South African letter
Pandora's TV box
Roy Macnab
During the past few weeks South Africans, white and black, have ben going through a riveting experience. They've been watching television — South African television — for the first time and they have been watching it on the most expensive sets in the .world. It's colour only and a set costs about E600, a fact which accounts for the little groups of whites and blacks gathered these days in front of Johannesburg shop windows where they watch together, for nothing. The full television service does not begin until the end of the year but this month the SABC started its try-out transmissions in English and Afrikaans, and, just a quarter of a century behind the rest of the world, took a bold step into the television age.
The 'results may be incalculable. Certainly the days are gone when people in Britain would talk of the ease with which their guests from South Africa could be entertained. Put them in the 'telly' room, send in three meals a day and the South Africans would return home delighted with their trip abroad. It may seem barely credible that a country that is among the first fifteen trading nations of the world, that can enrich its own uranium for its nuclear power, that transplants human hearts, makes diamonds in the laboratory when it is not digging them from its soil, has a golden goose that will lay Krugerrands to order, manufactures jet aircraft and makes oil out of coal, that such a country has been content to jog along all these years with steam radio. However, to present the question of South African television in the context of technology is to misrepresent it. As Dr Jan Schutte, head of South African TV told me in his magnificent office on the thirtieth floor of Johannesburg's television centre, South African television will be one of the most technically impressive in the world; his Personnel have been training for years at television stations in Europe and North America. South Africa's long wait for television has little to do with technology, in which it is highly advanced, but with the socio-political sphere where it is not. Or at least until about a Year ago.
Television, or the lack of it, has emphasised the South African paradox, that a country that revealed such extraordinary dynamism, adventurousness and courage in industry, science, commerce, medicine, in order to create a powerful modern state, could never bring itself to take any of the risks associated with these creative qualities when it came to tackling the human problems arising in a country with no heterogeneous population. Here the tendency has been to erect the barricades — racial, linguistic, cultural — instead of to storm them. Descending from Dr Schutte's TV tower, where in due course they Will broadcast in nine languages, 1 was reminded of what South Africa's most famous poet, the late Roy Campbell, once told his compatriots, that their country resembled the Tower of Babel, where the people were divided by their languages, except that South Africa added race and colour as refinements to the confusion. In such circumstances they tended to over-emphasise those things when trying to fix their identity. Time, too, adds its complications in South Africa. Here the contemporary scene includes at one end the Stone Age of the Kalahari bushmen with their bows and arrows and at the other the nuclear age typified by the ,personnel at the Pelindaba atomic centre. In between lie any number of cultural permuta
tions. If television is a mirror, then in South Africa it has an opportunity to present the greatest variety show on earth. But will it? Perhaps because its possibilities are so great, because the visual picture provides a disturbing universal language for those who, though they live in the same country, have still to learn to communicate with each other, perhaps here are the considerations that made South Africa hesitate so long before taking the plunge.
Now television has come, and, oddly enough, at exactly the right moment, for quite clearly during the past six to nine months South Africa. from behind those socio-political barricades, has been breaking cover and making a dash to catch the twentieth century before it disappears into the next one. Television has come at the very moment that South Africa is trying, not without success, to communicate with Black Africa in the hope of achieving permanent reconciliation as the latest Vorster-Tolbent exchanges indicate. And at home -D-and-D" (detente and dialogue) is becoming an increasingly fashionable exercise, as somewhat diffidently, different kinds of South Africans, Afrikaners and Africans. English-speakers, Indians and Coloureds have been making signals to each other from behind the screens and not always of the V-Sign-in-Reverse variety. Sometimes the results are surprising. A leading Afrikaner in Pretoria told me of his recent experience at a dinner party. He warned his wife beforehand that a prominent Black businessman and his wife would be among the guests. She was dismayed at the idea, complaining that she had nothing in common with an African woman. At the dinner party my friend noticed that his wife and the African woman seldom drew breath as they talked non-stop to each other. Going home in the car he asked her what they had been talking about. "Do you know," she said nonchalantly, "that Mrs Mapamula is having exactly the same problems with her servants as we are. Her cook-boy is always drunk and her maid seems to be permanently pregnant." Many a race relations myth, many a white and black stereotype is being exploded by conversations such as this. Class consciousness and status symbols (servants, a Mercedes Benz, now a TV set) may be as divisive in South Africa as elsewhere, but if they eventually cut across race and colour they may even provide a kind of unity. The desire of the Black bourgeoisie to be catered for as a social class rather than as a racial group has been expressed by the black columnist S. L. Sidzumo, writing in the lohannesburg Star, the country's biggest daily. Referring to the fact that it would be another four years before Bantu TV, that is a service in the Bantu languages as with Radio Bantu, would begin, he said: -Members of the Black middle-class want the universal TV which will be made available to Whites, Coloureds and Indians . . . already many are installing electricity in their homes at their own expense in readiness for TV sets for which many have already paid huge deposits. The middle class (whose members have multiplied in recent years) all own pretty expensive radios. But seldom do they tune in to Radio Bantu. Their radios are invariably switched to either the
Afrikaans or English transmissions. . ." It looks like the beginning of a kind of class solidarity. S. L. Sidzumo in Johannesburg may not appreciate Bantu Radio any more than Gwyn Jones, detribalised in London, may like the BBC's Cymru, but 1 know a number of white South Africans who do, simply because, they say, township jazz from Black Soweto is the best home-grown modern music. So it looks as if there might be some cultural give-and-take, some nourishing cross-fertilisation if South African television is handled imaginatively and creatively. As I said, South Africa might provide television with its greatest opportunity.
Roy Macnab is a South African author and former diplomat
Previous page
