Rafael Marques de Morais
9 January 2009
In an article examining the efforts of Angola's ruling MPLA to harness the media as a tool of social control, Rafael Marques de Morais explores the isolation of alternative media outlets and the regime's efforts to re-appropriate subversive coverage to its own ends.
For the past nine years, an alternative media has been challenging the status quo of the former Marxist-Leninist regime of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), in power for 32 years in Angola, the oil-rich and yet poverty stricken southern Africa country. In reaction, the authorities initially embarked on widespread arrests, threats, harassment and legal actions against the dissident media which, in turn, had a boomerang effect on the regime, for it attracted greater public solidarity, networking and legitimised such media outlets as the 'weapons of the weak', and beacons of democracy.
As a brief political context, it is important to highlight that the country has not held elections since 1992, and therefore constitutionally the state institutions hold no legitimacy, for the constitutional law requires universal suffrage every four years.
This essay explores a new kind of approach to mass media, in Angola, in which subversion has become a two-way street. I will make a comparative analysis with the guerrilla media in Taiwan of the 1970s (Lee, 2003), to argue that the subversion of mass media, as a site of contestation against hegemonic power, is effective when it is part and parcel of strong social and political movements that challenge the status quo.
In contrast, I elaborate on a specific case study of the alternative media campaign, in early 2008, against the takeover of one of the two public state television channels by the president of the Angolan republic's children to expand their business interests and pleasure. In so doing, I demonstrate that because the campaign has occurred in a social vacuum, efforts to challenge hegemonic power have been be re-appropriated by the regime as useful tools for self-legitimisation in the absence of democratic legitimacy.
MASS MEDIA
For clarity and a better understanding of the mass media role in Angola, both as a tool of the hegemonic power and as a site of contestation against that hegemony, I locate the media in two different, at times overlapping, camps: media power and alternative media.
I refer to media power, a concept broadly articulated by Couldry (2003:39) to encompass chiefly the state and corporate influences over media institutions and productions. I narrow the term here to the state ownership and iron-fist control of the only TV station (Televisão Pública de Angola - TPA), nationwide radio broadcaster (Rádio Nacional de Angola - RNA), the only daily newspaper (Jornal de Angola), and the only news agency (Agência Angola Press - ANGOP) in the country. To this, I adduce the overlapping and influential three commercial FM radios and a recently launched weekly newspaper, Novo Jornal, co-owned by politburo members of the ruling MPLA and the Portuguese Bank Banco EspÃÂrito Santo (Semanário Angolense, 2008a), which all serve the regime.
As alternative media I adopt Couldry and Curran's (2003:7) assertion of it being media production that challenges, at least implicitly, actual concentrations of media power, whatever form those concentrations may take in different contexts. Currently, I also use, within the same category, the guerrilla media concept, for it is embedded in the current forms of political contestation in Angola. For Lee (2003:163) guerrilla media comprises mainly the resource-poor, low-cost, and small-scale media outlets, in which political activism takes primacy over professional journalism. Moreover, these media outlets engage in '"hit and run" battles with state censors and the mainstream media by constructing counter-hegemonic realities'. (ibid.) Such outlets in Angola are the Catholic-run Rádio Ecclésia, which only broadcasts in the capital Luanda, the weekly newspapers Semanário Angolense,[1] Folha 8, A Capital, Agora, Angolense and Cruzeiro do Sul, which together print up to 40,000 copies a week for a circulation also mostly limited to the capital.
Lee (ibid.) characterises the guerrilla media as the primary site of contestation in Taiwan (1976-86) for the dissenting voices and protest groups to challenge the legitimacy of the authoritarian party-state and system of patronage-clientele. The Taiwanese guerrilla media, as explained by Lee (ibid.) was an integral part of strong social and political movements. The latter sought to galvanise mass support for the causes of the oppressed, and to undermine power domination by using such media as privileged vehicles of political communication. The Angola case is one in which the guerrilla media is what there is of a consistent social and political movement of contestation, for the mainstream political opposition has been co-opted into a token Government of National Unity and Reconciliation in place for the last 16 years.
Moreover, the existing civil society organisations are, on the one hand, integrally dependent on foreign funding and their often restricting and conflicting agendas, for primary donors like USAID, DFID also represents the interests of the government's main business partners in the oil sector, the US and the UK. On the other hand, such organisations are either induced and fully patronised by the ruling elite as a counter-measure to thwart the emergence of a genuine movement of contestation or co-opted.
Hence, by way of illustration, I briefly analyse how isolated alternative media is and how the regime re-appropriates its subversive coverage to further strengthen its own hegemonic power. I empirically sample the recent alternative media outcry on the rumoured privatisation of the second channel of Televisão Pública de Angola, in favour of two of President José Eduardo dos Santos' children, namely Ms Welwitchia and Mr José dos Santos. This channel has been running for a few years with a view to providing the masses with more entertainment, while the first one retains, as its main feature, news information.
There is an element of curiosity here that calls for an explanation and a theoretical framework, which makes this empirical sample more remarkable. The alternative media takes the stand to defend the wholesome maintenance of the most important medium of state propaganda, the state television. This move should be contextualised within the concept of mass media and popular culture as 'the most important and powerful institutions' that, according to Strinati (2004:205) control and shape all other types of social relationships.
As a political propaganda tool, TPA has become fossilised by decades of tight censorship and self-censorship. Although no research has been done yet to assess its impact on people's mindset, empirical evidence contends that a significant number of people tune into it mostly to watch Brazilian soap-operas and a few other entertainment programs. Therefore, one can say that there is a view that it does not have much impact on socio-political relations.
However, the outsourcing of the TPA's Channel 2 to the president's children aims at producing the highest possible impact on the masses by introducing a radical agenda of locally produced entertainment programs, never experienced before, since Angola became independent in 1975. Another aim that is clearly articulated in the programming, which includes one on holidaying abroad and motoring, is the promotion of a Western style consumerism, targeting the youth. This is set to construct an image of a prosperous and trendy society, and, as the alternative media has consensually labelled, to be a 'social anaesthetic' against the pain of the political and economic exclusion of the majority. Nonetheless, the star programme focuses on sexual fantasies and marketing of sex toys - Sexolândia (Semanário Angolense, 2008b). It is co-hosted by a former Angolan model and Big Brother Africa participant, Tatiana Durão. In an editorial Semanário Angolense pulls no punches in attacking the programme:
'It is clear that with Tatiana Durão (who performs sex in front of the whole Africa, in the Big Brother house) and certain guests of her kind, we have the Televisão Pública de Angola, paid for by the Angolan people, turned into a den of pornography.' (Semanário Angolense, 2008c)
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