Post-apartheid social life was conditioned by elites who begrudgingly negotiated a neoliberal settlement. Drawing on visual sociology and business history to drive a series of case studies that span the spectacular to the commonplace, Sean Jacobs provides a broad critique of this settlement, with all the attendant antagonisms resulting from that political economic arrangement. The result is a rich conceptualization of the politics of identity and representation in South Africa.
For Jacobs, the study of the media can augment the discipline of political studies, which is at times preoccupied with formal mechanisms (p. 29). Just as an examination of the National Economic Development and Labour Council can reveal various interpretations of the neoliberal settlement, so can a study of the media. There is merit in this approach because it is attentive to contests and cleavages. For example, Jacobs explores how different African National Congress governments, headed by Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, shaped the media space, either through regulation, state budgets or the tone of government–media relations.
In Jacobs’ analysis, the media events involving Mandela ‘defined political life in South Africa’ (p. 5). Although faltering, the residual elements of a reconciliatory nation-building project embodied by the late Mandela circulate in corporate and government messaging to this day. While the government and corporations have a preferred reading of South African history, all have emphasized the trope of ‘overcoming’ historical injustices at one point or another (p. 57). Herein, the iconography of the recent past becomes a resource to be mined for a post-racial future. As Jacobs explains, South Africans are adept at selling an image of overcoming a violent history as a moral virtue (p. 57). However, with the liberation struggle confined to the past, it is much more difficult for projects striving for egalitarian social change. Furthermore, by submerging conflict, advertisers are engaged in the politics of accommodation, which stabilizes conditions so that the market can thrive.
While the South African media space is influenced by Northern mediascapes, Jacobs rightly focuses on local businesses and local decision making. For example, the last three decades have seen the South African Broadcasting Corporation experiment with channel identities, defining market segments and making audiences. Much of this experimentation occurred concurrently with the state mandating privatization. In the case of soap operas, Jacobs writes that these ‘provided models for changing racial attitudes and aspirational politics among black South Africans’ (p. 6), but they also had to be relatively attractive to advertisers. Plots, for the most part, ‘emphasized racial and class mobility and glossed over racial and class conflict as well as lingering inequalities’ (p. 79). Another top-down demand of public broadcasting was to create ‘new values’ (p. 70). As Jacobs finds, commissioning editors understood the ‘activist nature of their job’ (p. 70). Arguably, such top-down approaches alienated white Afrikaans audiences, whose relative purchasing power had declined and whose likeness was de-centred in stories.
Jacobs addresses Afrikaans communities’ grievances about marginalization. He finds that appeals to language serve as a cover to preserve privileges in the debris of white supremacy. Although such communities are numerically small, digital platforms afford amplification. Granted, progressive poetics are seeking to remake the Afrikaans community. However, Jacobs is somewhat pessimistic given how Afrikaner nationalism has embraced the transnational far right, whose conspiracies about local white genocide receive hospitality. On a related note, private satellite television with US and UK media offerings has helped whites who retreated to gated suburbs, deciding to pursue an ‘internal exile’ (p. 145). These whites could imagine themselves abroad, if not in reality – until load-shedding from the unstable electricity grid interrupted their screen time.
I found Jacobs’ discussion of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its media politics (pp. 109–36) to be the best chapter in the book. Jacobs conveys how TAC activists built relations with the media to teach journalists how to cover HIV and AIDS issues. This was a shrewd tactic given the extent to which Thabo Mbeki’s presidency was the major source of AIDS denialism. The TAC also deployed familiar rhetoric from the anti-apartheid struggle. As Jacobs judges, the TAC’s success hinged on never delegitimating black government as such, only specific government policies. The goal was to make good on basic justice codified in the constitution. The TAC is emblematic of how mass social movements can bend neoliberal institutions to their own goals. This chapter would enrich many course syllabuses on public advocacy and misinformation.
Given Jacobs’ sharp eye, some readers might wish he had ventured into other topics, such as state capture or sport. The Gupta family’s newspaper, The New Age, was a key venue justifying blatant corruption while premier division football has navigated a tense relationship between private and public television broadcasters over rights (an issue complicated by sponsor deals). But, to reiterate, this solicitation comes because of Jacobs’ skill, not a lack of it. It is a testament to Jacobs’ scholarship that he can convey the intricacy of the South African media so neatly. Media in Postapartheid South Africa is a particularly strong account of the politics of cultural production in a polity undergoing considerable restructuring.
