Governing Images: The Politics of Film and Video Distribution in Late-Apartheid and Postapartheid South Africa

Abstract

IN SOUTH AFRICA DURING THE 1980s, opponents of the apartheid state intensified their resistance to the regime. This resistance occurred in the form of strikes, unsanctioned mass rallies, direct confrontations with apartheid security forces, and covert military and political operations by the banned African National Congress, as well as international boycotts and sanctions. South African censors responded to this resistance in two ways unaddressed by scholars writing on apartheid censorship (e.g., Coggin; Tomaselli; Merrett; Coetzee; deLange). First, in order to temper opposition to the regime at home and abroad, apartheid censors reformed the way they regulated film and video distribution. second-and connected to the reform measure-apartheid censors strategically adjusted their understanding of race and racism instrumental to the regulation of film and video distribution. This politicization of race and racism during the 1980s is not surprising, given South Africa's colonial and apartheid history. Beyond the obvious, though, late-apartheid censorship illustrated how and why a budding form of governance came into existence. Specifically, those charged with regulating film and video distribution in South Africa subtly started to govern the way that the state visualized, understood, and talked about whites and nonwhites. These liberal South African censors significantly helped to soften the binary tenor of apartheid's racial template, where whites historically used discourse in order to construct themselves as civilized and nonwhites as savage. Furthermore, these liberal censors-or, really, neoliberal censors-also sought to direct responsibility for 1980s political conflict and the correcting of these conflicts away from the apartheid state and toward individuals and groups who were to increasingly govern themselves. Indicative of what neoliberal critic Pierre Bourdieu calls an ethos of deregulation (Essence) and what Michel Foucault called governmentality, this redirecting of responsibility, in addition to neutering the state as a force for good, made it possible for apartheid censors to talk about race without really talking about race and especially without forthrightly talking about apartheid as a racist ideology. Circumventing discussions of race and racism, from the censor's perspective, removed politics from film and video distribution. Problematically, the regulatory form adopted and deployed by the late-apartheid censorship apparatus has survived apartheid. Of course, the face of the South African state has dramatically changed since the establishment of a multiracial democracy in 1994, even if, as one Nigerian commentator derisively suggested, South Africa is a white country with a black president. There exists, though, a kind of continuity between the old and new states, specifically between the late-apartheid and the postapartheid forms of film and video regulation. This continuity in the regulation, understood in this article in neoliberal terms, has hindered the transformation of apartheid's regulatory state practices because the role of the state has been marginalized and the public sphere eroded in the name of a private and individual freedom. (This South African trend is in the vein of the Reagan revolution and Thatcherism, as well as of Bill Clinton's New Democrats and Tony Blair's New Labour as Third Way, where the state is perceived as the problem, not the solution.) Continuity in the regulation of film and video distribution has also stymied the transformation of race and the destruction of racism in postapartheid South Africa because, not unlike the regulatory order in late-apartheid censorship, a postapartheid reckoning with race as construct and racism as reality is deferred. In short, the persistence of neoliberalism in the regulation of film and video distribution has impeded the realization of that for which so many South Africans fought and died. Mapantsula as Image The official response to the film Mapantsula (1988) exemplifies the problematic continuity in South African media regulation before and after apartheid. …