Apartheid's Aftermath   

More than a decade after Nelson Mandela emerged from prison, South Africa's news media are embroiled in a bitter dispute about race. Do black people continue to receive second-class treatment from the nation's newspapers?

T HE PRESS IN SOUTH AFRICA has always been both storyteller and part of the story when the subject is race. It has, after all, spent the better part of its existence chronicling the bloody struggle to end apartheid while standing accused of abetting the bigots.
But never has the country's media, particularly its newspapers, been closer to the center of the firestorm than in the past 18 months. In that time, a government-sponsored inquiry into media racism brought howls of protest from editors, most of them white, even as it forced them to look at coverage and hiring shortcomings that are not hard to find.
Now, more than a decade after Nelson Mandela walked away from a 27-year prison term and began a stunning rewrite of South Africa's racial story, news organizations that once joined the government in declaring Mandela's African National Congress a terrorist group are embroiled in the diversity debate. It is a debate that will ring old and familiar in many U.S. newsrooms, though the social and political forces pushing for change in South Africa lend greater urgency to solving the problem.
"There's an increased awareness that we need to speak across race, we need to speak about race," says Cecilia Russell, a white day news editor from the Johannesburg Star, the flagship newspaper of the country's largest media group, Independent News and Media. "We need to talk about how we deal with people."
The controversial inquiry, unfolding as the glow of reconciliation steadily dimmed across the political and social landscape, incensed many journalists who said they feared being told how to do their jobs and exposed a seldom-discussed rift between white and black editors. It mocked the civic-boosting promotion Simunye--we are one--that the leading television network airs during commercial breaks.
The investigation was spawned by the 1998 complaint of a group of black lawyers who said two papers--the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times--were trying to undermine black leadership with negative coverage. The newspapers denied the claim and said the lawyers and President Thabo Mbeki's government were claiming racism to discredit legitimate investigative reporting. The inquiry quickly expanded to place all of the often-prickly industry under a racial microscope.
It ended last fall with an incendiary, if unsurprising, finding of guilt that dominated conversation in September at the country's first national summit on race relations. Its words echo those of the 1968 Kerner Commission report about the U.S. media's coverage of racial issues that was released after the riots of the 1960s.
"The point is made that South Africa's media continues to be controlled by white people and caters for white interests and reflects the worldview of the white community," the Human Rights Commission members wrote of complaints they had heard. "The pace of change and transformation has been very slow. The country's publications are grossly unrepresentative of the population. There are few black people in positions of authority, which leads to an inadequate representation of the South African story."
An interim report by white freelance researcher Claudia Braude was released in late 1999 to provoke discussion in advance of the HRC's 2000 hearings. Instead, it provoked condemnation. Mean, unforgiving condemnation.
"I submit that poor Claudia Braude was 'used,' " wrote Sunday Times columnist David Bullard, who is white. "She was told to go and sniff out racism and like a good truffle hound she trotted off and did just that."
Braude's plodding study, packed with dense, academic language, drew connections between the stereotypical, racist images that have long been part of the country's media history and what she found to be cleaned-up, modern, encoded versions of the same sins.
She saw clear evidence that white-run newspapers were perpetuating the notion that black people are stupid, criminal, primitive, incompetent and unimportant. Others saw it as uninformed, destructive paranoia that reached too far to find evidence of racism.
A much-celebrated example was a wire photo of a stork standing amid garbage in Uganda. Braude concluded that it was meant to symbolize Johannesburg's decline "from a first-world to a third-world city" since the black government took over. The photo linked anxieties "about decaying urban infrastructure with (white) fears of incursions from Africa," Braude wrote.
Her choice of examples was reviled. Her choice of words was lampooned. The indignation of the indicted was resounding.
Phillip van Niekerk, former editor of the Mail & Guardian, said the report was "bad academically and it's bad journalistically and it's full of incredible verbiage and twaddle."
A Sunday Times' editorial was even less charitable, calling it "mendacious rubbish" couched in "mellifluous psychobabble."

I N THE MONTHS BEFORE the final report was released in August, a crisis unfolded off the coast of Cape Town, and the protagonists were unlikely contributors to the media's debate about black and white.
They were penguins.
The African penguins, members of a perennially at-risk species concentrated on the islands near Cape Town, were awash in oil after a tanker sank in Table Bay in June. The disaster threatened to decimate the penguin population, and the local media jumped on the story. For weeks, the Cape Times, the morning paper, and the afternoon Argus expended front-page space, tight travel budgets and the time of their small staffs to chronicle the cleaning of the hapless, flightless birds.
Many journalists and readers, black and white, decried the expense and exposure as misplaced news judgment at best and, at worst, disparaging to thousands of people, most of them black, whose daily lives go largely unacknowledged by the white press.
Ryland Fisher, former editor of the Times and one of the first black people to lead a South African newspaper, says the paper's zealous coverage of the penguins was a stark example of editors' myopia when they're pursuing white readers. The story deserved coverage, he says. The penguins are a national treasure. But the tone and scope of coverage that eclipsed other stories, Fisher says, sent a clear message to black readers.
"The problem in South Africa is that because of poverty and so on, environmental affairs is considered to be white affairs," says Fisher, who was the Times' editor from 1997 until December 1999. "The majority of the people who live in shacks and who live in townships, they aren't turned on by environmental affairs. So, the penguins' story, from that point of view, is a white story."
While the nation's newspapers enthusiastically followed the aquatic journey of celebrity penguins "Peter," "Pamela" and "Percy" from their de-oiling station in Port Elizabeth back to their Robben Island home (the birds were equipped with satellite transmitters), the ruling African National Congress' policy-making body was meeting in Port Elizabeth. The ANC, though always integrated, has historically represented the country's more than 30 million black people. So the general council meeting, from that point of view, was a black story.
Those meetings, Fisher says, were badly underplayed in the white press throughout South Africa.
"When your ruling party--and your ruling party by a bloody great majority in this country--is sitting in Port Elizabeth and deciding on the future of the party and the future of the country, you pay some attention," he says. "But while these guys are leading with penguins, the ANC is making profound policy decisions, and the ANC is on page five of the newspaper, and on page one is penguins and penguins."
Saturday Star reporter Peta Krost, in one of the few stories responding to the criticism, suggested that the emphasis on the penguins in the face of the country's "perennial national problems" stems from a widespread belief that the penguins' problems can, at least, be solved. "There is a belief," Krost wrote, "that no matter how much you throw at [South Africa's social problems, they] will not go away."

L IKE SO MANY OTHER South African institutions, the media have been forced into fast-forward since Mandela was freed, propelled through profound transitions at dizzying speed toward greater inclusion and better coverage.
In the mid-1990s, Independent Newspapers sent about a dozen editors known as the "fast-trackers" through a series of training sessions, preparing them to move into senior positions across the country. All but two were black, including Ryland Fisher.
Since 1996, nearly all of South Africa's major papers have added senior editors who come from the once-oppressed groups of mixed-race coloreds, Asian Indians and Africans, all collectively housed now under the racial umbrella "black."
At the Cape Times, the changes showed up in the coverage. Behind Fisher's leadership, the Times found its way to the vast communities of black people whose stories remained largely untold. The paper published some of the most groundbreaking stories on racial issues in South African journalism, including the "True Colors" project in 1997 and 1998. It featured candid voices and faces of South Africans from across the spectrum of color and thought. The series hit readers with the messy truth about the "new" South Africa. Simunye, it wasn't.
"All that I will say is that it sucks," Herman Els, a white policeman said in the April 1997 package. "The blacks are discriminating more against the whites than the whites were against the blacks. I think they are trying to get us back for the past and I think it sucks."

Said black shop assistant Patricia Mkize: "I don't think that we can just trust that the whites have changed and therefore we must live as one nation. Neither side trusts the other. It will take time. Maybe my children can benefit from this new South Africa."
Though requests for reprints of the 1997 project were still coming in when the paper tried to launch a third package in 2000, Fisher says he couldn't get financial backing. "A lot of the business people said, 'Yeah, it's too political,' " he says. In September, the project's two leaders, white senior reporter Roger Friedman and black chief photographer Benny Gool, quit. They made no secret of their frustration with the newspaper's preoccupation with chasing white, well-off readers.
In January 2000, Fisher was promoted to a more prestigious but, he says, less influential corporate position with the Independent Newspapers group, which owns 14 dailies and weeklies in the country. In July, feeling pushed out by his white bosses, he resigned and began a consulting business.
Though black people have moved into higher positions, Fisher says they were undermined by white management and ownership reluctant to cede true power to the black majority. With few exceptions, newspapers across the country remain in the hands of a small number of white owners. Nearly 76 percent of the nation's top editors are white, though white people make up only 13 percent of the population.
In their submission to the HRC, five black editors chastised the nation's white-dominated editors' group for speaking for them in objecting to the inquiry. The editors said that they were outnumbered in news decisions despite their rising numbers, and that their newspapers continue to print stories that perpetuate stereotypes of corrupt, incompetent black leadership. The coverage shouldn't give the impression that white life is more important than black life, they said, and the rare use of black experts in stories creates the impression "that there is a paucity of black intellectuals."

I N THE SUNROOM OF the old mansion that houses the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in Johannesburg, four reporters sat unwinding from a week of talking about race and journalism last August.
Like journalists elsewhere in the country, Cecilia Russell, Mandulo Maphumulo, Andrew Trench and Sandile Memela agree that there is a problem, that it is anchored significantly in race, and that the HRC has made clear the need for change. Beyond that, little is as black and white.
When the initial teeth-gnashing had abated at the Star, Russell says, she thought about the HRC's phrase "subliminal racist," and wondered if it applied to her. Did the recent story about a 19-year-old Pretoria woman, who'd used sex to get young men to steal for her, appeal to Russell because the teenager, like Russell, was white?
"In a way, I see a story in terms of a story and not in terms of color," she says. "But even that's difficult, because the reason why the gangster mom from Pretoria was interesting was because she was white and from the suburbs." When you're dealing in South African stereotypes, that story is news, Russell says, because it flies in the face of the assumption that "black is violent and white is peaceful."
Coexisting with that story was the Star's coverage in August of Edith Erins. The body of the murdered black teenager remained unidentified for weeks until the newspaper, with huge front-page stories, patched clues together and, police agree, solved the crime, underscoring their own past apathy in the process.
The story of a poor black girl from a township might have made the paper 10 years ago, Russell says, but it would never have received such prominent exposure. The next hurdle, she says, is to tell those stories as South African stories, not as news defined first by the country's segregated geography.
Andrew Trench, now news editor for the Sunday Times in Johannesburg, has seen maturity and introspection replace insults and anger after his paper was singled out for investigation by the HRC.
"There's definitely been a push to get stories that previously would have been 'black' stories into the paper in a mainstream way, says Trench, who is white. Still, he has seen "editors petrified to actually tackle those issues straight on," fearing they would be labeled racist.
Lurking just beneath the euphemisms of change that litter the current conversation--transformation, reconciliation, nonracialism--are the ghosts of apartheid-era journalism. There are still rumors that former apartheid government spies report and write in newsrooms. But a more deeply held and widely shared belief is that the media still serve white people first.
"In the white media, white newspapers in particular, both black and white reporters are guilty of treating black issues as special reports," says Mandulo Maphumulo, now a copy editor with the Star's Business Report. "It's like, 'It's not really news, but let's just move away from our daily work and make special mention of black issues.' We don't really have the right to be there; it's more like they're doing us a favor."
Lost in that kind of journalism, she says, are the stories that show the ordinary side of the country's racial and ethnic majority. "Report on something light," says Maphumulo, who is black. "Kids who are willing to bring up their schools in the townships because they want an education; children planting trees and flowers.... Whenever we wake or are going to bed, we don't think about stabbing somebody or stealing something."
Hiring and promoting black reporters and editors isn't the only answer either, says Sandile Memela, a black reporter with Sunday World.
"The black people who are holding senior positions, decision-making positions, positions of power, only get those positions if they toe the old white line," he says. "It has not resulted in very different content, because black people are now thinking like the white people 10 years ago."

F ROM AN OFFICE BUILDING overlooking Cape Town's Table Bay, Bun Booyens has watched the media racism conversation from a unique perch. The former environment reporter now is an assistant editor for Die Burger, an Afrikaans-language newspaper long regarded as one of apartheid's most enthusiastic soldiers. These days, though, the newspaper's readership is surging among mixed-race "coloreds"--most of whom speak Afrikaans--because editors are going after those huge, once-ignored communities.
Even as his newspaper reinvents itself, though, Booyens agrees with media critics about one thing: Racism lives.
"It's a huge problem," says Booyens, who is white. "Among a certain generation of South Africans, I think it's a lost cause to try and make them change their minds."
The problems stretch beyond intentional exclusion and stereotypes and are rooted in habit, history and talent, he says. Many of his white peers are journalists with good intentions but poor skills, reporters who learned their craft when breaking news was king, answers were elusive and journalists didn't spend a lot of time contemplating the values that drive them. The coverage that results often looks as bad as some of racism's worst products, he says, but fixing it will require more than anything prescribed by the HRC.
The HRC's last word on the subject in August was about the less-visible changes needed to transform South African journalism. Paula Fray, the first black editor of the Saturday Star in Johannesburg, testified before the HRC that the most meaningful change is not achieved with "the number of stories you write or by increasing the number of black faces in the newspaper. It is when the adrenaline rush goes through you at a story that you have not been trained to get excited about; when you begin to see news through different eyes."
The HRC recommended a few steps to get there:
Offer "racism awareness" workshops and encourage newsroom discussion on race relations.
Expose journalists to the country's various cultures through "plunges" and "transcultural" dialogues, where journalists immerse themselves in cultures different from their own.
Study regulatory alternatives, including whether the agency that regulates television might regulate the print media as well.
Encourage public debate about the role of the media in a democracy.
"Vigorously address" training and recruitment of black journalists.
Without the teeth of enforcement--the HRC is only an advisory body--the best ideas could easily be set aside as reporters rush to record the next earth-shattering change in a country that seems to convulse and evolve with each sunrise. The report could suffocate under the weight of resentment, or spark knee-jerk initiatives that might not be long-lasting. It might also provoke change.
In November, after a spate of racist events made news across the country--including a "dragging" murder similar to the 1999 incident in Jasper, Texas--a nonprofit watchdog group that joined the HRC in its biting criticism of the media had nicer things to say. The very existence of more stories in the mainstream press about racism, says a report on the Media Monitoring Project's Web site, "suggests a positive shift in the media towards reporting racism and ensuring that it remains on the news agenda." Still missing, the group wrote, is coverage that focuses on the humanity of the victims when they are not white.
The HRC made mistakes in its drive to promote that kind of journalism, Die Burger's Booyens concedes, but those trying to knit the new South Africa together--including the government--have a stake in how the media perform, he says. Because of South Africa's unique racial history, Booyens says, he is at peace with the democratic contradiction of press freedom and governmental intervention.
The press will have to get "the issue of race fully dealt with to the satisfaction of everybody involved" before it can take a strong role in the new democracy, he says. After all, Booyens points out, the government that was born with the country's historic, all-races elections in 1994 wrote laws demanding an end to racism alongside the laws protecting the press.
"You cannot be in the Constitution and the only private enterprise that enjoys this privilege and not answer to somebody," he says. "That Constitution was fought for and paid for with blood."