Foreword: Press Freedom in a “Game” of Interests

A focus on press freedom provokes a few questions. What exactly is freedom (press or otherwise)? How does one identify or authenticate it? If life is a game of interests and society the uneven playing field, how do researchers of the social world, as academic players from different backgrounds and positions, represent press freedom in ways that do justice to the complexities and nuances of the games in which they partake? In recognition of the enormity of the task, if one were to settle for a minimum of common denominators, what would this be? These questions are further complicated by yet others about how to provide for the backgrounds, positions and interests of the different players, and also for the varying degrees of individual and institutional creativity and inventiveness that make a difference in any game. These considerations make all the more frequently asked questions such as Steven Friedman’s in this volume: Whose freedom? Freedom from what? As opposed to what? In whose interest? Given the media’s disproportionate focus on politics and the political, and given also

how much suffrage this theme of freedom has among media scholars, the question arises whether politics and the political are necessarily the game in which freedom is the most threatened? What if the major predicaments were the rights of the politically disenfranchised majority – racial, cultural, geographical, class, gendered, generational, linguistic, or whatever? And what if it was evident that consideration of their predicaments was not the exclusive responsibility of government or the state (obviously impotent and subservient vis-à-vis the dominant interests of the local and global economic elite)? What if the logic and ethos of profit over people of the private sector and of the economic elite were fundamentally responsible for blatant and subtle inequality? How, in the light of these concerns, could claims of the press as harbinger, promoter and protector of Freedom as a democratic right and as a public good, in the utilitarian sense of the greatest good for the greatest number, be justified and substantiated empirically? A focus on press freedom is an invitation to accommodate press freedom as important – as an ideal, an aspiration, a right, an entitlement. More importantly, it is an invitation to examine the dangers of uncritically internalising and reproducing claims and beliefs about freedom. If life itself can be accommodating in its games, providing for improvisation and adaptation, why should the press and its practitioners opt for zero sum games? Contributors to this volume touch on the above questions to varying degrees. Colin

Sparks, through the example of South African media, highlights the importance of comparative perspectives grounded not in sterile prescriptiveness but in the sociological reality of the media and societies in question. In other words, if a universal theory of

press freedom is an aspiration and a possibility, it must be attained through intellectually sound, well conceptualised and rigorously implemented research, into real life processes and practices, not merely through abstract thinking and rhetorical affirmations and catalogues of unsubstantiated claims. Similarly, a critique of current metanarratives of press freedom – stemming from modernisation and other theories – should not amount to throwing out the baby of comparative research (on the universal or commonality of the human condition) with the bathwater of poorly thought-through and prematurely celebrated explanations of convergence and divergence. It is in this regard that Guy Berger, in his contribution, advocates a mutually enriching conversation between the global and the local, in what concerns media regulatory frameworks in Africa, without having to reduce this to uncritical selective borrowing and ad hoc transplants, as if Africa were incapable of history and the capacity to make original and innovative contributions to the game of press freedom. The games individuals and collectivities are compelled or opt to play are not without room for manoeuvre, improvisation and adaptation, however rigid the rules of the game. This would explain why, in post-apartheid South Africa, there is room not only for

continuities and discontinuities in elite terms, but also, for continued contestations by the dispossessed and savagely impoverished bulk of the population over why a new dispensation should translate into nothing more than rights, freedoms and citizenship with little meaningful content in everyday life. The warning here, is against media and intellectual bandwagonism that breeds a tendency to uncritically reproduce the rhetoric of being on the side of freedom and the poor, even when the reality is that of serving and servicing the interests of the power (economic, social and cultural) elite. Media practitioners and scholars need to constantly challenge themselves to establish empirically a propensity to claim independence and objectivity in principle, while being good bedfellows with big business and/or government in practice. When purportedly ‘private’ or ‘independent’ media are uncritically given the benefit of the doubt by media scholars who equally uncritically question or greet with suspicion anything state or government, this begs the question of the meaning of independence or autonomy in real terms. It presupposes that the ‘private’ or commercial, however bedevilled by contradictions, myopia and mediocrity, is invariably right or pardonable, whatever its excesses, and the state or government on the other hand, invariably devious and highhanded, and to be criticised as a matter of principle. It overly simplifies the game of life by uncritically crediting some with angelic pretensions, and others with demonic powers. Such bandwagonism in the case of post-apartheid South Africa, as both Colin

Sparks and Steven Friedman note, is often oblivious of the middle class and predominantly white biases of the mainstream press. It gives the impression, – if Herman Wasserman’s (2010) study of tabloid journalism is anything to go by, not only that the majority mostly black poor, un-and underemployed underclasses matter less or not beyond the sweeping rhetoric of freedom, human rights, and citizenship. For the poor to be kept at bay, tamed and subservient to the whims and caprices of the anciens and nouveaux riches of the ‘new’ South Africa, the press is all too ready to feed them condescendingly with highly sensationalised, scandal ridden, politically monotonic mass circulation tabloids that the middle classes shun. If only the middle classes were more accommodating, and the media more inclusive, our understanding of human rights and freedom would be significantly enriched when the downtrodden begin to voice their own stories and everyday experiences in their own language, using idioms they understand in multiple and layered ways - as Harri Englund demonstrates in his ethnography

of a popular radio programme on the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation, Nkhani Zam'maboma (News from the District), in Chichewa, the most widely spoken endogenous language in Malawi (Englund 2011). As Englund notes, ‘Rather than inciting violence or rebellion against those who have caused injury, the program gives more subtle insight into how obligations tying persons into mutual dependence have a certain prospective, aspirational quality (Englund 2011:3). If the media’s idea of freedom is limited to reproducing and protecting middle class values, concerns and anxieties – ensuring a ‘combination of elite continuity and renewal’ (p.11), to quote Colin Sparks, then no amount of press freedom could ever redress the inequalities of the past or ‘the rising tide of economic discontent’ (p.14). For no change is possible through a press that is critical only in rhetoric, while endorsing in practice an idea of humanity confined or unduly shackled by prejudices inspired by ideologies of race, place, class, gender, age, culture, religion or belonging, among others. The answer to these predicaments lies neither with the state nor private media in their current configurations and limitations, but in an alternative capable of drawing inspiration from and challenging both models in the interest of the world’s myriad multiplicities and creative diversities. A focus on press freedom in Africa also suggests that a closer look at pursuits, pro-

cesses and practices in places, spaces or configuration of particular relationships identified as AFRICA and AFRICAN, could add value to understanding press freedom globally. For, if one were introverted, narcissistic and self-consumed, there would be little reason to aspire towards enriching one’s life with the experiences of others, even if one were, quite paradoxically, guilty of megalomaniac tendencies and messianic delusions. Africa is seldom credited with having much to teach the world, a tendency so easily appropriated by those at the service of grandeur. With Africa ideology has so often and so very easily substituted science, and preaching at more readily the norm than learning from Africa. The challenge is thus enormous to accept that Africa could add value, and, to work committedly and systematically to unearth and embrace that value added. Matters are compounded when even those sympathetic to Africa are all too eager to prove themselves in the currency of others, and much less so in cultural and social capital inspired by Africa. A world shaped solely by one’s perspectives to the deliberate or unconscious exclusion of the perspectives of others (complementary or conflicting), is hardly the product of social science, even if it might sometimes coincide with social research findings. Meaningful comparison is not possible in a world impatient with the experiences of others. It is a world that seeks accommodation without demonstrating that it can accommodate. Africa has lessons for those modest enough to recognise what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has termed ‘the dangers of a single story’ (TED Conferences 2009). There is need to understand Africa on its own terms. Such a focus on Africa’s ori-

ginality, creativity and innovativeness should be privileged, not necessarily or primarily to contest exogenously generated ideas, but to put things in perspective that foreground the fact that Africa is far from being a passive consumer of exogenously generated ideas. The call thus, in this volume, to bring Africa to focus, is salutary, even if a tough challenge. It further implies that a body of knowledge exists on the theme, universal as well as specific to Africa, that calls for systematic, meticulous and dedicated examination by patient research and scholarship, for insights towards greater rigour in conceptualisation and theory building on and around the relationship between press and freedom as informed by variables such as interconnecting global and local hierarchies

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of peoples, places, ideas, various capitals (social, cultural, economic, political, etc.), and their interests. The very idea of Africa and Africaness begs a lot of questions – questions beyond

the scope of this foreword to delve into in depth. Suffice it to say, like every identity, being African beyond the arbitrary categorisations of states and forces with ambitions of dominance, is a dynamic and open ended reality, subject to renegotiation with changing encounters and the infinite possibilities of flexible mobility. It is easy to understand the advantages and limitations of an idea of Africa rigidly confined to race, place and problematic choreographies of culture and identity, but advantages and limitations not being frozen in time and space, those whom narrow articulations of Africa and being African might favour in one instance, stand to lose in another instance as things evolve and relationships change. To take Africa seriously is to avoid simplistic dichotomies and teleology. It is to provide for an idea of Africa not confined by or reduced to correlations between races and places. To seek to confine Africa to particular physical and cultural geographies is to deny histories of mobility that have domesticated and coloured geographies in fascinating and complex kaleidoscopes. It is also to deprive scholarship of the interconnections that have shaped and continue to shape Africa and Africans beyond essences and stereotypes. Hence the importance to seek as much as possible some measure of objectivity or impartiality, however elusive. What then, could be an Africa value added in the sense sketched above? There is

great value in Africa’s capacity to accommodate even when it is not being accommodated. Africa has reached out and embraced liberal notions of freedom and rights tailored narrowly to fit the ideology of the individual as an autonomous social agent. But others have chosen to invest in the production of guilty Africans, instead of reaching out to embrace in turn Africa’s complex, negotiated, and nuanced understanding of rights and freedom as the pursuit of domesticated agency. Relationships with Africans are preponderantly premised on the stereotypical perception that no idea of value could hail from Africa. Such stereotypes are difficult to justify in media and scholarly perspectives, and in campaigns promoting human rights and freedom. By way of an example, let’s take a closer look at an ethnographic study by Harri

Englund (2006) of the interactions between NGOs promoting human rights and the ordinary Malawian individuals and communities they target. The study draws attention to the processes by which human rights activists as agents and agencies themselves become particular kinds of subjects, keen to define and impose democracy as freedom, with scant regard for empirical evidence amongst the masses targeted by their rhetoric of rights and freedoms. As Englund argues, it is hardly enough simply to propagate democracy, share the rhetoric of human rights, or claim that the public sphere is vibrant simply because arguments and disputes are allowed to take place in public. Much more crucial to democracy is the very composition of that public sphere and what those arguments are about. The study identifies three domains in which ordinary Malawians most directly grapple with the new rhetoric and practices of rights, namely: translation, where a narrow definition of human rights as political and civil freedom has emerged through a profoundly undemocratic process of translation; civic education, where an examination of how Malawians are recruited to act as civic educators and how the crowds they encounter in villages and townships respond to their messages shows the extent to which a nation-wide civic education project effectively disempowers the very masses it is intended to empower; and legal aid, where a detailed analysis shows how its providers treat claimants as individuals rather than as people whose

grievances, such as exploitative labour relations, derive from similar structural problems. Englund thus uses this empirical substantiation to show how a narrow and abstract definition of human rights as freedoms in Malawi, while capturing the attention of politicians, donors, journalists and activists, and indeed provoking public arguments amongst this lot, has been rather limited in relevance to understanding the situation of the impoverished majority, thereby unduly narrowing the preoccupation with ‘democracy’ to a privileged few. Far from making the actual concerns and aspirations of the people, their situations in life and experiences of abuse the starting point, Malawian activists and their foreign donors have opted for democracy and human rights as universal and abstract values. Together, they have deprived democracy and human rights of substantive meaning, by privileging a habit of thought and practice that conceals entrenched inequalities in a rhetoric of popular participation. Englund’s study of Malawi resonates with the experiences of ordinary Africans

across Africa. In South Africa, one of the latest to join the ranks of so-called ‘free’ and ‘independent’ African countries, colonial and apartheid inventions of cultures and traditions meant the silencing of more indigenous consensual approaches and variants of rights and freedoms informed by prevalent notions of personhood and social action such as Ubuntu. In this regard, distinction between ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’ and between ‘culture talk’ and ‘rights talk’, such as Mahmood Mamdani’s (1996; 2000), are useful analytical starting points. Starting points because, if we are to remain faithful to the lives of ordinary South Africans and their infinite capacity to negotiate and navigate the various identity margins in their lives, there is little to suggest that South Africans who were hemmed into homelands and bantustans and only selectively allowed into urban spaces during apartheid (Mayer 1971; Bank 2011), today live their lives neatly as citizens or urbanites subjected to civic authority and the rule of law on the one hand and as subjects or rural dwellers ruled by chiefs, traditions and culture on the other. For one thing, and for most, citizenship remains confined to a constitutional provision, analogous to the biblical parable of many called but few chosen (Landau 2011). In the same way, nothing prevents individuals and communities from embracing and eventually celebrating and aggressively defending imposed identities or “invented traditions”, in the good old African tradition of bending over backwards to accommodate, even when not being accommodated (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Social transformations are not automatic, just as integration and nationhood are not

attainable via declarations of intent and the assignment of labels exclusively. A multiracial, multiethnic and multicultural – ‘rainbow’– South Africa with a past of tense, bloody and highly unequal racialised and ethnicised relationships and a present of radical inequalities in citizenship despite laudable constitutional freedoms, calls for provision to include intermediary groups (racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, etc.) that mediate the relationship between the individual and the state, in providing for freedoms and rights in concrete terms. A multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial South Africa needs to protect itself not only against the selfish interests of individuals, but also against the selfish interests of racial, ethnic and cultural entities or communities, making it clear that freedoms end where those of others begin. To play a meaningfully role in this regard, the media must reflect the interests and value systems not only of each and every South African as an individual, but also of South Africans belonging to cultural, ethnic and racial collectivities that shape their thinking, outlook and action within the South African state as a system of interconnected hierarchies of power relations. It is hardly enough to freeze recognition at an abstract level of an assumed

universality of freedoms and rights. It is only in this way that the media can ensure that the quest for the successful functioning of post-apartheid South Africa is not merely a ploy to continue serving and servicing the interests of a powerful and only marginally reconfigured elite few to the disadvantage of the majority as individuals and also as groups. Nothing else quite makes sense in post-apartheid South Africa than to seek group restitution and reparations for those who were dispossessed and disenfranchised as a group, and not merely as individuals. The conversation towards media representation for collectivities recommended here should be pursued concurrently with individual rights. The prospect of democracy being simultaneously an individual and a group right and aspiration must be taken seriously in rethinking press freedom in Africa. Only in this way can media practitioners and scholars resist the temptation to equate press freedom with active, participatory citizenship and freedom of the poor in Africa. Press freedom sensitive to the complex multiplicities of being African, need media

capable of adaptation and improvisation to accommodate often neglected endogenous forms of sociality, conviviality and interdependence in Africa. Ordinary Africans have demonstrated an infinite ability to modernise their cultures and traditionalise their modernities – a process to be adequately provided for in all its complexity and not condescendingly dismissed in mainstream elite media. African ideas of personhood and agency simply refuse to be confined to the logic of dichotomies, essentialisms, markets and profitability. Elite media practitioners can learn from Africa’s artists, whose art navigate and negotiate myriad identity margins, challenging all and sundry to rise beyond the blinkers of their preconceptions and prejudices. The sooner current elite media in Africa are able to internalise the fact that African cosmopolitanisms are both local and global, and that no one in Africa is too cosmopolitan to be local as well, the better for media perspectives and content. The narrow insistence on disembedded individual rights and freedoms has impaired understanding of the interconnectedness of peoples, cultures and societies, and facilitated the production of Africans as the scum of humanity, deserving to be defined and confined by others, and expected to mimic, but not to think or create. The way forward for Africa’s elite media is thus in recognising the creative ways in

which Africans merge their traditions with exogenous influences to create realities that are not reducible to either but enriched by both. The implication of this argument is that how we understand the role of journalism in African depends on what democratic model we draw from. Under liberal democracy where the individual is perceived and treated as an autonomous agent, and where primary solidarities and cultural identities are discouraged in favour of national citizenship and culture, media are expected to be disinterested, objective, balanced and fair in gathering, processing and disseminating news and information. The assumption is that because all individuals have equal rights as citizens, there can be no justification for bias among journalists. But within popular notions of democracy where emphasis is on interdependence and competing cultural solidarities are admitted, the media are under constant internal and external pressure to promote the interests of the various groups competing for recognition and representation. The tensions and pressures are even greater in situations where states and governments purport to pursue liberal democracy, while in reality they continue to be highhanded and repressive to their populations. When this happens, media are at risk of employing double-standards as well, by claiming one thing and doing the opposite,

or by straddling various identity margins, without always being honest about it, especially if their very survival depends on it. More representative or alternative media in Africa would have to question basic

monolithic assumptions and conventional wisdom about democracy, journalism, government, power myths and accepted personality cults. Such media would have to suggest and work for the demystification of the state, business and society. They would have to provide the missing cultural links to current efforts, links informed by respect for African humanity and creativity, and by popular ideas of personhood and domesticated agency. Alternative media should be capable of negotiating conviviality between competing ideas of how best to provide for the humanity and dignity of all and sundry. Above all, they should be media that can observe and draw from the predicaments of ordinary Africans forced by cultures, histories of unequal encounters and material predicaments to live their lives as ‘subjects’ rather than as ‘citizens’, even as liberal democratic rhetoric claims otherwise. Finally, alternative media would need to blend popular forms of communication and social networking with conventional media in the best interest of the human rights and freedoms of Africans, who are complex and multiple.