Media Flaws

Disclaimer: I fully support the views that follow below. After twisting her arm, Nomalanga* emailed me her piece on how our media loses itself in translation and lacks the shared social imagination of the majority. It goes as follows:

South Africans are, to all intents and purposes, lost in translation. But it is not all, it is only some, particularly, white (not all, but the majority), and other middle-class suburbanites whose daily chatterings are informed by what they read in mainstream English language media. In a discussion about how to move towards a non-racist society, I said to a friend, ‘the answer is ubuntu but not the way white people say it’.
 
This is the challenge of being multilingual within the monolingual insularity of middle-class South Africa. One has to constantly qualify and translate, for those who only speak English from a particular social lens, what words, idioms and terms mean in specific contexts and moments so as to not be misconstrued or misunderstood. Thus one has to say things like ‘I mean Black with a capital B’, or ‘I don’t mean white ‘phenotypically’, I mean the social positioning of racial privilege.’ It is exhausting.
 
In my experience, these translations are often necessary when talking to white South Africans who have little experience of being politically integrated as whites used to be in the United Democratic Front (UDF) and other formations of the 1980s where people of different social backgrounds learned to become politically intelligible to each because they lived in dangerous times.
 
Fast forward then into the present; the Jimmy Manyi controversy, the Zuma ‘heaven’ statement; the McBride ‘murderer’ label and the ‘Kill the Boer’ saga currently in the courts. Within media discussion, these moments are illustrative of a kind of linguistic malfunctioning as various viewpoints clamour for equal recognition in an unequal society; where former oppressors and those they oppressed want to be heard in this ‘post-conflict’ society.  It makes for fascinating socio-linguistic analysis, but frustrating for political engagement. 
 
Anyone who has sung militant struggle songs, in their original languages, knows that they are not rousing calls to kill. In the 1990s, when Peter Mokaba led toyi-toyi by chanting, ‘Kill the Boer, the farmer’, in English, the African National Congress recognised the danger, and banned it (it has not been used since) because it had a volatile political meaning when chanted in English.
 
However, when we sing ‘Hamba kahle Mkhonto, thina bafana boMkhonto sizimisele ukuwabulala wona lamabhunu’ as a homage to comrades at funerals, it does not translate, or signify malicious militancy, but is in remembrance of a righteous cause against white supremacy.
 
Journalists who directly translated Dubul’ibhunu to ‘Kill the boer’ were just plain wrong, and I mean bawrong man, as Black people say it. Surely they hear these songs sung in African languages at countless political gatherings, with white comrades. If they do not know this, where do they live, whose reality were they representing in their shrill headlines about the song? Just a few weeks ago Grahamstown service delivery protestors sang the popular struggle song ‘Senzeni na? Amabhunu ayizinja’ against the local municipality.
 
Displacing struggle songs from their contexts and translating them into English headlines feeds a social imagination of anxiety prevalent amongst white South Africans who have struggled to adjust politically since 1994. Swaart gevaar is an indelible part of the conservative white South African psyche; it has become pretty obvious that sensational media reporting feeds into these self-constructed delusions. 
 
Murders of white farmers are undoubtedly horrific; however, the claim of special victimhood cannot hold up against the generalised violence that is dispensed against thousands of South Africans who are also viciously tortured and maimed during the course of crime. This is not to deny that there may be retaliatory attacks against some farmers which are fuelled by unresolved tensions over power and land. However, until media reported that Julius Malema sang ‘Dubula’ (translated) as ‘Shoot the Boer’, there was no connection drawn between struggle songs and the shocking murder statistics; only right-wingers did that.
 
It does serve divisive right-wing groups to draw false connections even though similar songs are sung on a daily basis. Ironically, the alarmist reporting on the meaning of the song, and subsequent court action is concretising and legitimising combative and reactionary militancy; it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Banning the song will not make vulnerable farmers (and generally under-policed rural populations) safer. 
 
Mainstream reporting, for all its laudable commitment to uncovering corruption, serves a particular social imagination; it is not that of the majority, and it is a social imagination that only speaks in hegemonic conceptions English. It is a language that constructs images of unstable, chaotic and unintelligible Black politicos.
 
Amongst Black colleagues, we confess our frustrations at how much is lost in translation in political discussion, not to us, but to our counterparts who are deeply Anglicised either by schooling or upbringing. We are up against thick and high Anglo-Saxon normativity and the mythical notions of English being the supreme language of political rationalism.
 
Yet shifting ones linguistic universe beyond English, into other languages deepens ones grasp of political dynamics. When politician A says  ‘eZulwini kungenwa ngoKhongolose’, we would share in the joke and put it on page five, instead of blazing it on front pages, drawing heated overreactions from Christians defending God’s name from being abused by these ANC bogeymen. The unwashed masses got the humour. 
 
It is in this sense of shared imaginations that I said to a friend, that we can move beyond our narratives of ‘race’ without diminishing the brutality of its past and present, by using African language idiom. We need to talk more of ubuntu, not ooboontoo, for the Anglicisation of the term in public discourse has denuded the term of its layered idiomatic meaning.
 
To have ubuntu is amongst other things, to have a visceral and deeply ingrained understanding of the effect your presence has on others. It is not simply to be kind or warm in some ‘Jambo!’ happy-go-lucky African Native way. It is a deeply humanistic conception of acceptance and embracing others as your kin.
 
These universes of meaning are missing in mainstream media because of the  dominance of white suburban English. Sometimes it is hilarious, but sometimes it is dangerous. The poor translation of words or social discourses amounts to a mistranslation of the truth; it has the effect of making what is not real, appear real, and then indeed, become real once taken up as a public fact.

I am behind Blade, it should be compulsory to learn an African language as a matter of course in this country; watch how walls will tumble and political debate sharpens as suburbia finally learns to share in the social imaginations of everyone else.

*Written by Nomalanga Mkhize (PhD Candidate at UCT) & first published in Grocott's Mail 28 April 2011.