Digital immigrant

A Google search for information on whether ‘slams’ is a pejorative word led me to an article by Ashraf Johaardien about his struggle to find information on the disappearance of the words teram-akasie and kanala in the Cape Malay community.

He doesn’t mention his feelings on the struggle to find any information but this is [yet another] an example of erasuring a people’s history.

So yes, there can be many reasons why he failed to find anything about the disappearance of teram-akasie and kanala from the Cape Muslim community on Google. But we live in a Western world, even though we live in Africa. Many white people still refer to themselves – and to others of their tribe – as European. Never mind that many of the Afrikaner tribe can’t speak any European languages.

Some of the best reasons that I can think of are the following:

1. The POC community exists only to make jokes about
2. POC communities exist only in pictorial books in Exclusive Books stores
3. Few people in [white] academia see POC as worthy of research
4. There are few interested [insiders] people who chronicle the history of POC dialects’ language quirks.
5. The publishing industry is not as transformed as they would like to think(pdf)
6. And POC communities are only worthy when they exude ‘blackness’, ie, poverty.

Another example of this erasure is ‘Daisy’ Dube’s murder on 12 June 2008. Few online South African newspapers mention this murder; I learnt of it from a comment on a blog that had criticised the blogger slash comedian for his sketch about a transwoman.

Rarely even do we get to write our own histories. That honour is reserved for people such as Chris Ledochowski, John Liebenberg and David Goldblatt. Don’t forget about anthropologists and sociologists. But they are nearly always fond[er] of stories that contribute to the single African story. And these stories all conform to the ‘one true’ way of telling stories about Africa. POC who do not fit the narrow mould of their story are erased. Their experiences are discounted as not ‘black’/'authentic’/'African’ enough.

The other reasons why few ever hear our stories is not there are too few people creating content. And the number one reason for this is systemic racism. This is racism that is built into our society and that might be eradicated in a couple of thousand years, though I highly doubt that. Umuzi’s writer page shows that only 11% of their writer base is black. Oops, sorry, K. Sello Duiker is dead. So out of the 98 writers on that page, only 11 are black. And Sir Richard Branson is a British citizen. But Umuzi has more POC writers on their books than Jonathan Ball Publishers; I could only find one living black author on JB Publishers’ fiction page.

Solani Ngobeni, the former International Young Publishing Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, said this: “We are not documenting our own stories and history; instead, we are allowing the former colonial master to do so on our behalf and then to resell it to us. Shame on us African publishers!“

I’d bet a substantial amount of money that most publishers believe they are being fair in sourcing unique stories to be published. But the reality is that transformation needs to happen sooner rather than later. And not just on junior levels. We need people in senior positions, people with clout, who can help us to get everyone’s story out there. This means that POC should be promoted and not side-lined.

Online media, on the other hand, does not rely on publishing houses; online media relies on eyeballs. But to start an online media empire one needs tools: decent broadband, some type of computer, networking, a smattering of good fortune, and writers. Oh, and time, too. These criteria exclude more than 95% of this country, let alone people of colour.

We don’t need more blogs written by POCs with Gammat jokes; we need more POC blogging that dissects the news and offer analysis; we need more POC blogging about fashion theory; we need more POC blogging that criticizes something, anything, everything; we need more POC blogging that can challenge the stereotypes the [white] media creates and perpetuates of us.

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