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Can Africa Sustain a Free Press?
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10572 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1986 |
3,831 Words |
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David Yeats-Thomas
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There is a malaise on the African continent that has infected virtually every nation regardless of race, creed, or ideology: a chronic intolerance of an independent and critical press.
The rationale for this universal contempt for free expression is shrouded in a variety of obscure rhetoric. Whatever it is called, a ruthless control of the press has become as African as coups, military dictatorships, drought, and famine.
Thus, the international uproar kicked up by South Africa's latest restrictions on reporters' movements was surprising. Like it or not, South Africa, despite the hue of its government, is part of the African continent.
In any case, it would be a contradiction for a police/fascist state, as South Africa is reputed to be, to have a free press, however limited. The South African government should be excused if it is bewildered by all the fuss and contraction.
'Catalyst to Violence'
This is not to say that the subcontinent's white rulers are not themselves past masters of obfuscation. The angry reaction of the western press to the November crackdown on reporting in South African's violence-torn areas was further aggravated by Pretoria's usual evasions. The government's main concern was with, in the words of Law and Order Minister Louis le Grange, "the presence of television and other camera crews in unrest situations which proved to be a catalyst to further violence."
A chance comment by a South African police officer may be more to the point. "We cannot let anything bad about South Africa get out anymore," he told members of the press following a brief detention in December of several reporters and television crews who had been covering a political funeral in a black township. Whether the officer's words were a slip of the tongue or intentional, they accurately summed up the opinion in the South African capital and the underlying motive for acting against the press.
Like the other African continental regimes, South Africa's Afrikaner government has never been, even in happier times, comfortable with an independent and critical press. Now, faced with the worst crisis in 37 years of rule, the National Party government of P.W. Botha is more convinced than ever that the local and foreign press is hostile and an enemy of white survival.
It should not be surprising then that the South African government is seriously considering whether it can afford what is increasingly seen as the dubious distinction of having the freest press in Africa. News of South African's troubles has maintained an unprecedented momentum in the western media. Television particularly has done much to make apartheid the political issue it is today. All this has given impetus to the anti-apartheid movement's lobby for sanctions and disinvestments. Already hard-pressed, the South African economy is reeling under the sting of these measures.
Pretoria appears not to see a solution in faster change. Instead it has transferred the blame to the bearer of bad tidings in the traditional way of Africa.
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