The academic environment that participants describe in the mid-1980s is one in which a synergy between the formal curriculum and political education outside the classroom had become well established. Amner, who arrived at Rhodes in 1987, explains that activist organisations operated as an efficient filter for identifying students who had the potential to be drawn into a struggle for social change. They were steered towards academic choices that complemented this purpose:

On the first day of arriving I was recruited into a political organisation … I was pulled in through … contact with other activists into particular courses … one chose courses … because one knew that’s where the … leftists … in academia were, and …those were the courses that were ‘right on’, and … that would … support the ‘project’ (Amner, 2010).

Knowledge of social theory was equally important both in and outside the classroom, and ideas explored in coursework translated with ease into the spectrum of political discussions that were taking place within the student activist community:

It was actually quite a … hair-raising experience to be part of that process of induction not only into … academic discourse, but in fact into political discourse. So for me, almost immediately, there wasn’t really a separation between those things … it was all in some ways … intertwined, made sense together (Amner, 2010).

In contrast, Mati explains that his political schooling began well before he came to university, in context of his involvement with black activist organisations. This education took place in reading groups organised by the Young Christian Workers (YCW) and the Congress of South African students (COSAS). Here he was introduced to ideas drawn from liberation theology and critical pedagogy:

So it really profoundly shaped me before even I encountered … formal education … we had a serious kind of culture of reading … by the time I came to university I had … some sort of background around these issues and a sense of the moral choices that I had to make (Mati, 2019).

In 1985, when he came to Rhodes University, Mati stepped down from his position as national president of COSAS.  He had resolved that, during his years of study, his primary contribution to the resistance movement would be to help build a culture of critical reading amongst students at Rhodes:

The only responsibility I will have is to set up a network … it was a kind of political study group  … to go through literature. We were reading Marx … Che Guevara … the African communists, of course … all the copies that we could lay our hands on. I introduced them to liberation theology thinkers … (Mati, 2019)

The purpose was, he explained, to “… understand society and the causes of the social problems that we were faced with so that we can intervene to transform them”:

So for me it was part of that struggle for social change … there was certainly at the time a huge culture of taking the written word seriously through reading (Mati, 2019).

Switzer notes that, by the beginning of the 1980s, this culture of critical reading was also well established amongst Rhodes staff in the Department of Journalism. As a result of this influence, the curriculum began to expand beyond a focus on journalism to embrace a broader focus on the critical study of media. Indeed, when Switzer took over as Head of Department in 1979, he took the opportunity to add the words “media studies” to the department’s name.   He explains that he avoided the term “communication” because he saw in it a code word for the conservatism which, at that time, was dominant within American journalism education (Switzer, 2008). The research participants who speak about this period refer to the emergence of two streams of teaching; courses that focused on the study of journalism, and those that dealt with the study of media. The two subsections, below, deal with each of these streams of teaching in turn.

Studying Journalism

Stewart, who had worked as a journalist at the Rand Daily Mail in the 1970s, took on the headship of the department in 1980. Like Giffard before him, he aimed for the department to work in partnership with progressive elements in the English liberal press. He explains that it was because this partnership was supported by the leadership of Rhodes University that his own application to teach in the department could succeed. At the time of his job interview in 1979, his academic qualifications were “flimsy”, which would under normal circumstances have made his employment unlikely. Because of his endorsement by the progressive journalistic community he was nevertheless offered the position:

‘79 was the year in which the Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Express had exposed the whole information debacle. And the two editors there – Allister Sparks and Rex Gibson … I said to them … would you support me … Which was hugely powerful backing (Stewart, 2010).

Steenveld notes that, in context of this partnership, teaching dealt with an approach to production that replicated the practices of mainstream newspapers, even while they offered contextual courses that critiqued this tradition and offered alternatives to it. She refers in this context to John Grogan, who was responsible for teaching about print journalism when she arrived in the department in the mid-1980’s. On one hand, Grogan presented a course that dealt with literary new journalism and which offered students alternatives to the ideal of a journalism of objectivity. On the other hand, in his teaching of writing and editing, he was focusing on “… the facts, and accuracy, and all the kind of …. ethics that go with that” (Steenveld, 2010).

            Amner, who completed the undergraduate programme in the late 1980’s, makes a similar statement about Charles Riddle, who was responsible both for a course in the Sociology of News and for teaching about writing and editing. The Sociology of News course allowed Amner to look more critically at examples of South African journalism:

Texts like Deciding What’s News by Herbert Gans, I remember reading that, and … feeling very excited by it, because I … found it challenging … and I remember … watching … SABC broadcasts through the lens of texts like that (Amner, 2010).

In his approach to the writing and editing modules, Riddle nevertheless reverted to the language of fairness and balance associated with ‘professional’ journalism:

It was very much the kind of journalism you would produce in … the United States, or the UK … There was the … hegemonic ideas around professional practice, of balance [and so on]… (Amner, 2010).

Amner does not suggest, however, that the department’s writing and editing courses were unquestioning of the rhetoric of objective reporting. There was, rather, a form of ‘paradigm repair’, in which adjustments were made to guidelines for objectivity in order to accommodate their limitations. Like Richards a decade earlier, Amner explains that this was a response to the conditions under which journalism operated under apartheid:

Because we were in a situation of obvious inequality and oppression … critique by the mainstream press was allowable to a certain extent … we needed to …  transcend the strictures and the limitations of that moment… (Amner, 2010).

In the 1980s, then, there continued to be a sustained interest in preparing students to play a role in strengthening critical tendencies within the South African mainstream newspaper industry. Amner argues, however, that such interest did not amount to a commitment to a transformation of this landscape:

We needed to be reflexive … but I think there were limits … the Sociology of News thing was … taught … with an idea in mind that mainstream media practice needed to be reformed rather than radically overhauled … (Amner, 2010).

Objectivity could, in other words, be “played with a little bit”, but only insofar as it enabled the mainstream paradigm to accommodate a critique of the South African political context:

It was really … about political position – you are allowed to be anti-apartheid, but you are not allowed to let go of fairness, balance …  the methodology of mainstream professional practice (Amner, 2010).

Amner also argues that, in order to make sense of these limitations it should be understood that the analysis of South African society that informed teaching about journalism in the department was that of conservative liberalism:

There was a … dominant position that needed to be opposed, and I think that was the liberal … press position … but I mean there is a big difference between the PFP opposition to apartheid, and … a … national democratic revolution … opposition (Amner, 2010).

The assumption also remained that the department existed to prepare graduates for employment in the English liberal press rather than for work in alternative traditions of journalism. This despite the fact that, by the late 1980’s, such journalism had become a crucial feature of the South African media landscape:

We weren’t being taught Sociology of News so that we could go and join Grassroots in Cape Town or … for that matter … Radio Freedom … we were being primed for … a mainstream press that took pride in its anti-apartheid stance, but nevertheless held onto some of those hegemonic ideas about professional practice (Amner, 2010).

Mati explains that his introduction to journalistic production occurred before he came to Rhodes, in context of this alternative journalistic tradition. As part of his work in COSAS, he had worked closely with SASPU on designing a newsletter for the organisation. In this way he came to understand that, like books, journalism could play a role in building a culture of critical consciousness:

And so … in a sense I kind of understood the value of the media … so this idea of the power of … media to spread ideas, and knowledge (Mati, 2019).

At Rhodes, his education in the practicalities of print journalism continued primarily in the context of the student press. This was despite the fact that the department worked closely with  Grocotts Mail, a Grahamstown-based English-language newspaper, where students gained access to experiential learning about mainstream journalism. Because of the repressive political climate and in context of his involvement in COSAS, Mati was not welcome at the newspaper. Instead, he found his way into Ilizwi LaseRhini, where he was given the opportunity to produce community-based journalism in isiXhosa (Mati, 2019). 

Amner also explains that his own education in  journalistic practice occurred in the student press rather than in journalism courses, but in contrast to Mati this was in context of English  campus-based media. It was here that he became versed in the subtleties of engaging with a conservative white audience around political issues without actively alienating them:

There was real strategic thinking about … how [our journalism] would be presented to  …  a relatively hostile audience of middle-class white students … we  … needed to think in very strategic … ways about how that material would … slowly change people’s minds, and pull them kicking and screaming … into … social-political transformation (Amner, 2010).

From these descriptions, it is clear that teaching about journalism at Rhodes in the 1980s included a focus on academic knowledge which allowed for a critical analysis of journalistic practice. Such courses existed, however, in separation from those that focused on teaching students how to produce journalism. The suggestion is, furthermore, that their existence was motivated not by the need for a fundamental questioning of mainstream conventions of journalism. Instead, critical analysis was necessitated by the ‘abnormal’ conditions in which such practice existed within the South African context.  Within production courses, in turn, the treatment of guidelines for journalistic practice did include a degree of critical reflection on the standard guidelines for objective reporting. As such, they can be seen to echo a similar process of questioning that was taking place in context of progressive mainstream newspapers. The focus was not, however, on a fundamental questioning of these guidelines but rather on strategies of adjustment that would ensure their continued credibility. Any learning that students like Amner and Mati were able to pursue about alternative approaches to journalism occurred outside the classroom, in the context of the student press and resistance media. It would seem, however, that, the Department of Journalism did not recognise these journalistic communities as being their primary partners.

Studying media

Whereas teaching about journalism defined itself in terms of a constructive partnership with mainstream news, teaching about media was driven by an interest in disciplinary identity. This interest operated not only at an individual level, but also as part of the department’s claim to a status of academic legitimacy. Participants suggest that it was through an association with critical theory that the department attempted to achieve this goal. Berger notes that critical theory was already central to students’ experience in the late 1970s:

Those particular brands of Marxism that at that point were relevant to understanding media issues and in particular looking at stuff like Ralph Miliband and Gramsci … (Berger, 2010).

Through such theory, the programme offered students a reflective language in which to make sense of South African political context – and as part of this to offer explanations of “… how the ruling class rules and hegemony and so on”. The emphasis was also on the possibility of questioning hegemony so that the media could become a site of resistance to the forces of the state:

You began to recognise … media … was not just a tool of the ruling class … you could actually do something. And then Stuart Hall … in about 1980 started writing about the media as a site of struggle. So that … crystallised some of this thinking, that you could actually … go and contest things within there (Berger, 2010).

Stewart notes that, by the time he took up his post at Rhodes in 1980, the critical study of media had come to define the department’s official identity (Stewart, 2010). Tomaselli argues that the administrative leadership of the university encouraged such attempts at strengthening disciplinary identity. In his view, they hoped that this would “bring stability back” into a department that, in the late 1970s, had become “chaotic” and “fractured” because of the political activities of students and staff. He suggests that this concern informed his own appointment in 1981 as a replacement for Berger. The university authorities saw him as someone who would be serious about the establishment of a coherent academic identity in the department:

I think one of the reasons why I got the job was because … I didn’t present myself as … a subverter of everything that the university took seriously. I … had already begun to develop a research output … there was an academic project behind my practice (Tomaselli, 2011).

In the early 1980s, a staff reading group was established to make sense of the implications of Cultural Studies for the study of media in South Africa. The understandings generated from such reading became the foundation of these academics’ approach to teaching and research. Courses began to draw strongly on Marxist concepts such as those of Althusser and Gramsci (Tomaselli, 2011).

By the time Pinnock joined the department in 1983, it was no longer the “hot bed of agitation” that Addison had found there in the late 1970s. Pinnock notes that although many journalism students were politically involved, he found “remarkably few” members of staff who were “… remotely interested in political stuff”. This did not mean that staff were disinterested in South African politics but rather that they avoided engagement with their immediate social context. Like Berger, Pinnock sought out such engagement, and in this context became involved in the production of Ilizwi LaseRhini. Indeed, it was through his friendship with Pinnock that Mati first became involved in this newspaper (Mati, 2019). According to Pinnock, his own interest in direct social engagement was not encouraged by colleagues in the department. This, he says, was because of an association with the political activities of previous members of staff:

They left before I came. So there was this legacy of these dangerous people who had now left. And then I came along and then there was another dangerous person … there was a … sense in the department that … we must get back to the business of being, you know, lecturers … I can’t really say that I was getting much support  … for an attempt to understand what was going on outside (Pinnock, 2010).

Pinnock identifies a shift amongst staff away from attempts to “understand what was going on outside”, and towards the articulation of disciplinary identity for the study of media in South Africa. A key theoretical term of reference, as he remembers it, was scholarship drawn from the “Birmingham” school of Cultural Studies. Pinnock had read into such scholarship himself, and “… really appreciated [the] stuff and … loved the intellectual rigour that was going on”. He nevertheless questioned whether this literature was of significance to the South African political situation:

Everybody was getting their information from overseas … and it had [no] relevance at the end of the day, in my estimation … it … didn’t really connect with what I saw was going on outside the door of the office, in the streets. It was useful [academically] but kind of rarified (Pinnock, 2010).

In Pinnock’s estimation, the ‘critical turn’ in the department signalled a reaction against the difficulties of social engagement, and with this a withdrawal into the sanctuary offered by the academic work:

My impression of the people in the department was that they were retreating into an academic space which was non-controversial and comfortable and then they could …  become the experts in that field but I wasn’t quite sure of the relevance it had to what I saw was an unfolding revolution (Pinnock, 2010).

Amner, in contrast, notes that as a student in the late 1980s it was exactly the courses dealing with Cultural Studies that seemed politically relevant to him. It was, in fact, political relevance that distinguished these courses from those dealing with the production of journalism:

I didn’t do terribly well in my … prac classes … the Cultural Studies dimension of the curriculum … spoke to me in terms of my political agenda … more powerfully than some of the production courses I was taking (Amner, 2010).

Other participants also speak more positively than Pinnock about the emphasis in the department on academic rigour and disciplinary identity. They suggest that, because of this shift, the department had become uniquely positioned as a space in which it was possible to establish the foundations for a vigorous South African tradition of critical media studies. Tomaselli notes that it was this that had convinced him to take up a post in the department. At this time, he and his wife, Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, were “…working up a political economy analysis of the South African media, and we were looking for places in which to interact with … like-minded scholars”. The department offered a space in which he could find such colleagues (Tomaselli, 2011). Steenveld also speaks of the department as a space in which she found unique opportunities for establishing expertise in the field of media studies. When Tomaselli left Rhodes in 1985 she was offered his post and took over his teaching in film studies. This came to represent her main area of expertise during her first years as a lecturer, when she expanded film studies from a first year course to modules offered in each year of the degree (Steenveld, 2019). For Mati, Steenveld’s teaching represented one of the most memorable aspects of his education in the department. He explains that film studies provided him with access to an intellectual heritage about media production that was located outside the domain of Western liberal media:

We did you know the Latin American film movement … all those thinkers … and in fact we went back to the Russian revolution – to the beginnings … montage – and editing – so we went all the way back. And so that stood out (Mati, 2019)

The participants explain that media studies as it came to exist in the department emphasised the study of visual texts. With regards to the establishment of synergies between such teaching and production courses, there was a focus on partnerships with video production. In the mid-1980s, production courses had expanded from print journalism to include radio and television. Steenveld notes that she contributed to a course on video production, collaborating with Larry Strelitz who had been appointed at the same time as her as a television lecturer. The course did not deal with the television journalism and was, instead, conceptualised around “community production”:

We were very conscious at that time that we had resources here, which community organisations didn’t have, and … we would make our resources available to [them] … the students were paired with community organisations, and they would find out what their issues and needs were, and they would make programmes for [and] with them (Steenveld, 2006).

Amner refers to this course as one of the most valuable learning experiences of his undergraduate degree. He explains that the work he produced in context of the community partnership was not technically impressive:

It was … an appalling television production … aesthetically it was very dull. It was badly shot, it was – well, we tried, you know. But it was a disaster, from a mainstream documentary … point of view (Amner, 2010).

For both Strelitz and Amner, the importance of the assignment had more to do with the way in which the process of production impacted on those involved. Viewed in this way, the production was profoundly significant:

It was an incredibly powerful political experience … really the process was more important than the product. And I think I always carried that with me (Amner, 2010).

Steenveld explains that such teaching held significance for students because they saw its relevance to social context:

There was a point to it all, and … they grew enormously, in terms of maturity and all of that stuff. You know – because of their relationship [to the course], and the seriousness, because the stakes were high (Steenveld, 2010).

This account can, perhaps, be seen to throw some doubt on Pinnock’s argument that staff who became invested in Cultural Studies were involved in a wholesale retreat from social engagement.

At the same time, Stewart notes that the centrality of Cultural Studies to the identity of the department impacted negatively on its relationship with the mainstream English press. He explains that these newspapers were in fact a “rather conservative bunch”. Papers such as the Rand Daily Mail were the exception to this rule but even for them the critical language adopted by the department held little relevance. Stewart argues that these papers were “engaged in a different kind of fight” to that of the media studies academics. The English liberal press defined this fight in terms of an analysis of race rather than class:

The Rand Daily Mail, the kind of enlightened journalists if you want to call them that … at that stage it was primarily a racial issue. It wasn’t so much an ideological issue, at the level of what sort of economic system (Stewart, 2010).

The department’s investment in critical theory did not form part, then, of an attempt to develop a language of critical reflection that could be shared with mainstream journalism. Indeed, Steenveld explains that staff who were involved in the critical study of media did not understand their primary purpose to be that of the transforming mainstream journalistic practice. They rejected the assumption that their responsibility was that of preparing students for work in these spaces because they regarded them as irredeemably compromised by collusion with the state (Steenveld, 2010). In her 2006 study of the school’s history, Steenveld notes that this applied not only to the mainstream press but also to the SABC, which was understood to be a vehicle of propaganda for the state. The role that students saw themselves adopting after graduation was not that of becoming journalists in these spaces but rather that of producers of alternative media. Because of this, the film and video courses did not prioritise knowledge of broadcast journalism. The emphasis was, rather, on experimenting with alternative media production (Steenveld, 2006).

Mati’s description of the SABC differs in some respects from that of Steenveld. He explains that what was then known as Radio Xhosa, the isiXhosa-language channel of the SABC, had always been central to his media world. Furthermore, in the mid-1970s, he had become conscious of a group of broadcasters at the station who succeeded in producing both journalism and drama that was critical of the state. Even though the station fell under state control, there were “pockets of resistance” inside it that allowed for the emergence of such subversive media practice:

So those broadcasters – there was a level of resistance, because often when we look at the SABC we think it was just monolithic, and everybody followed the ideology, but there were spaces there that was very interesting (Mati, 2019).

Mati explains that he would have loved, after graduation, to find his way into this community of subversive broadcasters. When he left Rhodes, he applied for work at Radio Xhosa but he knew that it was “not even a dream, thinking of working there”. The SABC’s management would check security police files, and reject his application:

My wish was that I could just materialise myself inside the SABC … to just find myself there … (Mati, 2019)

There was, however, little consciousness in the Department of JMS about the existence of such traditions of subversion within the SABC, or about the value of engaging with them.

Steenveld also speaks of a disconnect between the study of media in the department and the alternative press. This was despite the fact that these newspapers were, at this stage, the primary domain of alternative journalism. She explains that her own interests had “… veered … towards visual media” because the study of semiotics and film was more relevant to such texts. This meant that she did not engage with the alternative press:

Obviously concurrently there was the alternative press. That was … the moment of the alternative press movement, but my engagement wasn’t with them, but with the alternative visual media (Steenveld, 2010).

It would seem that for Steenveld, teaching and research did not at this stage involve a sustained empirical engagement with progressive journalistic practice.

By the end of the 1980s, then, the application of critical theory to the study of media did not result in a sustained tradition, at Rhodes, of critical engagement with either alternative or mainstream journalistic practice. This would suggest that the role that Cultural Studies or critical theory could have played in the transformation of journalistic practice was not realised. Instead, the history of teaching within this programme, as it existed then, can be seen to represent a missed opportunity for the articulation of a critically engaged tradition in university-based journalism education.