History in the new South Africa: an introduction - Det danske ...

state after the 1948 nationalist victory, the English language press, along with the Chamber of
Mines and Chamber of Industry, became the key sites for the political expression of
autonomous capitalist interests. The Afrikaans language newspapers tended to be more the
agents of the main factions of Afrikaner nationalist politics that controlled the state for much
of the twentieth century in South Africa. Indeed, like many other language-based nationalist
newspapers, the Afrikaans newspapers functioned as institutions for the articulation of
ideology and constituted key sites for the development of nationalist leaders. The marginal
black press, when repressed by government, tended to reflect either the modernist, petitionary
protest stance of the small African middle-class intelligentsia, or later the revolutionary
visions of political organizations that dominated among the black majority. Throughout the
1980s, as resistance to apartheid as well as to economic exploitation reached fever pitch, an
“alternative press” emerged that directly sought to challenge apartheid through its journalism.
One final, characteristic of apartheid was that under Apartheid broadcasting – with minor
exceptions that were tolerated – was the exclusive domain of the state. For most of the
period of NP rule, censorship was conducted in powerful yet indirect fashion. The
government passed laws against representation of entire areas of public life. It banned
“undesirable” people and groups and passed legislation prohibiting the dissemination of their
ideas.
I highlighted the major reforms of the early 1990s that accompanied political liberation. These
included the beginnings of a debate around restructuring the SABC from a “state broadcaster”
to a “public broadcaster,” and some attempts to restructure newsrooms. However, I suggest
that the full potential of these processes were undermined by narrow political aims (with an
eye on an advantage in the 1994 democratic election in the case of broadcasting, for example),
and that existing media elites succeeded in ensuring that the structural underpinnings of print
media remained largely intact. Nevertheless, this period also solidified the growing
importance of media, and especially journalists, to political processes. This will have
important implications for the kind of public sphere that would develop over the immediate
term and for the impacts of the media of communication on South African political battles.
References
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Goga, F. 2000. Toward Affirmative Action: Issues of Race and Gender in Media
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Harber, A. 2002. The Power of Words: Journalism in the Age of the Market. Indicator SA, 19
(3). 13-19.
Horwitz, R. 2001. 2000. Communication and Democratic Reform in South Africa. Cambridge:
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Human Rights Commission. 1999. Public Inquiry into Racism in the Media. Johannesburg:
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Jacobs, S. 1999. The News Media. In Reynolds, A. Elections ’99: South Africa. The
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Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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Jacobs, S. and R. Krabill. 2005. Mediating Manenberg in the post-Apartheid Public Sphere:
Media, Democracy and Citizenship in South Africa in S. L. Robins (ed.), Limits to Liberation
after Apartheid. Cape Town: David Philip and Ohio University Press.
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