Against the Odds: Media and Cultural Studies in Southern Africa[1]
Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand and NYU
The most interesting academic work in the Global South has always had to be home-made. Scholars have had to rely on improvisation to negotiate the exigencies of the “third world” academy, distorted by colonial exclusion and postcolonial austerity.
Thinking about the histories and formations of Media Studies and related disciplines in the Global South requires reckoning with these circumstances. This article sketches how these constraints have played out in southern African, tracing how various players have maneuvered around them, producing a landscape of rich scholarship and public intellectual discourse.
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Under colonial segregation and then apartheid, black intellectuals had little access to “white” tertiary institutions or to white-dominated publishing domains. One major response was to set up the black press as a key site of intellectual production. This work in turn generated theorizations of the media and the politics of representation. As I have argued elsewhere, Gandhi’s South African newspaper, Indian Opinion and his printing press functioned as a medium of information and as a site for theorizing ideas of reading and writing which in turn provided models of satyagraha (Hofmeyr 2013).
These activist-inspired theories of media have powerful lineages in southern Africa. The influential Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s and 1980s pursued practices of psychological liberation and existential freedom rather than grand political schemes. The artisanal media they used (roneo-ed pamphlets, hand-made posters, poetry performances) enacted their philosophies in miniature. More recently, the post-apartheid student movements, #RhodesmustFall and #Feesmustfall sparked extensive debate about legacies of white-dominated media and curriculum and how these might be decolonized. Matching form and content, these projects were pursued through a repertoire of genres – durational performance, public art interventions, actual and metaphorical burning. Like much black intellectual activity in South Africa, these latter initiatives took shape in a black Atlantic matrix, drawing on, and feeding into Black Lives Matter.
These media practices took shape outside or on the peripheries of academic institutions. Inside these universities, academic disciplines related to the study of media started to take shape. These emerged initially from a Cold War crucible, taking shape as Communication Science, with strong footholds in white Afrikaans-medium institutions. These legacies persist. South Africa’s largest tertiary institution, the correspondence University of South Africa still offers a bachelor’s degree in “Communication Science”. One might regard the persistence of such paradigms as a type of intellectual dumping. Models from Euro-America make their way to the peripheries where they assume after-lives that exceed their sell-by dates. Academic fields in the Global South can hence be strange amalgams shaped by the accumulating detritus of older schools of thoughts.
Within white English-medium institutions in the 1970s and 80s, neo-Marxist models in the form of cultural studies emerged amongst dissidents in English departments and as a broader “history-from-below” movement across the social sciences. The regional politics of southern Africa with Mozambican and Angolan independence in 1975, followed by Zimbabwe in 1980 created new networks and academic formations. The Centre for Communication, Media and Society at the University of Natal, Durban formed part of a Nordic-funded venture between the English Department at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) and the Oslo University Media and Cultural Studies program. An important strand in this configuration was an emergent African cultural studies, apparent in the work of Kimani Gecau a Kenyan exile in Zimbabwe who had worked with Ngugi wa Thiongo’s radical Kamiriithu Theatre project (Tomaselli, Mboti, Rønnig 2013).
The mounting post-independence crisis in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe led to Nordic funding being withdrawn and academics from the UZ-Oslo project relocating to South Africa where several scholars became important players in establishing or strengthening Media Studies departments. These departments continue to produce innovative scholarship on African, decolonial and popular cultural approaches to Media Studies (for example Chiumbu and Iqani 2020).
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These developments were not without their own fault lines which are worth keeping in mind in order to offset overly romanticized views. A useful illustration of such romanticization emerged around the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Hofmeyr 2015). The Making had been influential in left-wing scholarship in South Africa and Thompsonian-style social history inspired a “history from below’” movement. This development precipitated a major shift in the social science traditions of white English universities (as well as in emerging cultural and media studies paradigms) largely towards class-based analyses of racial capitalism in South Africa. The 2013 anniversary sparked several accounts which celebrated the reach of The Making in South Africa and the radical anti-apartheid scholarship that it enabled.
Yet, as Shireen Ally has demonstrated, the class-based analyses of the Thompsonian moment have to be contextualized in the emergence of Black Consciousness. As she argues, “What Marxism’s class analysis offered this group of intellectuals was not just a powerful theoretical lens to explain apartheid, but a powerful political tool for white intellectuals to deal more comfortably with questions of race” (Ally 2005, 73). Faced with a separatist black-led organization, white radicals found themselves without a leadership or revolutionary role. One response to these changed circumstances was to embrace a class-based analysis and/or a nonracial African National Congress-United Democratic Front position.
Having been part of the “history from below” movement myself, I was asked to write something on The Making (Hofmeyr 2015). Taking a book history approach and drawing on Ally’s work, I explored these configurations by comparing the marginalia in The Making with those in Biko’s I Write What I Like (IWWIL), using copies in South African libraries. In the case of The Making, marginalia reflected dutiful student engagement with the text: underlining, highlighting, asterisking. With one exception – a volume that had originally belonged to an academic – no words or phrases were written in the margins. It is as if The Making is so massive and monumental that it leaves no room for responses. All that South African reader can do is dutifully internalize it, rather like an imperial kit from the metropolis.
The copies of IWWIL by contrast provide evidence of a more engaged relationship with the text. In addition to the usual student markings, the edges of the pages teemed with annotations, questions, thoughts and exclamations. “What do we do when we found [sic] consciousness” mused one reader, referencing a major debate about the tactical difficulties facing any movement propounding psychological liberation. IWWIL turned readers into annotators, creating writers from readers, even if only on a miniature scale. The extent of the book’s influence is also apparent from the regularity with which it gets stolen from libraries and bookshops. The Johannesburg Public Library has had six copies taken out and never returned, producing the poignant entry “Biko, Steve. Long Overdue.”
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Rather like the marginalia in IWWIL, academic work in the Global South has taken shape in constrained spaces. Nonetheless scholars have produced rich and insightful work. From the redoubts of the Global North, this scholarship remains largely invisible. In keeping with the aims of this site, this article has drawn attention to the historical trajectories, regional patterns and political fault lines that have shaped Media Studies as a discipline in southern Africa and the innovative scholarship that has emerged, often against the odds.
References Cited
Ally, Shireen. 2005. “Oppositional Intellectualism as Reflection, not Rejection, of Power: Wits Sociology, 1975–1989.” Transformations 59: 66–97.
Chiumbu, Sarah and Mehita Iqani. 2020. Media Studies: Critical African and Decolonial Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2013. Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2015. “South African Remains: E. P. Thompson, Biko, and the Limits of The Making of the English Working Class.” Historical Reflections 41, no. 1: 99–110.
Tomaselli, Keyan, Nyasha Mboti, Helge Rønnig. 2013. “South-North Perspectives: The Development of Cultural and Media Studies in Southern Africa.” Media, Culture and Society 35, no. 1: 36–43.
[1] My thanks to Mehita Iqani for advice on the historiographies of Media Studies in South Africa.