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- Volume 8, Issue 2, 2016
Journal of African Media Studies - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2016
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Diamonds are forever? Press coverage of African conflicts and the Westphalian filter of resource wars
More LessAbstractThis article argues that when it comes to reporting conflicts in the developing world the western press ignores the private sphere of economic activity because it privileges a narrative of people fighting over the nation state, as well as political ideologies and territory gained and lost. This choice of media framing matters in how western audiences understand the complexity of resource wars. To explore this concept further I examine American and British press coverage of conflict diamonds in the civil wars fought in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sierra Leone in the pages of four western newspapers of record: The Guardian (UK), The Times (UK), the New York Times (US) and the Washington Post (US). Overall, while conflict diamonds were present in the reporting, the press ignored the full extent of involvement of private companies and international capital in the financing and trading of diamonds to fuel war.
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Maid to serve: ‘Self-fashioning’ and the domestic worker trope in contemporary South Africa
By Alude MahaliAbstractThis article investigates how the domestic worker sartorial trope is reflected and embodied in contemporary South African culture. Domestic work has received very little public or media attention from feminists, trade unionists, or even political activists broadly until the recent movement of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). This article observes how the South African political party, the EFF, use the domestic worker dress as a subversionary tactic in sociopolitical culture. By appropriating the archetypal domestic worker dress, the EFF demonstrate both identification with the domestic worker and a subversion of what the domestic worker dress has, for so long, inferred. In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, the author examines the domestic worker trope and the significance of dress. This article uses critical discourse analysis and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus to explicate both the personal and political significance of the domestic worker dress in contemporary South Africa.
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Zimbabwe’s state-controlled public media and the mediation of the 1980s genocide 30 years on
More LessAbstractSince the end of genocide in 1987 Zimbabwe has remained a zone of ‘conflicts’, and the enduring debates surrounding this genocide, especially in public-owned but state-controlled media, call for critical attention. Three years after independence, in 1980, Zimbabwe was plunged into a genocide named ‘Gukurahundi’ (meaning the rain that washes the chaff away after harvest) that lasted until 1987. This article argues that there has been a clash of ‘interests’ playing out in the mediation of this yet-to-be-officially addressed genocide. Through evidence from public-owned media, the media that carry the official voice of the ruling party, I argue that public media have seen genocide from conflicting and complex angles, making it difficult to reach a consensus suitable for national building based on genocide truths, meanings and effects to Zimbabweans. I specifically use the Unity Accord-associated holiday, the Unity Day, and its associated debates to pursue two arguments. First, public media have played an ambiguous role in appreciating the conflictual and multipronged nature of the genocide within ZANU-PF. Second, public media have largely been supportive of, and even complicit in, official silences on genocide debates and memory. The article uses public sphere and narrative analysis as frameworks for understanding the operations of public media journalism in the mediation of genocide nearly 30 years after its occurrence.
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Tweeting democracy: An ethnographic content analysis of social media use in the differing politics of Senegal and Ethiopia’s newspapers
Authors: Jeslyn Lemke and Endalk ChalaAbstractThis descriptive, empirical study gives context to how print journalists in two politically different African nations, Senegal and Ethiopia, use Twitter and Facebook to report the news and to what extent. We ask, ‘how is this new model of online reporting manifesting itself in Ethiopian and Senegalese newsrooms, given Senegal’s track record of democratic government and free press and Ethiopia’s infamously authoritarian control and censorship of the country’s journalists?’. The method is a content analysis of 60 days of posts on ten print newspapers’ Twitter and Facebook pages, to establish a comparative assessment of the two nations. Findings are also given context by comparing the print newspapers’ popularity on Twitter and Facebook against each nation’s top 20 most popular Twitter and Facebook pages. Results show Ethiopia to be markedly behind in Twitter posts, but the newspapers of each country show similar rates of posting to Facebook. Journalists in both nations are not livetweeting events, but instead are linking content on social media to the newspaper’s main home page.
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Young citizens in South Africa: A paradox of engagement with politics and the media
Authors: Vanessa Malila and Marietjie OelofsenAbstractIn 2014, South Africa’s democracy turned 20. Just like the young democracy is learning to find its feet, young citizens are negotiating the unknown territory of full citizenship rights while confronting a ‘totally different world than that of their parents’. Whether their parents were black and not entitled to full citizenship or whether their parents were white and therefore implicated in a system that withheld full citizenship from the majority of the population, young people do not have a template to draw on for meaning and form of citizenship in a new and liberated South Africa. This article examines political participation amongst young South Africans and their negotiated participation in both political and civic activities within the context of media use and consumption. Their paradoxical relationship with both politics and the media is detailed in an attempt to understand how to deepen a culture of meaningful citizenship amongst South African youth.
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Capacity building, tertiary postgraduate interventions and the changing media environment in southern and eastern Africa
More LessAbstractAn academic revolution in higher education during the past half century has been marked by transformations unprecedented in scope and diversity. Simultaneously, the significant changes in the ‘mediascape’ of southern and eastern Africa over the past two decades have replaced total state control with a degree of liberalization, while the digital revolution has changed the access to, and the content of, media programming. The article argues that the production of postgraduate scholars, particularly at the doctoral level, is a useful indicator of the way in which capacity building in higher education – specifically, higher education for media and journalism studies – is being undertaken. This desk research article synthesizes the trends in media and academia under six headings: 1. structure and regulation; 2. end users – audiences, readers and viewers and students; 3. content delivery – programmes and curricula; 4. human resources; 5. digital technology and new media; and 6. financial sustainability.
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Lovers in Time – practice research in the times of patriotic journalism in Zimbabwe
More LessAbstractThis article features my practice research in Zimbabwe. In particular, I focus on the issues surrounding the staging of the most controversial theatrical play during the Harare International Festival of the Arts in 2014, Lovers in Time, written by Zimbabwean Blessing Hungwe and produced and directed by myself. I present the case against the background of the media furore that surrounded the production. I see the press reactions, which changed from very positive to irrationally vitriolic, as an example of patriotic journalism and Althusserian interpellation. Under the particular circumstances in Zimbabwe, my whiteness, gender and European background were also an issue discussed both in the media and among the members of our theatrical company when decisions had to be made regarding where the lines of belonging lie and why. The article suggests that open discussions of this nature might be helpful in terms of de-mystifying the cultural challenges and subverting patriarchal notions of production of knowledge in which the myth of objectivity is still advanced as the only valid scholarly interrogation.
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Book Review
More LessAbstract‘C’EST L’HOMME QUI FAIT L’HOMME’: CUL-DE-SAC UBUNTU-ISM IN CÔTE D’IVOIRE, FRANCIS B. NYAMNJOH (2015) Mankon, Bamenda: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG, 204 pp., ISBN: 9956762520, p/bk, £20.00
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