JOHANNESBURG SOUTH – Famed Afro-American jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong mused about ‘What a wonderful world’ and I too, like many members of the progressive colourless society I circulate in, often wonder what a wonderful world South Africa would be by now if the powers-that-were, 67 years ago, had not dragged and dug us into this messy, stinking and antisocial quagmire we find ourselves in as a nation.
As Mondli Gungubele, the executive mayor of Ekurhuleni once quizzed, “As a nation, the blacks, coloureds, Asian and white South Africans, need a healing process through which we can all find one another and wash away the mental scars left by the garbage of our evil past.”
Clr Gungubele goes on to add that, as a nation, we need to stop fighting and tearing each other apart and instead strive to come together and inspire the best in each of us to build Mzansi. South Africa remains the only country on the African continent whose inhabitants are still divided by the colour of their skin.
These same words were echoed by two highly acclaimed visiting journalism professors and lecturers, John Hatcher of the University of Minnesota’s Duluth campus and Bill Reader who is a media studies expert, graduate of the Pennsylvania State University and associate professor at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. Both were guest speakers at the ‘No Guts – No Story’ Sanlam Community Journalist Forum (FCJ) in Middelburg on Friday, August 21.
Hatcher and Reader have nothing but high praise for the future of journalism in South Africa, especially among the country’s young media students whom both claim showed high levels of interest in their media studies. Hatcher and Reader’s presentations were informed by the pair’s interaction with journalism students at the University of Technology in Pretoria, as well as visits to several community-driven grassroots print, online and radio media during their two-week stay in South Africa.
The two visiting journalism experts would also like to engage local journalism training institutions through twinning programs with similar media training institutions in the US. They say these programs would involve student exchange programs.
It was also their contention that the future of a free and democratic non-racial society in South Africa will only be better addressed and informed by the involvement and participation of an open and transparent media. Both also believe that it is only when the local media refrains from being a platform for political ideologies that the country will become a more democratic nation.
We’ve come a long way from where we were and now is the time to come together and join hands in pushing the horizon a little bit further away so as to make more room for us all under the African sky.
