Alternative Media

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date:
Contemporary Cultural Studies Unit
This paper has been written and edited by Keyan G. Tomaselli. The paper is drawn from: Keyan G. Tomaselli, P. Eric Louw and Alex Holt (1986). “An Investigation into the UmAfrica Newspaper: Its Past, Its Present, and Its Prospects.” CCSU, University of Natal, Durban. 48 pp. Chief Researcher: Emmanuel Sithebe; Section Co-ordinators: History-Alex Holt. TechnologJ-Donn Edwards. Advertising- Alex Holt. Alternative Optiofu-Christo Doherty. Reader Survey-RuJh Tomaselli. Student Researchers (1986): Mark Allison-Broomhead, Ansuya Chetty, Daniel Daran, Craig Doria, Michael Graaj; Wendy Helling, Jeanne Prinsloo, Michael Urbasch. Researchers (1987): Sipho Dlamini, SkhumbuzoNdlovana, Umikuwo Yengwa. We are indebted to Protas Madlala, Built Environment Support Group, and Cyril Madlala, UmAfrica Editor, for their advice and assistance in the writing up of the present paper. Thanks also to Fr. Dieter and the Editorial Board of UmAfricafor permitting us to publish this paper in the Journal of Communication Inquiry.

Introduction

During 1986, the Contemporary Cultural Studies Unit of the University of Natal undertook a project which roughly fell into the first category of concerns mentioned in the previous paper: assisting in the development of progressive community organization. This was a consultation with the management and editorial staff of the Mariannhill Monastery’s Zulu-language UmAfrika, serving urban and rural black Catholic communities.

The exercise itself was fraught with difficulties, and the Monastery proved to be far from a textbook case of a “progressive democratic organization.” Yet, from our side, much was learned about demoeracy, intellectual intervention, and methodology; while from UmAfrika’s point of view, the project facilitated a substantial movement away from paternalism and inefficiency, to the point where by mid-1987 the newspaper was in a far better position to serve as a progressive and educational force for the readers at whom it is aimed.

The first section of this paper briefly locates UmAfrika in relation to the four phases in the evolution of the black-oriented press in South Africa over the last one hundred and fifty years (Switzer 1979). Our periodization of the black oriented press since the early 1880s is derived from the general schema provided by Johnson and Switzer (Johnson 1988). The characteristics of the four phases identified mediate the development of resistance in response to changing literacy, educational, locational, technological, political, social and economic conditions at various historical conjunctures in South Africa.

The second section critiques the research practices developed by the Unit and examines the nature of the academic-community cooperative relationship.

Download the entire article

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1989
The idea of participatory video often elicits sarcasm and dismissal. Conventional motion picture categories and professional common sense suggest that ‘visual illiterates’ cannot be made into video makers. Production is technologically complicated and should therefore be left, according to this logic, to those who know how to use it. The crew thus vests solely in itself the power to determine the nature of its relationship with subject-communities. And yet, participatory film production is not new. John Grierson’s British documentary movement of the 1920s and 1930s positioned middle-class film makers between conventional cinema and their working-class subjects. During the mid-1920s the Bantu Kinema Educational Experiment attempted to ‘create a cinema produced by and for the peoples of East Africa’. Mindful of this early work, the following article take the reader towards definitions of ‘community’ and ‘community video’. At root, the power relationship that always arises between crew and subjects, no matter what the intentions of the video makers, is addressed.

Too often, ‘community’ is fetishised as an ‘object’, therefore it is assumed that it exists. But what is a ‘community organisation’? What are the class implications of existing concepts? And, what is the relationship between ‘a community of common struggle’ and the material processes of ‘class struggle’?

Rhetorical use of ‘community’ tends to disguise class, race and gender relations and disputes, offering and immunity from these potentially disruptive – but vital – sites of domination and resistance. To talk about ‘black’ or ‘white’ communities, for example, is to perpetuate apartheid categories, and to suppress from sight social stratification and resultant tensions and conflicts within these groupings. These are nothing more than agglomerations of people who actually have very little in common. Organisations within communities cohere around particularistic interests, and are thus often manifestations of competing interests and dynamics.

‘Progressive community organisations’ are self-constituted associations actively opposed to apartheid (or other forms of oppression). They avoid coercion as an organising principle, and identify with the aims of democratic social movements. Basic questions that identify the type of democracy within organisations include: Who has the authority to make decisions? Who gives the authority to that person or people? Are those people who have authority accountable to the people who gave them authority?

Problems arise, however, when church, trade union, educational and other community bodies are themselves sites of struggle between progressive and conservative factions both within and between organisations. How to work with such without splitting them, while at the same time facilitating democratic alternatives, is as yet an unanswered question.

What are ‘community media’?

Some critics place community video in the realm of awful and boring ‘home movies’. As Costas Criticos states: ‘They see community media as a primitive stage, a temporary phase which patiently and longingly anticipates the benefits of dominant media and its associated high technology.

As one television critic, David Basckin, put it: “Many community videos are travesties of communication, reflecting in their structure an archaic Maoism that owes more to the catastrophes of the Cultural Revolution than anything else. With their wobbly zooms, random focus, curious colour and incoherent soundtracks they are all of a piece with consigning ballerinas to the paddy fields and swineherds to the stage of the Peking Grand Opera. The fact of the matter is this: community videos share two characteristics with home movies: first, their skill-less construction and second, a relevance and interest limited to the participants and their immediate families.

‘Most ordinary people with access to TV (i.e. most ordinary people) watch several hours every week. They know how to read the professional stuff they see. In contrast, the electro-optic jabberings known as community video are often rendered utterly incoherent by their intrusive and clumsy methods. Like it or not, a high level of craft is essential. Anything else is an insult to the viewers.

Basckin was reacting to Criticos’s (1988) Media Attachment Programme (MAP) in which novices make videos at the request of community clients. Basckin emphasises product – that is, video form. Criticos emphasises strategy: ‘video has become an organising device and an emancipatory tool’. This crucial destination often disintegrates in practice.

Community videos do exhibit traces of what Criticos terms ‘messiness’ and what Brazilian Glauba Rocha calls ‘films of discomfort’. ‘The discomfort begins with the basic material: inferior cameras and laboratories, and therfore crude images and muffled dialogue, unwanted noise on the soundtrack, editing accidents, and unclear credits and titles.

Little changed with the introduction of VHS or Video-8. Through recent technological advances make anything possible, the possibility of making anything, is not always possible. Form is usually taken for granted, video makers often paradoxically using dominant commercial broadcast codes to construct oppositional messages. Formalistic ideological seduction by the gizmos, the special effects, and automatic self-correcting functions, often displaces video makers from their raw material, from subaltern-class experiences, and local histories. Video technology directs producers down ideologically predictable paths, resulting in an insider’s private duplication of prevailing world views.

Formalism – whether technological and/or aesthetic – privileges technique over exploratory content, dialectical coding and consultative production practices. In other words, a particular Social relations of communication accompanies both technology and the conventions and genres which structure content.

Community videos are not like home movies. Characteristics of ‘discomforting form’ they may share, but more people watch community video than ‘home movie’ – for different reasons. Proletarian audiences have high political expectations of video. Home-movie viewers expect very little. Where home movies suppress ideological critique and unhappy, painful, and distressing events, community videos confront the pain of life. Producers of community media are less concern with images of stable and happy family life and rituals than they are with community relationships which contest dominant versions of reality. They are oriented to forging a fundamentally different society to that which currently exists.

Basckin cautions: ‘It is wrong to assume that ideological purity alone makes for food video’. However, even within the ‘archaic Maoism’ of some examples of ‘community video’, theories to form, production and practice are emerging. Theorist/producers have battled against the stream, in that most video makers think of their cameras as windows looking on life as it is. They thus collapse the distinction between two forms of coded reality – that of life and its re-representation on screen. This prejudices dialectical communication in that alternative uses of video or communication are concealed.

This collapsing of the signifier into the signified results in a post-transformation realism being imposed on the antecedent pre-transformation realism. In post-revolutionary societies media structures remain uni-accentual, authoritarian, distant and inaccessible to the popular classes. Left-wing rhetoric is then substituted for right-wing rhetoric. Structures don’t change; who gets media access (the powerful) does not change, though who becomes powerful, does sometimes change .The relationship of the state to the people does change much. These problems tent to replicate themselves at the micro level in community media. Community media (CM) are not, argues, Criticos, ‘primitive media; low technology; about communities; produced by a community member, nor it is media produced for a community. All or some of these may be present in CM, but in their presence does not constitute CM….

Drawing on Group Media Journal, Criticos’s idea of ‘community media’ is close to the concepts of ‘group media’ and ‘media for group communication’. Group media is, according to Klaus Muller, ‘Any medium which can foster the process of group interaction through communication based on the life situation of the group members, and sharing of personal experiences that will lead to common endeavours and actions.’ In other words, a community is drawn together by the media, which is the means for mobilisation.

Attempting to theorise ‘community’ Criticos continues: ‘CM is community in media…. Community takes priority over media. Community in media means that the community, i.e. a community of common struggle, has collective and democratic engagement in the contents, production and distribution of CM … explores the development of collective production methods and collective creativity.’

This attempt to problematise the idea of ‘community’ is a significant advance on earlier South African work. Certainly, in some cases, a mutually enriching interfacing between praxis-oriented academics and subject-communities and progressive organisations is showing some significant results.’

How participatory is ‘participation’?

While great strides have been made with regard to providing channels for disadvantaged and repressed communities, even transforming the relations of production, some claims for the ‘organising power’ of community media tend to be self-validations of a ‘closed discourse’ derived from taken-for-granted assumptions about class. Academics and church communicators’ social positions are those of intellectuals ‘removed’ from ‘the community’. While desperately seeking a ‘connectedness’ (even if mythological), they tend to create a discourse about ‘the community’ which has more to do with their own positions in society than with actual situations on the ground.

Writing about a video on super-exploited black film-actors in Natal, Criticos observed that the actors: ‘developed a collective understanding, a collective consciousness of the issues … they started to look towards ways in which they might organise themselves to address their individual and collective plight. This led the actors to explore the possibility of establishing a Black actors’ union.’

This never happened, despite subsequent attempts by both the SA Film and Theatre Union (actors) and the SA Film and TV Technicians’ Association (SAFTTA), working through the National Council of Trade Union (a black consciousness federation) which tried to persuade the actors to meet with the film unions. Eventually, only one, fearful actor met a SAFTTA representative. These actors would rather lose their lives and limbs than risk their jobs for the greater good. They refused to permit the screening of their interviews. Interviews with the exploiting technicians and producers showed them to be aware of the effects of their employment practices, but they too proscribed transmission.

The Lamontville video also opened up the new horizons in production practices, but the comrade have yet to mobilise people in the area through systematic distribution. The follow-through of ‘group interaction’ (in Muller’s terms) has yet to permeate outwards from the Lamontville cultural organisation itself. Amongst the black actors, group interaction ceased and conscientisation dead when the video makers moved on to other topics. In Kat River – The End of Hope the ‘community’ is in the video’ and the ‘video (was) in the community’ – but this made no difference to their immanent dispossession or ability to organise themselves into a ‘community of resistance’. The video now is merely a popular memory for the dispersed community. These examples emphasise problems in relationship with subjects, and conception of audiences in relation to mobilisation and organisation.

Inter-meshing theory and practice

Structured community participation in production is one way of preventing tensions between form and process, and facilitators (video makers) and disadvantaged and oppressed subject-communities. Criticos has outlined some such relationships. However, even here, the camera and technical processes still remain in the hands of the facilitators themselves during training. This raises a number of problems concerning the nature of the relationships that develop, crew assumptions about the composition, cohesion and nature of the ‘community’, issues of form, and questions of power.

Of the Bantu Kinema project, Seth Feldman warns that ‘the best way to screw subjects may be to emphasise their participation … to the point where the complex interactions between maker and subject seem obvious or, worse yet, seems to disappear.’ In other words, if community video makers aim to catalyse constructive processes resulting from their encounter with communities, then they need to theorise the nature of that encounter.

Theory can be put into practice by responding to briefs provided by community organisations rather than by outsiders imposing topics on their subjects. A dialectical redefinition not only of video/filmic codes, but of participatory production practices and new interactive relationships with audiences, subject-communities and/or clients is emerging. The emphasis is on a continuing process; the product is the vehicle facilitating that process. The video gains ideological resonance in terms of the web of relationships it documents. In terms of how it came to be produced, and as a command to move towards a democratically structured future.

Community and Professional Video: Table of Differences

Community video Professional and conventional video
Communication

Group media animates and mobilises personal experience in group contexts

Non-profit motive

Develops human relations

Communication associated with process

Mass media infonns and homogenises personal experience in individual contexts

Profit motive

Develops techniques

Communication associated with technical quality

Knowledge
Produces new knowledge

Recuperates local histories

Retains local cultural specificity in tenns of subjects

‘Restricts’ knowledge or repackages and reconstructs it in new ways

Emulates dominant view of world

Homogenises local cultures in tenDS markets and techniques

Questions of Democracy
Emphasises relationships

Horizontal/participative working relationships

Transformative

Fragments relationships

Imposed/top-down working relationships

Reformist

Coding
Creates new codes, if often crude, but organic origins address community’s agenda

Refers to processes beyond the community

Refines conventional styles, sophistication often hides local issues and specificities

Literal/if processes not shown, they do not exist

Production, Distribution, Exhibition
Production cannot be executed in terms of predetermined schedules

Process precedes product

Develops local audiences

Crew not alienated from its labour

Participant video-makers are part of local distribution networks

Production must be executed in terms of pre- determined schedules

Product is only goal. Process is concealed

Develops national and international markets

Crew alienated from its labour

Are alienated from their audiences through independent distribution

Power, Empowerment
Decision-making power vested in the subject- community

Initial power relationships exposed and negotiated between crew and subject-community

Empowers/active response

Community networks strengthened

Community must take responsibility for completion of video

Facilitates both video and political theory building

Producers are part of subject community or are drawn into it

Collective decision-making

Long-tenn relationship between crew and community develops

Viewers have political expectations

Empowennent takes place, if differentially, at every level of production, from production techniques to recovery of local histories and catalysation of community organisational networks

Decision-making power retained and secured in the production crew and/or producers

Nature of power relationships mystified by crew in its relations with the subject-community

Disempowers/passive response

Community networks exploited and/or weakened

Crew takes responsibility for completion of video

Prevents theory building by concealing processes of production

Producers are outside subject-community

Hierarchical decision-making

Short-term relationship develops

Viewers want to be entertained

Usually only film/video makers are empowered. Sometimes subject-communities can be detrimentally affected through exposure to alien influences and payment for acting services.

Video and democracy

Ideally, community video is the community speaking to itself. Success occurs when the crew enters into ‘comradeship’ with the subject community through empathising with its ideology and struggle for survival. But certain crucial questions remain:

What is the crew’s perception of ‘the community’? Is the community homogenous? Is it divided? If so, in what ways? How did this happen? What criteria guide choice and factions with which to work?

How and in what ways does a video intervention change the power relationships and social networks within the subject-community?

Do video maker accidentally empower once factions? Was this a motivation for requesting a production? How to use video to transcend factionalism?

How does this sectional empowerment affect the community as a whole?

Does this selective empowerment happen because of our naivete and failure to understand dynamics in that social formation? If so, how to deal with this?

How to deal with unrealistic expectations. Uncritical exposure to commercial and state television leads to criticisms like those aimed at Imijondolo: Durban’s Shadow Suburbs (1989): ‘why are there no aerial shots?’

CM contests the idea that only VIPs get onto TV. But too much emphasis on community organisers can elevate them to this status. Such leaders are the most articulate in the community and find themselves speaking for those who are less articulate or don’t speak the language intended by the producers.

How to address the audience where emotion is prefigured over analysis?

What class and gender issues are entailed in ‘community review’ of production? ‘Local control’ by a relatively isolated Aboriginal group to ensure non-violation of traditional law and sacred material is possible, but in urban industrial situations, issues become much more complex.

How to ensure accountability of crews/facilitators to subject-communities?

How to prevent the crew/facilitators from becoming their own subjects?

How to cede the power of determining form from the video makers to the subject-community? In other words, what happens when video makers work with people who lack experience in video production or analysis? What happens when they get their ‘hands on’ the equipment?

What are the semantic implications of the video facilitators retaining control over equipment? These can be significant as discovered in experiments with Navajo Indians in the United States, Inuits in Canada, Australian Aboriginals, and the Bantu Kinema project. Editing structures, sequence and rhythms, form and emphases often contradict video conventions, resulting in totally different messages arising where communities or individuals are ceded the power of production. Community review is not always sensitive to these differences.

What are the ideological implications of withholding access to equipment? Eric Michaels’s example of Aboriginals and a national broadcasting service which agreed to a collaborative approach resulted instead in the subject-community being ‘kept resolutely in front of the camera ¼ and never (getting) behind it.’ They thus ‘learned very little about the mysteries of commercial production’ and lost control over images taken from them.

Community media foresees the relationship between facilitators and the community/client organisation as continuing, until the latter is no longer dependent on the former. How is this withdrawal affected if only individuals within factions within communities are trained individuals use their new found media power?

The finished edited product is not always appreciated by popular audiences who get bored with analysis and talking heads (unless they are owners of the talking heads). How to introduce analysis using codes of popular culture and everyday experience?

Problems of class: crew-community relations

Community video facilitators are usually structurally from the dominant classes. But they are alienated from this hegemony. It is therefore necessary for them to analyse their own class interests and agendas. Individual motivations for co-operating with ‘a community of common struggle’ cannot be taken for granted, for motivations can be altruistic, individualistic, selfish, power related or materialistic, even masked by the process of struggle but perhaps also not always in the interests of collective struggle.

Jean-Paul Fargier uses the term ‘materialist’ to describe a cinema methodology which is sensitive to class, ideological and power relations. Such an approach engages and contests dominant codes, conventional production practices, and the assumption of passive homogeneous audiences.

Aesthetic sophistication is not necessarily ‘bourgeois’, and therefore counter-revolutionary. But imposing conventional television codes on material that cries out for organic representation of the codes of indigenous class and cultural experience is a problem. The differences between the materialist and MAP approaches occur mainly in the former’s emphasis on hoe the relations of production of form come about. This method dialectically redefined form and questions the nature of the encounter and relations catalysed by the video team.

Reflexivity, editing and encoding

Reflexivity offers a means of encoding crew assumptions into the film or video text which alerts both subject-community and audiences as to how meanings have been constructed. It is one means of exposing production assumptions, of ideological orientation, and of decision-making. It also provides an ethical framework within which to work. A good example is I am Clifford Abrahams, This is Grahamstown (1984) which offers a methodology for a mainly white crew from the dominant and privileged middle class making a video about structurally imposed poverty in black townships. Media displacements of class, experience and history are less likely to occur under these production conditions. What ideological displacements do occur are acknowledged where known. An excellent example of reflexive reporting is The World is Watching: Press in Nicareagua, produced by Investigative Productions, Canada.

Editing is code-bound in terms of the technological structure of the medium. This brings with it certain ways of seeing and encoding as well as preferred readings of content. By refusing to edit a video or film it is possible to deny the codes and limitations of systematic form. Interpretation then becomes solely the job of audiences. Communication will not occur unless the content of the video intercepts community experience. In other words, how do subaltern communities represent themselves on their terms rather than in terms of inherited stereotypes and paternalism that so often accompanies image technologies?

An oppositional encoding which displaces and inverts dominant codes could be used to empower the empowered at a textual level if nothing else. For example, in Kat River – the End of Hope, visuals of white cabinet ministers guilty of dispossessing a coloured peasant farming community in the Ciskei bantustan are not shown

Rather, the camera reveals the many letters written by the letters written by the local school teacher to these ministers. He reads relevant parts from them – and the camera simply watches. The editing between shots of the teacher and close-ups of the letters puts the power to define meaning in his court, not that of the ministers.

Facilitating community organisation

Participatory video maximises transfer of skills to the subject-community, which ensures that the relations of dependency that develop between professional crews and their subjects, disempowering the latter, are prevented. That is, the crew must actively disengage themselves from an inevitable position of power, created through an asymmetrical knowledge of skills and theory and ownership of video technology. Reflexivity on the part of the crew and problematising the relationship between the academy and the mainly working class community vis-à-vis national social movements is a necessary element of analysis.

Production is not necessarily the prime purpose of community video. It facilitates a process of community organisation, of conscientisation of both the producers (if external to the community) and the participatory community itself. This ideal often becomes diluted in the doing because of apprehensions about the safety of equipment in unskilled hands, naïve assumptions about the subject-community’s internal dynamics and relation to class issues, and uncritical acceptance of form.

This article have raised more questions than it provides answers. Video makers need to be sensitive to these questions to ensure that they don’t become part of the problem.

Author: Louw, Eric
Date:
Other Authors: Keyan Tomaselli

Like most concepts, that of “development” is no less fraught with definitional contestation. What is commonly accepted as a positive intervention by dominant financial and political interests, may well be interpreted as exploitation leading to dependency by subject-communities or neo-colonial countries. In the final analysis it is a case of whose interests “development” will serve. In South Africa there is a legacy of development decisions coming exclusively from either government (which has served only narrow white interests) or from capital.

Not surprisingly, these decisions were seldom regarded as beneficial by the communities upon whom the “development” was imposed. Un- less development schemes are IN- ITIATED by communities them- selves, or at least by communities in consultation with representatives truly ACCOUNTABLE to those communities, it is highly unlikely that the development schemes will reflect what the community sees to be in its own interests.

1. “COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT”: WHICH COMMUNITY?

Top-down development is inherent- ly an “imposition” and out of touch with needs as perceived by the com- munity itself. For this reason this form of development is unlikely to succeed in generating community co-operation. To merely declare top- down development “community de- velopment” In the absence of real community participation will be per- ceived by the community concerned to be a farce.

Such declarations In the absence of real participation currently characterise many state-initiated de- velopment schemes In South Afri- ca’s townships. It is a form of de- velopment born of the perceived need on the part of state planners to try and reduce the economic causes of “revolution” WITHOUT granting real power to communities them- selves to decide for themselves what they want developed.

Hence a top-down approach con- tinues to underpin the state’s “Oil Spots” and/or “Win Hearts and Minds” programmes in the town- ships (see Boraine, 1988: 19-21). This “oil spot” approach to develop- ment has had a seductive appeal to many developers outside of (and hence unaware of the feelings and perceived needs of) the township communities. For this reason this state development strategy has suc- ceeded in co-opting many of those concerned with development in South Africa.

An example of someone co-opted into this “oil spot” approach even while apparently recognising its limitation is Matthew Cobbett (1987). Cobbett tries to justify work- ing within this top-down approach essentially by arguing that the state is in control and hence the need to work within the parameters for de- velopment as defined by the state (Cobbett. 1987: 333). We argue that there is an alternative to this top- down state approach. and that what is more, many within South Africa are already working on creating a bottom-up approach to develop- ment. (The Grassroots project is but one example of this.)

Cobbett produces a definition of development which is at complete variance with the bottom-up community development as being de- manded (and developed) within South Africa’s townships. Cobbett’s definition: “enlightened top-down projects to demonstrate goodwill with the intention of restoring a cli- mate of confidence thereby laying the basis for introducing communi- ty projects at a later stage” (Cobbett. 1987: 328) undermines his own po- sition. This is merely a re.formula- tion of a now outmoded (and unde- mocratic) colonial and paternalist model of development here couched in modem “reformist” jargon.

2. JUST WHERE IS THE THIRD WORLD?

The plethora of jargon that has been coined to describe economic de- velopment, or the lack of it. repre- . sents a cacophony of political noise: First World/Third World dichoto- mies have become the “one-third world” and the “two thirds world” (Sunter. 1987); the north-south di- vide; information-rich and informa- tion-poor areas; metropolitan growth areas versus subsistence economies; core-periphery concep- tions, sophisticated economies co- existing with traditional ones, and so on. These dualistic theories con- veniently divide the world up into “developed” and “underdeveloped” countries or, more recently, “less de- veloped countries”.

There is an inherent racism here: rich white developed North verstls poor black underdeveloped South. This logic sees whites as “progres- sive” and blacks as congenitally “backward”, who need assistance if they are to develop into a civilised world. It is but a small semantic step, then, to talking about “First World populations” and “Third World populations.’ residing within a single country (even within a sin- gle town) such as South Africa. This becomes a replacement for the more obviously racist terminology of “white” and “black”.

Much writing on development takes as its starting point the assumption that the subordinate sector – called the “subsistence econ- omy” – is the mirror image of the dominant sector. Thus. the Third World is often negatively defined in terms of what it is not. rather than in terms of what it is. It is viewed as a residual category, which is seen as the antithesis of the First World.

As a result, geography. history. economics and material and social relations are suppressed and mould- ed into objective categories which have little or no meaning for the pe0- ple who live in the so-called less de- veloped, information-poor, or poor Southfrhird World.

In contrast, we will substitute positive categories and examine re- lations rather than “objective” en- tities in our case study below.

Rather than engage in a lengthy theoretical argument examining the case for, and against, existing defi- nitions and descriptions of develop- ment, we try to develop an under- standing of the concept in terms of organic processes occurring within a specific set of politico-economic conditions in a particular communi- ty. We wlll examine an organic (grassroots, or popular) form of com- munity development that occureed in Cape Town”s townships during the 1980s. Special attention is paid to the role that communication – in the form of the local progressive- alternative newspaper – played within that development process.

The popular style of community organisation that accompanied black township resistance during the 1980s (see Louw, 1989) provides salient lessons for practitioners in- volved in “development”. From the late 1970s a shift became apparent in the organisational style of groups engaged in resistance to apartheid. ~ .’top-down” Populism was replaced with a “bottom-up” (grassroots) style of Popular organisation. In the wake of the June 1976 Soweto “mo- 1J1111-8tion” of mass participation. the populist style of Black Conscious- 11~88 (BC) was challenged by the de facto embryonic emergence of “non- Intellectual” popular participation In resistance. This re-activated grassroots communication at community level.

Between 1976 and 1983 popular (grassroots) communication over- took and, for the most part, super- ceded the populist approach. With- In the resultant structures of the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) a great emphasis was placed upon democratic practices internal to organizations. These changes were ac- companied by a decline of BC ideology (ie. black exclusivism) and a re- emergence of the 19508 Freedom Charter as a rallying document of a resistance built upon a multi-class, multi-race alliance. This phase came of age with the formation of the Unit- ed Democratic Front (UDF) in Cape Town in August 1983 (see Pinnock, 1990).

3. COMMUNICATION AND DEVELOPMENT

Communication obviously plays a crucial role in development. Yet although many books and articles have been written on the role of communication and media in deve- lopment. few have been able to re- late their theortes to the processes of development in a way which does not prejudice “less developed” or “developing” communities (excep- tions are Switzer, 1987; 1985; Kunc- zik, 1984; Balcomb, 1976).

The main problem has been the idea that injecting technology and information into developing areas wlll automatically result in econom- ic progress (see, e g, Lerner and Schramm, 1967; Schramm, 1960). This strategy assumes a top-down, one-way flow of information, exper- tise and machines parallelled by an inadequate knowledge of local con- ditions, or what the people them- selves think, want or do.

The crux of the problem can be seen in the oft used simplistic posi- tivist-functional model: Communi- cator-Medium-Recipient (CMR) , This equation was inappropriately adapt- ed by communication scholars from telecommunications modelling stu- dies conducted by Bell Laboratories in the 1940s (Shannon and Weaver, 1949). The concept is a determinis- tic one which cannot describe situa- tions where recipients resist, con- test, reject or misunderstand the in- formation imposed upon them, The model explains nothing outside the transmission of electric, electronic, frequency spectrums or bandwidth signals.

Developed by a host of research- ers like Gerbner (1956),l..asswell (1948), Newcomb (1953), Westley and MacLean (1957) and others, who sought to lessen the model’s es- sential determinism, they simply managed to compound the problem, The problem, however, started well before Shannon and Weaver’s experi- ments, It was caused by the emer- gence of mass production methods during the early years of the twentieth century, the consequent de- velopment of a consumer society and the need to sell products as fast as they were made.

Prior to interference by those in ruling elites who wanted to control who could speak to who, the potential existed for feedback (i e demo- cratic communication) where every person with a crystal radio transmitter could converse with all other transmitter/receiver owners. This capacity was systematically cur- tailed and then restricted in terms of military and commercial broadcast- ing imperatives during the 1920s (Hayman and Tomaselli, 1989: 1-12).

This restriction of communication between people using the new tech- nology fonned the basis of the modern communication and culture industries which reserved for them- selves the right to speak to whom about what and how. They tried to turn recipients into passive con- sumers along the lines of the C-M-R-model.

C-M-R assumptions underpin the commercial and state media. A com- parison of the media style of the commercial press and the progres- sive-alternative press illustrates two different approaches to community development, i e “top-down” (which may take on either an authoritarian or a “populist” fonn) versus “bot- tom-up” (popular).

The C-M-R model also feeds into ideas about development. The Tom- linson Commission (1955) worked within this mechanistic one-way framework. It served the needs of the communicators (the National Party and capital) and ignored the needs of the majority of South Afrians. It is described as “a first step in both the policy of separate de- velopment and of black develop- ment” (Van der Kooy, 1988: 1). Van der Kooy is certainly aware of the ironies of his statement when he asks: who are the ‘we’ who are try- ing to promote development?”

But he needed to penetrate further into development discourse: de- velopment for whom – i e in whose interests is development? And are there any losers? What sort of de- velopment? Who controls the alloca- tion of resources? To whom are the “developers” accountable? Are the subject communities to BE deve- loped, or are they to be PART of the process of development? And even being ALLOWED to be part of the process is a form of top-down mani- pulation. Perhaps most crucially, the question must be asked, is it really development we are talking about?

We hope to answer some of these questions in our case study which examines the role of a Cape Town progressive-alternative newspaper within community development.

4. TOP DOWN: “WE KNOW WHAT’S BEST”

The top-down approach envisages a passive community, waiting for “ex- perts” to teach It skills required for advancement (see Cobbett, 1987: 328). It is an approach that parallels the uni-directional understanding of communication which underpins the commercial media. This media is ancillary to the view of development which incorporates the “underdeveloped” sector of the population into the “developed” consumerist economy.

This is an inherently undemocra- tic view of both development and communication. Here, the media provide the infonnation necessary to facilitate the functioning of the de- veloped sector, and to further the widening of the consumer economy. Consumerism does not automatical- ly benefit peripheral communities. It is a view of communication which in the South African context serves to underpin the interests of monop- oly capital.

This consumer model of the me- dia has proved incapable ofprovid- ing a voice to, or for, subaltern class- es in black townships. It is failure that is typical of the top-down ap- proach of trying to penetrate com- munities targeted for development. Failure to understand the interests of the community to be targeted results in a failure to communicate.

Hence. for example. an important motivation for starting progressive- alternative presses was the per- ceived inability or “unwillingness” of the white-owned media to provide a systematic voice to either this growing anti-apartheid sector and/or working class communities in South Africa (Patel, 1985: 13). The com- mercial media failed in this regard partly due to media legislation, and partly due to structural constraints imposed by market forces (Louw. 1984).

It is characteristic of the Press un- der capitalism that “serious journal- ism” aimed at the working classes is eliminated by a combination of: (a) advertising pressures. and (b) the fact that neither capital nor the state are prepared to subsidise this fonn of press (in the same way that they subsidise “objective journalism” aimed at middle and upper class audiences).

Advertisers will only use media that reach audiences which have the desire and money to purchase the products they are trying to promote. In other words, advertisers want to tap the disposable income of the middle classes. They put “pressure” on the press to produce media which cater for the tastes of these middle classes.

Any “serious” media aiming at the working class – even if such me- dia have a large circulation – run into financial trouble because adver- tisers shy away from them. The eli- mination of a working class press due to market forces has been noted in Britain (Curran. 1978) and in France (Freiberg. 1981).

Curran (1988: 97) quotes the ex- ample of a national Daily Herald in Britain whose loss of advertising far exceeded its loss of circulation which proved the more important cause of its downfall. The paper found it difficult to attract advertis- ing because of its overwhelmingly working class readership (Curran, 1988: 96). Curran (1988: 97) lists several other newspapers which despite a substantial circulation also folded because they appealed to working class readerships. An ex- ample of this process in South Africa was the Rand Daily Mail (Tomaselli et al, 1987: 79-86; Louw, 1984).

This state of affairs in South Afri- ca necessitated the development of alternative channels of communica- tion to serve this rapidly growing sector of the population. The resul- tant alternative media have an “or- ganic link” to the populations they serve and are hence able to be PART of the process of that community’s development. The commercial me- dia are seen to be tied to EXTERNAL interests which seek to impose their definition of development onto the community.

5. BOTTOM-UP: EMPOWERING THE DISEMPOWERED

An alternative press aiming at work- ing class readerships has difficulty in surviving under capitalist condi- tions, unless some person or organi- sation with huge resources – trade union, political movement, church, etc – is prepared to subsidize it. In a few countries with mixed econo- mies – Sweden, Holland and Bel- gium – the state fulfills this role.

In South Mr!ca, certain church or- ganizations (such as the South Mr!- can Catholic Bishops Conference) have provided finance. Barring such subsidy, it is as If only one mode of communication, tied to the prefer- red mode of development – i e in the direction of capital accumulation – can be accommodated within a society already moving along the road of capitalist development.

6. POPULAR GRASSROOTS DEVELOPMENT:

A CASE STUDY During the 1980s the subaltern classes in the Western Cape become active in their self-development. These communities developed a style of popular (bottom-up) commu- nity organization. Taking the initia- tive themselves, they moved to shake off their passive acquiescence to domination at the end of the 1970s. An organic development which no top-down outside interven- tion could h8ve achieved, was catalysed.

Central to this development arose a new mode of (popular) communi- cation and organization. The local community newspaper. Grassroots was central to this self-learning process.

Grassroots was set up in 1979 as the result of a BC oriented Writers Association of South Africa (W ASA) initiative and funding. The first is- sue appeared in early 1980. A large- ly Cape town phenomenon, the paper was distributed to other Western Cape areas as far afield as Worcester. The headline. “A paper for you that fills the void”, explains the paper’s establishment:

This newsletter has been born out of the tremendous need for community organizations in the Western-Cape. Civil and commu- nity news are increasingly being kept out of major newspapers. . . (and) we know that these newspapers have never really shown an interest or concern for civic and community matters. es- pecially in areas where the disen- franchised live. When civic and community news items are high- lighted, these are in most cases restricted to separate “extra” edi- tions. Even then preference is shown for sensational news or the activities of ethnic bodies work- ing within separate development institutions. . . we, therefore be- lieve that a vacuum exists in the publication of community news and hope that Grassroots can to a certain extent fill the void.

No clear models to work from exist- ed and so Grassroots workers de- scribed the “trial and error” method adopted. What occurred was a de- mocratic style which encouraged bottom-up (popular) participation (see Traber, 1985). Evaluation work- shops became important, not only as a means of “correcting errors”, but also as a way of building democratic (participative) organiza- tion. The result was self-learnt com- munity development at its best. The explicit emphasis on “community news” marked a seminal develop- ment in South African journalism (Pinnock and Tomaselli, 1984: 11).

Grassroots developed from the premise that community issues were central to its raison d’etre. The idea was to provide a platform through which the community could talk to itself. From the very outset community organizations were involved. In December 1978 W ASA approached about 50 com- munity organizations, civics and worker groups in the Western Cape on the idea of such a newspaper. Only once endorsement was ob- tained was the project set in motion during 1979.

Acquiring democratically-derived agreement is usually lacking from conventional development projects. This is often a reason for the failure of such projects.

Grassroots was intentionally set up autonomously of W ASA, being made accountable to a board of trustees drawn from the local community (in the fornl of representatives of the endorsing organizations, plus journalists and academics). These trustees constituted the editorial board of Grassroots. In this way, democratic community involvement was carried into the ac- tual running of Grassroots in so far as the paper was (at least up until police repression made this increas- ingly difficult) controlled by this board.

Through this direct organic link to the various MDM organizations at the local community level, Grass- roots became de facto a part of the process of popular (bottom-up) resistance to apartheid. “Progres- sive-alternative” journalism hence became an important component (“link”) in the anti-apartheid net- work, and so also helped to shape the way in which the MDM develop- ed a democratic (Habernlasian ‘pub- lic sphere) mode of organization.

In this way it became, to some ex- tent, a model in the Western Cape for the democratically organized de- velopment of the community by the community. It proved to be a mode of organization in which the com- munity could galvanize itself; learn about itself; and so develop itself.

Grassroots hence became a semi. nal example of how the media can move beyond serving as a mere sup- plier of infornlation. and become a central component in the building of democratic organization. This is not to deny the important role Grassroots has fulfilled as a supplier of in. fornlation and an “alternative” ana- lysis of South Africa. Important in this regard has been its role in sup- plying infornlation that community and worker organizations needed which was not provided by the “mainstream” media; i e infonna- tion on community (and worker) news, views and aspirations; health; education; legal matters; and social services (such as transport and housing).

It was information tied to what the community p~rceived its own de- velopment needs to be, and not the “needs” communicated from out- side by media attached to external vested interests, and which conse- quently promoted “needs” attached to those external (monopoly capital) interests.

Grassroots, however, went be- yond infonnation. It became a catalyst for:

– The development of, at the “psy- chologicallever’, a sense of com- munity ‘unity’, and thereby of the community owning the project and the process of development associated with it

– Skills development and skills dispersal

– The construction, at the organiza- tional level, of a (local-tier) anti- apartheid network. This it did through providing a channel for the co-ordination of the various organizational initiatives (both community and worker).

From a development perspective it is important to note how Grassroots became a catalyst for the develop- ment and transfer of skills within the community it served.

Through involvement-of the com- munity in its operations it helped to stimulate and develop media and communication skills. Equally significant has been the influence of the project on raising – through hands- on exposure – general organization- al skills within the Western Cape “coloured” townships.

Important with regard to skills de- velopment was also the example set by the very structuring of the Grass- roots project itself. This provided a practical example. and pool of skills. of how to build a democratic media organization.

Control of the project by a board of trustees, which consisted of representatives of the community, set an important precedent for democratic community organiza- tion and control of projects. Such grassroots participation and control of the direction of the project en- sured a sense of organic communi- ty involvement. Upon this sense of involvement and “ownership” of the process could be forged changes (i e development) in that community that were truly organic to that community.

The managing committee. or ex- ecutive was elected at an annual general meeting, at least until police intervention under the States oi Emergency severely curtailed these procedures. These meetings were at- tended by representatives of the community and worker organiza- tions. which were subsequently sys- tematically decimated by repressive police measures.

The executive committee is where decision making – policy. finance, etc – was primarily centred. Re- presentatives from the community learned co-ordination. organiza- tional-communication and “man- agement” skills which they could then carry back into their own or- ganizations. In this way important skills required for community de- velopment were diffused.

With the increase in state repres- sion under the States of Emergency, the executive, however, found itself taking on more and more of the functions previously delegated to other sectors of the project. This meant reluctantly adopting some hierarchical methods of organiza- tion.

The executive was, in terms of the original “ideal” model. made ac- countable to the general body (GB). Members of this GB were. in turn an- swerable to their (democratically constituted) organizations. At the start of the project this GB met ev- ery five weeks; i e just after the pub- lication of the previous edition. (Grassroots appeared every five weeks).

This GB decided on what would appear in the next issue of the newspaper. with lists of stories for the next issue being discussed and approved. Again this helped to generate a sense of organic grass- roots participation in and/or “owner- ship” of the process. It also meant the process WAS more in keeping with how the community saw its own interests. This meant that any development springing therefrom would be more likely to attract genuine community support.

The GB also allocated to sub- groups the task of coliecting the sto- ries which had been approved for the upcoming edition. As a result democratic organizational skills were diffused throughout the com- munity. However, as repression mounted so these structures of ac- countability became progressively more difficult (although not entire- ly impossiQle) to operate. Increasing- ly the executive had to assume more and more of the responsibilities. Taken too far this would COmlpt the original democratically-conceived project – a matter of grave concern to those contributing to the Grass- roots project.

No-one may remain editor of Grassroots for more than two years, This prevents the “reification” of “leadership” roles, or the accumu- lation of technocratic power in the hands of a few “experts”, It also en- sures the spread of skills. Manage- ment of the production processes is designed to maximise access to skills acquisition. This is done through a news gathering commit- tee and a production committee. In its ideal functioning form:

– The news-gathering committee is

responsible for collecting and writing the stories which the GB decide upon, and for checking on this collection process. (The news-gathering committee is as. sisted by an advisory committee; a committee of “experts” who can help with stories on law. labour matters, health, etc).

– The production committee comes

into operation on printing day. It consists of up to 50 representa- tives from community and wor- ker organizations. They actually produce the newspaper (fold, col- late, stack, etc), and in this way the participating organizations again come to feel that the product “belongs” to them. It is also a way of cutting production costs.

– The distribution of Grassroots was designed at the outset to also help strengthen community “bonding”. This process was un- dertaken by a permanent distri- bution official together with a group of volunteers. They dis- tributed the paper door-to-door and used the opportunity to make face-to-face contact with the com- munity and hence assist in the process of social dialogue and “mobilization”. The distributors were also encouraged to try and ascertain the reaction of the read- ers to the previous issue: i e to cre- ate a “feedback” mechanism which could serve as an impor- tant source of critique. so that im- provements – and responsive- ness to the community – could be made. However, this process was hard hit by state repression (especially during 1985-86) by. for example. the detention of dis- tributors. As a result. this ideal pattern had on occasion had to be superceded by distribution via selected “drops” and “pick-ups’.. Again. those at Grassroots are concerned about this distortion of their original model. and so work very hard to try and maintain the community involvement in distri- bution.

Despite pressures of the States of Emergency, Grassroots has. none the less. pioneered and established a new style of journalism in South Africa. It is a style of communication that complements the popular mo- del of development. The Grassroots collective has probably been suc- cessful as a catalyst, having assist- ed the fonnation of other publica- tions like Ukusa, Saamstaan and South. Certainly Grassroots has been a seminal media project in South Africa. And alongside its im- portance in this regard has been its role in influencing the development of a certain perception of how (grass- roots community-based) develop- ment should be undertaken.

Unfortunately, the “ideal” (demo- cratic) model of communication and community development as origi- nally conceived and operated from 1980-1983 has had to be modified because of changing conditions (es- pecially due to growing state repres- sion since 1985).

However, the “ideal” and the brief years during which it d~d work, set an important precedent for what- ever fonn of journalism and commu- nity organization those in the MOM consider appropriate for developing South Africa. As a result, no amount of state repression is at this stage likely to succeed in obliterating the “Grassroots model” which is now located in the “collective memory” of the community’s media workers right across the country.

Further, those working at Grassroots and in the other community and worker structures have clearly learned to deal with state repression, and survive. The survival strategies they have learned in this regard are. of course, now also a part of the wider pool of skills available to those concerned with developing the com- munity from the grassroots up- wards.

7. CONCLUSION

Our discussion on Grassroots hinges on the concept of empower- ment of repressed or disadvantaged communities, and the relationship of their participation in tenDS of ownership and control. What is often taken for granted by major de- velopment agencies is rejected by communities subjected to imposed development. Often, such develop- ment leaves the targeted communi- ty worse-ofT than they were previ- ously because of a new consumer ethic which is inappropriate for es- pecially distressed areas and com- munities. As Johan Beukes (1987: 153) put it: What “we” think “they” need. might in fact not be what “they” know “they” want (or something).

REFERENCES

Balcomb, J (ed) 1976. Communications for social development In Africa. Nairobi: UNICEF.

Benjamin. W 1973. Illuminations. Fontana/Collins.

Beukes. J 1987. Review of myth. race

and power – South AfIica. Imaged on

film and TV. Development Southern AfrIca. 4/1- 153-4.

Boraine. A 1988. Upgrading of an oilspot. Work In Progress. 56/57.

Chimutengwende. A 1978. The press and the politics ofllberatton. London: Barbicon Books.

Cobbett. M 1987. Community projects: The possibilities in South Africa. De- velopment Southern AfrIca. 4/2. 324-333.

Curran. J 1988. The press in the age of conglomerates” in Curran. J and Sea. ton J (eds) Power without responsi- bility: The press and broadcasting In Britain. London: Routledge.

Ensensberger. H M 1974. Theconsclous- ness industry. New York: Seabury Press.

Freiberg, J W 1981. The French press: Class, state and ideology. New York: Praeger.

Gerbner, G 1956. Toward a general model of communication. Audio visual communication review, Vol 5, pp 171-199.

Gramsci, A 1971. Selectionsfromprtson notebooks. London: Lawrence and Lawrence.

Habermas, J 1974. The public sphere, in New Gemlan critique, Fall, pp 49-55.

Johnson, S 1985. “Barometers of the Liberation Movement”: a history of the South African alternative press, Media Development, 3/85.

Lasswell, H 1948. The structure and function of communication in socie- ty, in Bryson, L 1948. The communi- cation of ideas. Institute for social and economic studies: New York.

Louw, P E 1989. Rejoinder to “Oppos- Lng Apartheid”: Building a South African democracy through a popu- lar alliance which includes Leninists. Theoria.

Newcomb, T (ed). 1953. An apprQach to the study of communication acts. PsY- chological review, vol 60, 393-40.

Patel, L 1985. How small media can or- ganise communities, Media Develop- ment, 3/85, 12-14.

Pinnock, D and Tomaselli, KG 1984. Un- derdevelopment and the progressive press in South Africa, FUSE, 5/4, 19-24.

Ravan Staff 1985. Opposition Publishing

in South Africa – the case of Ravan

Press, Media Development, 3/85. 22-24.

Schlesinger, P Murdock, D and Elliot. P 1983. Televising television: Political violence in popular culture. London: Comedia.

Schramm, W (ed). 1960. Mass commu- nications. University of lllinois Press: Illinois.

Shannon, C and Weaver, W 1949. The mathematical theory of communica- tion. University of Illinois Press: Illinois.

Suttner. R and Cronin, J 1986. 30 Years of the Freedom charter. Johannes- burg: Ravan.

Author: Lazerus, Alison
Date:
Other Authors: Keyan Tomaselli
Does community video need to be professional to be successful? Or does its overriding value lie in the level of local participation and in how far it empowers others to play an active role in the struggle for democracy? In South Africa, producing a community video is often difficult and frustrating for everyone involved. It can also be exceedingly dangerous, as Alison Lazerus and Keyan Tomaselli explain in their case study of the Lamontville Unity for Cultural Activities.

The idea of participatory community video often elicits sarcasm. Professionals at the 1987 Independent Film Makers Conference, Johannesburg, claimed that this activity is ‘insane’, that it is impossible to turn ‘visual illiterates’ into video makers. This is not the intention of participatory video.

The other dismissal places community video in the realm of awful and boring ‘home movies’ (films made by amateurs to watch at home).

‘Many community videos are travesties of communication, reflecting in their structure an archaic Maoism that owes more to the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution than anything else. With their wobbly zooms, random focus, curious colour and incoherent soundtracks they are all of a piece with consigning ballerinas to the paddy fields and swineherds to the stage of the Peking Grand Opera. The fact of the matter is this: community videos share two characteristics with home movies. First, their skill-less construction and second, a relevance and interest is limited to the participants and their immediate families.

Most ordinary people with access to television (i.e. most ordinary people) watch several hours every week. They know how to read the professional stuff they see. In contrast, the electro-optic jabberings known as community video are often rendered utterly incoherent by their intrusive and clumsy methods. Like it or not, a high level of craft is essential. Anything else is an insult to the viewers.’[David Basckin, letter (1.10.1988) sent to Weekly Mail. Published in shortened form an 7-13 October 88].

Community videos are not like home movies. Characteristics of ‘discomforting form’ they may share, but many more than people watch community videos than home movies – and for different reasons. Proletarian audiences have high political expectations of what video should achieve. Home movie audiences expect very little. More importantly, where home movies suppress ideological critique and unhappy, painful and distressing events, community videos tend to encode perhaps little else. They are less concerned with images of stable and happy family life and rituals, than they are with community relationships that contest dominant versions of reality. They are orientated to a mediation of the processes of class struggle in the forging of a fundamentally different society to the one that currently exists in South Africa.

In some cases, a link between praxis-oriented academics, and subject-communities and progressive organisations is showing some remarkable results. However, problems remain in terms of form, practice, ideology, relationship with subjects, and conception of audience, (What is a progressive ‘community organisation’? what are the class implications of existing conceptions?).

Intermeshing theory and practice

Production in the Contemporary Cultural Studies Unit (CCSU) is done by students registered for the Film/Video and Cultural Production and Popular Culture Performance courses. The film course is an historical, critical and theoretical examination of documentary movements which have arisen in societies during times of crisis. The performance course is designed to shape the intergration occurring between indigenous performance and Western forms in attempts to develop anti-apartheid strategies and post-apartheid solutions.

Anticipating Basckin’s criticism, the film course is based on the materialistic dictum that ‘In the cinema the communication of knowledge is attendant upon the production of knowledge about the cinema’.

Our methodology engages and contests dominant codes, conventional production practices, and the assumption of passive homogeneous audiences. Students put their theoretically-derived knowledge into practice by responding to briefs provided by community organisations. In this way, student producers prepare the ground for a dialectical redefinition of video/filmic codes. They also establish participatory (producer-client/subject-community) production practices and a new interactive relationship with their audiences, subject-communities and/or clients. The emphasis is on a continuing process; the product facilitates that process. The video is important in itself, but its ideological strength lies in the web of relationships it documents, in terms of how it came to be produced, and as a command to move towards a democratically structured future.

CASE STUDY

Lamontville Cultural Project – A diary towards a facilitative approach

15 July (The brief)

a brief was relayed through the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) to the CCSU. The Lamontville Unity for Cultural Activities (LAUCA), had approached COSAW to video their Cultural Day of July 17 1988. Lamontville is a suburb of 30,000 Zulu speakers, with about 7,000 houses.

A brief historical introduction to Lamontville

‘Youth’ (young adults committed to political change) have, since the Soweto uprising in 1976, condemned and resisted the educational inequalities and ideological and economic agendas of Bantu Education. Resistance consists in part of making participatory democracy a real element of youth structures within the ‘broad progressive movement’ This movement has been co-ordinated since August 1983 by the United Democratic Front (UDF).

The banning of seventeen organisations in February 1988 and the continuation of the state of emergency disorganised progressive initiatives, especially the UDF. Additionally, in Natal, there have been alleged Inkatha (Zulu nationalists) attacks on UDF, and UWUSA’s (Inkatha trade union) violent confrontation with COSATU. All these forces are operative in Lamontville, just outside Durban. Lamontville has remained anti-Inkatha as it lies outside KwaZulu and is not therefore subject to its coercive control. Lamontville also has a history of strong and active leaders.

Formed in March 1987, LAULA is an attempt to reintegrate youth – school children, workers and the unemployed – into constructive community development.

Inkatha’s attacks on students, leaders, workers and civic organisations, led to numerous activists fleeing Lamontville in1985. This resulted in a breakdown in communication within the community. A sense of nihilism with regard to a negotiated/peaceful solution set in. it also gave rise to ‘defence’ committees set up by ‘comrades’. These nation-wide developments perturbed not only the youth but also parents of Lamontville, though by 1988, no defence committees existed in the area.

LAULA arose out of the Lamontville Youth Congress (LAYCO), set up in early 1986 and disbanded in late 1987. Street committees and civic associations incorporating broader community issues, such as rents and bus fares, had orignally been the province of the Masibambisane Youth Organisation (MAYLO). Since MAYLO ‘did not politicise youth or arrange activities’, LAYCO was formed and MAYLO disbanded. Culture became a focus of organisation as other activities were forcibly suppressed. The Lamontville Civic Organisation now incorporates street committees, concentrating on the whole community rather than just youth. LAUCA organises ‘ignorant youth’ by mobilising through ‘culture’: for example, gumboot dancing, recitals of political poetry, drama, chants and sloganeering, toyi-toyi and mapuntsula – a co-opted conscientised dance form – ‘starting where the young people are at’ as customers of discotheque and African ‘pop’ music.

Youth, including primary school children, popularise people’s culture through meetings of workers and women, at commemoration services held on 1 May, 16 June, 26 June (Freedom Charter Day), 9 August (National Women’s Day), on the anniversaries of murdered activists of the area – Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge – and so on. People’s culture resists dominant apartheid mass cultures. It expresses the worldview (synonymous with socialism) and the agenda of the subaltern classes. Its cultural forms are a negation of Euro-American trends: they are collective, choral,

employ indigenous and emergent song and dance, and use ‘structured stereotypes’ to mediate the experiences of the opposed. The content tends to be a combination of

(a) a celebration of resistance; (b) a lament and an outrage at oppression; and (c) a critical examination of social structures.

LAUCA’S Cultural Day manifested the conflict between people’s culture and the States attack on what it terms ‘subversive politics in the guise of culture’. The event was staged on the weekend preceding Nelson Mandela’s birthday, when celebrations all over the country were banned. LAUCA advertised the Day by word of mouth through the area committees.

17 July 1988 (The footage)

LAUCA raised R100 to cover initial recording costs. Editing, additional tapes and travel costs were met by the CCSU – about R400.

Performances began at 2pm, continuing until 6.30pm. Parents, youth, children and workers were present, and the programme included addresses by a member from COSATU, Health Workers’ Organisation, NOW (women’s organisation), gospel singing, gumboot dancing, mpuntsula dancing, a play about violence by a group from Pietermaritzburg, a comedy piece by a member of NOW and worker poetry.

7 August 1988 (Editing)

Sibusiso and Irvin decided to alternate to maximise their learning of editing theory and skills and to minimise time taken off from school. The schedule accommodation Lazerus who had to work two afternoons a week. LAUCA indicated an urgency to finish in three days, to have an edit ready for an education workshop from 12 to 14 August. The workshop was designed to access their long term activities in relation to their long term objectives for conscientisation, mobilisation and organisation in the Lamontville area.

On the first day both Sibusiso and Irvin learned the technical basics of the edit suite and completed half the logging of the five hours of tape. Neither arrived on the second day. The Lamontville High School caretaker had been dismissed and students refused to go into class. Students concern themselves with the plight of school workers through Students Representative Councils and want to say in the running of schools. Students involved in the video consisted of the school leadership aged between 17 and 2. They asked the principal to address the SRC and the student body, to clarify the issue and respond to student concern, after which the students would return class. With this problem resolved, crash editing resumed on 12 August. While Irvin continued with editing, Sibusiso made arrangements for the workshop.

Rough assembly – skills transfer

Lazerus asked Irvin to construct the rough assembly so that it would encode an impression of reality mediating his class and cultural perceptions, these being beyond the apprehension of the crew.

Criticism of the rough assembly – towards greater consultation

The rough assembly was selected and arranged by Irvin. It was screened to 80 LAUCA members at the workshop who made suggestions for the final edit. This made possible corrections, additions and illuminations which only the subjects’ response to the material can elicit. The crew was recognised as fellow workers, and as full participants in a Unit-community relationship which transformed their positions, from intellectual or academic, to co-worker.

The unit did not hear from LAUCA again until early September. Irvin and Sibusiso had gone into hiding from security police who had been called by the school principal on the Monday after the workshop. Irvin left Natal on the weekend, following Sibusiso, who had fled 14 days before. Both had visited the Unit (Irvin on 2 September, Sibusiso on 26 September) following unit inquiries to other cultural workers in Lamontville as to their whereabouts.

2 September 1988

Irvin recalled the responses of some people to the video:

They were unhappy with the ‘jumping’. This was an apparent reference to flashes between frames caused by the crash edit machine.

They wanted gumboot dancing to link the other items beginning-middle-end so that it would ‘keep people’s attention’.

The cultural event must be contextualised, i.e. we needed to include a speaker explaining where cultural activity fits into organising in the area. We also needed long shots of Lamontville.

The video should be about 40 minutes long.

Another video on the history of resistance in Lamontville should be made.

26 September 1988

Sibusiso was still on the run and had not written his trial examination. However, discussion on editing resumed he re-established contact with the Unit. He suggested a need to either add a history of the area in commentary or through cutaways to older folk interviewed on the history of the area.

30 September 1988

Sibusiso and Raphael interviewed Mrs I Lutuli of NOW for 45 minutes. We then recorded pertinent scenes decided by Sibusiso and Raphael: Msizi Dube’s gave; Nylon Hall, the base for LAUCA activities, the play area, and the men’s only hostel adjacent to Lamontville. Dube, a community leader, murdered on 25 April 1985, had been responsible for organising people around the rent and housing issue in Lamontville during 1984/5. He was also Sibusiso’s ‘mentor’, and had awakened a political awareness in him.

We tried not to attract attention during outside recording. Sibusiso tended to jump at the sight of white combis.he explained that at the height of the conflict in Lamontville in 1987, vigilantes and police used combis to patrol areas and ‘terrorise’ the residents, and that some had ‘disappeared’ after being carted off in one such vehicle.

The students wrote examinations during November, and the urgency to complete the video declined as LAUCA had screened the master tapes and rough edit ata meeting in September, and at four houses where video-cassette recordere were available. By this time, over 250 people had seen the videos.

We recorded some final interviews on the Unit-LAUCA relationship and circulated a draft of this paper. We retrieved one of the master tapes on 11 November. On 13 November we discussed this paper with four members of LAUCA. The seond master tape was returned on 16 November and the paper discussed with Sibusiso. Discussions on methods of distribution of the video suggested that there may be as many as 300 video-cassette recorders in private houses in Lamontville, and that area and street committees should be asked to ascertain their locations.

On 19 November, Irvin was brutally murdered while looking for missing members who had attended a vigil in Inanda, near Durban, for a youth allegedly killed by Inkatha members in Port Shepstone. The AMECEA/Sonolux Symposium in Lusake was informed on 22 November by telex and responded with the letter, printed in this issue of Group Media Journal.

Assessing the relationship

The Unit forsees the relationship between itself and the community/client organisation as continuing, until the latter is no longer dependent on it. The documentary ‘history from below’, to be done in 1989, will provide an opportunity where the facilitative approach can be further developed, and the seemingly endless disruptions which characterised the cultural video resolved. The success of the first project can only be really assessed on the second, which will hopefully incorporate LAUCA in scripting, recording and editing.

While skills transfer occurred, what of empowerment? Working with high school students as subjects of the video, and engaging school authorities through students organisation, it would seem that our participatory approach helped empower the students/subjects in their broader plan for community organisation. The web of relations were horizontal and circular:

CCSU benefited in its attempts to make praxis a concrete process in academic life and in its study of popular forms of culture;

LAUCA was able to extend its understanding of cultural practices through a theoretical application;

COSAW is given the opportunity to satisfy its agenda to co-ordinate and encourage syncretic forms of cultural activity that challenge the dominant Euro-American, apartheid-laden aesthetics.

The process has had its problems. LAUCA is a resourceless organisation. The CCSU budget for production is limited. Lamontville being 15km away from the University meant high transport costs. The safety of LAUCA people was at stake, as was later proved by Irvin’s death.

Video and democracy

Democracy takes time. It can be a frustratingly protracted exercise. It involves a lot of people. Often, the ‘structures’ become an end in themselves, stifling individuals initiative. Over-sensitivity sometimes results in conflicts, which can paralyse strategies and decision-making. Some individuals are committed to consultation; others simply use the words democracy for their own selfish ends.

South Africa is a country in extended crisis. The democratic practices that emerged with the formation of the UDF in August 1983 have partially disintegrated with the State’s increasingly brutal reaction to popular resistance. Organisations are in disarra, their leadership is exile, in detention, dead or on the run. The infrastructures remaining have been shattered. These problems had to be taken into account in the way we interacted with LAUCA over often frustrating periods of fragmented communication within LAUCA itself.

These we have described above. The first phase of the project has been successful in the following ways:

The conventional power relationship that usually governs crew-subject relations was first tamed, then inverted. The Unit facilitated a video that was rough edited almost entirely by the subjects. The power to determine meaning was thus vested in the subject-community, not only the video makers. This is not ‘archaic Maoism’ nor Leninist vanguardism.

The conventional power relationship that usually governs academic-community relations was negotiated with the subject-community through LAUCA.

The Unit empowered members of the subject-community in televisual understanding, and in certain technical functions, which its representatives carried out during the editing stage.

The production of the video was group based. The pattern of community was horizontal and participatory, rather than hierarchical and transitory.

While the video might at this stage be the realisation of Basckin’s Maoist nightmare, it should not be seen as an end in itself. The completed video will be one small step towards the realisation of the New World Information and Communication Order that will ultimately emerge in South Africa. Sylvanus Ekwelie (1985) explains it this way:

‘With the will to act, each country, no matter how small or poor, van organise an effective new information order. Bearing in mind that the best communication system is one that keeps the rulers and the ruled in dialogue, provides information for intelligent decision making, gives every citizen a chance to contribute directly or indirectly to national debates, responds to the intellectual, cultural, psychological and material needs…’

This article is based on a paper present- ed at the SonoluxjAMECEA symposium in Lusaka, Zambia in November 1988.

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to David Basckin, Costas Cri- ticos and Eric Louw for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1 Home movies are a rich source of sociolo- gical data quite unlike any other form of cinema. They cannot be simply dismissed as unimportant. See Erens (1986). Richard Chalfen (1986), an anthropologist, argues that the home movie is an expression of world views and should stand alongside ‘other symbolic forms such as art, science, journalism, ideology, ordinary speech, religion and mythology.’

2 Rocha, 1982: 7.

3 See Steenveld, 1986; Criticos et al, 1987; Criticos and Scott, 1988; Tomaselli and Sienart, 1988.

4 Fargier, 1980.

5 Prakasim, 1985.

6 Tomaselli et al, 1988. 7 Tomaselli, 1987.

8 The video crew recording the Cultural Day consisted of Alison Lazerus and Keyan Tomaselli (CCSU), Steve Schmidt (Media Centre, University of Durban-Westville) and Myron Peters (ML Sultan College).

9 CIIR, 1988: 177-180.

10 UDF spokesperson Murphy Marobe defin- ed ‘self-defence’ as follows: ‘It would be incorrect for us to think of defending our- selves in purely militaristic or violent terms. . . but we need to devise political strategies to actually make advances to these people, first isolating them and then winning them back over to the side of our people.’ (Weekly Mail, June 12-18, 1987: 17).

11 See Kerr, 1988.

12 See WeeklyMail,VoI4,N027,JulyI5-21, 1988)

13 Molteno 1987;Zungu 1987. 14 Zungu,1987.

15 See MacDougall, 1975.

16 See O’Sullivan-Ryan, 1985.

Sources

Anderson, P. ‘Documentary and the Problem of Method’, Critical Arts, Vol 4, No.1, 1985, pp 1-71.

Chalfen, R. ‘The Home Movie in a World of Reports; an anthropological appreciation’, Journal of Film and Video, Vol 38, Nos 3/4,1986, pp 102-110.

CIIR. Now Everyone is Afraid: the changing face of policing in South Africa. Catholic Institute for International Relations, Lon- don, 1988.

Criticos, c. ‘Narrowcasting and Emancipation: the development of a participative practice in media training and production.’ 1988. Paper presented at Talking about Moving Picture Conference, University of Cape Town, August 1988.

Criticos, C; Chetty, A and Prinsloo, i ‘Through the Eye of the Camera: a struggle to define the community. video process. ‘ 1987. Paper presented at the 10th Inter- national Festival of Scientific, Technical and Art Films, University of Brussels, February 1988. 4pp.

Erens, P (editor). ‘Home Movies and Amateur Filmmaking’. Special issue, Journal of Film and Video, Vol 38, Nos 3/4, 1986.

Fargier, JP, reproduced in Williams, C (editor). Realism and the Cinema. RKP in associa- tion with British Film Institute, 1980, pp 171-185.

Kerr, D. ‘Theatre and Social Issues in Malawi: Performers, Audiences, Aesthetics’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol 4.

Molteno, F. ‘Students Take Control: the Boy- cott of Coloured Education in the Penin- sula’, The British Journal of Sociology of Education.. Vol 8, No 1, 1987.

Prakasim, C, quoted in Tomaselli, KG. ‘Pro-‘ gressive Film and Video in South Africa’, Media Development 3/1985, pp 15-17.

Rocha, G. ‘The Tricontinental Filmmaker: That is called the Dawn’, in Johnson, R and Starn, R (editors). Brazilian Cinema. Associated University Presses, New Jersey, 1982, pp 76-80.

Tomaselli, KG. ‘Documentary and the struggle for realism in South Africa’, Media Information Australia, No 44, 1987,pp20-27.

Tomaselli, KG and Sienaert, E. ‘Ethnographic Film/Video Production and Oral Docu- mentation – the Case of Piet Draghoender in Kat River – The End of Hope’, Research in African Literatures (forthcoming).

Torr, L. ‘Lamontville – Durban’s “Model Vil- lage”: The Realities of Township Life 1934-1960’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, Vol 10, 1987,pp 103-117.

Zungu, F. The Role of Teachers in the Educa- tion Crisis and in People’s Education, 1987.