I kinda like Al Jazeera English. So much so that I download it on iTunes–subscription is free–to follow its news reports (the dominant US cable providers have been shy to carry it, though looking at its online viewer statistics, it certainly has a large potential TV audience stateside). I am a big fan of “Inside Story” and the media analysis program “Listening Post.” And I like the way they make Africa into an ordinary continent. For those reasons I can even put up with Riz Khan and Jeff Hannas interview styles (it’s bad). But more recently they seem to be losing the plot somewhat and slipping. Take the new feature “Africa Uncovered.” I watched what appeared to the first episode a few days ago: a sensationalistic program on albinos in East Africa (it’s in two parts). I thought it was an aberration. Then I saw the “Africa Uncovered” episode on the “end of the rainbow in South Africa.” I was excited to see a program that delving into the race and class politics of the “new” South Africa. I was also interested given that the video was uploaded on the Al Jazeera around the time Irene Grootboom passed away. If you forgot, Irene Grootboom is the working class Cape Town woman who 10 years ago sued the postapartheid government to make real the new Constitution’s promise of a right to shelter and won her court case. Last week she died still living in the same shack. She was 39 years old. Instead Al Jazeera offered a focus on the racist rants of of Eugene Terreblance, the leader of the Afrikaanse Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), a fringe group of Neo-Nazis who briefly. The insert also focused on the families of white, right-wing political activists in prison for bombings. Somewhere in there was a discussion about Afrikaners’ (as a group) “marginalized status” in postapartheid South Africa. I had seen enough once I saw Terreblance predictably hamming it for the camera as he rides a horse (he did not fall off this time), driving his bakkie (pick-up truck) with black workers sitting at the back, reading bad poetry and making idle threats.
If you want to watch it, see here.
Filed under: politics , Africa in Western media, Africa Uncovered, Afrikaners and media, Al Jazeera does South Africa, AWB, Boeremag, coverage of South Africa in foreign media, Eugene Terreblance, media, Neo-Nazis, rightwing politics
Something interesting: Al Jazeera Africa (in English) is packed with people from the BBC, some of whom had been frankly appalling reporters on this continent. If Al Jazeera starts to slowly slide into cliched takes on the continent, it won’t come as a surprise. I fear, in the end, the Al Jazeera will slowly become like the other big channels, despite its good intentions and the hope it gave us (all) at the start.
Stereotyping Afrikaners is such old hat. They’re still the exotic, racist Other. It’s lazy reporting and affords Afrikaners a much more central place in contemporary South Africa than would be the case in a careful analysis of the class and racial politics of which they’re a part.
“They’re still the exotic, racist Other.” You mean to other white people (I mean foreign correspondents, writers, essayists, documentary filmmakers, etc) in the West? I wonder if that partly fuels the neo-right Afrikaner politics in SA?
Al Jazeera is an outpost of CNN. Or BBC.
Interesting post and I like the blog name. Majority of north Americans believe Afric is indeed a country…
Where are you based? I’m a Canadian in Accra for the past 11 years.
This continent is quite a place – most often misunderstood and mishandled by the governments and the rest of world… but it’s a place I’d rather be with a live pulse and never a boring day…
Keep up the writing – and educating the rest of the world about good old Africa!