The Independent Media Centre – South Africa

With apartheid having severely deprived the majority of South Africans of basic services, health, education, welfare, etc, GEAR denied any possibility of the state making resources available for meaningful redress to occur. Instead of the RDP’s promise of ‘a better life for all’, GEAR ushered in a series of policy changes that were to result in serious attacks on the lives of the poor. These have included over a 100 000 job losses since 1996, water and electricity cut-offs as a result of the privatisation of basic services, evictions, cuts in state spending on health, welfare and education and accompanying increasing individual costs in these areas, and a general rise in the levels of poverty and vulnerability of South Africans.

In the last three years, people have come together in communities, groups and campaigns to resist the implementation of GEAR at various levels. While they vary in terms of their focuses, strategic orientations, tactics and so on, they have been united in their critique of the ANC government and the neoliberal policies that it has come to champion in the interests of transnational capital. While the mainstream media has played a significant role in trying to make the ANC and Nelson Mandela the heroes of the world’s poor, and in portraying new, emerging movements as small, fringe, radical, ultra-left groupings, a critical voice has also emerged in the form of an independent media from within these movements in South Africa and internationally to assert the right and ability of people and movements to speak for themselves, outside of the constraints of the capitalist market.

In August 2001, in the run-up to the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), held in Durban, South Africa, movements from all over South Africa came together in the Durban Social Forum (DSF) to protest the posturing of the ANC government as champion of the fight against racism whilst it implemented neoliberal policies, and the UN system for its complicity in the continued oppression and exploitation of racial minorities worldwide. Members of different NGOs, independent film-makers, activists from new social movements, and journalists, were brought together by Ben Cashdan, an independent film-maker living in Johannesburg, to establish the Independent Media Centre-South Africa.
IMC-SA would be a space for the production of independent media (print, video, audio and web), alternative to the corporate, mainstream media and critical of the mainstream views being expressed in the WCAR and UN system. It would be the ‘voices of the community’, ‘the people’s voice’, and it would offer alternative views on the WCAR. These would be directed both at the mainstream media in trying to get our stories out to the public, as well as activists who might be looking for some alternative space during the WCAR. Its primary task would be to win people out onto the streets. We were assisted in this by the international Indymedia activist network, into which we were warmly and generously welcomed, in particular, IMC-Seattle and IMC-San Francisco. We were able to set up our website – http://sa.indymedia.org - which is still hosted by San Francisco.

Alerting South African civil society
A programme was developed for the period of the WCAR which included daily press conferences and briefings, press statements, film screenings and so on. Being part of the international Indymedia network also gave us a website which allows for interactive discussions through the system of auto-publishing. South African civil society was divided in its approach to the WCAR. With the South African National NGO Coalition (SANGOCO) heading the secretariat of the official UN NGO Forum, and sitting in the DSF, tensions arose between those of us who were more critical of the ANC government and the UN system and those who wanted to use the DSF to legitimise the UN NGO Forum and thereby the WCAR. With the IMC-SA centre in the NGO Forum becoming the headquarters of the DSF, all the tensions within the DSF played out in the IMC-SA, with fights breaking out regularly between SANGOCO and social movements over press conferences, statements and even the use of the space. It became clear that SANGOCO had seen the space as a means to portray itself as leading the DSF and so collapse any divisions between the formal WCAR process and the programme of the DSF.

IMC-SA activists were adamant that the space remain independent from any political force, including the DSF, despite the fact that we were largely prioritising the programmes of social movements within the DSF. This independence allowed us, however, to remain outside of a supposedly representative process that was in fact just becoming a way for SANGOCO to legitimise its participation in a process that was viewed by social movements as flawed. In this way, the DSF was able to maintain an identity oppositional to the ANC and to SANGOCO without the underlying tensions becoming overt at the time.

This was, however, a result only of the presence of activists within the IMC-SA group who were part of discussions within social movements and knew of the role being played by SANGOCO. These activists also had a broader and more in-depth understanding of the independent media network as coming out of the radical traditions of Seattle and being extremely critical of the NGO movement. They were also extremely conscious of the attempt within Indymedia internationally to build a culture of self-organisation and representation and to create new, less hierarchical ways of relating within organisations. While IMC-SA provided an incredibly critical space in Durban for social movements through its creation of the presence of an other world and difference in the NGO Forum and in Durban, it was also a space and time during which many debates and fights over organisational form and the ways in which the representation of struggles and movements happens presented themselves.

While many of these debates were to continue, some still going on today, the WCAR marked a clear alliance of the IMC-SA with new social movements in South Africa fighting neoliberalism as opposed to a general commitment to representing all voices of civil society equally and uncritically. In addition, the fact that there were different understandings of the nature of Indymedia became very clear during this time. While there were those who knew of Indymedia from Seattle and Genoa, most people who became involved in IMC-SA around the WCAR did not. There were those from NGOs and social movements who thought that IMC-SA should be playing just the role of doing the public relations work of organisations, there were those who saw IMC-SA as a means to gaining skills and developing capacity for their own organisations, there were a number of aspirant young film-makers and other journalists, who also saw it as a way of gaining skills and making themselves more marketable in the media sector, and those who were just there to make a little bit of money, as well as unemployed youth from community structures set up by themselves to address problems of unemployment and crime, and members of social movements.

In addition to various interests in IMC-SA, there were varying levels of skill and capacity. In a highly charged political atmosphere in which media production becomes central to a political programme, such differences can prove difficult to manage. While these were contained during the WCAR, there would be a need to resolve some of them thereafter.

Building an independent space
Following the WCAR, activists from the Concerned Citizens’ Forum (CCF), Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC), Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), Landless Peoples’ Movement (LPM) and NGOs and individuals who had been involved in IMC-SA during the WCAR met in a national workshop held in Johannesburg in November 2001 to discuss the future of IMC-SA. After much discussion, it was agreed that it would be important to continue the project as a space with the following aims: ‘to build an independent space outside of the corporate, mainstream media, for the production of independent, critical media; to open up spaces for alternative voices, stories, critiques from communities to be heard; to provide a quality news service for the mainstream media, with the aim of providing more critical news for the mainstream press; to build community media and media activists; to encourage/facilitate the integration of media with the struggles of marginalized communities and groups; to build the capacity of media structures already existing within community organisations; to challenge traditional notions of media production, and allow for communities to make their own media rather than perpetuating the ‘media as observers’ paradigm; to encourage media as activism; to encourage new and creative ways of producing stories; to provide a network for the shifting sites and foci of community struggles as they unfold; to provide a space for activism generally; to build a non-hierarchical form of organisation in which different traditions of activism can interact in enacting the general aims of the organisation.’ (IMC-SA, Workshop resolutions, November 2001).

It was agreed that Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg would establish offices and an interim national co-ordinating committee was elected to facilitate national discussions and programmes. Each office would decide on its own structure and activities. While original funding for the IMC-SA programme around the WCAR was secured from the European Union Foundation for Human Rights (EUFHR) using the organisational cover of AIDC, after Durban we were left also with the problem of sustaining ourselves materially.

While Durban and Cape Town have been unable to establish functioning offices, the Johannesburg office has received considerable support and assistance in keeping itself going, and has thus been the main force driving IMC-SA. Khanya College provided us with free office space and we have been able to, in a very ad hoc and inconsistent manner, raise funds through paid media work that we do for resourced NGOs and unions, such as the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) and donations from the international IMC network and activists from the movement internationally. Although many attempts have been made to secure more regular funding from traditional donor sources, these have been fruitless except around the specific programme we ran around the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), which was again funded by the EUFHR.

While Durban and Cape Town were inactive after the WCAR, they did, however, participate in IMC-SA around the WSSD. Through this programme, 15 activists from the CCF and 15 activists from the AEC joined the IMC-SA programme around the WSSD. In Johannesburg, of the 20 volunteers involved, many were members of the APF. During the WSSD, we were able to set up 2 media centres, 1 at the Workers’ Library and Museum in Newtown, and 1 in the Landless People’s Camp at Shareworld. Unfortunately, while we had made great plans with the National Land Committee (NLC) for this space with a programme of panel discussions, workshops, media production, film screenings and so on, the crisis which presented itself when NLC and LPM leaders were arrested before the WSSD, did not see this space becoming what we had intended it to be. Nevertheless, it did help with some media support for the LPM during their crisis.
In addition, the WSSD drew many activists from the international movement to the space of IMC-SA and so facilitated a great deal of interaction (formal and informal) amongst activists. Unlike the WCAR, when our space was one in which activists chatted and exchanged ideas and experiences, the WSSD saw activists from here and abroad working together, not only in the production of media, but in struggles during the WSSD. In many cases, decisions around actions which were eventually taken were made over drinks at the IMC centre, which was based at the Workers’ Library and Museum in Newtown, and a lot of the lobbying that happened amongst left organisations around the WSSD (particularly in relation to bringing movements together) happened at the IMC centre. It was also an incredible space in that it removed the often-assumed hierarchies that usually determine how relations between different layers of activists interact and saw ‘leaders’ and ‘luminaries’ of the anti-globalisation movement speaking as equals with ‘ordinary’ activists of the APF and CCF. In this way it became a space for the sharing of experiences and approaches amongst activists within a global movement.
The IMC-SA was also, through this space as well as our website, able successfully to initiate solidarity actions in other countries around the repression that emerged around the WSSD. During the WSSD, the website had over 20 000 hits a day, playing a significant role in profiling the struggles of movements here internationally. While IMC-SA has been successful in the above respects, there is still, however, a long way to go in developing this space. A national workshop to take forward its programmes will be held in late 2003 to discuss this.

For now, it has created the possibilities for movements to narrate ourselves and to imagine ourselves differently, through the various forms of media that we have gained access to (such as video and now more recently radio), through the different movements and people that we have come into contact with, and through the various possibilities for media when it is embraced as a means for self-expression and creation.