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Africa Media Review
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South Africa
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- Description:
- This is an analytical appraisal of the making of a vibrant media industry in South Africa. The author commends the government effort to repeal oppressive legal regimes that served the defunct apartheid system in stifling press freedom and fundamental human rights. While extolling the virtues of the new democratic culture in the country, the paper also underscores the centrality of the press, especially the media, in nurturing and safeguarding the new plural political system. The author argues strongly that the formation of a more media friendly communication policy, to create a final and rapid break with the divisive past, is imperative. The paper enjoins the new government of national unity to devise comprehensive communication policy and profound training packages for journalists to strengthen and professionalize the media industry, as an instrument of national development. It contends that democratic growth requires a free and authoritative press to provide a forum for national debate, where people can exchange critical and competitive views, to enable them to make rational or informed choices on various matters critical to national cohesion. This, the author says, is only possible if the new communication policy establishes efficient information feedback mechanisms. The paper also highlights various legislations put in place to ensure that national interest is catered for in programming in a liberalised broadcast media. The issues of ownership and media accessibility to the poor are discussed.
- Date Issued:
- 1997-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- This article condenses the theoretical discussion carried out by the authors for a framing paper on cultural policy. In it, they begin from the position that most discourse about the term 'culture' makes it difficult to define an exact constituency which, for policy purposes, can propose and benefit from implementation. In the South African context within which they work, they point out that taking into account the dynamics and special needs of transition from apartheid to democracy makes this a doubly taxing problem. The authors accept that the present circumstances favour a more radical appreciation of the concept of culture and need than enshrined in existing cultural policy, for example, in Australia. Therefore, they draw on the radical post-marxist approach of philosopher Agnes Heller to relocate cultural discourse within the pragmatic category of "raising endowments into talents". On this basis, they proceed to identify, in terms of a politics of equitable transformation, the constituency most deprived in terms of raising endowments into talents under apartheid. These, the authors argue, are the women in single-parent or all-female households who have accomplished the business of seeing their children into higher education. As principal actors in the ongoing business of raising endowments into talents, the authors argue, such women constitute the basic constituency in contemporary South Africa towards whom cultural policy research should initially be directed. As cultural actors, they do not as such exist in a vacuum, however. Thus the actual pragmatic relations between this constituency and others involved in cultural practice are what policy implementation should strive to strengthen, empower and protect until generations with other, more elaborated, needs mature.
- Date Issued:
- 1997-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- This paper challenges the entrenched Shannon and Weaver model of communication and suggests alternative approaches to community health education. An alternative, where the emphasis falls on the receiver or 'reader', is examined with special reference to DramAidE. DramAidE is a South African state funded HIV/AIDS education programme in which plays, workshops and community days become a process through which dialogue around health issues is established between health workers and a school community. The approach is to use local expressive forms (plays, songs, poems, dances and posters) as enabling resources or mechanisms of learning and of re-enacting and retelling the 'story' from shifting positions. The issues raised about the impact on the community of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are further explored in participatory workshops with the intention of changing attitudes and developing some skills. The work is based on the premise that good health is dependent on social, psychological, economic and environmental factors. Likewise, sicknesses are states which must be seen in a holistic sense. The understanding of the meaning of health in this approach is culture bound and it is important not to separate out the physiological from the cultural. A further contention is that health, as a constituent and dynamic component of subjectivity does not refer to a state so much as to a process. This means that health is about self-image, self-esteem and self-confidence. The drama based workshops offered in the progamme focus on building self-esteem and self-awareness as a first step in making choices about healthy behaviour. Therefore, health education should not be actively aimed at changing personal behaviour alone. Young people need to demonstrate skills in changing their social environment and to this end DramAidE is forming clubs in schools that will become self-sufficient and to encourage the school community to take pride in building a culture of learning and health promotion in the school. The long term aim of DramAidE is to develop a social movement around celebrating the joy of choosing to live a healthy life style. We are asking ourselves and young people to 'Act Alive'. One strategy for mobilising young people is build an awareness of the interaction between human rights and health and thus find a common theme that cuts across differences of heritage and culture
- Date Issued:
- 1997-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- The African National Congress (ANC) has been working towards establishing a blueprint for transition to a post-apartheid South Africa since the drawing up of the 'constitutional guidelines' in Lusaka in 1988. In all these deliberations, the political, land and economic policies have taken precedence, while In the area of social reform, housing, education and welfare have featured prominently. Detailed attention to the media has been a later development. Even so, media remains something of a poor cousin relegated to a lower order of priority while other areas of concern are better articulated. On 23/24th November, 1991, the Department of Information and Publicity (DIP) of the ANC convened a meeting of approximately 300 delegates to discuss the drafting of a media policy. The outcome of this gathering was a document entitled, Resolutions adopted at the DIP National Seminar (ANC, 1991). The Resolutions were prefaced by a 'Draft Media Charter' which was also the result of the November deliberations. The Resolutions and the Charter were adopted by the ANC's National Executive Committee on 13th January, 1992, and remain the key expositions of ANC media policy. This paper examines that policy in light of the potential and powerful impact of the broadcast media.
- Date Issued:
- 1994-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- If South Africa's potential is to be realized, the nation will need to be fully integrated into the global electronic information age. A future South African government can choose between two basic courses of action: (i) emphasis could be placed on reinforcing and expanding the technological infrastructures required to further the development of a post-Fordist South African information economy or (ii) emphasis could be placed on the modernist industrial base at the expense of the information economy and communication technologies of post-Fordism. The challenge lies in avoiding dependency on the West by accepting the top-down relations associated with multi-national capitalism.
- Date Issued:
- 1994-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review