Media and Identity in Africa, and: Cinema in a Democratic South Africa (review)

Despite the links suggested by their title terms, especially “Africa” and “media” (which should include cinema), these books do not share much common ground. Cinema appears hardly at all and South Africa, a major site for media production and consumption, infrequently in the first, and Africa beyond the Limpopo and media other than cinema only intermittently in the second. This separation is regrettable not only because it replicates old habits from the apartheid era when even anti-apartheid research in South Africa had little impact on the rest of the continent and African work with universal aspirations tended to omit South Africa. In this era of radically mixed media, old and new, oral and mass-reproduced, broadcast and interactive, local, global and glocal, it is no longer possible to investigate one medium, even the historically privileged institution of cinema, without serious investigation of others, from broadcasting to pirate vide to printing on clothing as well as paper, that enable the production, distribution and reception of visual narratives across Africa.

While Lucia Saks states that her book will “focus mostly on cinema, which has in the main addressed the big stories rather than the little ones” with only “small forays into television and advertising” (8), she follows her plan inconsistently. By favoring cinema, she invites comparison with researchers whom she cites briefly, like Ntongela Masilela, and those she does not, like Jacqueline Maingard, author of South African National Cinema, who offers more systematic formal analyses of individual films and of local transformations of international genres like the political thriller. Instead, she makes a promising foray into institutional analysis with a comparison between the nation-building aspirations of the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) in the Dept of Arts and Culture, and the commercial emphasis of the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) linked to the Department of Trade and Industry, which promotes South Africa as a site for international productions, like the Tim Robbins vehicle Catch a Fire (2006), which relegated local actors to supporting roles, but does not follow up with a thorough study of these or other key organizations, including local film festivals omitted here, like Sithengi and Encounters (for documentaries), and abroad, especially the Pan-African Festival of Cinema in Ouagadougou (FESPACO), which, despite alleged “Francophone” bias (79) was co-founded by South African exile Lionel Ngakane and deserves more systematic attention for promoting South African film since 1990.

Despite the initial dismissal of television, Saks acknowledges the role of both private companies (especially cable channel MNET) and the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), as well as the NFVF, in co-producing and broadcasting films and in developing directors and writers but does not analyze the implications of this institutional overlap. While she implies that the more intimate format of television might more readily tackle twenty-first century questions of generational conflict, and “subjectivity” (9), she describes the SABC as “timid and conservative” (55) without tracking its different postapartheid phases, from the critical documentaries and often bold political analysis in the 1990s to the distinctively local aspirational narratives couched in soap opera format around 2000, against which the present state of mismanagement, corruption and recycled programming should be measured. Ironically, the most illuminating chapter is devoted to “little,” i.e., community stories, particularly the STEPS for the Future series on AIDS and other social issues, which more South Africans saw on television than at festival screenings, but the exclusive focus on AIDS here excludes films like Kim Longinotto’s Rough Aunties (2008) that attempt to embed AIDS and other symptoms of social distress into more contextualized narratives of conflict between generations, between tradition and modernity, rural and urban life. Longinotto may be American but her collaboration with therapists and activists treating child victims of sexual violence in KwaZulu Natal, Saks’s former base, demonstrates that some American interventions transcend the...