Swaziland Gender Links is to host a two-day summit and launch a Women in
Local Economic Development network (WLED).
It is being held in collaboration with the Commonwealth Local Government
Forum (CLGF) and the eSwatini Local Government Association (ELGA). It will take
place on 29-30 October 2020.
In
a statement Swaziland Gender Links said participants were drawn from local
government, civil society, media and faith-based organisations from all over
the kingdom. The summit will focus on the importance of mainstreaming
gender in different areas including sexual reproductive health and rights (SRHR),
climate change, gender-based violence, economic justice and media.
Swaziland Gender Links said, ‘Running under the hashtag #VoiceandChoice
the summit serves as a springboard to call governments to account for gender
equality commitments made in the Southern African Development Community (SADC)
Gender Protocol and the Sustainable Development Goals. The summit will pave way
for the localisation of the recently adopted SRHR strategy.’
During the summit entrepreneurs will be presenting case studies and will
hold a mini trade fair to showcase their wares at the Happy Valley hotel, Ezulwini,
pool side.
On the evening of 29 October the WLED network will be launched with the
presence of the British High Commissioner John Lindfield and the guest speaker will
be Swazi Minister of Housing Urban and Development Prince Simelane.
See also
One in three girls in
Swaziland experience sexual violence, new report reveals
Is there the slightest glimmer of hope that attitudes to
gays and lesbians in Swaziland might be changing?
Lindiwe Dlamini, the Director of Guidance and Counselling
at the Swazi Ministry of Education and Training, has called on school teachers to
give support to gays and lesbians in schools and the wider community.
Dlamini told a meeting, organised by the Swaziland
National Teachers Association (SNAT) as part of the Gender Links’ 16 Days of
Activism Against Gender Based Violence campaign, that gay and lesbian pupils
and school staff were afraid to declare their status because they feared
prejudice.
The meeting in Matsapha was attended by about 300
teachers from all over the kingdom.
Dlamini said teachers and school administrators must be
supportive to gays and lesbians because they are afraid to declare their status
as they feared that their colleagues or headmasters were lacking
confidentiality.
‘So many children who are gays and lesbians fall into
cracks because their teachers are ignoring them,’ the Times of Swaziland, a newspaper independent of King Mswati, the
kingdom’s absolute monarch, reported
her saying.
‘Teachers must have the culture of tolerance in their
hearts,’ she said.
Homosexuality is illegal in Swaziland and gays and
lesbians are often shunned
by their communities. In August 2013, local media in Swaziland reported
that two men suspected of being gay were banished
by community police from Mvutshini.
Rather than tackle the issue of prejudice and
discrimination against gays and lesbians in Swaziland, governments deny there
are gays and lesbians in the kingdom. In November 2011, Chief Mgwagwa Gamedze,
Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, said Swaziland
would not give human rights to gay people, because they did not exist in
the kingdom.
Gamedze was responding to criticism of Swaziland by a
United Nations working group on human rights that said the kingdom should enact
equality laws for LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and inter-sex)
people. Discrimination against this group of people in Swaziland is rife and
extends to workplaces, the churches and on to the streets.
HOOP (House of Our Pride), a support group for LGBTI
people,
reported to the United Nation in 2011, ‘It is a common scene for LGBTI to
be verbally insulted by by-passers in public places. [There is] defamatory name
calling and people yelling out to see a LGBTI person’s reproductive part are
some of the issues facing LGBTI in Swaziland.’
The Times of
Swaziland, part of a group of newspapers with a long history of publishing homophobic
articles, in an apparent change of attitude, welcomed Lindiwe Dlamini’s
comments on gays and lesbians in schools.
In an editorial
comment, the Times said Dlamini,
‘is simply saying that we should not judge others for the way they live their
lives but should instead provide emotional support when their lives get
complicated, as all our lives do at some point. The simple truth is that a
portion of our society is sexually attracted to members of the same sex; these
people establish relationships and suffer heartache and confusion over love
just like anybody else.
‘The only difference is that they can’t talk about it
without being judged or, sometimes, physically attacked. Our Constitution does
not address the right to sexual orientation explicitly – but it does address
the right of people to live the way they want to as long as they do not deprive
other people of their rights. Gay lifestyles fall squarely into this category.’
The abuse and rape of sex workers in Swaziland at the hands of police is a growing and widespread problem.
Prostitution is still illegal in the kindom, yet sex workers have reported targeted campaigns of rape and violence at the hands of Swazi police.
One well known investigator is notorious to sex workers in the capital, Mbabane.
‘He attacks us at our hotspot,’ said one 20-year-old sex worker. ‘He threatens us with a gun so that we do not run away. He then rapes us, after he is done, he lets his boys rape us while he watches, and we cannot report this to the police.’
The following article is distributed by Gender Links (Johannesburg), South Africa.
Mbabane, Swaziland — In a country known for its skyrocketing HIV and AIDS rates, conservatism, Christianity and traditional mores, it may come as a surprise that the abuse and rape of sex workers in Swaziland at the hands of police is a growing and widespread problem.
Sex work, known as one of the oldest trades, is still illegal in the country, yet sex workers have reported targeted campaigns of rape and violence at the hands of Swazi police.
One well known investigator is notorious to sex workers in the capital, Mbabane.
"He attacks us at our hotspot," said Phumzile Mamba*, a 20-year-old sex worker. "He threatens us with a gun so that we do not run away. He then rapes us, after he is done, he lets his boys rape us while he watches, and we cannot report this to the police."
Sex work in Swaziland is not confined to urban areas, but also common in rural areas, where patterns of abuse are often less evident.
A recent report by Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse (SWAAGA), in partnership with other local organisations, noted: "It is not just that they are arrested, to a greater or lesser degree they are forced by police to comply with demands for free sex or sex in exchange for not being arrested.
27% of the sex workers have at some point been arrested by state police for loitering. 60% of those arrested end up being sexually and physically abused by the police."
The study involved 150 sex workers, both female and male, from urban and rural communities.
In an attempt to intensify the fight against HIV and AIDS, several local organisations, including SWAAGA, have called for the decriminalisation of sex work in the country. They argue that the decriminalisation of sex work would enable their organisations and other partners to reach those involved in the illegal trade.
The National Strategic Framework for HIV and AIDS (NFS) identifies commercial sex as one of the key drivers of HIV and AIDS in Swaziland.
"Sex work is often characterised by high rates of partner change, low rates of condom use, unsafe sex and high rates of sexually transmitted infections.
Consequently, HIV infection is often high and the virus can quickly spread through sexual networks encompassing sex workers, clients, regular partners and associated lovers," states one NFS report.
Over the past several years, Swaziland has recorded one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world. Data from the country's 11th National Sero-Surveillance Report indicates that HIV prevalence increased from 39 to 42% between 2006 and 2008.
The Swaziland Demographic and Health Survey estimated the prevalence among the population between 15-49 years to be at 26%. This means that for every four Swazis in the reproductive age, one is HIV positive.
In such a climate, sex workers have become a vital link in HIV prevention in the country.
Another recent study, the 2010 United Nations Assembly Special Session on HIV and AIDS (UNGASS) found that Swaziland's sex workers are being pressured by clients not to use condoms. These clients often pay more money, something sex workers may find hard to turn down.
Sex workers are put at greater risk of contracting HIV, and the client then likely goes home to a wife, who is also put at risk.
Many times that "client" is a police officer.
Because sex work is criminalised, law enforcers often overlook that sex workers can be victims of crime, and street-based workers in particular experience high levels of assault and rape.
Yet Police Public Relations Officer Superintendent Wendy Hleta said the police have no knowledge of sex workers in the country because their trade is illegal.
However, she said in cases where they have been abused or violated by police or individuals, such cases should be reported.
"We have competent officers, both female and male, who can listen to their concerns even when it means being heard in private. We encourage them to come forward and report such violations," she said.
However, because their trade is illegal, sex workers rarely avail themselves of such services.
Zanale Dlamini*, a sex worker from Ezulwini said: "Even if I have a simple cold I don't go to Lobamba Clinic, everybody knows that I am a sex worker.
Although the nurses don't voice it directly at you, they act funny and make silly comments about you."
Poverty and unemployment remain the major forces pushing young Swazis into sex work.
Xoliswa Sithole*, a 24-year-old sex worker from Gundvwini said: "I looked for a job at the textile factories for five months and I got tired of "facing" (waiting outside the factory gates before being employed) there. My friends suggested that we try selling sex at Matsapha. At first I was afraid but I have now learnt the trade. I have a room at Matsapha and go home on weekends. At least I can afford food and pay for my children's school fees.
My family thinks I am working at the textile factories."
Until sex work is recognised and decriminalised in the country, desperate Swazi mothers like Sithole will continue to be raped and abused at the hands of police and other violent men. And as long as this happens the HIV prevalence rate for the entire country will only continue to rise.
Alec Lushaba is the editor of the Swazi Observer. This article is part of a special series on the 16 Days of Activism for the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that offers fresh views on everyday news. For more information on the 16 Days Campaign go to www.genderlinks.org.za
Readers who followed the saga of the way the Swazi media, church and ‘cultural’ leaders ganged up on a lesbian couple and hounded one of them into a suicide attempt after they announced a plan to marry might be interested in this article about discrimination in neighbouring South Africa.
Oliver Meth, a researcher at the University of KwaZulu Natal Centre for Civil Society, writes that ‘in some ways, South Africa is way ahead of the region when it comes to the rights of same sex couples’, but the church in South Africa still opposes ‘gay marriages’ even though they are legal in the country.
In an article for South Africa’s Gender Links, he writes, ‘Conservatism as a political movement and a way of life, needs to come to grips with the reality of gay relationships in precisely the same way it came to grips with its errors regarding to racial segregation: own up to its mistake, and simply expand its moral boundaries to include gays and gay marriage.
‘Most older conservatives now acknowledge that they once erred in “keeping blacks in their place.” They should make the same acknowledgement for gays and their right to marry, and live happy, open and contented lives in each other’s arms, without fear or discrimination.’
He also corrects the stereotypes that gays are ‘promiscuous, unable to form lasting relationships, and the relationships that do form are shallow and uncommitted’.
To read the full article, go to the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service section here.
There are significantly fewer women in media in Swaziland than men, a new report reveals.
A ‘glass ceiling’ exists that stops women from progressing in media houses and patriarchal attitudes dictate the pace of progress in the media industry.
Swazi women face invisible barriers in most departments, although they predominate in advertising and marketing, at which they excel, and in supportive roles such as finance and administration.
Also, the gender division of labour is still alive in the allocation of news beats in Swaziland media houses. The top three beats covered by women are Science & technology, Youth, Lifestyle. For men they are Sports, Sustainable development & environment, Disaster/War/Conflict.
These are the main conclusions of a report,Glass Ceilings: Women and Men in Southern Africa Media, published by Gender Links in partnership with the Gender and Media Southern African (GEMSA) Networkin Swaziland.
One of the key findings of this study is that media houses are inconsistent in their commitment to gender equality. And there are no comprehensive, systematic policies and practices to narrow the gender gap, with quotas frowned upon by male and female media practitioners alike. None of the media houses indicated that they had a sexual harassment or gender policy, and only one stated that they needed a gender policy.
Other findings are that women fill fewer senior management positions (29 percent) than men; men get better work deals: 59 percent are far more likely than women (41 percent) to be employed in open-ended, full-time contracts.
Many of the respondents in the study believe family commitments, work being too dangerous, and a lack of role models are the primary reasons why women do not enter or stay in the media industry.
Many respondents blamed the patriarchal society and cultural norms that do not see women in certain professions, much less as decision-makers in those professions.
One male told the study, ‘Women are not taken seriously in most cases, considering the Swazi culture that a man is “head of a woman”. That’s what makes women less considered for higher positions.’
And another male agreed, ‘Women and men are not treated equally. Women are still considered as minors, even at the workplace. This is a norm with our culture, thus no matter how competent they may be, they are made to be subordinate.’
Unfortunately, these views are nothing new in Swaziland. As I reported in November 2007, research among Swazi media houses showed that some male journalists found it difficult to accept women as colleagues. One told a researcher, ‘Women make lousy journalists because they are incompetent and easily intimidated.’
In the latest report Gender Links / GEMSA say there is a need for awareness-raising in media houses. Media houses also need to ensure they have functioning sexual harassment policies and that training programmes are in place to manage mainstreaming gender at the workplace and in editorial content.
Information on media and gender in Swaziland and the whole of southern Africa is now available online following the official opening of a new website called the Gender and Media Diversity Centre (GMDC).
By clicking here you can get to an on-line resource centre; a photo library; an email newsletter and online networks and communities.
The GMDC also contains searchable databases of resources.
The GMDC is aimed a number of users, including media practitioners, trainers and training institutions, students, researchers and gender and media activists.
The GMDC wants people to ‘interact with the centre’ in a number of ways. These include submitting ‘examples of your own research to the Media Diversity Journal and online; seek out collaborators on your projects and offer your own experience to others’.
The GMDC says that its main objectives are
- To promote more analytical, responsive and contextual journalism. - Develop and share a body of knowledge on gender and media diversity. - Publicise the work of media scholars, students and practitioners. - Provide resources that makes the links between media theory and practice. - Create a space for participatory discussion and debate on gender and media diversity. - Develop global and local partnerships with strategic organisations. - Become a centre of excellence on new approaches and fresh thinking.
Gender Links and the Gender and Media Southern Africa (GEMSA)manage the centre.
‘Women make lousy journalists because they are incompetent and easily intimidated.’
‘Women have a problem because their productivity and output is naturally low.’
These two comments come from male journalists in Swaziland. The second comment comes from a senior editor of one of the kingdom’s top two newspapers.
The comments are contained in a research report on gender and employment in the Swazi print media industry.
Nok’thula Hlophe studied the experiences women have as journalists in Swaziland by interviewing men and women who work at the Times of Swaziland and the Swazi Observer. Hlophe interviewed people of different ranks from reporters to editors and senior managers.
The two comments highlighted above represent just two of the discriminatory attitudes women journalists face in Swaziland. Of the people interviewed by Hlophe, men mostly held negative views of women in the newsroom.
Here are some of the comments reported.
One male reporter said that the number of women in the newsroom should be kept to a minimum. ‘Journalism is not office work but more like field work, there are assignments that women cannot handle because there are so many factors governing their natural being.’
A male senior editor said that there were few women in the newsroom because when recruiting only a few proved their capabilities.
The male senior editor said, ‘Women fall pregnant and cannot do the job very well. That period requires the reporter to stay away for some time and we lose a lot in the process. Some males get drunk and never turn up for work and others lose stories in the process. In worse situations management is forced to fire reporters.’
A male reporter said that there are no particular problems with women reporters. The problem is that women do not want to compromise their commitments such as marriage.
Another male reporter said, ‘If you could come into the newsroom after 5pm you could notice how impatient women become to leave.’
Seemingly working conditions in the media clash with the roles that women are expected to play. A female reporter said that the newsroom conditions are unfriendly for women because of their commitments. She said, ‘Every day we are expected to be at work by 8am and most of the time we leave around 9pm, you can imagine how bad the situation is for married women’.
Not all men had negative views. A male reporter said it was ‘necessary to have both men and women in the newsroom because we complement each other.’
Another male reporter said, ‘Journalism is not a muscle job so women are capable of doing the job men are. In our newsrooms there is too much male domination and that you can tell by merely reading the newspaper.’
Unsurprisingly, Hlophe, who undertook the research while a student at the University of Swaziland in 2004, wrote that women reporters believed that gender equality should apply in the newsroom.
A female reporter said, ‘Women are as capable as men are so they should be given the equal opportunities as men but what confuses me is that how can we have such a large number of men in the newsroom when there are many capable women out there?’
Another female reporter said that the main problem women faced was stereotyping. They are told that the best can never come from a woman and they believe it. As a result women were stagnant and did not strive for the best. ‘Even the little things they do are not given the attention they deserve because they never focus on their jobs and lack self-confidence.’
Another female reporter said that women tend to shift responsibilities to men, not because they cannot do the job themselves but because they have developed an inferiority complex because they have been discriminated against in the past.
Women report being discriminated against within newsrooms. According to one female reporter, editors do not trust them with the minor assignments they do every day so it would be very hard for them to entrust them with bigger tasks. ‘When you come back from covering an assignment the Editor will breathe down your neck questioning every statement you write such that you can really feel that this person doubts your work,’ she said.
Women journalists reported they were treated differently outside the newsroom, as well as inside. Sources tended to take advantage of female reporters and sometimes intimidated them because they knew women could be soft targets and that costs the women good stories. ‘The employers do not understand this and as a result women are perceived as incompetent,’ according to a female reporter.
Contrary to what the male editor said about women having a ‘naturally low’ productivity and output, a woman reporter told Hlophe that gender does not affect performance and productivity was monitored in the newsroom. ‘I learnt from this that performance does not have anything to do with whether you are male or female but it is about how you deal with the situations you face: do you have confidence in yourself?’ she said.
A male reporter said it was difficult to detect the failure or incompetence in women because the number of women in news reporting roles was so small. ‘The fact that they are never given major responsibilities they are always given easier assignments makes it even harder because it is obvious that they cannot fail to do a simple story from a press release.’
The attitudes to women displayed in Swazi newsrooms reflect those of Swazi society generally. A woman senior manager said, ‘Women are relegated to a lower level by culture such that if women rise to higher positions in society some people view that as an abnormality. The belief is that a women’s place is in the kitchen.’
In the research Hlophe reminds us that media play a large role in promoting (or not) gender equality and in the past the Swazi media has been seen to be perpetuating gender inequality by concentrating on men alone.
Hlophe puts the situation in Swazi newsrooms in a larger context. She quotes Gender Links saying that women’s voices are underrepresented across the media in Swaziland and are virtually missing in certain topics. Older women are invisible in both the print and the electronic media. Women’s voices are not even heard in proportion to their strength in occupational categories, such as agriculture.
This situation is unlikely to change anytime soon if the negative attitudes male dominated newspapers have to their own women staff is anything to go by.
I have been writing a lot lately about various aspects of gender in the Swazi media. Last Thursday for example, I wrote about how ‘ordinary’ women were hardly ever featured in the Swazi press.
Thinking about the raw deal women get in Swaziland reminded me of some research that was conducted in 2005 that looked at what women (and men) wanted from their media in Swaziland. One of the study’s conclusions was that more and diverse stories about women would sell papers.
The Swaziland Gender and Media Audience Study conducted by Gender Links was the first (and to date only) comprehensive study of how people in Swaziland access the news and what kinds of things they like to read, hear and see.
The study interviewed 88 women and 91 men, a total sample of 179 from three of Swaziland’s major urban centres.
The study found that radio was by far the most important source of news (53 per cent of women, 63 per cent of men). The largely rural country in which literacy levels are relatively low explains this.
Television was the second main source of news for women (31 per cent) and the third main source for men (17 per cent). The second most important source of news for men was newspapers (19 per cent) with women 16 per cent. No women and very few men (1 per cent) access the Internet.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found there was a strong correlation between levels of education and the main source of news. Women and men with primary level education constitute the highest proportion of those who chose radio as their main source of news. Women with secondary and tertiary education constitute the highest proportion of those who chose television as their main source of news. People with tertiary education constitute the highest proportion of those who chose newspapers as their main source of news.
Most of the women (74 per cent) and men (63 per cent) interviewed prefer short news reports to any other news genre. A low proportion of Swazi women (7 per cent) preferred in-depth features (compared to 24 per cent of men). Double the number of women (14 per cent) as men (7 per cent) cited news that asks for feedback as their favourite genre.
Who chooses the news medium? Most men in Swaziland (60 per cent) make their own decisions about where they get their news from compared to 53 per cent of women. Given the status of women in the country the fact that the majority of women make their own choice with little interference from spouse or partner is significant. This could be a warning to media owners that they ought to take women consumers more seriously in their own right.
Representation of women in the news There are mixed views in Swaziland about whether the news reflects the concerns of women and men equally and about whether women are accessed often or seldom as sources. The study recorded that women constitute 17 per cent of news sources in Swaziland
There were strong perceptions of gender biases in the news. When asked to identify the roles in which women and men are most frequently portrayed in the news audiences said that women predominate in roles that emphasise their vulnerability and or physical attributes, while men feature in more diverse range of roles often associated with power, money and prestige.
There were strong views about the way women are portrayed as sex objects in news media. Swaziland is a conservative society reflected in the findings that 36 per cent of women and 49 per cent of men said they felt uncomfortable when they saw very sexual images of women in the news. Only 6 per cent of women and 4 per cent of men said such images encouraged them to buy newspapers or watch the news.
Women (76 per cent) and men (41 per cent) said they would find the news more interesting if the ideas and views of women were reported more often. Most women (79 per cent) and men (51 per cent) agreed that the news would be more interesting if there were stories about women doing a wider range of things.
Conclusions The Swaziland Gender and Media Audience Study leads us to conclude that media decision makers should be aware that women make decisions about what to buy / hear / see. Also, that sex does not sell in Swaziland. This will come as a shock to the editors of the weekend and Sunday newspapers in Swaziland.
Newspaper reports on women tend to focus on successful or prominent women rather than ‘ordinary’ people.
This was the main funding from a report published recently.
The Media Monitoring Project researched newspapers in South Africa as part of its Women’s Day campaign to get the media to show their support for women by focusing not only on the prominent women in government and business, but especially on ‘ordinary’ women and their roles in effecting social change. This includes women who successfully entered the workforce in previously male dominated environments, as women were, and to some extent still are, excluded from some of these workplaces.
The report stated that the media tended to continue in the ways of the past and concentrated on prominent women and did not cover ‘normal women’ engaging in acts to change society.
Women’s Day on 9 August 2007 was a national day for South Africa and so not marked in Swaziland. However, a study of the Swazi Press would reveal that things are not much different in the kingdom.
To see whether the newspapers in Swaziland were any different to those in South Africa I surveyed a week’s worth of papers (13 – 19 August 2007).
The first thing I noticed was how few reports and articles that had women as central characters were published at all. In the Swazi Observer I counted 12 over the entire week and in the Times of Swaziland I counted only eight. There were three in the Weekend Observer and one each in the Swazi News (published Saturday) and the Times Sunday.
In the Observer only four of the stories involved ‘ordinary’ women of which two concerned women in rural community development projects. One was about women receiving a donation for HIV work and the final story involved a court case.
The stories involving ‘prominent’ people in the Observer included stories about the king’s wives, finalists in the Business Women of the Year Award (all from urban companies as far as I could tell), the Deputy Prime Minister (a woman) urging women to take a lead in development and the Minister of Tourism (also a woman) who was nominated for an ‘achievement’ award.
In the Times, all but one of the stories were about ‘ordinary’ people, but most were about women who had suffered misfortune, for example as victims or perpetrators of crime. The only ‘prominent’ story was about the Business Woman of the Year nominations.
The Weekend Observer had three stories, which concentrated on women and all were about prominent women (a princess, the director of Women and Law of South Africa and the chief executive officer (ceo) of the Observer group of newspapers). The Observer ceo was reported saying that women in Swaziland are still marginalized. The irony of her statement is there for all to see when you consider how little her own newspapers do to represent women in their pages.
The Swazi News only had one story about a woman and this was about a US singing star who was due to tour South Africa.
The Times Sunday only had one story that featured a woman and this was about an ‘ordinary’ woman who witnessed a shooting.
These statistics should make worrying reading for the editors of Swaziland’s newspapers. What they show is that hardly any stories about women (prominent or ordinary) get into their papers.
Last week the results of the 2007 Swaziland population census revealed that there are more females than males living in Swaziland. That’s an awful lot of people being ignored by the newspapers.
Also, research by Gender Links into what people in Swaziland said they wanted to see in their newspapers has revealed they want to see more stories about women.
This leads me to conclude that if Swaziland’s newspapers want to have healthy sales figures editors need to rethink their news agenda very quickly.
The Tabloid Explosion, an exploration of the tabloid press and television in Southern Africa, was launched on Tuesday (12 September 2007). This special edition of the Gender and Media Diversity Journal looks at the debate about whether tabloids are a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing. It also looks at the human rights perspective and whose voices get into the tabloids.
The journal is well worth reading and I recommend it, but I took exception to one of the articles, which claimed that there were no tabloid newspapers in Swaziland. I think this is wrong. And wrong big time.
First of all we need to define what we mean by ‘tabloid’ and then ask why people are bothered about whether the press is tabloid or not.
The main characteristic of the tabloid is that it concentrates on news that is not serious. I wrote on Wednesday that the two daily newspapers in Swaziland, the Swazi Observerand the Times of Swaziland had assigned between 40 percent and 44 percent of editorial space to entertainments and sport (the most ‘non-serious’ news there is) combined. That doesn’t leave room for much else.
Other things you notice about the tabloid press are that they have a large amount of visual material, such as pictures, and big headlines and a lot of the pages are in vivid colour.
Tabloid newspapers contain short reports, which lack detail and avoid complicated explanations; for the tabloids there are usually only two sides of a story (often with someone who is ‘right’ and someone who is ‘wrong’). In the Swazi newspapers, often there are not even two sides to a story, as reporters prefer to use only a single source of information in their reports.
People think it matters whether newspapers are tabloid or not because there is a general widespread unhappiness about the state of the media. This isn’t something that is particular to Swaziland or southern Africa. Across the world there is a feeling that standards of journalism are falling and papers today are worse than newspapers in the past.
Critics believe today’s newspapers contain sensationalism, prurience, triviality and malice and in a drive for profits newspaper owners who are competing for small and even diminishing markets use ‘tabloid’ type material to gain readers who are attractive to advertisers. It is by attracting advertisers that the newspaper companies make their profits.
So how ‘tabloid’ is the Swazi Press? Take a look at any front page of any of the five newspapers that are published in the kingdom during any week and you can see that usually there is a big picture, a big headline (only one story is on the page), hardly any text (sometimes none at all). There may be ‘teaser’ lines and pictures that direct people to articles that are inside the newspaper.
The front page of the Times of Swaziland from 22 August 2007 (pictured above) shows all the elements of the tabloid. A big headline ‘Residents Fight Cops Over Booze’ dominates the page, along with three subsidiary headlines (e.g. ‘As truck carrying booze overturns in 12-car accident’). These are meant to whet the appetitive of readers and make them want to read more.
There is no text with the headline; instead you have to turn over to page two to find out what the story’s all about. There is a big dramatic picture (in colour) showing the booze on the road and people trying to get at it.
The rest of the page has ‘tasters’ for other reports that are inside the paper (‘Manzini Wanderers Lose Violence Case’) and details of a competition. If you stand back from the page a little you can see that it is not really a ‘news’ page, instead it is a poster advertising the newspapers. It is meant to look exciting on a newsstand and encourage people to buy the paper, even if they had not intended to. The Times of Swaziland’s rival the Swazi Observer is trying to do exactly the same thing with its front page.
One way of getting an idea of what kinds of stories newspapers think are most important is to look at what they publish as their main (or lead) story on their front pages.
I looked at one month’s worth of all the Swazi newspapers (8 August to 7 September 2007) and found that the stories were overwhelmingly sensational or trivial. In the Times, 11 out of 21 front pages had a crime story (in the Observer it was seven out of 21). The other front pages in the Times covered stories such as road accidents, the unexpected death of a prominent person, and the prices of bus fares and bread.
The Observer had a similar news agenda and on seven out of the 21 days both the Times and the Observer led the paper on the same story.
In the whole month there were only two stories that were about politics and both were in the Times.
During the month the Swazi News (which comes out on Saturdays) had four editions and three of them were about sex, which included one about a DJ and newsreader allegedly having sex in a radio studio, which I have written about before.
The Weekend Observer (another Saturday paper) also had four editions, two of these were ‘serious’ political stories, another story was about a minister being involved in a car crash and the fourth was about students forging their O-level certificates.
The Times Sunday had four editions and all the main stories could be called ‘serious’ to some extent. These included an attempt by ‘traditionalists’ in Swaziland to sack a High Court judge they disagree with; and the report of a police shooting a man in cold blood, which I have written about previously.
Although the front pages in the Times Sunday are serious, the inside pages rely heavily on sensationalism and trivia. It was the Times Sunday that published the articles describing gays as ‘evil’ and supporting the sexual harassment of women, which I have written about before.
What the survey of the front pages demonstrates, I think beyond any doubt, is that the Swazi newspapers are tabloid in form and in content.
So what should newspapers be like? A serious newspaper should do some or all of the following:
Examine what government is and is not doing - Report and interpret the news - Influence citizens’ opinions - Provide space for rational debate - Set agenda for government action - Socialize citizens about politics - Encourage a political culture to evolve
The Swazi press does hardly any of the above, a topic I’ll return to again in the future.
This is an edited and revised version of a presentation I made on Tuesday 11 September 2007 at the launch of the Tabloid Explosion at Highways Africa, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
Today’s Swazi Observer (20 August 207) has a special eight-page supplement on gender in the Swazi economy.
It contains reports and feature articles on a range of topics including how women are moving up in the business world and ‘gender bending’ women who are making a success of work in areas that are traditionally thought of as male preserves. Among the highlights is the story of Ntombiyenkosi Mabuza, a woman with no arms who sews clothing and baby blankets using her feet.
The supplement makes interesting reading as it contains the kind of stories about women that rarely get into the media in Swaziland.
The supplement was written and produced by participants at the Business Unusual workshop that took place in Mbabane all last week. The workshop was conducted by Gender Links with the support of the Journalism and Mass Communication Department at the University of Swaziland (UNISWA) and the Netherlands Institute of Southern Africa.
Participants were invited from all the main media houses in Swaziland, but most did not attend. Business World magazine was there all week, SBIS radio turned up for most of the lunches, but the main newspapers and television only made fleeting visits.
Third year journalism diploma students from UNISWA did most of the work in the supplement. It is sad that more people from the mainstream media did not attend the workshop, because if what they produce in their newspapers, and on radio and television, every day of the week is anything to go by they need to think a lot more about the way they report on women.
A great example of this need happened this week (even as the workshop was in session). On Tuesday the finalists of the Business Woman of the Year Awards (BWYA) was announced at a breakfast meeting. Swazi TV went and filmed the opening speakers at the event who were both men. As soon as the women started speaking, the camera was packed away and Swazi TV left.
The following day (Wednesday 15 August 2007) the Swazi Observer ran reports on the event. The main story headed Fresh List of BWYA Finalists quoted only men and the two pictures the newspaper used to illustrate the story were both of men.
The Times of Swaziland did better. In its report it quoted one woman and two men.
One of the sessions at the Business Unusual workshop was about how to get a better gender balance in reporting.
Here for anyone who is interested here are some of the tips participants were given:
- In your reporting reflect the diversity of age groups, social classes, ethnic groups, physical characteristics of women.
- Include more than one perspective or one voice in the story.
- Include more than just the views of men, and the views of only men and women who are in positions of power or formal authority.
- Seek out the ‘missing’ voices – be proactive.
- Represent women in a way that allows them to speak with dignity and authority
- Be conscious of language that reinforces stereotypes.
