Journal of African Media Studies - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2015

This article considers the concept of media and citizenship in relation to the politics of representation on the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s channel 2 (SABC2). It examines the ways in which a group of audience members negotiate and reflect upon issues of representation on SABC2’s flagship soap opera 7de Laan, which professes to be a multicultural soap opera, paying reverence to the diverse cultural, ethnic and linguistic make-up of South Africa. In previous work, I have argued that the soap opera presents a utopian view of community and citizenship in contemporary South Africa. Building on this observation, this article explores audience engagement with 7de Laan’s utopian construction of South African citizenship through a social networking site, Twitter. It examines the ways in which a group of audience members negotiate and reflect upon issues of representation on 7de Laan through the Twitter hashtag #7delaan, arguing that Twitter provides a platform for viewer fans engaged in a love/hate relationship with television to ‘bamboozle back’. My primary interest in the #7delaan community is therefore centred not only on what the community members tweet but more so on how their tweets frame the soap opera and their perceptions thereof, and to try to understand what these discourses might reveal about their perceptions of place, race and citizenship in contemporary South Africa.

Community radio is one of the resources that can give ordinary or disenfranchised people a voice. This opportunity can be increased through the combination of community radio and mobile phones. Using focus group discussions, face-to-face interviews and observations, this article examines how this combination can improve ordinary people’s participation in media production and in public life in Malawi. It also examines the extent to which marginalized people are using mobile phones to voice their concerns through community radio in Malawi. I argue that the proliferation of mobile phones can accord community radio stations increased ability to give people a voice through use of text messaging and phone-in programmes. It can also expand the resources with which ordinary people have a voice. When people are accorded the right to voice their concerns and be heard, they can remove a major communication barrier that prevents them from enjoying the life they value.

Are there events that temporarily unite differences among ethnic groups in a multiethnic nation state? Using a Kenya’s drought-relief initiative, dubbed Kenyans4Kenya (K4K), this article responds to this question. It uses framing analysis to examine how K4K and its followers constructed messages to deliberately generate empathy for the drought victims. Messages on K4K’s Facebook page were placed in three collective frames: diagnostic, prognostic and motivational. They were also coded according to three identified thematic frames: anti-regime, humanitarian, and patriotism/ national pride. The findings of this study demonstrate the success of K4K in its ability to frame a humanitarian crisis in a way that rendered the divisive fissures of ethnic differences temporarily insignificance and inconspicuous. K4K successfully cast the pain and suffering of the drought victims as unwarranted by locating its discourse within the ambit of a nation that had failed to provide its citizens with the very basic of human rights.

Various video-on-demand (VOD) platforms streaming Nigerian films have popped up on the Internet since 2011. These VOD platforms facilitate the consumption of Nigerian films among African diaspora. Despite an increasing academic interest for Nollywood audiences, these new modes of viewing Nigerian films online have yet to be explored. In this article, we will therefore give attention to the consumption and reception of Nigerian films on the Internet among African diaspora of Nigerian, Ghanaian and Cameroonian origin in the cities of Antwerp and Ghent, Belgium. In this study, we adopted a media ethnographic approach, including fieldwork and semi-structured in-depth interviews. Although scholars have suggested that the Internet fragments and individualizes film viewing, the results of this study show that indeed online Nigerian films are most often watched individually by the respondents, yet the reception of the films remains a social practice of shared meaning-making.

This reflexive study examines the idea of African storytelling. It sheds light on a specific university newspaper column, The UKZN Griot. A critique of neoliberal managerialism backgrounds the discussion of the satirical column that examines the local in relation to global issues of academic governance. The Habermasian theory of the public sphere frames the discussion. Responses to the column are analysed in terms of power relations, resistance and democracy.

It normally is assumed that new media activism, in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ political protests in the Middle East, has the potential to promote and effectively enable social and political changes in contemporary societies. However, nowhere does the influence of the digital explosion appear somehow exaggerated as in the case of Africa, where lack of empirical evidence has seen policy-makers, commentators and journalists making extraordinary conclusions justifying the Internet’s perceived potential to shape political processes on the continent. This article questions this notion through an online ethnographic assessment of Zimbabwean blogger Baba Jukwa’s Facebook webpage, which became a prominent platform for the anti-Robert Mugabe establishment up until its sudden withdrawal from the web in August 2014. At its peak, the webpage became a meeting point for activists opposed to Zimbabwe’s long-time president as the anonymous blogger shared what he (assuming he was a man) claimed were juicy state secrets with the rest of the world. His pronouncements especially ahead of the 2013 elections gave hope to opposition campaigners that the era of a man, who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980, was coming to an abrupt end. Calls were then made suggesting that the presence of the historic page was buttressing democratic participation as Zimbabweans from across the world converged on the blog discussing issues of mutual interest. The findings of our research, however, give a different picture, concluding rather that in spite of the page’s ability to encourage Zimbabweans to openly discuss and share thoughts, there simply is no evidence that Baba Jukwa had helped facilitate increased democratic participation in the country.

Why I Did n’t Kiss Tatiana, J. S. Motlhabani (2013) Gaborone: self published by J.S Motlhabani, ISBN: 9789996800092, p/bk, no price listed. 168 pp.

White Hotel, directed by Dianne Griffin and Tobi Solvang (1996)