Tell Our Story. Julie Reid
imbued with their particular demographic identity. By collecting the stories and first-hand accounts of persons who had actually lived through a particular set of events, we were able to then compare the contents of these first-hand accounts to the way in which these same events had been retold by the dominant news media. It is only a small adjustment of methodological focus, but it makes all the difference. A detailed comparison to news media content is not possible when examining the perspectives of a particular demographic of participant regardless of their individual position: here, even though each participant may belong to a similar demographic, each will have experienced a different set of events. Instead, we opted to talk to people who had lived through a particular set of events by focusing on the geographic communities where those events had taken place, meaning that we could thereafter compare the collected first-hand accounts to the manner in which these events had been retold by the dominant media.
Another important shift in methodological focus was that when we interviewed our participants, we did not approach the interview with a stringent, predetermined set of must-ask questions. Given the centrality of voice(s) to this project, we knew that we had to interrogate our own strategies of listening. On a purely practical level, this meant we needed to rethink how we were going to approach the interviews with the different participants from the three communities that we were working with in order to best allow them adequate space to narrate their own stories.
We did not ask the people we talked with to focus on any particular aspect, event or key category as identified by us. We only asked them to do one thing: we asked them to tell their story. We found that in allowing them to claim as much lateral narrative space as they liked, they related to us in far more depth, detail and richness of content than if we had interjected and tried to force their responses to focus on any set of stringent predetermined categories or questions.
Of course, this is not always a comfortable thing for a researcher or a journalist to do. We are trained to get straight to the core of a story in the least time possible, to focus only on the ‘facts’ and ignore unnecessary waffle. The arrogance of this approach, however, is that it too often denies the respectful iteration of voice(s). Firstly, it assumes a position of power on the part of the researcher or journalist. It is the researcher and/ or journalist who will decide what information is relevant and what is not and will guide the engagement accordingly. The arrogance of the myth of the ‘expert’ here disenables the notion of voice as a process of engagement and all of the richness that lies therein.
Social scientists and journalists, however, are problematically trained to approach interviews with a predetermined set of criteria in mind, or a set of research goals and objectives, which then determines the trajectory of the inflexibly formulated interview guideline or schedule (a preset list of questions that have to be asked of each interviewee). Researchers will tell you that this has to be done to ensure consistency, reliability and validity in the data, as if people’s personal accounts of their experiences and lives can be properly described by a term as impersonal as ‘data’. Journalists will tell you that this approach is necessary in order to collect only those ‘facts’ that are of relevance to the news story they are piecing together, as if the only parts of peoples’ stories that are relevant are the ones that we in our supposed ‘expert’ knowledge deem to be relevant. But as journalists and researchers, who are we, really, to say what is relevant and what is not with regard to an event that we have not lived, are not personally impacted by and of which we have no situational or historical experience? Who, then, is the real ‘expert’ on the story if not the people whose lives are directly determined by it?
Secondly, when we are too hasty to arrive at only the ‘facts’ of an isolated event, we too often miss, overlook and disregard important contextual and historical details that would more accurately inform understandings of current events. Again, this approach ignores voice as an embodied process, that it is socially grounded and that each narrative retelling of events is only one part of a broader interlocking set of related narratives.
Thirdly, the narrow, delimiting and sound-bite-driven approach to interviewing so often applied by researchers and journalists ignorantly and arrogantly bears little respect for difference and diversity, which is another key aspect in the value of voice. Again, where each voice is distinct, the failure to recognise the differences between voices is a failure to recognise voice at all. However, an engagement with the multiplicity of voice(s) that are able to speak to one event requires more patience than what the narrow, more traditional approach to interviewing allows.
Fourthly, a narrow and limited approach to interviewing does not do much in terms of respecting human dignity, or in terms of treating people as if they do in fact know how to tell their own stories. Further, simply claiming (or being allowed) the room to narrate one’s own story, or speaking, is not sufficient to effect the successful process of voice. To afford dignity to the speaker, then the speaker must know that their voice matters and that it is heard (Couldry 2010: 1). But do these voice(s) really matter to us if we insist that they only speak to the particular predetermined categories that we have established before the engagement even commences?
THE CURRENT CONTEXT: POST-1994 SOUTH AFRICA
Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. There are many ways of reaching this point … by denying and distorting information … and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of a privileged few depends on the forced labour and the forced silence of the many.
— Levi in Pugliese 2016
While South Africa is certainly not a fascist state, there are just as certainly enough warning signs that should arouse serious concern for all of those who have sacrificed and continue to struggle for a vibrant and healthy democracy. As Primo Levi notes in the epigraph above, it is particularly when concentrated power and the interests of the elite begin to consistently undermine the realm of free expression, will and information – all of which are indispensable to democratic action and voice – that we should be more than concerned.
Such undermining has been well entrenched within South Africa’s political, economic and social fabric for generations, including, even if differentially applied and experienced, in the post-1994 democratic era. This is nowhere more so than when it comes to the dominant media and the perspectives, experiences and voices of poor communities. Much like the country’s economy, the media sector is highly monopolised and, as such, exclusivist in its DNA. More specifically, at the core foundation of this exclusivity is class, buttressed by considerations of race, gender and sexuality.
Here is the class reality: South Africa has ‘world-class’ inequality where 75 per cent of the aggregate wealth is held by the top 10 per cent of the population, while the bottom 50 per cent hold a mere 2.5 per cent (Simkins 2014). Not surprisingly, the overall number of people living in poverty – measured as an ‘upper bound poverty line’ of R779 (in 2016 rand) per month, per person – stands at 54 per cent (StatsSA 2015).
In structural terms then, the dominant media largely speak for and to the dominant class. In practical terms, this translates into the perspectives, experiences and voices of the majority of people who live and work in South Africa, and who are poor, being treated as peripheral. There are few better examples of this than Jane Duncan’s exposé of the coverage of the Marikana massacre by the dominant media, which clearly reveals the consequent structural and practical class bias, as described in chapter 1 (Duncan 2013a). If only one side of the story is told or is so dominant as to effectively sideline and/or caricature any counter-narrative or competing story, then the conceptual frame and practical approach of the individual reader and societal consumer can only serve to reinforce ignorance, division and untruths.
That is why it is so crucial, not simply in respect of exposing and contesting the ‘storytelling’ of the dominant media but to defending and sustaining democracy itself, that the stories of the poor majority are listened to and communicated.
Herein lies the basis for the research that underpins this book. The three communities that provide the case studies – Glebelands, Xolobeni/Amadiba and Thembelihle