kagablog

Author: Siyolwe, Wabei

Interview WS: Southern Africa has a unique media history - race, class, cinema, broadcasting and censorship. Your research and writing explores these issues in the context of South and Southern Africa. Why do you address these issues? Why does this mean so much to you?

Tomaselli: I started my university education at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) in 1968 wanting to be a meteorologist, then a psychologist, then an urban geographer. However, while at Wits (1968-1973) I became interested in making movies. I had made a number of short Super-8 films for modern idiom church services at St Columba’s in Johannesburg in the late 1960s. This was a most progressive Church, in which the youth were involved in church government, and encouraged to create annual multimedia worship services. The services were very successful in drawing in youth who normally avoided religion. This was my first taste of a truely democratic institution.

My second film was on the last legal student protest march during apartheid in Johannesburg in 1970. The film was shown on campus and at churches. It was regularly updated over the next four years, as protest and anti-apartheid student struggle intensified at Wits. As South Africa did not have TV in those days, the films I made on these protests were shown in edited, and immediately in unedited form, at campus film screenings and other events. The continually lengthening documentary and the unedited shorts performed the function of TV news for students who were also often the participants in the protests. The composite edited film was sold to a number of local and international anti-apartheid organisations. I then made other short films for a variety of University and anti-apartheid organisations. I learned TV production while working as a cameraman and floor manager in the newly built educational TV studio on the campus between 1972 and 1973.

The title which gained the attention of the South Africa film industry, however, was a 30 minute Super-8 film I had made with friends and colleagues on surfing in 1972. Suddenly I was being offered top jobs in the professional industry. Compared to these professionals I was still very much an amateur. When I finished my studies I joined a company and made sports documentaries, vox pops for advertising companies, and product promotional films between 1974 and 1977. As the protests on the Wits campus continued I found time to cover these events. This eventually led to my brief detention by the Security Police. I was fortunate, however, in working with some of the industry’s top technicians as a production manager, cameraman and director during the late ’70s.

Though I learned a great amount, and had a great time while working in the industry, making a living was very hard in those pre-TV days. When TV was introduced in 1976 I bought into a film sound studio. But the pressures of paying the monthly lease on the studio killed the enjoyment of production. I sold my shares and was offered a post in the newly established School of Dramatic Art at the University of Witwatersrand in 1977. I was employed to teach film and TV production. Though I knew the technical side of filmmaking, I knew next to nothing about film history, theory and criticism. What I had learned was from Ross Devenish, director of some of Athol Fugard’s films, with whom I taught a film course in 1977. I had previously attended a short course on cinema at Wits with John van Zyl, who later set up the School of Dramatic Art at Wits. It was Ross who had introduced me to Third Cinema and its accompanying theory, which I am still teaching to this day. While at Wits (1997-1981) I registered for an MA in film studies and it was there that I obtained a more comprehensive knowledge about cinema theory and history.

One of my MA projects involved research on the South African film industry. This early essay, drawing on my professional experience, was published as The South African Film Industry (African Studies Institute, Wits, 1979). Though the book was a very cheap production, and theoretically very thin, it sold fast and furiously, and garnered intelligent and enormous press, radio and TV publicity. It was reprinted in 1980 and again in a revised edition in 1981. A few years later I met Dan Georgakas, an editor Cineaste, the US magazine on film and politics. Geogakas offered to publish The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film (Smyrna: New York, and Lake View Press: Chicago) appeared in 1988. This title was an immediate critical success internationally and I was greatly honoured to have been the recipient of a KWANZAA Award. The international rights were sold to Routledge, though this edition is now out of print. Intervention Press in Denmark has the European rights.

The Cinema of Apartheid was surprisingly well received by sections of the South African film industry, though it is highly critical of it. (The book had obtained endorsement from veteran anti-apartheid activists, novelist Nadine Gordimer and the exiled poet, Denis Brutus.) The reason for this surprisingly positive response from an otherwise ideologically conservative industry was partly because the book explains the way the industry worked under apartheid, in language which could be understood by professionals. To some extent, aspects of the book also voiced their own concerns. My direct experience of the industry, and of labour issues via my work for the SA Film and TV Technicians Association, told them that this was not ivory tower writing, but a description and explanation o f actual conditions and processes in which they were themselves participants. People could recognize themselves in my analysis.

A journal which I started in 1980, Critical Arts , contributed to the systematic development of critical media and drama studies in South Africa. Critical Arts then provided the only domestic outlet for sustained theoretical critique of the South African media. As a result of the international prominence that this journal earned in a short period, I found myself at the helm of a publication - and a host of progressive co-editors and authors - which mapped out the critical history and strategies for anti-apartheid mobilization within the academic media and cultural sectors. Earlier, I had been involved in the technicians’ union as an executive council member and then chairman. So, my contribution to the industry was both academic and professional, incorporating labour and anti-apartheid issues.

I have continued to publish extensively on the South African film and TV industries in books and journals. I wrote the historical section in the “Film” chapter in the Arts and Culture Task Group Report and was a co-writer (with Martin Botha, and a number of professional advisors) of the Film White Paper which was published in 1996. The White Paper aimed to restructure the South African film industry to meet the needs of the new democratic order. (A version of this White Paper has also been presented to the Zimbabwean government by that country’s industry). The work I was invited to do on the White Paper was a rare honour: not many academics have the privilege of putting their theories into practice via democratic policy-making at the level of the state itself. Seeing one’s life’s work take an affirmative and democratic direction is a once in a life-time experience. It gives meaning to life, to struggle, and to the (regrettably declining) notion of “public service”.

One of the proudest moments for me after apartheid was when Lionel Ngakane was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Natal in 1997. I had personally motivated Lionel’s nomination for this award. Lionel is a powerhouse in African cinema, constantly facilitating, always encouraging, developing and exploring new avenues for African cinema. Most people nowadays are devoted to building their own careers and PR images; Lionel continues to contribute to the development of others, and the industry as a whole. He, of course, played a major role in formulation of the White Paper

WS: Broadcasting is currently going through a major revolution in Southern Africa in terms of who “rules the airwaves”. What are your feelings regarding the recent successful bid by Midi TV (of which Warner Bros owns 20%) to operate South Africa’s first free- to-air commercial television station?

Tomaselli: Seven consortia (most with international partners) bid for the license. All the bidders had involved black empowerment interests. Midi’s shareholding is 80% black-owned. Midi TV will broadcast 24 hours a day, and include a news service, which is not part of the line-up of M-Net, the pay-TV channel. Significantly, M-Net in late 1996 came under primarily black control and owns about 4% of Canal Plus in France. The growth of black-dominated South African capital in the South African media industries has been phenomenal. The entre` by Midi TV continues this black empowerment trend, which started in 1993, though it would have occurred with any of the bidding consortia.

The inclusion of Warner Bros, part of the Time-Warner stable, has raised eyebrows in South Africa. This was because this US company came on board very late in the bidding process. Also, Midi was permitted by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, against bidding regulations, to modify its business plan at a very late stage . (The Authority has been dogged with allegations of corruption and incompetence since it was established in 1994.)

Warner offered to buy the maximum (20%) of the proposed Midi company permitted by South African law. While the other bidders had long included foreign partners, a veritable rogue’s gallery of media moguls, the current era of globalisation makes this international cooperation inevitable. To secure programming is one thing; to secure global markets for locally made product is much more difficult. A foreign partner is useful for raising the necessary capital injection and meeting start-up costs, and for top class management expertise, affordable programming, and export opportunities.

One consequence is that trivial American product might may find another outlet to clutter up yet another South African channel (five South African channels existed prior to Midi going on air, three of which were free-to-air). Fortunately, the purile playground smut that passes for day-time entertainment in USA network TV is currently not that evident on any South African TV channel. And, in any case, local content provisions reserve at least a minimum of 20% airtime for South African productions (excluding news and sport). But the themes may not be necessarily South African in orientation. The local content provisions have to be enforced by the IBA. Whether or not Midi gets on-air in October 1998 as intended depends on whether the other bidders take the IBA to court for allegedly breaching the tendering procedures with regard to the Midi application.

The national public broadcaster in particular is going to have to develop programming strategies to ensure that relevant social issues remain the pre-eminent topics for social debate. The SABC will have to work hard and creatively to retain viewers in its attempts open up and develop the public sphere. The quality of our hard-earned democracy partly depends on the audience impact of the public service broadcaster. Private commercial broadcasters always pander to the lowest common denominators, no matter their protestations to the contrary. Regrettably, profit always comes before the polity.

WS: Considering the ideological changes in South Africa, where is the pre-election socialist rhetoric in film?

Tomaselli : Socialism is no longer on the agenda in South African politics. The world into which South Africa re-emerged in 1990 after decades of sanctions and boycotts had also witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The demise of apartheid was connected to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Armed struggle was replaced by negotiation. In a post-Cold War world in which capital now reigns supreme, and which has seen the rise of global entertainment and information industries, there is currently very little space for socialist mobilisation. A Luta continua, but the terrain of this struggle is now to limit corruption, to make politicians accountable to the people, and to create growth policies which benefit everyone, not just the few who wield political and economic power.

In writing up the White Paper on Film the Reference Committee appointed by the Minister, for example, grappled with clauses and criteria to discourage corruption, nepotism and selfish accumulation. We proposed a series of funding measures to facilitate the entrance into the industry of new producers, new directors, new exhibitors and new distributors. One of the objectives is to facilitate new entrants into all sectors of the industry, and to provide seed funding and venture capital (in partn ership with industry) in stimulating new and critical themes. Audience development is a key factor in this strategy. Econonmic growth, jobs and sectoral development are also key objectives. But it is early days yet, and the mechanism to facilitate this, t he South African film and Video Foundation, has yet to be established.

The themes which are currently emerging from both the film and TV industries are far more positively intercultural than previously. They are far more nuanced, and far more broadly South African than they have ever been. The SABC, in particular, has seized the initiative. Amongst the TV genres which work towards reconciliation and development are:

1. documentaries representing the history of popular struggle;
2. situation comedies courageously negotiating intercultural and interracial prejudices (Going Up, Suburban Bliss);
3. dramas offering health education via entertainment (Soul City);
4. game shows teaching about electoral politics (eg. Local Voter);
5. dramas made in part-documentary style on human rights (Rhythm and Rights);
6. visionary documentaries providing African perspectives on conflict resolution (In Search of Common Ground );
7. drama series which re-examine inter-racial relations during apartheid (Homeland);
8. docudramas on key anti-apartheid figures (like Alan Paton); and
9. magazine programmes which represent the full spectrum of South African politics from the far left to the far right.

In cinema, the Afrikaans-language film, Paljas (1997), about small town Afrikaners, was financed by Anant Singh, a South African producer of Indian descent, and directed by a white Afrikaner, Katinka Heyns. Paljas was nominated for an Academy Award in 1998 by a multi-racial South African committee, under the auspices of the Independent Producers Organisation chaired by Mfundi Vundla. This is where the real change has occurred. Intercultural communication, resolving the divisions caused by apartheid, reconciliation, and a critical interrogation of social prejudices and racism are high on the agenda. Socialist themes might well return, however, if the current centralisation of wealth accumulation continues at the expense of a broader redistribution.

WS: What about black consciousness?

Black Consciousness (BC) as humanistically articulated by Steve Biko continues in a racially exclusive form within the Azanian Peoples Organisation (AZAPO). AZAPO claimed the mantle of Biko’s Black peoples Convention after his death. The strategic value of BC was initially revealed in Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom, shot in Zimbabwe in the late 1980s, and in the Zimbabwean-made documentary, Biko: Breaking the Silence (made by Olley Maruma, Richard Wickstead and Mark Kaplan). The latter film explained the shift after Soweto ‘76 from BC to Charterism, a mildly socialist, non-racial, philosophy drawn from the Freedom Charter (1955).

AZAPO is a small, intellectually-based group, whose emphases have been largely supplanted by the racial inclusivism of Charterism as propounded by the United Democratic Front of the 1980s, and Nelson Mandela’s policy of non-racialism in the 1990s. Central to this notion of the “rainbow nation”, as described by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is the political strategy of reconciliation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the central mechanism facilitating absolution for political crimes carried out in the name of ideology, no matter the identity of perpetrator or victims.

Since the post-apartheid moment is dominated by the policies of reconciliation, absolution and the building of a single non-racial nation, issues incubated within BC circles have not yet made their appearance in post-apartheid cinema and broadcast TV. Now that the black majority wields political power, and in the light of the speed with which black capital is being integrated into the national (and international) economies, BC may have to reorientate itself to address the new class dynamics which have come about since 1990.

WS: Where do concepts regarding orality in African cinema fit into your writing on film and video?

One of the advantages of the post-boycott era is that South Africans now regularly get to see African-made movies. The Film Resource Unit in Johannesburg, which is engaged in audience development projects, and the All Africa M-Net Film Awards, now bring these films south. The national public broadcaster has been showing African films weekly, and M-Net has been screening these films as well. For the first time South Africans are now privy to the cinema of their African colleagues to the north.

My writing on orality and South African film started in the late 1980s. Documentary films such as The Two Rivers and a number on popular storytellers like Mzwakhe Mbuli and Gcina Mhlope, required different analytical perspectives from those found in conventional documentary film theory. The Two Rivers, for example, is structured in terms of poet Rashaka Ratshitanga’s oral testimony about Venda history and the interpenetration of African and Western cultures in Johannesburg. The films on the storytellers are themselves sometimes structured in terms of the oral. A video on which I worked as a cameraman, I am Clifford Abrahams, This is Grahamstown (1994), is edited in terms of Cliffie’s own oral tale about his poverty-stricken life in Grahamstown. Another video I shot, Kat River - The End of Hope (1974), has become a cause celebre with regard to a spontaneous Lament uttered by an elderly coloured peasant farmer about to be dispossessed by land consolidation under apartheid. This Lament, by an illiterate, has been compared in structure by a scholar of orality to laments uttered by anguished European peasants of the 13th century also undergoing extreme hardships. It was this scholar of orality who actually unlocked the latent linguistic significance of the Lament.

Your question, of course, primarily refers to my more recent co-authored writing relating also to cinema made by West African directors. Africa is still comprised of people who exhibit varying cultures of orality, semi-literacy, and total literacy. As such, African directors often find themselves interfacing between oral and literate worlds. Tensions between tradition and modernity in the post-colonial era dominate West African films in particular. Literacy ensures continued economic and often cultural dependency on the Western metropoles (as in, eg., Jean-Marie Teno’s Afrique, Je Te Le Plumerai). To understand these kinds of films in terms of their own historical contexts, it is necessary to introduce theories of orality to film analysis. Orality helps to explain their episodic, often disjointed, lateral narratives, which break with Hollywood linear conventions of beginning, middles and ends. The film, Keita , for example, has no beginning, middle or end! The extraordinary experiences I had on videoing Cliffie and Piet Draghoender (in Kat River) sensitised me to these different ways of making sense of the world, history and experience.

WS: You mentioned Cry Freedom. I played Thenjiwe Mtintso in that film. Back to Black Consciousness and visual representations in Post-Apartheid Southern Africa. Do you think, the current positive production climate in Southern Africa will finally produce images and “collective memory” of Southern African blacks, that is authentic and original or do you think Southern Africa is currently going through a post- neo colonial scramble. Cheap locations, perfect light 365 days a year, cheap starving natives who will work for anything, wild exotic animals, natives who are still too savage to actually be the true protagonists and heroes of the films. Tell us Keyan is the industry in Southern Africa concerned about these issues?

Tomaselli: Film makers from both South Africa and elsewhere did cash in on the struggle against apartheid during the 1980s. White, vicious, Afrikaans-speaking characters were cast as the `bad guys’ in a number of US titles. Unlike the USA which has been pursuing its exorcism regarding Vietnam via its film industry, South Africans want to move on: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the vehicle which is providing a forum for absolution for the horrors of the past. Film makers are going back to roots, and developing themes on reconciliation, local histories, and identity, as seen in Paljas , Sarafina , Cry the Beloved Country, and the TV shows I mentioned above.

Since the new film legislation is still in its infancy, things will take a while to develop. Original treatments about local issues and histories have been a feature of short videos made by students from the Newtown Film and TV School, broadcast on SABC, and the young directors who have contributed to the M-Net New Directions series. These young directors still have to make their mark, and will do so increasingly in the next few years.

But the factors you mention - cheap labour, sunny skies, wildlife and top class production facilities, will continue to attract foreign films like the Ghost in the Darkness and the new TV series on Tarzan shot last year at the Lost City location at the infamous Sun City complex. Here are South Africans in a paper mache` environments built on myths about Africa claiming that these productions represent the `real’ Africa. What the Film White Paper Reference Group is hoping for is that the income earned from these kinds of commercial productions will help to contribute to the building of a more relevant cinema relating directly and critically to South African themes. This is a key provision in the proposed film financing mechanism. It’s a sort of ying-yang financial relationship in an era when governments want to get out of subsidising business operations.

WS: There seems to be this sense that “new” South Africans” are cashing in and openly dealing with those who were once the enemy. Does this contradiction play itself out in the media arena in South Africa ?

The whole point of the ANC policy regarding nation-building, reconciliation and economic growth is that there are no more enemies - only constituencies. As I pointed out above, despite numerous teething problems, our new economy, unlike Zimbabwe’s is rapidly becoming multi-racial as black and white dominated capitals interpenetrate on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange especially . Black empowerment schemes via the Stock Exchange, and via other mechanisms have brought black-owned capital (mobilised via the union pension funds) into the national economy, and via this stake, into the global economy, especially with regard to media. So, M-Net, Midi-TV, Times Media, the Sowetan, the Metro Cinemas, and numerous radio stations, and so on are now largely controlled by black-owned capital. However, this does not mean that these companies will automatically make space for African content. While local content provision on television ranges from 20-40 percent, there are no such provisions in cinema distribution. The SABC and, to a lesser extent, M-Net, are really playing the most important role vis-a-vis local content. They are also bringing films from the rest of Africa to our TV screens, and to the cinema and the home video market via the Film Reseource Unit.

WS: What is the most memorable thing you take back with you from Sabbatical in the US?

One of my tasks here at Michigan State University has been my work, ongoing since 1990, with the African Media Program, a division of the African Studies Center. The Program is developing synopses and critiques of film, TV and video by African film makers. We are also developing critiques on other media on and about Africa, by non-African directors. The intention is to place this educational data base on the World Wide Web. In this small way we hope to provide instantly accessible and accurate information to American educators looking for appropriate movies for use in classroom teaching. In 1997 at the African Literature Association conference on African Films, scores of papers were given by American professors on the topic. This growing interest in African expression provides the kind of base line which the African Media Program hopes to enhance. Also, innovative policy is now being put into place by President Clinton following his discussions with African leaders during his recent tour to that continent. This suggests a much more sophisticated understanding of the foreign policy issues involved. We may well be moving to a new plane of American foreign relations with Africa. It’s just a pity that the US network media continues to trivilise and senationalise everything on which it reports.

WS: What are your immediate or future plans in South Africa? Planning on making any films or any new publications ? What is the role you are keen on playing?

Tomaselli: We are still reconstructing all aspects of our society. Universities in particular are having a difficult time of it, as funds are cut, and academics who are unused to the need for regular restructuring as has occurred elsewhere, have to become more entrepreneurial and adapt to constantly changing circumstances. The Centre in which I am professor, however, has continuously adapted to this financially austere climate. Our MA in Media Studies has been a great success, with our students coming from all over Sub-Saharan Africa, North America and the USA. This year we introduced for the first time two undergraduate certificate courses in media studies, and we are now planning a whole undergraduate degree programme. So, while other disciplines contract, we are actually growing to meet the demands of the new media developments described above.

Also, most of our lecturers and even some senior students have been directly involved in government policy-making regarding media. Others have worked with African development agencies across the continent. One of the projects with which I am engaged is the Training in Developing Countries Board (TDC). TDC is a sub-committee of CILECT, the International Association of Film and TV Schools, based in Brussels. The TDC was responsible for the establishment of the Zimbabwe-UNESCO Film Training Project. My hope is that this Project could become the locus for a SADC Film, TV, video and multimedia training project, in which all the public educational institutions within the SADC area participate.

The transition from apartheid to democracy has been an exciting (and exhausting) time for all of us. The exhilaration we all feel in actively participating in the democratic process has been an empowering experience all round. I will return to South Africa in mi-1998 feeling recharged and keen to carry on with reconstruction and development in those sectors in which I and members of my Centre in Durban have been so active.

ENDS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Keyan Gray Tomaselli is Professor, Graduate Programme in Cultural and Media Studies, University of Natal, South Africa. This interview was conducted while he was a Visiting Professor in the African Studies Center, and the Departments of Anthropology and English, Michigan State University, USA. Tomaselli was working on the MSU African Media Project, and teaching courses in Third World cinema and documentary film.

Author of The Cinema of Apartheid (Smyrna Press, New York), Tomaselli co-wrote the South African government White Paper on Film (1996), and was responsible for drawing up the Department of Health’s Guidelines (1997) for a national AIDS media strategy which mobilizes grassroots participation via action research and participatory communication. His most recent book, Appropriating Images: the Semiotics of Visual Representation (Intervention Press, Denmark) offers an analysis of visual imaging of Africans from largely Third World and African perspectives.

Tomaselli has served on the juries of the Milano Festival for African Cinema, Riminicinema, and as a judge for the All Africa M-Net Film Awards. He has been the guest of film festivals in France, Canada, the USA and South Africa.

this article first published here