The structure of "When South Africa Called, We Answered" is chronological, consisting of writings specifically for this book as well as from his unpublished personal journal and for various publications, including "Africa Report, "MORE," "Z Magazine," "Truthout," and others, and extending from how Schechter was drawn into the anti-Apartheid movement to its history, fruition, and aftermath.
Simple? Schechter finished an A to Z biography of Nelson Mandela ("Mandiba A to Z" [Seven Stories Press, 2013]), the radius of the liberation, just weeks before the 2013 death of this epochal hero. That, too, subsumes some of the history described herein. Mandela may also occupy the heart of Schechter's narrative of this latest book, but during much of the chronology of it Mandela is imprisoned, a chrysalis in a cocoon, while the dance slowly acquires motion, violence one medium that simply didn't work.
The publication of "When South Africa Called, We Answered" purposely coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the successful revolution and the fiftieth anniversary of the author's activist, multimedia involvement in it.
A compact chronology of this involvement in freeing South Africa occurs in the first chapter, in the form of repeated questions: did they decide to deny him a visa in 1990 because: of the TV program? When he helped produce the "Sun City" recorded anthology in 1985? Or the plethora of anti-apartheid articles that appeared before then or his first participation in an anti-apartheid sit-in in 1964. . . . The questions continue, and then some answers: the strong influences that absorbed him more and more into the issues: Ruth First, the journalist/activist whom he met at the London School of Economics (LSE); the New Left activist Pallo Jordan who would join the cabinet of a post-liberation president, and another LSE colleague, Ronnie Kasrils, who would become a minister under Thabo Mbeki, Mandela's successor as president of the new South Africa.
Another close associate of Schechter was the ANC (African National Congress, the country's oldest liberation movement) leader Joe Slovo, to whom, along with his wife, the martyred Ruth First, the book is dedicated; both were colleagues of Nelson Mandela. Slovo
"negotiate[d] the deal that made democratic elections possible. He was Minister of Housing in Nelson Mandela's government and consistently ranked #2, right behind Mandela, as the person black South Africans respected most."
First and Slovo "inspired me to get involved with South Africa and I did so for the next thirty years as a researcher, writer, TV producer and filmmaker."
Insufficient and shallow media treatment of events in South Africa was another force that drew Schechter to fill in so much for his readers and audiences. Among the problems was that the CIA had journalists on its payroll, misinforming through proprietary companies and phony news agencies. The South African government even imitated GlobalVision's "South Africa Now" to divert viewers from the true reports, but the imposter production, "Global News," didn't last long.
And the American civil rights movement was offered up as analogous, even though our fight was over extending the protections of a constitution to all citizens. "'South Africa Now' [which aired for 156 weeks] sought to provide an insiders view of a struggle for majority rule and economic transformation, not just for civil rights under a structurally inequitable system." South Africa had no constitution. Racism was legal, enshrined in its laws. "The economic underpinnings of apartheid were hardly considered and the liberation movements were rarely publicized by the media."
Apartheid had modeled itself on the early 1950s inquisitional tactics of the "witch hunter" Sen. Joseph McCarthy, to preserve its diamond-studded symbiosis with the West. One of the catalysts of its laws had been exploitation of black labor.
Our own civil rights struggle continues. "Jesse Jackson explained how the histories of the ANC and the civil rights struggle in our country were intertwined, how the South African ANC was formed in the same year as our own NAACP, how the two movements turned to nonviolent bus boycotts and defiance campaigns at about the same time, and how ideas between these two black communities cross-pollinated across the oceans over the years. It was instructive, and precisely the type of contextual information that was missing in most media accounts." [underlining mine]
Schechter's media manifesto is simple:
We declare before our country and the world that the giant media combines who put profit before the public interest do not speak for us. We proclaim this democratic media charter and pledge ourselves to work tirelessly until its goals have been achieved. We urge all Americans of good will, and people throughout the world who want to participate in a new democratic information order to join with us.
We call upon our colleagues, readers, editors, and audiences to inform themselves and the American people about the dangers posed by the concentration of media power in fewer and fewer hands.
What a gaping difference there was between reports by journalists who knew and what the mainstream press offered the public--relatively little for many years.
"Blacks in Africa had become a black hole in the American press."
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