The warning signs are there — freedom of expression in South Africa is under threat

A new report by the Campaign for Free Expression (CFE) tries to read across different fields — the media, the arts, gender and sexual rights, the right to protest, etc — to get a sense of where South Africa is when it comes to realising the right to free expression. 

The report is not complete and doesn’t cover areas such as freedom of expression and religion, or deal with migrants, prisoners, people with disabilities, or free expression in universities. But it suggests that things aren’t looking that good. It might not be that the canary has stopped singing, but it has changed its tune and there are long and ominous pauses between some of its notes.     

South Africa is a contradictory landscape. Mostly, and in many ways, we do have the right to speak, and this is often protected by the courts. The recent backhand a high court gave the attempt by former President Jacob Zuma to silence journalist Karyn Maughan is one example, as is a similar response meted out to the Moti Group. 

The Constitutional Court sending Rica — the surveillance legislation — back for parliamentary review is another. Writers appear to write what they like, actors play whoever they want to play, and rock bands tell police cars to “Fokof”, with only the church doors wailing. There is even a new theatre and dance policy that wants to reconnect to the spirit of the 1990s and use “church and community halls as well as people’s homes (garages, backyards, lounges)” as venues. 

As the policy recognises, there are important questions to ask in a country as diverse and as unequal as South Africa about how freedom of expression can best be enabled. 

So far, so good. On the face of it, we’re a long way from, say, a country where journalists and bloggers are imprisoned and tortured, where people speak in hushed voices when they criticise the state, or where homosexuality is outlawed and punishable by death.  

But, as the CFE review suggests, whether by intent, chance or sheer negligence, it is not entirely true to say we’re not heading in that direction either. 

An example that speaks of a few issues at once involved a female reporter who tried to interview the Economic Freedom Fighters’ Mgcini Tshwaku, a member of the mayoral committee for safety and security, during the launch of a crime prevention project in Johannesburg. The journalist was shoved to the ground by the party’s supporters, and then stepped over as she lay there. Not just by the EFF apparatchiks who shoved her, but by Joburg Metro Police Department officers too, apparently there to keep the peace. This should alarm us. 

It should also alarm us when in Kwanokuthula, Plettenberg Bay, a journalist had to move out of her home and her byline was taken off her stories after the community she lived in threatened her because she had written about xenophobic violence. 

These incidents are not isolated and it’s hard to dismiss them simply as part of a robust democracy finding its feet. It’s also not easy to dismiss police repeatedly defying standing orders on how to treat journalists, or journalists being hit by rubber bullets when police open fire on crowds — in at least one incident, it seems that reporters were deliberately shot at. This should concern us, as much as we should be concerned when a journalist is beaten up by the police, and then assaulted again when he opens a criminal case. 

No laughing matter