The first, rough draft of history: How journalism has helped not just report, but shape the course of South Africa

Journalists report the first draft of history in newspapers and magazines. Some then write the detailed backstory second draft in books. Academics provide the third, theorised draft – one that explains what happened.

Despite documented evidence of massive shifts in the ownership of South African media since the mid-1990s, accompanied by extraordinary upheavals in newsroom practices, the myth of blanket white control prevails.

Despite corrupt factions of the new ruling party re-engineering the political economy enabling capture of public assets, legitimised by global accounting, PR and research firms, the idea of white monopoly capital persists.

Despite the United Democratic Front’s preference for non-racialism during the 1980s, we have retained race classifications that again objectify and dehumanise in the name of redress.

Yet, despite an onslaught on the media, the institution is largely holding its ground.

How did we get here?

Gawie Botma’s “Race talk in the South African media since Jan van Riebeeck” (2019) and Lizette Rabe’s “A luta continua: A history of media freedom in South Africa” (2020) draw on meticulous archival research.

Botma accepts that South Africa’s problems started with Van Riebeeck in 1652, as did the country’s modern media history. Van Riebeeck is described as an avid “blogger”, a quirkiness that renders “history” relevant for contemporary readers.

“Race Talk” navigates the following topics: Dutch colonial race talk; race talk in the white colonial press during British rule; race talk in the black press during colonialism and apartheid; Black Consciousness and race talk in the mainstream media; race talk in the Afrikaans press during apartheid; race talk in the English and alternative press during apartheid; the law and race talk in the media; race talk and winds of change in the media; race talk in the digital media age; and academic race talk in the media.

Botma reveals that the current preoccupation with race is quite recent. Historically, racial epithets shifted from being initially descriptive of nations, later becoming ethnically derogatory and defamatory.

Wynand Harmse’s “SABC 1936-1995. Still a key player… or an endangered species?” (2018) addresses practitioners, discussing change and technology as a concerned ex-SABC executive. Botma fractures the contemporary populist Fanonesque-derived epithets by revealing conceptual cracks, ideological contradictions, political contestations, differences, changing alliances and shifting allegiances, indicated in lexical changes in language over time. 

Race-talking taken-for-granteds are upended, such that smothering contemporary political slogans are cautioned.

Where Botma’s narrative implicitly invites readers to ponder how he is himself as writer/researcher/raced, Rajesh Sundaram’s “Behind the Scenes at Gupta TV” (2018) offers a comparatively thin diary narrated in first-person novella style. 

He reveals how he was illegally headhunted from India to launch the Gupta-financed television station, ANN7, that squatted on DStv between 2013 and 2017. Though recruited with promises of mentoring young black broadcasters and illegal migrant Indian workers, he reveals how editorial staff were subjected to “indentured labour” by the Guptas. The amateurish channel was to be positioned “to loot state coffers of millions in advertising funding”. 

He found himself “caught in a web of lies, deceit and political thuggery”. Sundaram tells of his short unhappy immigrant experience in a matter-of-fact way.

Rabe’s “A Luta Continua” examines the swashbuckling early press. A few have actually survived to this day. She opens intriguing windows on the past, speaks to us in the present and takes readers into the future. That future is messy, confused and contested. Plots and subplots break out here, there and everywhere, rendering a Robert Ludlum thriller tame and much more narratively coherent.

The main sections of Rabe’s book are: colonialism’s terra incognita; the Unfreedoms of White Unionism and White Nationalism;  and the New Democracy Dawns. Rabe’s tome is coterminous with the flood of scores of excellent exposés written by journalists and others on other sectors of the economy, polity, security, State Capture, corruption, Sanral and tax evasion. 

However, “A Luta Continua” starts four centuries ago and tracks the topic from then on. The plot and story start slowly, and build in momentum through the centuries during the slower print age.

The story’s impetus begins to increase with the change of government in the mid-1990s, coterminous with the onset of the digital age, and the meshing of the new and the legacy media legislative regimes. When discussing the Zuma years, the pace changes frenetically, and the not unusual bumpy historical linear ride until then becomes a roller coaster nightmare without safety harnesses, fracturing this way and that.

Rabe reminds us of what has been, what could have been and what the consequences are going to be. What started out four centuries ago in the always difficult and very slow negotiation of press freedom, including access to a physical printing press, becomes by the end of the book, in the onset of supposed liberation, an uncontrollable tsunami of state deceit. 

Fractional deception and attempted destruction of press and media freedom are the common thread in all of the books reviewed here, writing the second and third drafts of history.

The authors discussed in this article transport readers into the nuances, textures and feelings of the different periods, humanising their often flawed characters. 

Today, in a period of intractable racial hardening and monological prescriptions on history, these would be seen as unforgivable ideological transgressions. The key journalists and editors are named and lauded, and many paid the price in loss of employment, health and security.

Similarly, and where appropriate, those, along with their owners who failed to adhere to professional principles, and who manipulated the media for sectarian gain, are named and shamed, which is Anton Harber’s technique in, “So, For The Record – Behind The Headlines In An Era Of State Capture” (2020).

The struggles initiated by the pioneers brought to life by Rabe are still playing out more than four centuries later. They are not just the “bad guys” (settlers) of history; they are creating it, they are shaping it and they are embedding the resulting democratic impulses for centuries to come. 

If history explains why we do what we do today, all these “spirited itinerant newspapermen” with their small presses “wove South Africa into a country”. They spun “a net of mutual awareness over the thinly populated expanse of the land. They welded loose collections of individuals into communities”.  

Foeta Krige’s “The SABC 8” (2019), and “Paper Tiger: Iqbal Survé and the Downfall of Independent Newspapers” by Alide Dasnois and Chris Whitfield (2019), are written by insiders to the beguilingly named “transformation” processes. 

Newsrooms across the nation were sundered by suspicion, interfering managements and narcissistic CEOs. Krige tells the harrowing story of how the SABC 8 – eight broadcast journalists – stood up to censorship and the reign of terror unleashed by the then chief operating officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng.

One of my key takeaways on reading the Krige and Dasnois and Whitfield stories is that these chilling – but often inspiring – studies alert one to just how immunised many of us may have become with regard to attacks on media freedom and on individual journalists and editors. 

The enemy is often within the media institution itself. The digital age has brought more than just constant state surveillance – indeed, we are all now persons of interest – often subject to anonymous trolling, death threats, professional stalking, sexist labelling and shaming of female journalists just trying to do their jobs. 

Physical harassment and rage, and of course assassination and imprisonment (in some other parts of the world), have become routine. “The SABC 8” is a most traumatising tale of officially sanctioned terror.

Sketching the third draft of history, Herman Wasserman’s “Media, Geopolitics and Power. A View from the Global South” (2018) sweeps up numerous issues through its wide-ranging essays: transitology, ethics, media freedom, professionalism, ubuntu, African culture and values, and the massive post-apartheid growth of tabloids among new entry black readers. Drawing on published media histories, Wasserman pilots the prior story into the globalising present, offering a wide-ranging one-stop reference that offers an explanation of determining structures.

The contemporary populist telling of national history cannot become a shallow ahistorical monologue. Such telling suppresses the mess, contradictions and contestations of the past; how these have shaped the present, protected democracy and modernised the country.