizens directly using a sympathetic dub to translate isiXhosa into English. Instead of speaking about the protesters and citizens, Mutasa speaks to them, a welcome change from a reportage that often ignores the view from the ground. Similarly, Tania Page, also from AJE, interviewed De Doorns protesters in the Western Cape. As one of the only direct protester voices in the entire 2014 coverage, a farmworker representative

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states that if the government does not listen, “we are going to close the N13” (OB 2, AJE). Despite this contextualisation, however, AJE, like all other channels, still used prominent visuals of rubble, burnt debris, and destruction of property in all protest-centric broadcasts. The SABC in 2019 made a conscious effort to give citizens a chance to speak to journalists, and I want to highlight just how important this is. Throughout the 2019 election, many citizens boycotted the ballot, not through violence or destruction as in previous years, but by blockading roads to the voting booth and simply refusing to vote. The reasons were manifold but many demanded municipality changes, rebuked local government corruption, and wanted to send a message of their anger and frustration over basic service delivery to the national government. The SABC went to great lengths to voice citizens in these areas in their own language and words, without interpretation via pundits or elite sources. Multilingual journalists provided on-the-spot translation from isiXhosa to English, taking care to summarise their concerns. This was one out of only a handful of instances in the last six election years where citizens were allowed to explain their concerns and criticisms to the national broadcaster. The SABC, for their coverage of the pre-election protest action in 2019, should therefore be commended. The journalists allowed deeply critical voices from poor and rural South Africans onto the ANC-funded and controlled national broadcaster. Could it be that the government’s iron grip on news narratives is finally loosening under Ramaphosa’s New Dawn? Is this, as Max du Preez remarked in 2013, a rumour of spring? Despite this conscious effort to include grassroots voices in the election coverage, it should also be highlighted that the SABC described these community protests as “violent hot spots” but never showed what exactly made these areas violent. Remember, in 2016 SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng banned all images on television news that showed property damage, meaning that protests were not represented properly on the broadcaster. In a remarkable misunderstanding of media effects theory, Motsoeneng had censored South Africa’s primary news broadcaster in representing a key socio-political issue. The spiral of silence seems to have continued well into the 2019 election, even when Motsoeneng had long 3  The N1 and N2 are the major trunk roads that link Cape Town to the rest of the country and run through the Cape Winelands. A common protest tactic by farmworkers and township dwellers is to block these roads with concrete barriers, burning tyres, and pelt cars with stones in order to draw attention to their concerns.

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departed his SABC chair. SABC journalists referred to this anti-government dissent as “boycotting the election”, rather than dissenting against government or protesting specific issues. Despite voicing citizens directly, journalists still primed the broadcast and the vox pops for audiences, often reducing and oversimplifying the protests to issues of “road maintenance” and fixing potholes. Journalists suggested that protesters refused to do their civic duty and also judged them negatively for it. Continuing from Mbeki’s African Renaissance agenda, the ANC always had a chance for rebuttal in the coverage. As we will see in the next section, a heavy-handed police presence was also deemed fair, right, and necessary to “encourage” the citizens to vote. Although we never see the violence on the SABC in 2019, we certainly feel that it is imminent due to security forces that appear in almost every shot. Neoliberal Values Undermine Contextualisation Despite a clear desire on some channels to contextualise protests, voice citizens, and seek depth in the 2014 and 2019 election protests, the prevailing slant towards neoliberal news values ultimately undermines this investigative journalism. All news channels, including the SABC, eNCA, EWN, and Newzroom Afrika from South Africa, represented political and community protests as “violence” or with visuals of imminent violence (burning rubble, smoke rising in columns, intimidating protesters in claustrophobic framing). Cameras, eager to claim the visually rich moments, pointed at this black smoke and bright orange fire, thereby leaving little room for explanation and investigation. The predominant feeling was that journalists arrived too late on the scene to interview protesters directly or that the protest was too dangerous to get any closer, which might have been the case. Yet most journalists seemed reluctant to interview any citizen, protester or not, and rather focused on authorities or elite sources. Even when the SABC made a deliberate effort to interview citizens during the 2019 protest action, this was always flanked by the ANC’s rebuttal or long shots of marching solider regiments ready to “control” the violence. This lack of listening to citizens, or, as Nyamnjoh (2005) says, “talking without listening”, is symptomatic of mediatised political journalism. Elite sources and authorities are much more likely to present a sound bite ready for broadcast, rather than an interview answer that might need translation,

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editing, or discounting. The speed at which live television news happens is quicker than ever, and this might be one reason why mediatised journalism prefers elite sources rather than citizen vox pops. No matter the reason for the framing and interview techniques, the representation of protest action in 2014 and 2019 from all news channels was often reductionist, simplistic, and disappointingly flat. Understanding the Protests South African channels across the years seem to have an aversion to reporting on election violence at all, even when destruction, bloodshed, and damage actually occur. This hesitancy could to do with the SABC’s long-­ held mandate of promoting nationhood (see Orgaret’s 2006 absorbing discussion), the soft censorship of ANC policy and agendas, the simple lack of resources or training amongst journalists and newsrooms, or, more likely, a combination of all. In distinct contrast to this active avoidance of controversy and violence, international channels, prohibited by a profession in the grip of mediatisation, fixated on the details of violence at the expense of context or deeper analysis, which also does not represent the situation accurately. Neither avoiding violence nor fixating on the details of it adequately tells the story of South Africa’s elections. So, what is a journalist to do? Some clear examples of good practice show us the light in this tunnel: in AJE’s 2014 and the SABC’s 2019 coverage, a balance was struck. Citizens directly affected by the protests and the violence were allowed to speak, at length, about their experiences. Protesters, although scarce, spoke about the reasons and consequences of their actions. Audiences encounter the protests through those people directly affected, rather than through layers of interpretation, be it pundits, proxemics, or powerful elite sources. Showing images of violence, debris, and property destruction is not problematic unless it is the only way in which we understand the protests. There must be a balance between visually rich images and thematic reporting that explores depth and consequences. In a rushed, deadline-demanding newsroom, of course this is a tall order. But it is possible, and it seems the SABC and AJE attempt this, in the struggling, complicated, side-winding manner that first steps often are. If you are a journalist in this position, please consider reading the concluding chapter for some suggestions and contributing to the developing approach of Constructive and Solution Journalism.

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Control of Violence The depictions of violence during elections changed over the years, and between channels, but one element stayed the same: the authorities, in particular the military and police, were always supported and presented as benevolent “bringers of law and order” in every broadcast I viewed over the six elections. In 1994, smiling white soldiers sitting atop army tanks rumbled down a road to KwaZulu to save the day. In 2004, the police raided apartments in Hillbrow to “make sure the polls are safe”. In the troubled “hotspots” of Bekkersdal and Sterkspruit in 2014 and Vuwani and Mahikeng in 2019, the military rolled in yet again to “instil a sense of calm”. We hear about the violence and protest action more often through these elite voices rather than through citizen experiences, despite the SABC and AJE making a concerted effort otherwise in later years. This section details how election broadcasts showed both the might and benevolence of the security forces, with specific focus on visual rhetoric and framing. Controlling the Edge of Democracy Pre-democracy, ethnic and factional violence drove South Africa to the brink of disaster. US reporters highlight this tension in 1994 through discourse: “Zulu power on the march, massing in tribal regiments” (Sadler, The Big Story, CNN, 1994), “Hope runs neck and neck with danger” (Rather, FF and IFP have common ideals, CBS, 1994), “Which will prevail, the bullet or the ballot box?” (Electing the Future, CNN, 1994). Visuals too indicated the threat of violence in derailing the election. The military was often portrayed in control of this violence, through might or through mercy. Smiling soldiers atop tanks rumble into KwaZulu as a “hammerhead” to “shake down” the Zulu impi. Low angles of the oversized tanks and wide shots of armed white soldiers emphasise the military might, ready to “save the day”. Pre-1994 images also peppered the footage: police charge at groups of protests in wide shots, fire live rounds into crowds, whip protesters with sjamboks and leather straps, and deploy stun grenades in scattering crowds. The violence here is excruciatingly conspicuous. Visuals of the “all guns, full ammo” approach to peacekeeping in the early 1990s dominated international coverage, with US news channels seemingly at pains to point out how the internal conflict risked overrunning the fragile election.

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Despite the brutality of many of these images, at no point were the authorities reprimanded or distrusted, either in visuals or in discourse. At this stage, the international broadcasters presented violence and “dodging bullets” as a “way of surviving” (Oliver, Earth Matters, CNN, 1994), while the police and authorities aid this survival rather than add to the violence. Other broadcasts highlighted the perceived mercy and benevolence of the military presence. Children jump joyously on dusty streets and wave to passing army trucks as CNN’s Peter Arnett narrates: “the South African Defence Forces rode in to the rescue, to the evident relief of the residents” (The Big Story, CNN, 1994). In case we were in any doubt about the role the military had to play in this first election, Arnett’s verbal anchorage helps us to arrive at the dominant reading that the military are a peacekeeping force to ensure that democracy was achieved at all costs. This framing negates, of course, the decades-long war fought between discriminatory police and the black population, the secret police who harangued citizens daily, and the army folk riddled with PTSD after ill-­ planned wars north of the South African border. Perhaps the journalistic insights into this history weren’t there, or the time allocated to this story on the agenda was too short, but the international broadcasts of the 1994 election did not go deep enough in critiquing the authorities. Framing the security forces in this singular fashion wipes out context and nuance, necessary for a full picture of a pivotal moment in South Africa’s history. In the coverage of this, and other, elections, police and military authorities were ultimately deemed right, just, and neutral in their actions against distant, chaotic, and violent black people. Camera proxemics kept the viewer and protester apart: protesters were far away, often mediated through the police and military placed in the mid-foreground, between the camera (us) and black people (them). Fair and Astroff (1991, pp. 58–60) suggest that positioning the white/authoritative government as unquestioned “bringers of law and order” undermines the agency of unrest. This signifying practice equates white-on-black violence with “control”, but black-on-black violence with “chaos”. The broadcasts I looked at, across all election periods, confirms Fair and Astroff’s assertions: the police and military were almost always white, almost always in “control”, while protesters and perpetrators of violence, were almost always black and almost always “chaotic”.

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A “Subjective Angle” of South African Police With fewer international journalists on the ground in the 2004 election, it was up to the SABC and eTV local news channels to represent the election. On the SABC’s broadcast aptly titled Police, Preshane Pillay follows police officers on a raid in Pretoria, to “make sure the polls are safe on Wednesday”. Police raided suburbs, arrested 66 people, and “seized Mandrax, cocaine, dagga, and stolen vehicles”. The discourse and the visuals in this broadcast are particularly telling of how the SABC view this crackdown on the eve of the election. A high-speed police chase, filmed from within the police vehicle, leads to a side-of-the-road arrest in dim torchlight. Uniformed police form a line in the foreground with the suspects barely visible beyond. In the next sequence, an armed police officer marches up a flight of stairs, with the camera light focused on a gun tucked into his trousers. The camera follows the officer up the stairs and then from room to room. Finally, uniformed officers apprehend Indian men on the side of the road, scrutinise documents and root through their open car trunk. This broadcast is representative of the many that focus on security forces during the six elections. The scenes place police officers in the foreground of the shot with the “criminals” or suspects in the background, and so the story appears from authorities’ point of view. This “subjective angle” (Chandler, 1994; du Plooy, 2009, p. 171) positions the subject (like the police officer) either facing in the same direction as the viewer or allows the viewer to see the action through the subject’s point of view. For example, filming the police chase while inside a police vehicle is a “subjective angle”, but filming it from the street as the vehicle passes the camera would be “objective”. Following a police officer from room to room as if the journalist is part of the police raid would be subjective, but keeping the camera neutral and static while the police enters and leaves the rooms would be objective. “Following” police up the stairs is subjective because we are part of the group, watching police walk up the stairs in a static camera shot is objective because we are observers. Du Plooy argues that the subjective camera angles assume “the viewpoint of one of the persons who are involved in the scene. … This camera position is frequently used for instructional and marketing purposes, or to increase the tension in a dramatic scene because it increases the reader’s involvement” (Du Plooy, 2009, p. 171). This is an important camera proxemic that is often overlooked in many analyses of television news packages but can often be the

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most telling of hidden ideologies or angles. The subjective angle of security forces during these elections also reiterates Fair and Astroff’s argument that the authorities in South Africa are deemed unambiguous “bringers of law and order”. Embedded journalists automatically take the side of the authorities, rather than criticising what was often heavy-handed policing during the pre-election periods. Security in Maintenance Mode: 2014 and 2019 When AJE in 2014 and SABC in 2019 interviewed South African citizens, the channels attempted to get a “view from the ground” without unnecessary layers of interpretation. However, alongside these citizen voices, journalists gave more space and time to depicting the abundance of security in these protest “hotspots”. Military and police were unquestioned peacekeepers, there to “instil a sense of calm” (Page, OB 2, 2014) and “ensure safety” (Stuurman, Security cluster, SABC News, 2019). In Bekkersdal, Haru Mutasa paraphrases the military message: “Keep calm, vote, and go home. Be careful” (OB 3, AJE, 2014). These authorities are in “maintenance mode”, always present when protests are mentioned, visible but relaxed. All news channels, local and international, across the six election years promoted and sourced the authorities. Police minister Bheki Cele spoke at length about the reasons why police were necessary in the 2019 hotspots. Brown army tanks stood stationery yet prominent in the scene. Relaxed soldiers lent against vehicles and police trucks drive by on dusty roads. Vast police regiments marched neatly behind journalists who were in direct address to the camera. The very visible police symbols (trucks, tanks, police regiments, and soldiers) were not always present to control overt violence at polling stations but to seemingly encourage—take that as you will—people to vote, to do their civic duty, and to prevent damage to property. The visual framing gave an overall sense that police and the military were right, justified, necessary, needed, and unquestionably benevolent in all actions. Despite the lived experiences of South Africans during the protest action not at all resembling this interpretation, the dominant framing is persistently neoliberal. During the student protests in 2015, the anti-Zuma and workers’ protests in 2016 and 2017, the election boycotts in 2019, and most recently the coronavirus lockdown of 2020 and 2021, the police presence was often heavy-handed, brutal towards black citizens, and intimidating. Yet this narrative rarely makes the mainstream news.

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Journalists in the election periods did not go far enough to interrogate this side of the authorities’ presence in areas of conflict, which highlights the neoliberal news values driving Westernised journalism. The heavy security presence, never overtly questioned, is ultimately judged as an appropriate response to the seemingly destructive, violent, disruptive protests. Fair and Astroff’s argument, now decades old, still rings true: broadcasters maintain the neoliberal hegemony and protect the status quo through narratives that endorse the authorities as unquestioned “bringers of law and order”. These values, along with camera proxemics seen in the next section, undermine the agency of South African protests in later years.

Distance and Hesitation As this chapter has argued so far, international channels fixated on the details of violence, local channels avoided showing violence altogether, and both framed the security forces as unquestioned bringers of law and order. While in the last election analysed, 2019, local news channels attempted a view from the ground, the overwhelming impression was that protests and violence happened at a distance from the viewer. Broadcasts depicted protests happening far away—both in discourse and in visuals— which restricts the amount of deliberative and substantive information possible on news representations. This section shows how camera proxemics in particular heighten this sensation. At Arm’s Length In 2009 until 2019, as viewers we are kept apart from the populace both in their experience of poverty and in their protest action. Long shots of the protests and of township, close-ups of burning rubble and debris, and a lack of citizen voices kept the experience of ordinary South Africans at arm’s length during international broadcasts. Despite notable broadcasts on AJE and SABC, the overall sensation was that participants were unknowable. The visualisation of protest action centred on the destruction of property and disruption of the election rather than on consequences and experiences of those directly affected by the events. Citizens appear behind a layer of interpretation—be that pundits explaining policies, shallow depth of focus on burning rubble, or protests viewed from behind a line of “law and order” authorities. Even though AJE and the SABC attempted a view-from-the-ground analysis, these few broadcasts

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were lost in the sea of visually rich destruction, burning tyres, black smoke, intimidating marches, stun grenades, and ruined buildings. This “racy” journalism turns politics into spectacle. Getting close to protests in moments of crisis is dangerous, no doubt. But the lack of protester voices and deep investigation into reasons and consequences of election violence degrades deliberative information into “fly on the wall” stories. Journalists seem to be there to merely show intense visuals rather than to explain, explore, and summarise democracy for local and international audiences. Keeping the events at arm’s length, mediated by security forces in the “subjective angle”, plays into neoliberal news values that demand dichotomies yet does not adequately represent South Africa’s democracy. South African Hesitation Throughout the six elections, South African channels were cautious to explore controversial frames and narratives. This hesitancy was rooted in the local channels’ desire to present democracy as normal, stable, and uncontested, which Wasserman (2010, 2013, 2014) describes as rooted in African media ethics. Another reason was born out of a chilling effect amongst local media. The ANC’s need for total control over the news media means that the government often accuses journalists of racism and right-wing policies. The SABC’s hesitancy to investigate critical narratives or present controversial stories during elections suggests the ANC’s sensitivity to negative frames has influenced the news agenda. Yet the SABC was not the only local channel to show such hesitancy—eTV/eNCA was equally cautious, while there were too few Newzroom Afrika broadcasts in 2019 to judge this effect accurately. Perhaps further research could investigate how far the chilling effect amongst journalists actually reaches. Justice Malala’s insightful and personal 2015 book suggests it stretches from the top echelons to the gutter press. An important note here, too: the SABC in the crisis years of the 1980s relied on police reports rather than journalists on the ground to reassure viewers that everything was under control. Scholars at the time reprimanded the SABC for being a puppet of the apartheid government rather than reflecting the lived realities of South African people. Sadly, despite a period of rapid transformation, the SABC seems to have fallen back into its old, comfortable Ugly Monster shoes once again. Relying on police and authority views, rather than critiquing these sources, is a nasty reflection of the apartheid-­ era SABC.

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The Lack of Listening The difference between the local and international news coverage of the elections centred on the visualisation of democracy. Local broadcasters opted for the “safe” option of showing IEC election processes, citizens voting calmly, and normalising leaders as they voted amongst their constituents. This somewhat pedestrian news coverage shied away from important or controversial news issues. International broadcasts went too far the other way, offering mediatised coverage that fixated on the “razzmatazz” of events, which happened to be factional violence in the early years and protests later on. Both sides promoted and highlighted security clusters and authorities, focusing on elite voices and showing the merciful might of police forces. By showing democracy in this way, the Westernised journalist ignores the idea that it is a complex concept, hard won, and strenuously maintained. It cannot easily be explained away by visuals of burning tyres and destruction of poverty, or simply by ignoring it.

References Anglin, D. G. (1995). International monitoring of the transition to democracy in South Africa, 1992–1994. African Affairs, 94, 519–543. Berger, G. (2002). What are the media preconditions for an election to qualify as being free and fair? SANEF document. 22 February 2002. [O]. http://guyberger.ru.ac.za/Research/Democracy/election.htm Chandler, D. (1994). Notes on the construction of reality in TV news programmes. [O]. Retrieved September 5, 2015, from http://visual-­memory.co.uk/daniel/ Documents/short/news.html. Du Plooy, G. (2009). Visual text analysis. In P. J. Fourie (Ed.), Media studies 3: Media content and media audiences (pp. 148–203). Unisa Press. Duncan, J. (2014). ‘It’s not just the unions that are cut off from people, but the media too’: Reconstituting South Africa’s mediated public sphere. Acta Academica 2014, 46(1), 73–97. Earth Matters. (1994). [News broadcast]. CNN: David Mattingly, Sharon Collins, Joe Oliver. Electing the Future spot. (1994). [News broadcast]. CNN: Unknown reporter. Election 94. (1994). [News broadcast]. SABC TV 1: Tim Modise, Penny Smythe. Fair, J.  E., & Astroff, R.  J. (1991). Constructing race and violence: U.S. news coverage and the signifying practices of apartheid. Journal of Communication, 41(4), 58–74. Freedom Front and IFP have common ideals. (1994). [News broadcast]. CBS: Dan Rather, Connie Chung.

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Hall, J. (2015). What the global media missed with Burundi: Superficial coverage celebrates crisis and overlooks the bigger picture. [O]. Retrieved May 2, 2016, from http://www.inonafrica.com/2015/10/21/what-­the-­global-­media-­ missed-­with-­burundi-­superficial-­coverage-­celebrates-­c risis-­a nd-­overlooks-­ the-­bigger-­picture/ Hawk, B.  G. (2002). African politics and American reporting. In G.  Hyden, M.  Leslie, & F.  F. Ogundimu (Eds.), Media and democracy in Africa (pp. 157–176). Transaction. Jacobs, S. (1999). The media and the elections. In A. Reynolds (Ed.), Election 99 South Africa. From Mandela to Mbeki (pp. 147–158). David Phillips. Jones, B. (2018). Desperately seeking depth: Global and local narratives of the South African general elections on television news, 1994–2014. PhD thesis, University of Cape Town. Journalist recap. (1999). [News broadcast]. SABC: Various. Malala, J. (2015). We have now begun our descent. How to stop South Africa losing its way. Jonathan Ball. Maserumule, M. H. (2016). What rising protests say about our attitudes towards local government. [O]. Retrieved October 10, 2016, from http://www. timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/opinion/2016/06/21/What-­rising-­protests-­ say-­about-­our-­attitudes-­towards-­local-­government?platform=hootsuite Mutua, M. (2002). Human rights, a political and cultural critique. University of Pennsylvania Press. Norris, P. (1997). Introduction, the rise of postmodern political communication. In P.  Norris (Ed.), Politics and the press: The news media and their influences (pp. 1–17). LPR. Nyamnjoh, F. M. (2005). Africa’s media, democracy, and politics of belonging. Pretoria: UNISA OB2. (2014). [News broadcast]. AJE: Haru Mutasa. OB3. (2014). [News broadcast]. AJE: Haru Mutasa, Tania Page. Onyebadi, U., & Oyediji, T. (2011). Newspaper coverage of post political election violence in Africa: An assessment of the Kenyan example. Media, War, and Conflict, 4(3), 215–230. Orgaret, K. S. (2006). Moments of nationhood: The SABC news in English—The first decade of democracy. Unipub. Police. (2004). [News broadcast]. 10 April 2004. SABC: Preshane Pillay. Ruling SA party wins its fifth successive election. (2014). [News broadcast]. CCTV: Guy Hendersen. SA police arrest 59. (2014). [News broadcast]. Reuters, Unknown reporter. SA poverty 20 years later. (2014). [News broadcast]. CCTV: Rachelle Akuffo. Security Cluster. (2019). [News broadcast]. SABC News: Sipho Stuurman.

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Silke, D., & Schrire, R. (1994). The mass media and the South African election. In A. Reynolds (Ed.), Election 94. The campaigns, results, and future prospects (pp. 121–143). David Phillips. South Africa election bomb. (1994). [News broadcast]. ITN: Mark Austin. South Africans vote in general election. (2014). [News broadcast]. AJE: Haru Mutasa. Sparks, C. (2009). South African media in transition. Journal of African Media Studies, 1(2), 195–220. The Big Story. (1994). [News broadcast]. CNN: Brett Sadler, Peter Arnett, Mike Hanna. Wasserman, H. (2010). Freedom’s just another word? Perspectives on media freedom and responsibility in South Africa and Namibia. International Communication Gazette, 72(7), 567–588. Wasserman, H. (2013). Media ethics in a new democracy: SA perspectives on freedom, dignity, and citizenship. In S.  J. A.  Ward (Ed.), Global media ethics: Problems and perspectives. Wiley-Blackwell. Wasserman, H. (2014). Youth, conflict, governance, and the media: A South African perspective. [O]. Retrieved May 16, 2014, from http://hermanwasserman. wordpress.com/2014/03/14/youth-­c onflict-­g overnance-­a nd-­t he-­ media-­south-­african-­perspectives/ Wasserman, H., Bosch, T., & Chuma, W. (2016). The voices from the poor are missing from South Africa’s media. [O]. Retrieved October 16, 2016, from https:// theconversation.com/voices-­o f-­t he-­p oor-­a re-­m issing-­f rom-­s outh-­a fricas-­ media-­53068 World Service South Africa report. (1994). [News broadcast]. BBC: Fiona Werge.

PART III

Conclusion

CHAPTER 9

Desperately Seeking Depth

This book chronicled how international and local television news represented six South African general elections. It explained how a nuanced form of mediatisation framed the elections on international channels, even though these journalists sought narrative depth to explain the complex South African voting patterns and democracy. Locally, the ANC’s tightening grip on the media restricted news about the elections, resulting in avoidance of important and controversial stories, information that could have developed a broader picture of the elections. Citizen voices and political leaders as sources were missing from the later election years on all channels in favour of pundits, a symptom of the swing towards media logic in mainstream political journalism worldwide. Overall, the representation of the elections kept the electorate and the viewers apart, inserting levels of detachment via camera proxemics, evaluative voices, and mediatised news frames. As the concluding chapter, it highlights these elements and compiles three suggestions in order to improve, enhance, and challenge the status quo in political journalism through the Constructive/Solution/ Hybrid Journalism approach.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Jones, Elections and TV News in South Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71792-6_9

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Neoliberal Values and Mediatisation American psychologist Martin Seligman, at an Annenberg School of Communication conference in 2019, scrutinised the “holy writ” of American journalism. During the conference, Bill Moyers, former White House press secretary, explains that “the basic mission of journalism is to uncover what is hidden”. Yet Seligman does not let this lie, and instead makes it his mission to interrogate it, hold it up to the light, inspect it. He questions Moyers (Seligman, 2019, p. 491): Once you uncover and correct all that is hidden, you would have gotten all the way up to … zero. Not getting it wrong does not equal getting it right. Has journalism no positive values? What is journalism’s positive vision? What is praiseworthy? Heroic? Virtuous? Is there not a world above zero, a world that journalism should envision, praise, nurture, and help birth?

In our world where journalists and media are distrusted, where fake news is prolific, and where social media has more sway than legacy news, what is a journalist to do? Seligman argues that arriving at what is right is more complicated than eliminating what is wrong (ibid.). This chapter therefore argues for revisiting the basic tenets of journalism in the contemporary news environment, using Constructive Journalism as a basis for practice, in order to enhance the quality of journalism and promote solutions and community voices. Even though this book focused on the South African election coverage, these suggestions and approaches could be used for all types of coverage globally. In 2009, South African academic Jane Duncan (2009, p. 219) noticed that societal issues affecting general elections, that required investigation, received very little attention from local media. This trend had continued from 1999 until the point she wrote the analysis in 2009. The high degree of personalisation in the news media resulted in coverage that focused on superficial issues, without seeking the depth required for the media to play an adequate role in democratisation. Duncan blamed the ANC’s long-­ running battle with the media and political pressure on the SABC in particular for this hesitant approach to covering controversial topics. She labelled the 2009 media coverage of the election “desperately seeking depth” because of the focus on “‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’, at the expense of ‘why’” (Duncan, 2009, p. 231). The title of this chapter and indeed the book shamelessly borrows Duncan’s phrase because it so accurately fits the

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majority of news broadcasts over the election years. Journalists attempt to seek depth when reporting South Africa’s confusing and complicated elections, but are ultimately hamstrung because of their professional codes, neoliberal news values, and the pressure to get the story fast, often with few resources. Three conclusions can be drawn about the broadcasts during the six election years. First, mediatised political communication hampers clear and concise political communication. Barring a few standout examples over the years, most international journalism was awash with racy reporting and visual rhetoric that entertained rather than informed. Second, there was a stark difference between the content on local and international news regarding the elections. Local journalists were hesitant to critique or show controversial news frames, restrained by intensified political involvement over the years. Even non-SABC local broadcasts were disappointingly narrow and flat. International journalists meanwhile went too far the other way and fixated on the visualisation of crises. Dramatic footage bewildered both journalist and viewer in trying to make sense of the burgeoning and inherently contradictory democracy. Finally, all mainstream news channels disengaged with politician and citizen voices over the years until these were finally replaced with pundits. It was the non-mainstream news that did the heavy lifting in later years to represent the “view from the ground” through citizen experiences, rather than through the elite. So, What Is a Journalist to Do? Without wanting to sound like an admonishment from the pulpit, this chapter instead draws suggestions from a burgeoning approach that recommends emotion-driven journalism. Constructive Journalism revisits the profession’s key tenets of societal good, information-based communication, and citizen-focused and solution-oriented stories. It is true that the push towards mediatised political journalism dominated election coverage, but in each election year there were some masterful examples where journalists created magic and responded to society’s most pressing needs with compassion and care. This concluding chapter therefore compiles ideas from these “best practice” broadcasts while following the Constructive Journalism approach in order to suggest three methods to improve, enhance, and challenge the status quo in political journalism. First though, is a summary of how local and international journalists reported the elections.

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Mediatised Political Journalism The modern political newsroom is in a crisis. Bennett (2012, p. 3) suggests that newsworthiness and immediacy often trumps fact-checking in the digitised era, and economic pressures drive this deficiency. Brutal reliance on ever-diminishing advertising revenue, resource cutbacks, closure of investigative bureaux, juniorisation of newsrooms, and staffing cuts prevent journalists from cultivating their natural curiosity and aptitude for clear communication. These limitations combined with influential news frames that mostly confirm and conform to discourses of liberal capitalism result in both narrow and shallow frames of elections. Because of this crisis, news stories are either somewhat diverse in content but never deep enough to get to the heart of the story (shallow) or try to dig deeper but never take into account alternative or controversial stories to show the full picture (narrow). Worse still, political journalism is further enraptured with PR material, pre-packaged and designed specifically to gain media space and audiences. “When news is consumed with public relations, the messages become a mix of absurd sensationalism … and formula slogans” (Bennett, 2012, p. 9). As Nyamnjoh notes, these thrusts towards a PR-ised form of journalism result in too many cases of “talking without listening” (Nyamnjoh, 2005, p. 57) and prevent the media from performing their role adequately in the democratisation process. This “racy” style of modern political journalism comfortably confirms liberal hegemonies: narratives lack substance and therefore deal in the spectacular only without holding power accountable. Entertainment is favoured over substance. This style of news avoids the discussion of solutions and prefers to confront the viewer with shocking or outraging scenarios, leaving them entertained but not wiser. With increased digitisation and convergence of journalism and the reliance on social and swift media over long-form and investigative stories, journalists are no longer encouraged to get “down on the ground”. Most research shows that mediatisation of political journalism occurs on Westernised news channels (Strömbäck, 2008; Bennett, 2012; Cushion et al., 2015) and that it is often thought of as a global (i.e., Western) problem. This book has added depth to this debate and shown that local news channels in South Africa suffer the same steering neoliberal news values. Mediatised political reporting demands flashy visuals and fast news, rather than deep considerations of citizen concerns and solution-driven explanations. Both local and international broadcasts demonstrated neoliberal

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values through a mediatised representation of the elections. Yet there were differences too in the local and international coverage.

Local and International Reporting Local Political Journalism South African broadcasters across the election years were visibly cautious to explore controversial frames and narratives, a hesitancy rooted in the desire to present democracy in South Africa as normal, stable, and uncontested. Another reason for this avoidance was born out of a chilling effect amongst local media. The ANC’s need for total control over the media, in order to maintain its hegemony as the Struggle party and liberator of South Africa, means that the government often accuses journalists of racism, anti-democratic agendas, and right-wing politics. This control and influence affects the flow of information and news from local channels, and particularly the public broadcaster. While the SABC’s mandate as public service provider has improved recently, the broadcaster still faces financial and political problems from the ground up (see Wasserman, 2020a). During the election coverage, the SABC in particular was invested in visually normalising the experience of democracy during the elections, choosing to focus on depictions of the IEC processes and political leaders casting their ballots alongside citizens in calm polling stations. Local broadcasters overall also showed an enthusiastic electorate that queued for hours to make their mark and, while some polling stations opened late, the mood never dampened. Democracy on local channels was both normalised and normative. As the only South African broadcaster in 1994, the SABC presented a careful and optimistic overview of the first all-race voting day and avoided any mention whatsoever of the pre-election violence, an important aspect that drove the feeling of inclusivity and euphoria in the first election. At the time, the broadcaster was under a harsh international spotlight from media watchdogs, which may have contributed to the scant and often optimistic narratives. In 1999, the reporting was surprisingly critical of the ruling party, with vox pops openly stating the ANC had not delivered on promises. This was one of the only times that overtly critical voices were heard on local channels, although the ANC received overall favourable coverage from all local broadcasters. In 2004, both the SABC and eTV shifted to narratives that supported authorities and the government,

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presenting President Mbeki as a man of the people, popular with the youth, and personally delivering on promises. This frame contradicted contemporaneous  accounts about South Africa’s second president, who was frequently accused of being aloof and out of touch with the electorate. Most conspicuous in local 2004 coverage was the lack of news representation of the stark inequalities in South Africa and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 2009, South African broadcasters once again ignored controversial issues such as Zuma’s corruption trial and the Mbeki ousting only months before. The “Born Free” election in 2014 exhibited even more hesitancy as both eNCA and the SABC overlooked the Nkandla scandal, the pre-­ election protest action (save for repetitions of how the military enforced order) and increasing citizen disillusionment with the democratic process. Instead, local channels chose overwhelmingly to focus on the 20-year anniversary of democracy and normalising the processes of the election. By 2019, the SABC appeared to have made a tentative return to its public broadcasting mandate. The broadcaster went out of its way to voice citizens at protest “hotspots” and visit “on the ground” areas on the election day through numerous live outside broadcasts. Yet, despite this change, the SABC and all other local channels still supported and sourced elite voices far more often than citizens, through both discourse and visual rhetoric. The heavy police and security presence were intensely noticeable in the foreground of all local broadcasts during the 2014 and 2019 election, with narratives confirming Fair and Astroff’s (1991) decades-old argument that South African security forces are unquestioned bringers of law and order. As we saw in Chap. 6, the ANC also has a tendency to control the type of narratives and histories spoken of, about, and through the party lines, which is then implemented into media and communications policy. This partly explains why ANC officials were always present during moments of dissent on news to contradict or explain away controversial issues. With Ramaphosa at the reins from 2019 onwards, it remains to be seen whether the ANC will continue to be uneasy towards the media or if Ramaphosa’s course-correction “New Dawn” agenda will make any difference. With the liberation narrative as hegemony, ANC-controlled and influenced media is hamstrung in the type of news told about the party. Even though some local journalists grasp at elements of depth in later years, the lack of space and time to develop these ideas and the fixation on promoting elite and pundit voices generates a flattened and superficial depiction of democracy in South Africa. As reflected in literature about South African journalism, local journalists tended to avoid important yet

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controversial narratives throughout the years, suggesting a chilling effect (echoing Davis, 2005; Wasserman & De Beer, 2009; and Malila, 2014), increased government involvement in news agendas (as per Gouws & De Beer, 2008; Sparks, 2009; and Malila, 2014, Wasserman, 2020a), or the lack of training and access to resources (Duncan, 2009). South African channels were progressively more hesitant to cover controversial topics or criticise the ruling party as an increasingly paranoid government policed South Africa’s primary broadcaster, demanding loyalty to the party narrative at all costs. International Political Journalism In a sharp difference to local reportage, international broadcasts, particularly those from Westernised news channels, highlighted events that were dramatic, visually rich, and pitted one side against another in a “horse race”. Creative camera techniques and juxtaposition between visuals and audio depicted these events. In 1994, the push towards post-Cold War news frames meant that neoliberal concerns were foregrounded at the expense of a clear explanation of the South African reality. White fears of loss of civil liberties were highlighted and black hopes of egalitarianism were pushed to the background and kept ambiguous. The tremendous, yet imagined, threat to democracy posed by the IFP during the first election was intensely visualised in fisheye lenses, loud audio, extreme low angles, and “Hands Up”1 framing. Between 1999 and 2004, international broadcasters avoided covering the elections at all, with only a handful of broadcasts mentioning these two polls. When journalists did alight upon the topic, stories focused on long, exasperated queues and the stark contrast between the “black diamond” Haves and the poor urban Have Nots. It should be noted that the SABC (and, in 2004, eTV) did not comment on these issues in the broadcasts I looked at. So, despite the relative shallowness and scarcity of international broadcasts during these two elections, at least some societal issues were covered. Moving to 2009, the international spotlight returned to highlight the Zuma Show and his controversial impact on democracy in the country. Visualising Jacob Zuma’s controversies and accentuating the symbolism of his cult-like followers ensured that the context of Zuma’s campaign, exploring the vehement loyalty that the ANC commanded, and discussing 1

 See Chap. 7 for a discussion of this signifying practice.

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complex voting patterns were skimmed over. Any kind of substantive analysis was lost in the sea of swaying black bodies and piercing singing that drowned out the journalists. In 2014 and 2019, the fixation on visually rich events continued as journalists portrayed the protest action through neoliberal frames of property destruction, keeping poverty and protest at a safe distance. In doing so, these stories overlooked grassroots voices that could have added depth to these issues. Journalists also relied on simplistic binaries to represent the expanding youth vote and ANC supporters, but repeatedly contradicted themselves when confronted with a complex, inconsistent electorate. In the “pivotal” elections of 1994, 2009, and 2014, Westernised news channels tended to report on the captivating crises of the elections in a kind of breathless excitement shorn of context and solution-­ driven journalism. Depicting the complicated South African democracy in this way trivialises issues and flattens experiences. The resultant narrative is not one of informed context but of entertaining flashy images. An adjusted horse race frame was also employed throughout international coverage but, because of South Africa’s single party-dominated democracy, the “game frame” was not between two parties (as in Broh, 1980; Hallin, 1992; Aalberg et  al., 2011), but between two narratives. Journalists binarised coverage by presenting two competing sides, reminiscent of Nyamnjoh’s (2005, p. 235) observation of the polarised media and Rassool and Witz’s (1996, p. 339) morality play: peace ran neck and neck with war in 1994; the rural competed with urban in 1999 and 2004; traditional rituals and modern policies collided in 1994 and 2009; and the chaos of protesters and control of the police clashed in 2014 and 2019. The “race” that involved the ANC was not whether the party would win, but whether the much-feared two-thirds majority would be reached. The reimagining of this horse race frame indicates the strength of neoliberal news values, including mediatisation, in the narratives about elections. These framing devices flatten the experience of democracy and the elections to a few already-known narratives and stereotypes of the threat of a failed state, a prized negotiated settlement, the intimidating tribalist movement, a moral military controlling chaotic protests, and the unknowable rural and poor existence. International journalists played prophet in judging which side would win, particularly in the “pivotal” elections where violence, protest, and populism vied for the spotlight against peace, control, and policies.

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Just as there was a difference between local and international reporting, so there was a difference between Western and non-Western international broadcasters. The most simplistic, binarised, sensational narratives came from UK or US channels like the BBC, Sky, and CNN.  Non-Western global channels like AJE, at least in 2014 and 2019, attempted more in-­ depth reporting of issues on the ground with dedicated live OBs from “hotspots” while also including numerous citizen interviews. US and UK channels appeared to have a more mediatised type of journalism than non-­ Western channels, although this was not always the case. VOA, especially in 2014 and 2019, explored the inherent contradictions of South African society and avoided using the binary, “horse race” frame of other US channels. This reliance on binary frames illustrates the point that Norris (1997), Turkington (1997), Reta (2000), Hawk (2002), and Ndlela (2005) argue: US and UK channels (frequently termed Anglo-American) are more frequently binarised in their reporting about African elections because of the driving neoliberal news values and a profession where deadlines demand dichotomies.

Voicing the Populous From 2009 onwards, the proliferation of protest action was undeniably one of the biggest issues in South African society. The protests directly contradicted the ANC’s “good story to tell” and “a better life for all” agenda, and indirectly caused a soft censorship on the national broadcaster in 2016. Yet, and this is one of the most important points of this book, the media reporting of this protest action was disappointingly absent or simplistic. News media during times of crises should be clear, explorative, explanatory, and should lead to wider knowledge and debate. News media has a social function to encourage participatory debate amongst citizens. Poorly representing protest action in a shallow fashion, without digging deeper into the reasons and consequences of such protest, means that the media does not fulfil its role in the democratisation process. Two problems exist in this: first, the top-down organisation of the media excludes grassroots voices. Second, a lack of listening to citizen (and political) voices in favour of pundits stems from a drive towards neoliberal news values.

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Top-Down Organisation of the Media The protest action that surrounded the 2014 and 2019 election was often framed as a “horse race” between two sides: who would win, the chaotic protesters, or the military employed to restore law and order? In a similar but less urgent way to the 1994 election, journalists framed peace and war in a “neck and neck” race to the election. Despite this energetic framing, we learnt more about the protests through the security forces that controlled the chaos than through the protesters themselves. Wasserman et al. explain that this is the norm in mainstream media, especially in South Africa: protesters were either not heard, or not taken seriously, and “are reported only inasmuch as they inconvenience a middle-class audience, for instance to inform them where traffic may be disrupted” (Wasserman et al., 2016). Indeed, very few citizen voices were heard during the broadcasts. Citizens spoke most often about their excitement to vote, reminiscing about the 1994 election, and, occasionally, their disappointment in the ANC’s delivery (often bookended with an ANC or security official responding to this comment). The grinding poverty that most black South Africans face almost always happens away from us, in the background, at a safe distance, and is understood through a journalist or politician rather than through a resident. We hear very little from the grassroots communities who are actively involved in the protests. Even though some journalists in later years grasp at elements of depth— acknowledging this liberation narrative, for example, and distinguishing disillusionment in divergent groups of the voting populace—the lack of space and time allowed to develop these ideas leaves entangled narratives and perplexing stories, as well as a flattened and insubstantial depiction of democracy in South Africa. In using Iyengar’s (1991, p. 18) episodic or event-driven reporting, journalists focused too heavily on binaries and drama, rather than exploring context that might enlighten and explain the complexities of South African democracy and society. The shallow portrayal of the election with a few repeated narratives meant that style triumphed over substance. Ultimately, the perspective of these six elections was a “view from the suburbs” that informed audiences of only some realities. This view stems from the top-down organisation of the media that promotes elite sources and identities and relegates grassroots information and voices. Wasserman (2014) notes that commercial South African media represent a narrow sliver of citizenry in the country: those who are attractive to advertisers, those who can afford the advertisers’ goods, and those

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who are ostensibly in power. Media, in this respect, are angled towards the top, with the powerful elite at the top and the ordinary average South African citizen at the bottom. This is not a uniquely South African problem, which in itself explains how and why mainstream news media step over grassroots voices and sources to get to the elite. The Lack of Listening The final conclusion we can draw about the coverage of South African elections concerns the worrying and significant drop-off of quotes and information from sources, particularly from political leaders. In order to create and maintain a functioning democracy, substantive information between communities and governments should be adequately mediated through the news media. The decrease in citizen voices post-1994 indicates a focus on authorities and, later, pundits at the expense of grassroots voices. ANC voices were also substantially missing from the broadcasts in 2009 and 2014 election, leading most journalists to rely on simplistic juxtaposition and lip flaps to present a shallow overview of a complex society. Despite the SABC’s attempt to voice more citizens, and the ANC in turn, in 2019, all broadcasts across the years relied heavily on pundits and other journalists for information rather than directly sourcing political leaders or citizens. Even though there was some profound coverage on AJE, VOA, CBS, ViceNews, and the SABC that attempted to listen to sources directly, these moments were lost over the years in mediatised, top-down, and polarised coverage. I want to reiterate Jane Duncan’s warnings from 2014: the top-­ down organisation of a media that promotes authority sources yet neglects citizens “has serious implications, as it fosters a society that is unable to see itself, and respond to its most pressing problems” (Duncan, 2014a, p. 92). The media should provide substantive information necessary to enable democracy but, “in order for them to play this role, they need to constitute an inclusive public sphere that provides equality of opportunity to receive information, to listen and to speak” (ibid., p. 76). The importance of “listening” to the view from the ground cannot be overstated, especially during volatile situations, when presenting controversial issues, and during rising unrest. When the populace no longer feel they are taken seriously or, worse, no longer trust the representation they are given by an unsympathetic and uncaring media, citizens distrust journalists. Duncan (2014b), Cross (2010), Bennett (2012, p. 2), and Louw (2005, p. 81)

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suggest that recent political journalism prefers drama to depth, pundits over people, and personalities over policies. This is the “hype-ocracy” that Louw (2005, p. 50) describes and, based on the conclusions presented in this book, we are living in the middle of it. Understandably, voicing political leaders and citizens comes with limitations: time, resources, training, and funding are all barriers to including more grassroots voices, while adding political sources depends on the relationship between politicians and the media. But in order to effect change journalists should take the lead in investigating citizen and political voices. The moments that stand out the most are AJE’s embedded journalists during the 2014 and 2019 elections, the SABC’s live outside broadcasts on the 2019 election day, CNN’s Mike Hanna interviewing the Freedom Front and IFP leaders in 1994, Robyn Curnow interviewing COPE members in Soweto in 2009, and ViceNews holding the ANC’s Jesse Duarte to account for land redistribution mismanagement in 2019. Embedding journalism is a costly exercise, and in an era where newsrooms are routinely underfunded, bureaux across Africa closed, and long-form journalism pushed to the side in favour of quick acting social media and “fast news”, this may seem like a tall order. As Beckett (2016) asserts, news media should not merely listen and represent voices but rather create the space for the relationship that allows us to hear each other better. Listening to the community and presenting these voices on broadcast media is a key tenet of journalism, and the art of listening is slowly being subjugated in the blizzard of fast news and mediatised razzmatazz. It is thus up to the journalists and editors themselves to regard community, citizen, and grassroots voices as powerful sources, rather than rely on the easily accessible elite voices of punditry and journalists-as-experts. Getting more journalists on the ground, up close and personal with everyday sources, will help halt the stampede in political journalism to mediatised information. This next section thus draws together the impressive examples from this study in three suggestions, utilising Constructive Journalism as practice.

Suggestions for Improving Practice Characteristics of Constructive Journalism Proponents of Constructive Journalism are keen to highlight that this approach should not “replace” other forms of journalism practice. The approach is applicable to a diverse range of reporting and subject matters

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and is part of a wider ecosystem of methods where the most appropriate mode of reporting will depend on the issue at hand (Constructive Journalism Project, 2020). It is therefore important to understand that these suggestions speak to the wider profession of journalism, rather than individual journalists themselves, although development of stories using the characteristics of Constructive Journalism is a good place to start. The Constructive Journalism Project (2020) states that this approach to news: • Includes positive and solution-focused news formats within conventional reporting styles, • Is informed by the understanding of how stories impact both culture and behaviour, • Focuses on wellbeing of the world rather than a disease model (for example, people have strengths and are not just victims), • Is a problem-solving approach where media actively addresses problems that concern their audiences, • Considers the perspective and interpretation given to stories, as well as considering what is important and relevant, • Is journalism that cares as well as promotes understanding, • Is critical but constructive rather than existing with a solely negative mindset, • Is independent of political and business influence, • Has high societal value, • Offers a more meaningful role for the journalist, • Doesn’t just focus on the powerful having an impact on society but provides space for all people that have an impact, • Fosters thoughtful conversation, collaboration, and offers space for building consensus, • And shows that change is possible and highlights opportunities for response. Acting as a fourth-estate watchdog by enabling informed citizenry is a key principle of Constructive Journalism, reflecting the fundamental, widely shared conception of what journalism means and the value it has in society. Therefore, for the Constructive Journalist, the modern tendency for stories to be negative, formulaic, episodic, and event-driven, is damaging to news media’s societal role (Mast et al., 2019, p. 494). Alternative and inclusive practice seeks positive values, points out possible solutions,

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and engages with citizens as sources and solutions. The three categories of suggestions below reflect the characteristics of Constructive Journalism. I mprove Visual Rhetoric and Framing This book is unabashedly in favour of visual studies and promotes the importance thereof. This book takes television news and the images therein seriously and treats the text and the context as equals. Therefore, my first suggestion to improve visual rhetoric and framing is to treat the visuals as seriously as the discourse. The way to do this is by training journalists, authors, creators, and producers in the art of visualness, be that through semiotics or graphic design. Much time is spent on crafting the right prose to explore complex stories, but images too must be given careful thought and adequate attention. Bucy and Grabe in 2009 reflected on this absence of visual mindfulness, where image bites are one of the least understood elements of political communication. Sadly, a decade on, things have not improved. This book is a call to action to scholars and practitioners to pay as much attention to the framing on the visual track (from “lip flaps” to subjective angles, shot size to editing) as the discourse and verbal track. Use editing, colour, angles, lighting, and other camera proxemics to enhance the story. Not all journalists have the resources and time to spend on creating visually enticing broadcasts, especially in our post-pandemic digitised environment. But being aware of the connotations of editing and visual framing costs nothing yet can enhance the quality of journalism greatly. There is much importance in the stillness of the long take, where subtle editing rather than blatant interpretation guides viewers through a complex story. Becoming more aware of the impact of visual framing and taking responsibility for that framing is therefore the first suggestion to improve journalism about South Africa. Constructive Journalism is not just about “feel good” storytelling that avoids negative stories. It instead seeks out complexity and attempts to provide solutions, rather than simply explaining negativity. Using thoughtful visuals that reflect local connotative values can improve journalism from both within and outside of South Africa.  nhance Clear Communication E Another key element of societal journalism is to provide clear and accessible communication during moments of crises. As we saw in Chaps. 7 and 8, South Africa’s elections were often bookended by protest action against government corruption, service delivery, or mismanagement. Journalists

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often approached these moments with neoliberal news values: focusing on destruction of property rather than community issues; shining the torch on blazing fires and debris rather than grassroots perspectives; and voicing pundits and security officials rather than protesters themselves. This “top down” organisation of media structures is not unique to South Africa. Both local and international broadcasters across the years endorsed authorities, kept poor and protesting South Africans at a distance, and created confusing and contradictory narratives when faced with a complex situation. There are two sides to this suggestion. First, journalists are asked to reflect realities from the source, from the ground up. Second, reflexivity in one’s own practice can enhance the stories told. Let’s look at the first side. We know that African citizens are habitually erased from their own stories, relegated to background actors while a (white) Westerner guides viewers through the situation (see Chaps. 1 and 8). Part of the reason for this construction is adherence to neoliberal news values born from post-Cold War reporting practices. Constructive Journalism calls for journalists to push back against these values that create a distrust and a disconnect between the audience and the news. The way to push back is to voice citizens as agents in their own stories, acknowledging local perspectives for both local and international audiences. The SABC’s 2019 coverage of protest action and reporting from AJE, ViceNews, and VOA during the 2014 and 2019 elections are excellent examples of this practice. These channels gave citizens themselves the chance to explain issues pertinent to them and listened to the view from the ground rather than from the elites (although, especially in the SABC’s case, the elites still formed a large part of the sourcing). The second part of this suggestion refers to reflexive practice. While many journalists find their broadcasts transient, the impacts of these stories are long lasting. Promptly and explicitly acknowledging contradictions or complexities within stories that might not make sense in three broadcast minutes is the first step to being transparent. As seen in the 2009 and 2014 coverage of the Zuma Show, the ANC electorate kept voting for a party that appeared to be actively harming them. Telling this story in quick highly visual broadcasts that are delimited by agenda timings is not easy. But inserting a verbal narration of, “this story is complicated” or, “there are inherent contradictions here” will help both journalist and audience realise the realities in South Africa. Constructive Journalism shares problem-solving goals with Solutions Journalism, and the

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awareness and empowering aims with Public Journalism (Bro, 2019), but crucially the transparency of creating and producing a story for audiences should be at the heart of presenting complex stories. Journalists do not always have to provide solutions but seeking them out in collaboration with citizens is a key tenet of Constructive Journalism. Being open and transparent about the values that drive news production and dissemination treats audiences as equals in knowledge creation and empowers both audience and journalist. Other fundamental principles of journalism, we can agree, ask practitioners to be informer, educator, mediator, and provider of societal good, yet there are tensions between idealism and commercialism, it is true. So how does the modern overstretched multitasking journalist balance solution-­ oriented framing, co-creation, and inclusiveness with a commercial push to provide clickable and shareable stories often written without adequate time or resources? We must push back against the norms and practices that demand an unworkable juggling act.  hallenge Practice Norms to Transform Media Organisation C Constructive Journalism as a movement is gaining traction. Bro (2019), Hermans and Gyldensted (2019), and Mast et al. (2019) are proponents of the approach, while the Constructive Journalism Project (2020) has bases in both the UK and North America. Danish and German universities offer scholarship in Constructive Journalism, while the Solutions Journalism Network partners with news outlets in the US and UK. We are at the genesis of what could be a vigorous space for deconstructing and reimagining what journalism could, should, or will be in the future. This exciting time should not be seen as a “crisis” necessarily, but a Zeitgeist. Political journalism especially needs revisiting, given that our intersection between media and politics is at an all-time high. While this book has focused in on South African elections and the television news coverage thereof, the concepts and concerns within can be transposed to many Westernised democracies around the world. Mediatised coverage of elections, when reduced to “fast news”, does not give the whole story. We promote aesthetics, image bites, shrinking sound bites from pundits, distance created through layers of interpretation. We need to now focus instead on taking journalism as an art form seriously. Training our young journalists, so bright-eyed and concerned with the state of the world, in high-standard globalised and indeed glocalised journalism is imperative to produce both ethical and solutions-based reporting.

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But how do we do this when many governments in Africa demand (quietly or legislatively) “peace” or “developmental” journalism to promote their nation-building goals? How do we promote ethical, fourth-­ estate, solutions-oriented journalism when news media are actively bought up and strangled by advertisers and economic bad boys? How do we juggle the ethical, the constructive, the inclusive when journalists need to earn a salary and need to write the editor’s perspective? There is no easy answer to this. Some scholars have tried to offer some suggestions: Walulya in 2018 describes “hybrid” journalism that juggles peace journalism with watchdogs. The concept and approach are still in their infancy but deserve attention from practice and profession. Wasserman in 2013 and most recently in 2020b describes the ethics of listening, creating journalism that reflects citizen perspectives from the ground. From a scholar with a distinguished career as a journalist in South Africa, this approach is most noteworthy. Above all these approaches and concepts is the overriding need to fund journalism properly. If there is any crisis in the journalistic and media world, it is this. Journalists, editors, and media houses that rely increasingly on the “fifth estate” (PR-ised news) and “clickbait” (i.e. sensationalised stories often written for payment after audiences click the headline) do not present information but rather entertainment. Chasing the breaking story in order to get paid is extraordinarily damaging to the societal function of journalism. So, this final challenge is for the readers of stories, the watchers of television news, the scrollers of online media. Fund the journalism you want to see. Especially now, in a world wrecked by a pandemic that highlighted the cracks in society, journalism is in a funding crisis. Good journalism deserves to be funded adequately, and that is simply up to us, the audience. When the SABC in 2019 took multiple reporters to rural parts of South Africa, turned the cameras on the citizens, and allowed multilingual residents to explain issues in their own words, it is a moment that should be celebrated. The SABC is in a funding black hole as the South African government continues to remove money from advertising and production. Donations and paying for content, through crowdfunding or through paywalls, is increasingly important, especially when reading/watching online content for free has become so normal. Funding journalism adequately will allow journalists to spend more time researching and developing stories, and therefore may enhance the quality of stories themselves.

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Conclusion Achille Mbembe once wrote that we know virtually nothing about what African societies comprise. This book has attempted to provide the field with a comprehensive overview of South African news media, the television news coverage of its elections, and a critique of the mediatised political journalism that plagues the practice. By creating a dedicated analysis of television news coverage of South African elections, this book describes and critiques news coverage across six election years. The mediatised coverage changes over the years, from the post-Cold War news frames to neoliberal values, from voicing leaders and the elite to voicing pundits instead, and through increasingly visualised moments of crises rather than digging deeper into narratives. At its heart, this book argues for an approach that revisits the fundamental tenets of journalism to revolutionise the representation of South Africa on visual news. Global research about the media’s role in covering elections shows that mediatisation drives global journalism practice (Louw, 2005, pp. 66, 271; Strömbäck, 2008, p. 230; Cross, 2010; Bennett, 2012, p. 44), and this book is broadly consistent with established research. Context and comprehension were often obliterated when journalists emphasised strong visuals of scandalous events, and little substantive information about the elections was therefore forthcoming. Mediatised political communication relies on dramatic visuals, personality-driven coverage, media-centric sources, and the emphasis on the role of these authorities at the expense of citizen voices. Two consequences tend to arise because of mediatised election coverage: firstly, democracy is weakened as the media offer fewer opportunities for deliberative information, while feeding the electorate on a poor diet of bright colours and flashing lights. Secondly, these mediatised narratives flatten the complexities of elections, remove explanations, and suppress substantive information. Journalists thus urgently grasp for some kind of explanation when faced with a complicated democracy but ultimately resort to already-known stereotypes and juxtapositions to create the illusion of depth. This was seen throughout the election years, particularly when journalists could not immediately explain or understand inconsistent electorates, poverty and protest action, and the youth electorate so fired up by political issues yet who did not register to vote. The more journalists turned to pundits to insert layers of interpretation in broadcasts, the more distant the citizens and real lived experiences of South Africans seemed on the news. With fewer political leaders as sources, and

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fewer vox pops during broadcasts, journalists could not hope to get the full picture of the election. This book has offered a deep analysis of South African elections on television news over a quarter century, while providing an overview of television news and journalism practice both globally and locally. The suggestions within this concluding chapter offer journalists and scholars a point of departure to reconsider practice and the profession. The crisis, as discovered, is less in the individual journalist’s desire to report on the world but is instead wrapped up in the economic stranglehold on mainstream journalism and neoliberal values permeating all broadcasts from Westernised channels. While Constructive Journalism is a suggested approach and avenue out of the mess, it remains to be seen how journalism as a profession fares in the coming decades, post-pandemic, post-­ truth, and postcolony. If we are to flourish as a society, one that can adequately see itself represented in mainstream news, then we must take more care over the narratives crafted and created. Taking television news seriously is a step in the right direction.

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #FeesMustFall, 75 #RhodesMustFall, 75 A African National Congress campaign manifestos, 33, 34, 62 end of apartheid, 48, 49, 90, 120, 136 Government of National Unity, 36, 52 history, 33, 50 as liberation movement, 137, 138, 140 and the media, 21, 89–91, 93, 94, 104, 105, 126–129, 136, 139, 140, 157, 183, 204, 205, 211, 217, 218, 221, 225 as party state, 70–72, 76 representation of, 114, 115, 122, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150, 165, 169, 170, 172, 175, 178, 180, 183, 184, 223, 224

a rumour of spring, 77, 78, 222 splits within, 34, 38, 39, 46, 52, 53, 60, 63 state capture, 72, 74 as the Struggle party, 29, 45, 58, 59, 79, 133, 138, 142, 145–147, 149, 151, 172, 221 Africanews, 99 AmandlaTV, 99, 100, 126 ANN7, 99, 101 B Bell Pottinger, see Guptas Binaries of South African democracy, 187, 224 failure and progress, 14, 15, 119, 120, 160, 182, 195 friends and enemies, 14, 114, 188 hopes and fears, 121, 122, 124, 159–162, 223 peace and war, 3, 121, 224, 226

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Jones, Elections and TV News in South Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71792-6

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INDEX

Black left Black First Land First, 40 Born Free, 4, 68, 79, 170–174 definition, 68, 171 representation of, 171–174 2014 election, 158, 171, 172 Broederbond, 69, 86, 86n1, 88, 90, 92 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu, see Inkatha Freedom Party C Congress of the People/COPE, 34, 38–39, 63 Constructive Journalism, 17, 121, 188, 218, 219, 228–233, 235 Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), 32, 47, 90 D Daily Maverick, 38, 76, 100, 126 Democratic Alliance campaign manifestos, 32 Helen Zille, 84 history, 29, 31, 32 Mmusi Maimane, 33 representation of, 168, 171 Developmental (African) media ethics, 5, 12, 104, 105, 128, 233 DSTV, see Multichoice E Economic Freedom Fighters campaign manifestos, 37 inception, 37 Julius Malema, 37, 61, 67, 167 Marikana, 67 political tactics, 37, 117, 167 representation of, 117, 166–168 scandals, 38, 102 eNews/eNCA, 99, 152

F Fast news, see Mediatisation Fourth Industrial Revolution, 5, 95, 98, 111 FW de Klerk, see National Party G Game frame, 7, 10, 11, 30, 79, 121, 122, 124, 223–226 Glocalisation, 13, 232 GroundUp, 99, 103 Guptas Bell Pottinger, 74–76 and the media, 74–76, 93, 99, 101, 103, 105 origins, 73 and the presidency, 74 state capture, 73, 75 Zondo Commission, 77, 101 H Hands Up signification, 163–165, 223 Helen Zille, see Democratic Alliance Hype-ocracy, 7, 9–10, 12, 83, 112, 113, 116, 186, 187, 228 I Independent Electoral Commission, 30, 40, 49, 52, 120, 212, 221 Inkatha Freedom Party campaign manifestos, 36 Government of National Unity, 36 history, 30, 35–37 Mangosuthu Buthelezi, 35, 36, 115, 116, 162 representation of, 115, 155, 156, 162–164, 196

 INDEX 

violence, 36, 88, 116, 155, 156, 193 Zulu nation, 42, 63, 115 Inziles, Exiles, 46, 54, 58, 71, 138, 170 J Jacob Zuma, see Zuma, Jacob Journalism in South Africa female journalists, experience of, 102 freedom of expression, 104, 134, 140 Media Appeals Tribunal, 104 Protection of State Information Bill, 104 SANEF, 104 social media, impact of, 102, 111 top down organisation, 102, 103, 226–227 trust, 103, 186, 231 L Liberation narrative, 22, 34, 35, 45, 79, 129, 134, 145, 149, 222 Lip flap, 182–183, 186, 227, 230 M Maimane, Mmusi, see Democratic Alliance Malema, Julius, see Economic Freedom Fighters Mandela, Nelson background, 49, 50, 61, 137 health and death, 68, 141, 143–145, 181 politics of charisma, 51, 54 as president, 50, 52, 54, 59, 126 release from jail, 90

241

as symbol for ANC support, 62, 141, 143–145, 179 as symbol for the Struggle, 141–145 Marikana, 20, 37, 66–67, 67n13, 103, 141, 150, 167 Mbeki, Thabo background, 36, 54, 56 Broedertwis, 62 as deputy president, 51, 53 Favourite son, 34, 54, 57 loyalty, 58, 69, 105 ousting, 34, 61, 179 as president, 55, 59, 91, 126, 180 representation of, 176, 178–180, 222 stance on AIDS, 55 Media plurality, 94, 97–98, 102, 105 Mediatisation, 117, 118, 120, 122, 129, 130, 150, 168, 175, 178, 179, 184, 185, 188, 194, 204, 205, 212, 217, 219, 224, 225, 227, 234 definition of, 11–12, 17, 234 fast news, 119, 185, 220, 228, 232 global trend, 54, 234 media logic, 11, 116–118 scholarship of, 6, 14, 113, 220 Motsoeneng, Hlaudi, see South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) MultiChoice, 95–98 DSTV, 95–97, 105 N National Party, 30–31 end of apartheid, 47, 57, 88, 89 FW de Klerk, 31, 47, 51, 89 Government of National Unity, 36, 53 and the media, 84–86, 88, 89, 91 New National Party, 31 Start of apartheid, 49, 86, 134, 140 Nelson Mandela, see Mandela, Nelson

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INDEX

News values, 10, 11, 15, 113, 188 neoliberal news values, 125, 136, 158, 159, 174, 175, 177, 178, 184, 188, 194, 195, 204, 210, 211, 219, 220, 224, 225, 231 Post Cold War, 114–116, 121, 122, 159, 168, 182 Newzroom Afrika, 99 1994 election low level civil war, 3, 47, 48, 195, 197 miracle, 3, 48–49, 55, 120, 121 Project Rainbow Nation, 45, 51, 149, 179 representation of, 115, 120, 122, 124, 158, 178, 196–198, 207 1999 election, 34, 40, 52, 54 loyalty to Mbeki, 58, 92 representation of, 126, 127, 156, 170, 179, 180, 199, 221 Non-mainstream news, 125, 183–184, 186, 219 P Partisanship, 13, 125, 127, 128 Political journalism, 221–225 American-ised news, 113, 220 crisis in, 113, 119, 232 global challenges, 114, 116, 118, 125, 188 rhetoric of empire, 120 as spectacle, 117, 121, 194, 204, 220 visual nature of, 113, 186 Politically Aweh, 100, 103 Post-colonialism, 5, 13, 14, 53, 119, 129, 147, 149, 167, 194 Press in South Africa, 84 Afrikaans press, 134, 140 Naspers, 83, 96 political involvement in, 135, 136

Proxemics definition of, 10, 180 to enhance journalism, 230 examples of, 166, 188, 195, 205, 207 offer and demand, 177–178 subjective angle, 208, 211 use of, 10, 11 R Ramaphosa, Cyril background, 54, 76 balancing the splitting ANC, 77 Marikana, 66 as president, 3, 35, 70, 78, 79 representation of, 176 Role of the media, 7, 9, 84, 85, 97, 99, 103, 111, 113, 114, 118, 121, 139, 152, 185, 218, 220, 225 Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela, see Mandela, Nelson S Semiotic method lack of visual theory, 7, 8 semiotics of TV news, 19, 20, 189 social semiotics, 10, 19, 148, 155, 162–164, 167, 169, 177, 180, 193, 208, 223 usage, 112, 148, 157, 182, 194, 223 Semiotics lack of visual theory, 7 Sources, 8, 22, 98, 102, 121, 161, 183, 185–187, 194, 203, 204, 209, 226–228, 230, 234 citizen voices, 160, 161, 184, 188, 202, 210, 217, 225, 226

 INDEX 

political voices, 156, 182, 183, 185, 206, 217, 219, 225 pundits, 102, 185, 210, 217, 222 South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) apartheid mouthpiece, 86, 87, 90, 127 apartheid television, 87–89 Hlaudi Motsoeneng, 92, 139, 203 inception of television, 86, 88 political involvement in, 87, 90–93, 105, 127, 134, 136, 139, 152, 211 public service broadcasting, 85, 90, 91, 94, 96, 105, 128 Snuki Zikalala, 91, 92 Sunshine Journalism, 93, 135, 139, 193, 200 transformation, 84, 89, 90, 104, 211 Ugly Monster, 85, 87, 92–95, 127, 211 UNOMSA, 90, 127, 198 Zwelakhe Sisulu, 84, 90, 91, 94 South African voting diaspora, 5, 95 election results, 16, 29–35, 40–42 identity politics, 45, 59, 67, 79 (see also Liberation narrative) process of, 30, 39–40, 45, 46, 78 representation of, 120, 122, 127, 144, 145, 151, 155, 157, 158, 166, 169, 171–174, 176, 180, 182, 187, 198, 199, 212, 224, 231 scholarship of, 16, 172 voting age population, 68 voting eligible population, 29, 42 See also Born Frees Sunshine Journalism, see South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC)

243

T Television news definition of, 12, 85, 98 importance of, 5 legacy media, 85, 184 scholarship of, 8, 189 as a sign vehicle, 19, 208 Thabo Mbeki, see Mbeki, Thabo 2004 election, 53, 59 AIDS epidemic, 55, 59, 222 crime, 55 Loyalty to Mbeki, 92 representation of, 122, 125, 156, 164, 179, 180, 208, 221, 223 2014 election Born Frees, 67 factionalism, 69, 70 protest action, 151, 201, 202, 204, 209, 224, 226 Radical Economic Transformation, 72, 77 representation of, 93, 117, 125, 141, 142, 145, 148, 150, 158, 167, 170, 177, 181, 183, 205, 222, 225, 228, 231 security cluster, 71, 151, 195, 209, 212, 222 Zuma re-election, 67, 68 2009 election Ousting of Mbeki, 34, 179, 222 Polokwane 2007, 34, 38, 60–61, 63 protest action, 225 representation of, 127, 143, 156, 158, 165, 169, 183, 193, 222, 223 Zulufication, 37, 42 Zuma show, 176, 177

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INDEX

2019 election Fake news, twitter bots, 74 New Dawn, 35, 77, 78, 183, 222 protest action, 202, 204, 209, 224, 226 ramaphoria, 78, 200 representation of, 78, 94, 112, 125, 141, 143, 148, 164, 167, 183, 203, 205, 225, 228, 231, 233 security cluster, 204, 209, 212, 222 U Universal (Western) media ethics, 101, 125, 128, 129 W White Monopoly Capital, 72–73, 75 White right, 39–40 AWB, 156, 193, 195, 196 Freedom Front, 32, 39, 115, 116, 161

Z Zuma, Jacob background, 34, 63, 64, 74 control of media, 92, 105, 141, 143, 149 corruption trial, 61, 64, 65, 169, 222 as deputy president, 60, 74 Guptas, 76, 101 (see also Guptas) 100% Zulu Boy, 60, 178 Marikana, 66 Nine wasted years, 35, 77 Nkandla, 63, 65, 173 party state, 70, 72 populism, 60, 62, 63, 72, 176, 179 presidency, 71, 72 as president, 62, 64, 68, 69, 74, 178, 209 rape trial, 63–65, 169 representation of, 144, 169, 176–179, 187, 223 security cluster, 64, 69–71, 75, 92