Martha Evans

From 1952, when Nelson Mandela received his first banning order, the apartheid government attempted to remove the African National Congress leader from public life, through issuing successive banning orders, censoring the publication of his words and image and finally sentencing him to life imprisonment in the maximum security prison, Robben Island. The notorious prison – a site of brutality, quarantine and resistance -- was subject to the Prisons Act of 1959, which further shrouded it in secrecy. At the same time, the post-war growth of humanitarian and human rights law resulted in increasing global concern about conditions in prisons, particularly for apartheid’s political prisoners. In order to prove that its prisons were humane, the state was pressured to allow access to human rights organisations, and, increasingly, the media. It was also pressured to permit access to Mandela, the country’s most famous political prisoner.
This paper analyses four media visits to Mandela on the Island (two in 1964, one in 1973 and one in 1977), when Mandela was interviewed and/or photographed, looking at the context that led to the authorisation of such visits, complex behind-the-scenes negotiations between journalists and the authorities, Mandela’s attempted curation of his image, and the subsequent framing, publication, censorship and dissemination of information.
The paper argues that the state’s attempts to control the discourse around Mandela and Robben Island grew increasingly less successful – particularly in overseas reports – and that Mandela’s incarceration on the mysterious island contributed to his mythologisation. The paper further argues that, even from a position of imprisonment, Mandela was careful to anticipate his reception abroad, establishing an irrefutable moral authority from the confines of his prison cell. His comments reveal his consistent appeal to Western democratic sensibilities, his utilisation of human rights discourse and his careful negotiation of the issue of prison conditions.

Feminine identity has always been complicated by race and class in South Africa. The history of beauty pageants, like sporting contests, demonstrates the extent to which culture and contemporary politics intertwine. Examining the cover model choices of women’s magazines offers a fruitful means of tracking the complex interplay between beauty, power and politics. This paper explores cultural endorsements of femininity as they are represented on the covers of one of South Africa’s oldest women’s magazines. Using a content analysis of the covers of Fairlady from 1985 to 2005 the paper asks questions about how Fairlady mediated ideas about beauty, race, gender and nationhood in recent history. The paper reveals the essential role of the popular media in communicating the values of Nelson Mandela’s Rainbow Nation. It finds that this role is highly contradictory, however, and the representation of women is shaped by socio-political and cultural shifts and racialised discourses of beauty, often linked to other cultural industries. The paper argues that this ambiguous relationship to the political transition is partly a result of the inherently racist structures of globalised consumer culture, which have an ever-greater influence on the choice of cover model in the post-apartheid period.

This article looks briefly at the past and current role played by Dayan and Katz’s media events in South Africa and speculates about their potential future. While in the past, media events have played a pivotal role in the post-apartheid state’s nation-building project, current events suggest a more frissured socio-political landscape, with three likely manifestations of the media event. The first is the enduring integrative and hope-filled event, which audiences still desire and support. The second is the disruptive, non-integrative event and the third is the hijacked media event, which see media events being targeted as sites of protest.

The paper provides an analysis of Dirk de Villiers’ South African film ‘Snake Dancer’ (1976), an exploitation/biopic featuring the notorious exotic dancer, Glenda Kemp. Kemp’s life of notoriety and cult stardom (and her subsequent turn to born-again Christianity) are linked to the chaotic production and distribution of the film. Ultimately, however, the film was a commercial failure, suggesting an interesing paradox: While local audiences (deprived of pornographic material under apartheid’s strict censorship laws) wanted the racier, uncut international version, overseas audiences were nonplussed by the amateurish production and comparatively tame nude dance scenes. The film provides an interesting historical glimpse of white South African thinking in the 1970s, and the paper argues that the fascination with Kemp arose not only because of her risqué nightclub act, but also because she persistently emphasised the extent to which racial and sexual politics remained intertwined during apartheid.

Contrary to existing scholarship on the broadcasting of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this paper argues that the televising of hearings did not constitute a media event, as defined by Dayan and Katz (1992). Based on a qualitative analysis of the only two live broadcasts, a glance at viewership statistics, and discussions with personnel involved in the broadcasts, the paper attempts to uncover what liveness can tell us about the commission and what the commission can tell us about media events. The paper argues that the SABC’s decision to ‘go live’ – with the opening hearing and the broadcasting of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s testimony – demonstrates the ways in which the controversial amnesty provision provided loopholes that altered the original expectations of the Commission’s work over time, leading to the ANC’s eventual dissociation from it. At the same time, the paper argues that complex, unpredictable, and contested content – usually the subject of national commissions of inquiry – is unsuited to the media event genre.

This paper considers new representations of postcolonial Africa via five big-budget narrative films, including Hotel Rwanda (2004), The Constant Gardener (2005), The Interpreter (2005), Blood Diamond (2006), and The Last King of Scotland (2006). Although these films appear to have transcended old colonial stereotypes, a new set of features and themes, all Afropessimist in nature, links them, suggesting the West's negative influence on perceptions of the continent. Although the films show more commitment to realism and historical accuracy than previous cinematic treatments of Africa, they still struggle to represent the real challenges and complexities associated with the continent. The limitations of genre and the pressures of the industry result in several weaknesses, principally an inability to investigate the social and structural elements of African history, the overreliance on white focalizers and narrators, and a tendency to generalize from particular cases to continental trends.

Using theories of nostalgia, this paper examines a variety of texts produced and consumed on YouTube by white South Africans, particularly expatriates. Since many of the users grew up under apartheid, and now live on other continents, their interaction is infused with a kind of “double nostalgia” – for a vanished past as well as a distant homeland. At the same time, the Internet provides them with a communication technology that is particularly suited to reminiscence. Remembering takes on a variety of forms; most simplistically, nostalgia is evoked by videos that feature the cultural products and brands of the past and/or homeland, particularly televised images from the past. Other individuals engage in more complex and overtly politicised forms of remembering by actively constructing idealised versions of the apartheid past and setting them against the perceived shortcomings of the present. The makers of these videos are particularly drawn to images of urban ruin, which in turn provoke profoundly nostalgic reactions from expatriate viewers. The paper argues that in the case of a number of white South Africans, the articulation of nostalgia on the Internet has served as a useful means of collective identity formation, but that this often stands in the way of accepting the new political order.

... Exploring Afropessimist discourse in such a climate rapidly lands one in an impasse; what Achille Mbembe calls the ... a kind of fantasy of news production.19 The Internet generally offers the 'promise of control over the world ... Rainbow worriers: South African Afropessimism online ...

In the early 1990s, the response to the nation-building challenge in South Africa came most visibly through the adoption of rainbow nationalism, associated with Nelson Mandela and articulated through the medium of television. This article examines three powerful televised ‘spectacles’ – Mandela's release, his inauguration and the 1995 Rugby World Cup – all of which constituted ‘media events’ in the sense described by Dayan and Katz. The article argues that the illusion of a reconciled nation displayed in these broadcasts facilitated South Africa's transition, but also elided some of the complexities of the era.

South Africa came late to television; when it finally arrived in the late 1970s the rest of the world had already begun to boycott the country because of apartheid. While the ruling National Party feared the integrative effects of television, they did not foresee how exclusion from globally unifying broadcasts would gradually erode their power.

South Africa was barred from participating in some of television’s greatest global attractions (including sporting events such as the Olympics and contests such as Miss World). With the release of Nelson Mandela from prison came a proliferation of large-scale live broadcasts as the country was permitted to return to international competition, and its re-admittance was played out on television screens across the world. These events were pivotal in shaping and consolidating the country’s emerging post-apartheid national identity.

Broadcasting the End of Apartheid assesses the socio-political effects of live broadcasting on South Africa’s transition to democracy. Martha Evans argues that just as print media had a powerful influence on the development of Afrikaner nationalism, so the ‘liveness’ of television helped to consolidate the post-apartheid South Africa.

History and the live broadcasting of ceremonial events have been linked throughout the twentieth century. Events in the 21st century, however, especially since 9/11, suggest that the study of “media events” – those mesmerising broadcasts with the power to historicise events instantly – cannot be limited to preplanned, hegemonic and celebratory occasions (as was the case with Dayan and Katz’s 1992 book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History). Instead, it must be extended to include the spontaneous broadcasting of historical tragedies. More than this, in the early years of the new millennium, critics predicted that non-integrative broadcasts (of terror, war and disaster) would upstage traditional media events.

This chapter examines Nelson Mandela’s funeral broadcast, and its implications for media events theory. It argues that, contrary to expectations of media events’ waning fate, in the age of social media, we should not be too hasty to dismiss audience desire for shared experience and the possibilities of integrative events.