Apartheid

Inevitably, these racist stereotypes were at least partially internalized
by South African blacks, although their self-doubt never matched that
prevalent among blacks in the United States, where the official
proclamations of equality misled many blacks into blaming
themselves, rather than discrimination, for any miseries they
experienced. But undoubtedly, apartheid society also produced selfhatred.
The limited range of opportunities open to blacks gave rise to
rationalizations in favor of the status quo, and self-doubts and selfaccusations
led some blacks to accept their oppression as legitimate. In
short, blacks blamed themselves. In addition, the fragmentation of the
three black groups through differential privileges and incorporation
led to a reinforcement of an intrablack hierarchy. 633
257
In order to produce and to perpetuate such portrayals, the flow of information in
apartheid South Africa was severely hampered, controlled, and distorted, mainly by
government intervention, but also by the overwhelmingly dominant, White-owned media
businesses, which almost unanimously shared government interests and concerns. For
example, the 1976 Soweto uprising took place before the onset of the globalized information
society, in any case well before any signs of it could be detected in a South African township.
Government spin on violent developments was therefore ubiquitous. Around 200 children and
youths were killed on the first day after the police had opened fire to disperse a crowd of
unarmed demonstrators who had not even started throwing stones yet, but the official death
toll reported throughout the national news media was only 23. By the third day, over 500 were
in fact dead, but only 95 according to the South African media, which, with very few
exceptions, only echoed the lies of the apartheid government spokesmen. 634
Until the end of political and judicial apartheid in the 1990s, the western media outside
South Africa, not only the tabloid media, willingly took over much of the ideology from the
South African media and governments, especially their preference for the white perspective
and their racism against Blacks. Rich, white, and conservative publishers and other media
executives around the world, especially, even those who swore they were not racist, felt much
more affinity with South Africa’s Whites than with the oppressed Blacks. At least some of
this attitude, and its resultant institutional and structural racism, are no doubt still present in
the western mass media. Blacks were (and are) habitually misrepresented as more prone to
violence than others, as unable to govern or think abstractly, as being tied or held back from
progress by ‘tribal’ thought and behavior. 635
Corresponding lies and spin were activated in the coverage of the Second Intifada of
2000 in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, though this time the media were on
location in force from the very beginning, and were able to prevent the South African scope of
misrepresentation of quantitative relationships, despite the often successful counter-efforts by
633
Adam & Moodley 1993: Chapter 5: Psychological Liberation; Internalized Colonialism and the Psychology of
Liberation. In my opinion, the combined effects of five hundred years of intense and globalized anti-African
degradation, humiliation and propaganda, preceded by one millennium of Graeco-Roman apartheid and
colonialism in North Africa and more than one millennium of Muslim and Arab missionary and colonializing
activities, including racist slave raiding, have done more damage to people’s understanding of themselves than
perhaps any other single ideological effect in world history other than men’s continuous oppression of women
and others opposed to patriarchy. This process is still ongoing. See, for instance, Allimadi: Inventing Africa:
New York Times Archives Reveal a History of Racist Fabrication, 2003: 26-28. As Joe Strummer, the late poet
and singer, suggested, the most disadvantaged Blacks in South Africa hardly dare to have a vision. Strummer,
Norris & Cook: Yalla Yalla, 1999
634
Bonner & Segal 1998: 88f; Kotch: Soweto Museum Opens as South Africans Rewrite History, 2002. See also
Mandela 2002 (1965): 76-79 on the ‘shameful’ role of the South African press and broadcasting during the early
1960s, when they also toed the government line and ignored or misreported exactly what and how the apartheid
government wanted them to leave out and distort, respectively.
635
Dechant: Stereotype in den Massenmedien am Beispiel der Apartheidpolitik Südafrikas, 1993; ter Wal (ed.)
2002: 421ff; Kamalipour & Carilli (eds.) 1998: xixff.