Date: 11/09/2003
Source: Ministry of Communications
Title: Matsepe-Casaburri: Western Cape Broadcast Content and Languages Summit


ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF COMMUNICATIONS, DR IVY MATSEPE-CASABURRI, AT THE WESTERN CAPE BROADCAST CONTENT AND LANGUAGES SUMMIT, Somerset West, 11 September 2003

Chair, Dr Sydney Zotwana
Premier Marthinus van Schalkwyk
Members of our Parliament
Distinguished Delegates
Ladies and Gentlemen

I am pleased to be here in Somerset West to address the Western Cape Provincial Language and Broadcast Content Summit. The Western Cape is a province of many climates and a multiplicity of culture, a melting pot of people, true to the theme of unity in diversity that we recognised in our new Constitution adopted in 1996.

Known in the early period of colonial plunder and settlement as the Cape of Storms, this region has also witnessed the turbulent periods of our history. It was the first port of call for merchants on their way to the East and became the first outpost, a trading station and a military base from which colonialism was imposed with guns and through the ideology of racism on the people of South Africa and on what we now call the Southern African Development Community region as a whole.

In the early days we know that an almond hedge was built by Jan van Riebeeck to separate coloniser from colonised. We know that even two hundred and fifty years later, the construction of the railway line in the Cape in the early industrial period was meant to separate black from white as in many other parts of the world.

The result of this was that people even came to speak about 'the other side of the line' as if it were a geographic and cultural fact that would forever keep them apart, enforcing separate identities and separate destinies on people who ought to have been living together in peace as one community working towards common goals. If you lived on one side of the line, your economic well-being was ensured and if you lived on the other side of the line, your lot in life was further impoverishment and alienation from economic wealth.

Apartheid further divided people on the basis of culture and language. Language itself became a way of dividing people not only in our country but also throughout the continent.

In fact, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the great African scholar, who is currently visiting South Africa, has written in his book 'Decolonising the Mind' that "The domination of a people's language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of mental universe of the colonised."

We saw how Afrikaans, for example, initially the language of slaves and the underclasses of the Cape, became in the eyes of many a man the language of oppression that was enforced upon students and contributed to the student uprising in 1976. How should even Afrikaans be freed in the present period as the mother tongue of so many of our people along with all our other African languages to take their rightful and proud places in the mouths, minds and hearts of our people?

We recently marked the historic 20th anniversary of the United Democratic Front formed here in the Cape that played a key role in helping to bring about our liberation. The people who worked together collectively in this organisation came from a diversity of languages and cultures, but through their collective efforts helped to bring about an end to apartheid and the beginning of equality for the South African people as a whole. Their slogan "Apartheid divides, UDF unites" was a rallying call not only for the organisation, but it carried the message that the policies of divide-and-rule were over and that a new consciousness had emerged of a united people proud of who they were and where they were going to together. Very importantly, the language of many in shaping this direction, was Afrikaans. This was the beginning of liberating this language.

This progressive desire to break through the almond hedge and to cross the railway line as one people with a common dream of a free, united and democratic, non-racial and non-sexist South Africa brought South Africans together and led to the establishment of a democracy in 1994 and set in motion the freeing our indigenous languages, cultural expression etc. from which broadcast content can draw.

It was this humanist belief in the togetherness of people who had for centuries been kept apart that in and by the broadcasting sector in particular, our government would seek not only to free our people but also to free the airwaves by putting in place progressive legislation that resulted out of consultative and democratic processes.

We further focused on new broadcasting policies and regulations in order to introduce new broadcasting players and to place the regulation of the industry in the hands of an independent regulator.

In the past nine years, an unprecedented 94 community radio broadcasting licences have been awarded along with ten commercial licences. My Department of Communications through the work of our Multi-Media Unit has given both infrastructure support and programme production support through providing 42 community radio stations. Furthermore, 50 000 minutes of programmes have been produced to cover areas such as children, women, disability, women, HIV/AIDS and crime.

In this way we have provided access for many previously disadvantaged communities to multiple broadcasting services in their own languages. As a result of these changes, for the first time, people are also in a position to own and control their own radio stations at regional, local and community level. In this way, they begin to take control of their lives and destinies something which they have been deprived of as a result of apartheid in previous decades. But a major challenge has been the content of the broadcasting.

In January 2003 we signed into law a Broadcasting Amendment Act that also established regional language television services to focus on marginalised indigenous languages.

Our task nearly ten years into this democracy is how to improve the situation and to assess whether indeed the broadcast system meets the needs of all our people in terms of both language and content.

The Department of Communications is currently engaged in processes that will assist in the integration of telecoms, IT and broadcasting technologies. The convergence of technologies that was interrogated at the recent National Convergence Colloquium will help to enable the production and dissemination of local content as well as facilitate the use of all our languages and lead to a Convergence Bill.

But putting these positive technological developments aside, our intention with this summit is so as to listen to what the people of the Western Cape have to say about the state of broadcasting in our country, about what has been done and what still should happen to meet the needs of the people. As South Africans, we speak so much about the need to tell our own stories and we express immense pride about our achievements, but what are we doing collectively to ensure that the conditions are created in which stories can be told and transmitted to thousands if not millions of others in our country and abroad.

We should also think of our role not only as South Africans but also as Africans, people of Africa working towards the renewal of this continent are for Africa to gain centre-stage in the world. Our task should be to assert ourselves and to enhance our special relationship to the world in the new global economy and to make use of modern information and communications technologies to meet our goals.

This is not simply a romantic view of an ideal future, but I believe it is a reality that the people of the Western Cape, this southernmost part of Africa, can embrace and through their insights contribute to world culture and development.

In closing, I would like to quote the words of Ali and Alamin Mazrui in their work 'The Power of Babel' when they make the following points: "In the real world, however, languages are not equal. While some are privileged as the languages of politico-economic power and control, others are marginalised, and others still are pushed to the verge of oblivion. If global diversity is to take root, then, it must be built on politico-economic empowerment based on a new world order. Advocates of linguistic and cultural diversity, therefore, may also have to be engaged in a much wider struggle for the politico-economic reorganisation of the world system."

They further argue that what we need are "universal developments" and I quote: "It will probably be a universalism that is more sensitive to the contributions of the different sections of the global community. Diversity therefore, may be a first step towards a healthier universalism, built on a multicultural heritage, a universalism that is more in accord with a (humane) world culture."

In pursuit of a healthier universalism and in celebration of our multicultural heritage, let us ensure that this Summit today will be a great success.

Your individual contributions and the outcomes of the Summit will feed into the National Broadcast Content and Language Summit to be held in October. Your views will help to change the face of broadcasting in South Africa for the better.

I ask you to make your voices heard and I wish you well in your deliberations.

Thank you.

Issued by: Ministry of Communications
11 September 2003