1st Edition
Decolonising Journalism Education in South Africa Critical Perspectives
This book is the culmination of several years of collaborative work. It is a unique contribution to the field of journalism because of the depth and variety of contributions it makes to the field.
The scholars who contribute to this volume respond to the great need to rethink journalism from various perspectives including journalism training, research, the contents of the news media, language, media ethics, the safety of journalists and gender inequities in the news media. In doing this, they recognise how the societies that journalism address should themselves change.
PREFACE
CONTRIBUTORS
1. Introduction
Ylva Rodny-Gumede, Colin Chasi, Zubeida Jaffer and Mvuso Ponono
2. On the meaning of decolonisation
Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni
3. The decolonial problematic in journalism ethics
Phillip Santos and Admire Mare
4. Making a case for decolonising journalism and media studies
Bruce Mutsvairo and Robin Kasozi Bukenya
5. Birthed by the west: Complexities of redefining journalism curricula in South African universities
Bevelyn Dube
6. Towards a research agenda for African media and communication studies: Pathfinders must first know where they are
Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-Gumede
7. Journalism and media studies education in South Africa
Taryn Isaacs de Vega
8. Power, knowledge and journalism: The Naspers-127 submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its aftermath
Christi van der Westhuizen
9. A very long erratum note: The corrective role of the South African media as a form of transitional justice
Mia Swart
10. A decolonial analysis of the cyberbullying of South African women journalists
Glenda Daniels
11. Not clowns but capable agents: Tapping into subaltern theory to centralise the marginalised
Mvuzo Ponono and Anthea Garman
12. In-between journalism and media development: Negotiating journalist safety within decolonising African contexts
viola c. milton and Winston Mano
13. Decolonising media ethics and media accountability systems: Elevating the value of voice in southern journalism
Julie Reid
14. "Because of this khephu": Dehumanisation through language in ‘South African’ media
Zethu Cakata
15. ‘Living under coloniality from social experiment to common experience: Lessons from Nat Nakasa’
Willemien Marais
16. The oral archive as ‘first author’ in the emergence of the nineteenth century African newspaper intellectual tradition
Nomalanga Mkhize
17. Developing a new national narrative for South Africa
Zubeida Jaffer and Shepherd Mpofu
INDEX
Biography
Ylva Rodny-Gumede is Head of the Division for Internationalisation and a Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Johannesburg. Professor Rodny-Gumede has worked in journalism, marketing and PR and has consulted for several government, private and academic institutions in Europe and Southern Africa including the UNDP, the UNESCO, and the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education. She has held fellowships at Universities in South Africa and abroad, and she is actively involved in teaching and learning development including broader curriculum development initiatives at institutional, national and international level, most recently through the Teaching Advancement at Universities (TAU) fellowship.
Colin Chasi is Professor in the Department of Communication Science at the University of the Free State. His work covers various aspects of the philosophy of communication. He is currently occupied in the development of what has been called participation studies – an attempt at presenting a quintessentially African approach to the field. His latest research is focused on the transformation of higher education, in view of the contemporary decolonisation debate. He is rated as a nationally recognised researcher (C3) by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.
Zubeida Jaffer is Research Fellow at the University of the Free State. She holds an MSc in Journalism from Columbia University in New York. She is a graduate of both the University of Cape Town and Rhodes University in Grahamstown. Until June 2018, she was based at the University of Free State where she held the unusual position of Writer-in-Residence for five years. She is one of South Africa’s veteran journalists and has written three books and two pocket books (www.zubeidajaffer.co.za). She is one of the founders of the website The Journalist (www.thejournalist.org.za), a multi-media site that tells the stories of pioneer journalists who were largely written out of history under colonialism and apartheid.
Mvuzo Ponono holds PhD degree in Journalism from Rhodes. He is based at the University of the Free State, where he is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication Science. His research interests include audience and postcolonial studies. His MA examined the influence of a township family context on the interpretation of a health education television programme. His PhD research is an ethnographic study on the interpretation of mainstream news by township youth.
