Journal of African Media Studies - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2014

For more than five decades the political, economic and sociocultural landscape of Africa has been changing. Africa witnessed a change from colonialism to independence, which was immediately followed by one-party states and militarization. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the wind of change brought multiparty democracy and neo-liberalism into Africa. public service broadcasting (PSB) has been at the centre of these changes as a tool for legitimizing them. The central argument in this article is that the concept of PSB in ‘a changing Africa’ has been changing, reflecting the changes in political, economic and sociocultural sceneries in Africa. Thus, from a Tanzanian experience, this article is an overview of the concept of PSB in Africa from the colonial period to the present and concludes that lack of political will is an obstacle to the realization of the concept of PSB in Africa.

This article seeks to examine how advertisers meddle in journalists’ ethical decisions at the Nation Media Group (NMG) in Kenya. Grounded in the critical political economy of the media tradition, it is argued in the article that, in the highly commercialized media environment in Kenya today, market forces pose the greatest threat to media freedom and responsibility. Through in-depth qualitative interviews of twenty journalists from the NMG, the article shows how the expectation of private media to be purveyors of public interest while trying to maximize profits for shareholders leads to a clash of journalistic and capitalist values. The article answers the following questions: how do advertisers meddle in journalists’ ethical decisions at the Nation Media? How do journalists respond to advertisers’ influence? How does their response compromise their professional ethics? The findings show that there is a clash of journalistic values and capitalist values as journalists strive to meet shareholders’ expectations and maximize profits for owners.

The South African film industry, due to its inability to handle American Film Imperialism and put in place effective strategies to develop the South African film industry, has been virtually stagnant for decades. Arguably the most serious challenge, as often highlighted in research, is of ‘an industry fighting against the Hollywood machine’. The question that immediately comes to mind is: How does the United States manage to maintain world film domination? Although the SA film industry was established before Hollywood came into existence, the United States today accounts for 75 per cent of the world’s feature film market, while South Africa accounts for less than 1 per cent. This places an obligation on SA film-makers to design a turn-around strategy. During the 1980s when the French film industry (which pioneered motion pictures) was struggling, having encountered the same problem, a project similar to that advocated in this article, was initiated by the Minister of Culture, Jack Lang. French President Francois Mitterrand increased financial aid to the French film industry and the film Jean de Florette (Berrie, 1986) was produced. Jean de Florette attained commercial and critically acclaimed success and it is still making money to this day. In the United States Jean de Florette was hailed as the best foreign language film of 1986 and it went on to win numerous international awards. Jean de Florette was in 2010, for example, hailed by Empire Magazine as ranked no. 60 of the 100 best films of world cinema (Wikipedia 2014). In The Maestro Film Project, a partial solution to the deplorable state of feature film production in South Africa will be put forward. Although a total turn-around strategy is multi-dimensional and extremely complex, a step in the right direction would be to produce a three-dimensional artefact-driven film model (feature film, 50 instructional DVDs and 50 articles) that; identifies existing artistic communication codes (some 300) that influence the dramatic impact of a film and captures each one in an instructional DVD; researches these codes to gain an understanding of how they contribute to increasing a film’s dramatic impact; and implements, in a feature film, these codes using the best film-makers in South Africa (maestros) to test their efficacy. This model, as an instructional tool, will be unique in the world as no such project has ever been produced. The closest to it would be ‘the making of’ productions frequently seen on television. The major difference is that these productions have a promotional objective with very little instructional value (the prime objective of the 50 instructional DVDs). First, the model can be used by experienced film-makers to gain insight and second, to train future film-makers who, in time, will contribute to the development of the SA film industry.

The article contributes to the fledgling literature in the China–Africa communications field by approaching the topic from the perspective of an event – the fifth conference of the Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC V). It proposes that by analysing FOCAC V specifically, and the FOCAC phenomenon generally, new and interesting insights might be gained into the interests of the various players – namely, Chinese officials, African officials and the African media. It also contributes new perspectives in leveraging the framing of a communication theory as a means of drilling down to the motivations, tensions, confluences and divergences inherent in the China–Africa relations – a transnational engagement that continues to draw animated discussions and debate in and out of academia.

This study examined how Nigerian newspapers cover the effect of Boko Haram violence on the environment, the areas of the environment mostly affected by the Boko Haram violence, the prominence given to the coverage of the Boko Haram violence, the perspective from which the media reported the violence within the period of study and the forms of presentation of the reports on Boko Haram violence in Nigerian newspapers. The sample size for the study was 162 editions of three national dailies – The Punch, the Vanguard and the Daily Sun. The instrument of data collection was the coding guide and coding sheet because the research methodology was content-analysis of selected newspapers – The Punch, the Vanguard and the Daily Sun. Two hypotheses were tested using the chi-square analytical tool and the results showed that Nigerian dailies did not give prominence to Boko Haram-induced environmental problems during the period of study (December 2011, January 2012 and February 2012) and that Boko Haram violence significantly affects the environment. The result of the research revealed that the violence affects the environment, especially the land, which bears most of the brunt. The Nigerian dailies gave prominence to the Boko Haram insurgence, but little attention was paid to the environmental implications of the violence. On the basis of the findings, the researchers recommended to mass media operators that environmental beats should be given utmost priority in their organizations especially by separating this beat from property and housing beats, which are often merged with the environmental beat in most organizations. This merger could be playing down the pertinence of environmental reporting. Feature stories and editorial comments should be used more while presenting the environmental effects of Boko Haram activities in order to give a more in-depth interpretation to such happenings.

Zimbabweans in the diaspora engage in various forms of material and psycho-social remitting in order to maintain links with the homeland. Although geographically disconnected from their motherland, collective and idealized memories of the homeland linger long after leaving the country. This article focuses on the psycho-social dimension of the diaspora through an examination of the online news consumption practices of the Zimbabwean diaspora. The objective is to contribute on theoretical debates about the way in which the diaspora imagine their citizenship in the digital age. Data were elicited through an open-ended questionnaire e-mailed to Zimbabweans in the diaspora selected using the snowball sampling method. In addition, in-depth interviews with five of the respondents based in South Africa were also held to complement the survey data. The article argues that Zimbabwean diaspora use online newspapers to assert their membership to the Zimbabwean political community. This active information-seeking disposition of the diaspora is an affirmation of their loyalty to the homeland regardless of the social, economic and political reality in the homeland. The symbolic assertion of transnational loyalty by the Zimbabwean diaspora to the homeland could be viewed as a performance of patriotic citizenship through seeking of collective identification around the nation state.

This article has a twofold purpose: first, I look at the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) as a site of mourning and melancholia – to use the phrase that was first used by Sigmund Freud in his seminal paper and which was reformulated more recently by a postcolonial scholar Ranjana Khanna. I suggest that unconscious mechanisms, which are expressions of loss on the part of both black and white Zimbabweans, are acted out in the festival. In particular, on the part of white Zimbabweans it might be an expression of the so-called ‘white alienation’ experienced after the loss of domination. Second, I also look at assertions of a feminist academic, Sara Ahmed, who claims in her book Embodied Strangers that it is difficult, if at all possible, to circumvent the embodied and cultural context of an encounter between a representative of a western culture and the Other. I present a case study of the opening show at HIFA 2011, which seems to confirm this theory. However, I also suggest that it might be possible to subvert this expected narrative through a Winnicottian notion of a space for creativity and play. I look at two different examples of such encounters and cite the poem by Charmaine Mujeri in which she describes her hybrid identity.

People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited. Photographs by Bryan Heseltine, Darren Newbury, Amanda Hopkins, Vivian Bickford-Smith and Sean field (2013) London: Black Dog Publishing, 192 pp., ISBN-10: 1907317856 (pbk), ISBN-13: 9781907317859, £15.91