Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) News International launch, Monte Casino,
Johannesburg
20 July 2007
Master of ceremonies
Deputy Minister of Communications, Roy Padayachee
Your excellencies, Ambassadors and High Commissioners
Chairperson of the SABC Board, Mr Eddie Funde
CEO of Sentech, Dr Mokone-Matabane
Group Chief Executive Officer, Advocate Dali Mpofu
The Group News Executive of the SABC
Staff of the SABC News and Current Affairs and staff of SABC News
International
Honoured guests
Ladies and gentlemen
For far too long we have relied on others to tell us our own stories. For
that long we have seemed content to parrot the words and stories of others
about us as if they are were the gospel truth.
This is not a lament about some dim and distant past but the contemporary
reality facing Africa and all its citizens. As a result of this, most of the
time we are unable to tell our own stories; we are afraid to sing our own songs
and are thoroughly intimidated to respect our cultures and honour our true
heroes and heroines.
We become incapable of articulating our own reality and celebrating our own
achievements because we are told that the few setbacks relative to our many
successes, should forever define our existence.
Colonial and apartheid legacies abound. A telephone call from Ghana to
Nigeria may have to go first to Europe before being rerouted to its destination
in the neighbourhood. Often, the news and stories in our publications seem to
be following the same colonial routes even if not physically, at least
philosophically.
The international broadcast news landscape is not only dominated by a few
resource-rich channels, but even when African broadcasters participate in the
dissemination of news it is always in the context of stories filed by foreign
news agencies, with headquarters in Atlanta, New York, London and other major
cities of the powerful nations.
Accordingly, we trust that the new SABC News International will tell the
African story in as much depth and contextual detail as possible and physically
get around the continent identifying the successes and reverses so as to
reflect what is really happening on our continent.
In this way, the work that this channel will produce would also provide a
more balanced picture of the reality in all parts of our continent.
I understand that the SABC News International will become the first African
24-hour news channel. This, in itself is a great achievement. The question we
should answer is whether this news channel will ensure that Africans tell their
story or this will merely be an African conduit of foreign views, stereotypes
and prejudices presented as facts.
Will this channel be a tool used to perpetuate the incorrect typecasting of
Africa as a continent that is represented by nothing except conflicts, death
and everything that is negative? Or, will we see a refreshingly new approach to
reporting on Africa, whose greater part is characterised by peace, stability
and progress?
We warmly welcome the launch of SABC News International. We do so because it
can serve as one of the critical building blocks that should help us to realise
the vision of the African Renaissance.
Indeed, the SABC should be our dependable mirror reflecting to us our
African actuality and which, through its high quality journalism,
news-gathering operations, pursuit of truth and correct contextualisation of
events and processes liberate us from those who, for too long, have told
half-truths and lies that have served to magnify a negative image of
Africa.
I am saying that SABC News International needs to ensure that it is a
firsthand witness to events as they unfold, that the stories it runs are not
merely event-driven but informed by the context, perspective and memory of the
deeper historical background.
All of us know that in the international arena of news reporting the media
has not been a neutral arbiter above on-going contestations and struggles.
However nuanced and sophisticated the media presents itself, it has proven time
and again that it tends to be an active protagonist in the ideological battles
over power relations.
Chairperson,
The current distribution of resources in the media is representative of the
global divide that exists between the developing and developed world with this
skewed distribution dictating, in most instances, that the story is told,
mainly, from the perspective of the powerful.
Necessarily, large investments required to produce international television
news means that this is an area where the impact of those disparities is most
acute.
Covering news from across the entire continent, and doing this in a variety
of languages as the station proposes, shows once again that the channel will be
taking a critically important step towards fulfilling the dream of the African
Renaissance.
It promises to be an invaluable tool in reaching all Africans. Accordingly,
the poor, the worker, the toiling rural peasant, the intellectual and the
business magnate, should all have an interest in the success of the SABC News
International.
The SABC has a huge challenge ahead of it. We know of the astonishing lack
of knowledge about Africa even among our own people. Even among many of the
most worldly elsewhere, Africa is probably the least known and the most
misrepresented of the continents.
In most instances, news reporters have created a curiosity out of Africa and
its people in the psyche of their readers, viewers and listeners to which they
feel obliged to feed the expected images and stories of aberrations and
abnormalities.
It is therefore essential that African media practitioners understand and
deal with the ways in which Africa has been and continues to be misrepresented
to, and imagined in the minds= of, many in the developed countries.
Some entertainment media perpetuates negative images of helpless primitives,
backward and irredeemably tribal people happy in their state of nature.
In this regard, we have a duty consistently to wage a relentless struggle
for some sense of symmetry in media discourse panning out in global news
coverage.
When individuals are continuously fed a type of image or misrepresentation,
the results is the congealing of the images to form stereotypes or
generalisations.
In turn the recipients, international consumers of news about Africa,
develop meta-contexts that frame perceptions about the continent in a vicious
cycle that spans generations.
Generalisations and stereotypes, once deeply entrenched in the minds of
consumers of news, as is the case currently, invariably create general
conditions that spawn explanatory constructs that are used to interpret events
or evaluate the behaviours, including the cultural practices of Africans.
The SABC News International can therefore not shy away from the challenge of
purposefully confronting stereotypes and misrepresentations of Africa that are
popular in the imagination of especially the Western consumers.
Chairperson,
We are less than three years away from the biggest soccer event ever to
grace African shores, the 2010 Federation International Football Association
(Fifa) World Cup competition.
Already, some of the doomsayers, Afro-pessimists, detractors "human beings
who cannot fathom anything of this magnitude coming out of the African
continent" have told many lies about some scary stories on South Africa's state
of preparation and, indeed, our ability to host this historic tournament.
This clearly illustrates the challenge facing SABC News International.
Again, SABC News International should continue to play the role of promoting
and entrenching global democracy, accountable governments, a culture of human
rights and popular participation in the system of governance.
Let us use our resources to educate and empower ourselves, strengthen our
cultures, develop our countries and make information available to millions of
our people so that these masses of our people are able to make informed choices
about their future.
Let us celebrate our many successes - enduring peace after decades of
conflicts in places such as Mozambique, entrenchment of democracy in countries
such as Namibia and Ghana, economic successes in Mauritius, Botswana, Tunisia
and others. The good stories from Africa are indeed numerous and inspiring.
In his poem, "Stammerings on Bedrock", Ben Okri says:
I have seen lies grow from
Seeds of twisted dreams
They shoot up in ordinary nights
They gorge themselves upon our hunger
We feed ourselves on their poisons
Upon these times smash our lies,
Bare us to our naked highways,
Thundershine lights the fields;
We can reclaim our live
We sincerely hope the SABC News International will light our fields like the
thundershine, to enable us to reclaim our lives. I wish the SABC success in
this new and exciting venture.
Thank you.
Issued by: The Presidency
20 July 2007
Source: SAPA
