Abstract
M.A. (Communication Studies)
For anyone who watches the news or reads a newspaper in South Africa, even only on occasion, the phenomenon commonly referred to as “service delivery” protests has become a norm. So pervasive is this phenomenon that it has contributed to the perception amongst some scholars of protest and social activists, that South Africa is the “protest capital of the world”. Media coverage and statistics suggest that this is certainly the case. “Service delivery” protests have escalated in frequency, violence and severity since 2002. This study compared the representation of service delivery protests in selected media texts by 3 South African news media outlets and one international media broadcaster to protesters’ own lived stories, generated by themselves (“bahlali narratives”). The study concluded that selected local media tend to depend on a normative and episodic “single story” of “service delivery” protests. A single story is any situation, event, thing, person, or group of people that is seen in only one dominant and authorized way, as if there were no other sides, angles, stories or narratives that were possible. The study found that the single story of service delivery protests in South Africa is framed around the three tropes of vandalism of property, violent demand for “services”, and the poverty of the protesters. On the other hand, the protesters’ own narratives tended to de-emphasise violence and protest altogether, with most preferring to stress the centrality of personal histories, township identities, everyday lives, and material conditions in the township. By comparing a selection of episodic media narratives to real-world protester narratives collected through face-to-face interviews, the study determines that the mediated “single story” of protests suppresses the many-sided, multiplex stories of the protesters themselves. The study concludes that normative media frames of protests are simultaneously critiqued, counterpointed and enriched by bahlali narratives.