Riaan Cruywagen does not believe in Chuck Norris

(I did this guest post on The Leo Africanus):

The mythic status that the news reader Riaan Cruywagen has attained in South Africa is almost akin to that of the US action hero Chuck Norris. Just like Norris, Cruywagen has been the subject of the kind of jokes (circulated by text or email, or told around braai fires) that ascribe superpowers to him in an ironic pastiche of the urban legend. One of these, ‘Riaan Cruywagen knows the news before it happens’ features as a on-screen quote in this  quirky short film by Lucilla Blankenberg on the interesting website Why Democracy? (link). Cruywagen proudly (and only partly tongue in cheek) tells Blankenberg that he holds the world record for number of news bulletins read in Afrikaans. Cruywagen has been a familiar face on television since its (very late) arrival in apartheid South Africa in 1976, and is still to be seen on the SABC’s nightly news bulletins. Watching clips from his broadcasts over the years it is remarkable to see how little his physical appearance has changed. Rumours abound about how he manages this (wigs have been mentioned) but it is exactly this continuity through the tumultuous South African history as portrayed on (and in large parts ignored by) the public service broadcaster that explains Cruywagen’s appeal to especially the conservative Afrikaner viewership. When rumours surfaced in 2003 that the SABC planned to axe Cruywagen as part of a revamp, the Afrikaans community protested and Cruywagen remained firmly in his seat. For all Cruywagen’s claims to “neutrality” and “objectivity”, rhetorical constructs associated with the school of journalism that sees journalists as passive observers or stenographers of history, he has provided the apartheid regime’s propaganda machine with the genteel validation it needed to assure its white suburban viewers in the 1980s that although the country was burning around them, everything was still fine and the government was in control. Blankenberg’s film highlights some of the discrepancies between the world as it appeared on the TV screen and the world as it was lived on the streets back then, and confronts Cruywagen with the question of how he managed to work at the SABC at the time when  so much skewing of reality was going on . Cruywagen unflinchingly responds that his role is that of a trained professional – ‘cool, calm and collected’ in the midst of the turmoil. This isn’t journalistic fairness and balance, but the abdication of responsibility and willful ventriloquism of His Master’s Voice. Fast forward to 2008. The ruling party might be splitting. The SABC is under fire for allowing government interference in its content. The SABC board is marred by the politics of ANC in-fighting. Cruywagen is still at his desk – cool, calm and all the rest. What does this tell us about the SABC?

Western media better at feel-good stories?

Are the Western media better at telling feel-good stories about Africa? If this were true, it would go against the majority opinion that Africa only enters Western media discourses when there is a famine, drought or war to report on. Yet a report in the Kenyan newspaper The Nation seems to suggest otherwise.

Ludwig von Mugabe?

The UK tabloid the Sun has admitted they made a mistake by publishing a picture of a palatial house from the movie Beethoven’s 4th claiming it belonged to Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. The Sun admitted its mistake after the Press Complaints Commission received a complaint. Read more about it here

A24 goes live

Some time ago I posted an item about the online news agency A24 Media that aims to promote the work of African journalists and producers. The agency’s website has nowe gone live. Here is an interview with the agency’s Kenyan founder, Salim Amin.

Voices of Africa

The South African newspaper Mail & Guardian has launched a project aimed at countering the bad news about life in Africa that dominates the mainstream news agenda. By recruiting writers from all over the continent in what looks like a coordinated citizen journalism effort, the “Voices of Africa” project wants to paint a different picture than the “one-dimensional struggle to survive war, poverty, corruption and disease; an ongoing saga of famine and failure”. Instead of the usual bleak stereotype of Africa offered by the global media, this project wants to show “how we live in Africa, not how we die; how we thrive as multifaceted humans, not merely as survivors”. It is “an ongoing series of lively articles written by Africans about life in ‘their’ Africa — ordinary people getting on with their own lives, often in the face of adversity.”

Some of the stories featured already are about street life on a Saturday night in Kwame Nkrumah street in Harare, the expensive wedding business in Tanzania and the price of tiramisu in Addis Ababa.

Quite nice.  Check it out here.

The Media Online

Since I write a column for them, consider this post a brief commercial break:

The new issue of the South African magazine The Media ’s online version, The Media Online, landed in my mailbox today. The magazine’s theme this month is community media, and my column is about the new trend of ‘hyperlocal’ reporting in UK community papers.  Register, read and throw tomatoes.

Breaking news in Zambia

A group of Zambian journalists have launched a new breaking-news website, The Watchdog. In the light of equipment shortages and the perennial problems with internet connectivity in Africa, it is a brave move. Given these challenges, it also makes sense that the journalists want to combine the online site with a newspaper and partner with radio stations, as they explain here. Perhaps mobile phones will follow. This combination of traditional media, online news and mobile technologies can help to amplify messages from various sources, and exponentially increase the reach of the various individual platforms. In a context where connectivity is limited, this is the way to go.

Zapiro, Zuma and the ethics of lampooning

The South African cartoonist Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro)  is used to being in hot water.  Like cartoonists everywhere his work is built on satirical comment and humorous commentary, and a healthy disrespect for the political elite. His cartoons are often more than just comments or visual representations of current news. They provide journalistic analysis in their own right, often steering debates in new directions. He has on occasion described himself as a ‘visual columnist‘, and his contribution to critical journalism in South Africa has been honoured by, amongst others, CNN – in 2001 he became the first journalist to win a prize in the CNN African Journalist of the Year awards, and in 2006 he was named Mondi Shanduka Journalist of the Year.  It is perhaps this journalistic seriousness underlying the lampooning that adds to the sting his work delivers.

Currently, debate is raging again about two of his recent cartoons that comment on the legal battles that the new ANC president Jacob Zuma have been facing .  The first cartoon depicted Zuma about to rape Lady Justice while being spurred on by his alliance partners. The second cartoon, inserted into this post above, played on the contradictory comments on the rule of law coming from some of his supporters. Now that Zuma has managed to escape prosecution and a major hurdle on his road to the country’s presidency has been removed, one can perhaps expect even less tolerance for criticism (and even more criticism from those, like Zapiro, who choose the calibre of their weapons according to the prominence of their targets).

The ethical issues around Zapiro’s cartoon are intricate and linked to race, gender and political power. The metaphor of rape is especially problematic given the prevalence of gender-based violence in South Africa, and because it insinuates a charge of rape that Zuma was cleared of not long ago.  I thought the M&G’s ombudsman Franz Kruger gave one of the most considered responses in the debate.  For a detailed gender  critique, see Christi van der Westhuizen’s post here.

Perhaps one of the key questions that remain, now that the charges against Zuma has been exposed in court as having been part of the bitter leadership struggle in the ANC, is: Who was really caught with their pants down?

People are living there

 Perhaps this is a modern day, post-apartheid Fugard tale (if I have to spell out the post title): The young South African press photographer and Ruth First fellow Alon Skuy explains how he found people making a home out of nothing at all, under a bridge. There is something in the picture he describes that speaks of dignity and resilience, even in the most dire of circumstances. But the description, like his pictures, is also a deeply unsettling account of the precariousness of life in South Africa. You can read more about Skuy and see examples of his work (like the one posted above, for which he won a Mondi Award) here.

‘Africa’s Voice’

The representation of Africa in Western media has been a cause for debate and concern for decades. It has become a well-known fact that Africa’s media image usually consists of famine, disaster or conflict (to the background music of Band Aid’s ‘Feed the World’: ‘there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas T-i-i-ime’). These images are related to global imbalances in media flows, which in turn is the result of an unequal distribution of media power – in short, the powerful global media are owned and managed by big conglomerates based in the global North whose main aim is making money. And bad news sells – especially if it’s about that dark continent far away from Western civilisation. This imbalance was attacked at UNESCO in the 1970s-80s by proponents of the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), who sought to create a more equitable global information order. (In the end the USA spoiled all the fun, not surprisingly)

Fast forward to 2008, where the internet and new communication technologies have created new opportunities for media in Africa and the developing world to circumvent big media behemoths. Of course these opportunities should be viewed circumspectly – internet access is still very limited and unequally distributed on the continent – but African bloggers, media activists and civil society have already adopted these technologies with great success (see the older post about blogging in  Kenya during the post-election violence there last year).

Now a 38-year old Kenyan journalist, Salim Amin, is planning to use the web as a platform for a new news agency, A24 Media. The agency will seek to tell the African story from the African perspective by using a web portal to promote the work of African journalists and broadcast producers. The aim is to sell the stories produced by these journalists to African television stations but also in Europe, North America and the Middle East.

“Africa can only be covered by Africans,” Amin, told the South African Mail & Guardian, “[there is a story] beyond the starving children with flies in their eyes, beyond executions and genocide. Ours is a new and balanced agenda.”

It sounds like a great idea, as long as the agency does not fashion itself as a PR company intent on only showing the good, but also critically engaging with the ugly. Fingers crossed that the launch goes well (the website is still under construction), and that the journalism showcased there will tell the full, textured story of Africa today.