A Place of Convergence
Convergence is the coming together of separate entities. Makutano, is a place of convergence. It is a platform for Africans to raise their voices above the din of traditional media and flout false perceptions with insights into the reality.
Khatu Mamaila, deputy editor of South Africa's City Press, speaking at the annual media conference of the Communication Students of the University of South Africa (COMSA) in 2006, extrapolates on the quandary in which Africa finds itself in the media:
Many of us did not know anything about Rwanda before the genocide of 1994. What about Burundi? The sad reality is that Africans made news when they were in distress. We always see faces on children with disproportionally huge tummies, covered with blue flies. We see shocking images of people dying of Aids. We see children playing hide and seek with automatic rifles. We see bodies, beheaded bodies littered in the city centre in various African capitals.
As a journalist, I will be the first to say reality should be reflected as it is. These images should not be hidden. People ought to know the truth. If we accept that people should see the truth, then we will also know that the African story is much more than just about coups, wars, Aids and famine. We should also see smiling Africans in the media. We need to be told of peaceful democracies in Tanzania, Botswana, Mozambique and many other countries where governments are changed through democratic means. We also need to be told of economic transformation and of how Africans are increasingly becoming global players in the world economy. If we do that, then we shall have started on a road of helping ourselves to identify with ourselves and our continent.
(Mamaila K, September 2006)
As a place of convergence, Makutano is also an apt depiction of converging media. Online journalism is not confined to the highly polished, online editions of the mainstream media. News-orientated blogs have become an inextricable part of online journalism. In Reporting War, Stuart Allan says of blogs:
Steven Levy (2003), writing in a Newsweek Web exclusive, suggested that blogs "finally found their moment" as bombs were dropped on the city of Baghdad. The formal initiation of hostilities, he maintains, and the "variegated nature of this particular conflict, called for two things: an easy-to-parse overview for news-junkies who wanted information from all sides, and a personal insight that bypassed the sanitizing Cuisinart of big-media editing. In Levy's view, blogs were able "deliver on both accounts". Adopting a similar line of argument were those who pointed to the success of blogs in attracting attention, especially that of individuals largely indifferent to mainstream reporting (here young people are frequently mentioned), by virtue of their shared intimacy. "I think that sort of clarity of voice and immediacy is more possible on Web logs than in print media", argued Dean Allen of textism.com. "I can't think of another broadcast medium that has such a potential for directness. Someone reporting live from the battlefield for CNN can't come close".... Commenting on this type of "horizontal" communication, Glenn Harlan Reynolds (2003) of InstaPundit.com noted wryly that "the term 'correspondent' is reverting to its original meaning of 'one who corresponds' rather than the more recent one of well-paid microphone-holder with good hair."
(Allan, 2004)
While my fellow South Africans remain mired in questioning what it means to be South African in the aftermath of the recent xenophobic violence, I take the cue from
Thabo Mbeki's rousing, iconic speech in parliament as the then-deputy president, 'I am an African'.
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