Media Power and Hegemony in South Africa: The Myth of Independence

While a public service broadcaster is legally obliged to “be universally geographically accessible; have universal appeal [and] contribute to the creation of national identity and sense of community” (Ndlovu 2019), post-independence, many public broadcasters (PSB) in Africa have continued to remain influenced by complicating colonial legacies in broadcasting wherein the aim was to serve the interests of those in power (Harding 2015).

Blessed Ngwenya's latest book, Media power and hegemony in South Africa: The myth of independence, explores how media and economics influence SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) staff's conceptions of independence in the context of modernity/coloniality. The goal of this question is to help SABC staff members overcome Eurocentric thinking and show how Western knowledge affects their “ideological trapping in the practice, thought and processes of coloniality of power/knowledge”. Ngwenya adopts a decolonial approach that favours local understandings of the phenomenon being examined in his investigation which, unlike prevalent approaches, enables the SABC staff members to speak from their own social position (e.g., “subaltern epistemic location”).

There are three key contributions of the book. First, the study on which it is based seeks to understand how staff members interpret the SABC world and how it can be from their own local perspectives. Second, the study gives new insights into the philosophy of media through the lens of the liberation of African media. The above is done by building a better understanding of public service groups (like PSB) that use local knowledge in the global south. Finally, the book also interrogates the notion of race and racism as an organizing principle that structures all global communications.

This volume is organized into seven chapters. Delineating focal themes in research (decolonial, developmental and media) on public services institutions with specific attention to SABC, Chapter 1 justifies how the critique must navigate beyond SABC to governing socio-economic relations mediated by modernity/coloniality. Chapter 1 also elaborates on the analytical prisms and methodological approaches adopted to probe the multi-aspected processes that underpin how institutions such as the SABC navigate independence in the context of modernity/coloniality. Moving forward, Chapter 2 examines the “honeymoon period” in post-apartheid South Africa which was preoccupied with the celebration of national diversity. In addition to discussing the foundations of public service broadcasting in the country, Chapter 2 sets the stage for chapters to follow that explain the persistence of the apartheid state in the operations of so-called free public service broadcasting.

Exploring Keynesian rebuilding and development programmes in South Africa after apartheid and the country's current shift toward neo-liberal economic policy, Chapter 3 explicates the differences between the two. Chapter 3 focuses on media in addition to the developmental paradigms. It suggests that South Africa is no exception to the influence of global neoliberal ideologies advocating austerity or developmentalism premised on debt-driven expansion. Mapping the power asymmetries connecting the global North and the South evident in the macro-economic strategies in operation, Chapter 3 shows how South Africa’s critical location within broader structures of global power influences SABC staff members’ notion of identity as well as its role in the post-apartheid state.

With an eye to the intersections of media and economics within modernity/coloniality, Chapter 4 turns towards examining how SABC staff members make sense of commercialization by SABC and their work as well as how their sensemaking augments their interpretation of independence. Exploring the relationship between public service broadcasters and the economic market, Chapter 4 positions SABC staff as interpreters of this impact, with independence being conceptualized across the political, legal and anti-establishment notions which all have their provenance in state meddling.

Chapter 5 delineates how internal African National Congress (ANC) succession tensions transpire and play out within the SABC organization. Chapter 5 turns the spotlight on how these tensions mold notions of “independence” at SABC and how SABC employees make sense of the latter in terms of their work. Focusing on the fluidity and unpredictability of politics within ANC, Chapter 5 contends that it is these shifting sands upon which the notion of independence is built and conceptualized. This chapter examines how the idea of independence being related to ANC politics and powers has led stakeholders to assume that independence may be attained by countering ANC intervention.

The sixth chapter is about media and institutions in modernity/coloniality. In Chapter 6, the focus is on how the choice of epistemological approaches has a significant bearing on how we arrive at independent understandings, which in turn, may help us unearth the interconnectivities of hegemonic knowledge, government, media structures, and the public. Chapter 6 unravels how the approaches to knowledge chosen by us shape our view of independence and in turn, our capacity to probe the interconnectedness of epistemic hegemony, government, and media structures as well as the audiences. The author argues that due to its vital role as the interface between the government and the public, it is public service broadcasting that subordinates the public to the whims of power-hungry and money-obsessed politicians. Thus, it is the PSBs like SABC that can be coopted by the “institutional complex” perpetuating the domination of the elite and the rulers.

Chapter 7 argues that the independence of the media in the global south can only be understood if local forms of agency rather than broader macro structures alone are taken as referents. The SABC concept of independence must be considered in light of larger overlapping social interactions that include power imbalances between episteme, power, clout, and identity between the dominating north and the subordinated south.

While the argument offered by Ngwenya is well-articulated and compelling, the style of the book is academic and the topic is niche with maximum appeal to specialist readership within decoloniality and media, specifically in the context of post-independence African states. Since it considers the intersections of economics and media, the book may be of some interest to interdisciplinary researchers. However, given the dense language and style of the book, it is less than accessible to the lay reader, particularly presuming as it does a substantial amount of background knowledge of key notions such as decoloniality.

Additional information

Funding

This review is funded by “Faculty Teaching and Research Fund” in 2022 and supported by the “Comparative Linguistics and International Communication of Chinese Innovation Team” at Shanghai Normal University.