South Africa

South Africa at 25

Freedom of expression and assembly is here, but with definite limits

Freedom of expression and assembly is here, but with definite limits
Illustrative image. Photos: Katrina Cole/Flickr / Women march to the Union Buildings during the #TotalShutDown demonstration against gender-based violence on August 01, 2018 in Pretoria, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images / Sowetan / Thulani Mbele) / Annie Spratt/Unsplash

April 2019 marks the 25th anniversary of South Africa’s official transition to a democracy. Twenty-five years into the democratic era, we look at how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. In the first article of this series, freedom – of artistic expression, of political association, of the media – is in the spotlight.

Award-winning South African playwright Mike van Graan helped to shape South Africa’s first post-apartheid policies relating to arts and culture.

Twenty-five years ago this year, Van Graan was appointed as a special adviser in the department of what was then Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. Today, he is still active in the realm of arts policy, serving as president of the African Cultural Policy Network.

Looking back on then and now, Van Graan describes the last 25 years as a “mixed trajectory” when it comes to conditions for artists in South Africa.

On the matter of publicly-funded institutions, we have gone backwards to the apartheid era where politicians appoint boards and the chairpersons of boards of publicly-funded cultural institutions,” Van Graan told Daily Maverick this week.

The first five years of the ‘New South Africa’ were different. Boards were appointed through more independent means and the boards elected their chairpersons to ensure the principle of ‘arm’s length’ – in other words, that publicly-funded institutions would carry out duties like funding the arts without political interference, or genuflecting to the politicians who appointed them.”

The veteran playwright worries that true freedom of artistic expression is increasingly available only to those with the resources to turn their back on the public sector and government funding.

Herein lies one of the key points in post-apartheid South Africa,” Van Graan says. “We all have the right to freedom of expression – as we do to health, education, etc – but it is those with independent means that are more able to exercise it freely.”

This notion – that in the democratic era, freedom is largely indivisible from economic power – is one you confront repeatedly when assessing the progress made by South Africa in the last 25 years.

PEN South Africa’s Nokukhanya Mncwabe points out, for instance, that although South Africa’s writers and journalists now enjoy a degree of freedom unthinkable in the repressive height of apartheid, public access to the fruits of that freedom is still restricted by geography and money.

We must consider how freedom of expression doesn’t equally map across rural and urban areas,” Mncwabe says.

Calling to mind the SABC’s 2016 censorship of protests, we should be mindful of the uneven distribution of access to freely expressed thought, largely as a result of a dysfunctional centralised state news agency.”

And while the explosion of the digital arena has made it possible for some South Africans to enjoy a much wider range of viewpoints and information sources online, “the continuing legacies of apartheid – socio-economic, literary biases and so on”, still impede full public penetration.

This challenges us to think creatively about how to reach audiences not proximate to book launches and who do not participate in online engagement,” Mncwabe suggests.

Media Monitoring Africa’s William Bird agrees.

The simple reality is that the internet and our emerging digital reality (despite lack of access for millions) has massive potential, but unless we deliberately set about ensuring it works for democracy it will simply reinforce the same power dynamics and relations and anti-democratic tendencies of every other major revolution,” Bird told Daily Maverick.

But compared to the situation South Africa was in during apartheid, Bird stresses that there is a great deal that we should value.

We have high levels of media freedom and when we compare these to the other countries in our region or the continent, we probably fail to appreciate just how free our society is. We can publish and say pretty much what we like about our leaders, and start up a news service if you have the desire and resources. We have generally good and progressive laws and in many respects our country leads the way when it comes to things like media being allowed to report and broadcast criminal trials.”

Yet freedom of expression in the relatively elite sphere of the media is one thing.

Freedom of expression for ordinary South Africans wishing to voice their dissatisfaction with the state of their lives in 2019 is quite another. For those in civil society at the coalface of organising public demonstrations, there is much to be uneasy about today.

Police and other government officials manipulate the Regulation of Gatherings Act and other legislation to find reasons to shut down protests and make it even harder for activists to organise and participate in protests lawfully,” R2k’s Busi Mtabane says.

The intolerance for difference and diversity is most harshly felt when largely impoverished communities dare to speak up or out about their frustrations at more than two decades of neglect. Government, seeking ‘a good story to tell’, is very quick to quell dissent and unhappiness expressed quite harshly, using a range of mostly non-lethal methods.”

Mtabane notes that although freedom of association has been enshrined in the Constitution for the last 25 years, the past decade has seen “internal fractures” open up in settings ranging from communities to political groupings as citizens turn against those perceived as ‘other’.

In its most extreme form, we see the easy expressions of xenophobia that play themselves out,” Mtabane says.

In an area where freedom of association ought to be sacrosanct – the trade union movement – we have seen how harsh the breakups and consequent ostracisation has been.”

When it comes to freedom of association in particular, Mtabane suggests that “the relationship between the state and citizens is probably healthy; the relationship between citizens is in dire need of resuscitation”.

The idea that some of South Africa’s democratic challenges to freedom are the result of social tensions rather than government repression is one also voiced by Van Graan in the context of artistic expression.

Ironically, despite there being a censorship authority and laws limiting freedom of expression during the apartheid era, I don’t think artists paid too much attention to these, and generally said what they wanted to anyway, in the knowledge that they were part of a broader struggle, and that they were on the side of ‘right’. Any form of censorship then would have been worn as a badge of honour,” Van Graan says.

Now, I think the exercise of freedom of creative expression is far more mixed and complex, with self-censorship probably the most common form of censorship. As with so many things in our country, what is said is less important than who is saying it.”

International rankings of countries according to how “free” they are generally tend to place current-day South Africa fairly high on the list. Freedom House’s 2019 assessment of South Africa in terms of political rights and civil liberties gave the country an overall score of 79/100: just short of an A.

But for many, the real South African experience in 2019 fails to match that diagnosis.

The freedom gained in 1994 has meant precious little in the lived reality of the overwhelming majority of people living in South Africa,” says Mtabane.

We have progressed; it just does not feel like we have.” DM

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