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URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT: Dans le cadre de l’organisation de la fête de l’internet au Bénin édition 2001, les associations ORIDEV et ISOC Bénin organisent un Forum de discussion thématique sur l’internet au Bénin. Ce Forum appelé Forum I-Bénin, durera 45 jours et aura lieu à partir du 03 mars. Trois thémes seront discutées pendant ce forum : 1/ Amélioration de la connectivité au Bénin 2/ Mise en oeuvre d’un NIC au Bénin 3/ Promotion de contenu béninois sur Internet Chaque théme sera discuté durant deux semaines. Chacun de ces thémes sera introduit par un texte rédigé par un spécialiste de la question. Toute personne s’intéressant aux Nouvelles Technologies, étudiant(e), professionnel(le) de l’informatique ou de l’internet, fournisseurs d’accès, et particulier, peut s’abonner au Forum. Pour ce faire, vous pouvez: a/ soit envoyer un message à l’adresse majordomo@iafric.net avec comme contenu du messagesubscribe forum-oridev-isoc. Tous les messages adressés à cette adresse doivent être en texte simple (pas de format html). b/ soit aller à la page www.iafric.net/forum.htm <http://www.iafric.net/forum.htm>pour une inscription en ligne. Un message de confirmation vous sera envoyé.  THIS ISSUE OF NEWS UPDATE IS A SPECIAL REPORT AND WE REVERT TO OUR NORMAL WEEKLY SCHEDULE FROM 25 MARCH WITH ISSUE 52. THE GAP IN OPUBLISHING WAS FOR A TRIP TO SOUTH AFRICA FOLLOWED BY A HOLIDAY. ISSUE NO 51 CAPE TOWN
SPECIAL: Cape Town is one of the few cities on the African continent that can make a claim for being a creative city. News Update’s Russell Southwood looks at what this means, why it’s important to the development of new media in Africa and how Cape Town measures up when looked at from this viewpoint. Normally News Update focuses fairly closely on African new media content, technology and the regulatory frameworks that control these two areas. In this one-off, special issue we take the lens out a little wider to focus on a range of issues that will be crucial to a concern about whether Africa will make its mark in international content markets. Cape Town played host to an important set of conferences at the beginning of the month. The G8 Dot Force met followed by the African Telecommunications Union’s Ministerial Oversight Committee and then the Commonwealth Expert Group on Information Technology. At the same time there was the Fourth International Design Indaba (see http://www.designindaba.com). Ravi Naidoo, host of this year’s event wants it to become the "Cannes" (the annual international film festival in France) of the international design sector. Cape Town is clearly putting itself on the international map in a way that could make it a creative city. What is a creative city? Internationally, you can say quite easily that places like New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris are powerhouses for the production of content that is sold all over the world. Things happen creatively in cities that exert a powerful gravitational pull on creative people, both culturally and economically. For example, if you want to make a big budget movie, you’ll need to be in Los Angeles for some time. The giants of English-language publishing are found in London and New York. Design "hot spots" are better distributed but are nearly always close to major creative centres. So why is the existence of creative cities important to the development of new media in Africa? Because the technology is simply "a big biro". Unless you’ve got something to say (and/or to sell), you will not attract attention. In the developed world’s content markets there is a voracious appetite for new ideas and influences from other cultures. The effect of what is sometimes called the "three minute culture" can often mean that this interest often has an extremely short time-span before it moves on to the next new thing. The "buzz" of new ideas comes from creative people being immersed in a wide range of experiences and influences. This tends to happen in cities where cultures collide in the same breath as social problems. Africa is largely rural and its cities are not always memorable in a positive sense. But it will tend to be out of these cities that the exciting cultural ideas and products will come. This won’t exclude rural experiences or a relationship with those in rural areas but the skills required to articulate these experiences will tend to continue to be found in cities. Without these skills, new media in Africa will remain a one-way traffic going North-South. South Africa has the content and technical skills to reverse this flow. Cape Town is potentially a bridgehead for that process, The factors that lead to the growth of a creative city are outlined below. Against these headings, we look at how Cape Town measures up: A critical mass of creative people with access to technical resources Most African economies remain production-oriented (for example, mining) rather than consumer or service-oriented. When we visited four African countries for the first issue of News Update (4.1), the number of designers in each was quite small with the exception of Kenya. Likewise their advertising and broadcast sectors. Cape Town is a positive giant using this kind of head count. According to Alan Levin of the Cape Information Technology Initiative (CITI), there are 40-50 internet and technology companies in Cape Town, 35 of which are members of CITI. Although the majority of South Africa’s technology companies are clustered in Gauteng, Cape Town has a profile as the place where the creative content work gets done. It is also home to a number of large companies (M-Web, World Online) and several of the larger ISPs. However Cape Town is too small as a city by itself to support a wide range of companies so most market their work beyond the City’s boundaries to Johannesburg-based companies and elsewhere. One of CITI’s major initiatives is the Bandwidth Barn that seeks to create an ICT cluster in a 4000 sq m building in central Cape Town that offers excellent bandwidth in the local context. This serviced office premises is home to 25 companies with access to file-serving and groupware across the building. On a broader front, it is claimed that South African advertising agencies are consistent winners at international competitions and are regarded as the most polished producers outside Britain and America. Not all are based in Cape Town but a significant number are found there. The allied film industry generates around R2 billion annually in an average of four to six film shoots a day in the Cape Town summer season. There is a spread of design companies who are earning a significant proportion of their income in overseas markets. South Africa often produces some of the freshest design and craft products and these are found in some profusion in Cape Town. However, unless Cape Town’s creative companies can expand their markets internationally, its creative ambitions remain on shaky ground. The vulnerability of these "assets" is perhaps best exemplified by the "pull-back" at M-Web (see below) and the recent closure of Dockside (more in issue 52 to follow). Plural legislative framework for content production and independence of production Creative people need the freedom to express themselves and sufficient independence to be able to develop their ideas. Neither of these qualities is widely available on the African continent. Too many of its politicians fear the bracing effects of free expression. Under admittedly difficult circumstances, the current generation of ANC politicians are remarkably thin-skinned. Nonetheless Cape Town and more widely South Africa as a whole has a widely respected old media in its newspapers. However in the more sensitive field of broadcasting, things are much less well developed. The SABC/ETV duopoly produces only a small amount of local content and from the little we saw, not much of it is remarkable. Perhaps the economic underpinning for this type of local content is hard to find: people who lack purchasing power are poor prospects for TV advertisers. The ambitions of the consortium that launched ETV may have been too "scattergun" and the company has had to be rescued by Rembrandt. Sources close to the Government say that it will look again at broadcasting once it has got through the Telkom IPO and the opening up of the telecomms market. There has been some discussion about the possibility of regional broadcasters and this would greatly strengthen Cape Town’s position. However the underlying question of size of market remains. Politicians and regulators could do worse than look at what has been achieved in the UK through uncoupling the production and commissioning roles. Broadcasters need not contain both these functions. With the UK’s Channel 4 acting effectively as a "publisher" rather than a production entity, its output lead to the creation of a large number of independent production companies that helped the growth of the media sector in the UK. This growth was underpinned with the parallel growth of post-production facilities. With media being digital, the convergence of broadcast and new media has opened a whole fresh field of potential growth opportunities. There is no need for slavish copying but there are lessons in growing the broadcast sector as an important content producer. In a parallel field, many we spoke to were concerned to see a proper licensing framework for community radio. There needs to be more flexibility so it is possible to see if there is the stamina and skills required to make a station a success. Stations of this kind can act as the "A & R" research function for larger commercial stations. Local music producers can get their music heard and a local market for music can take off even amongst the poorest of the poor. Reggae in Jamaica grew up out of the slums of Kingston. The ability to take cultural influences from a wide range of sources and make them your own A music like reggae came out a wide range of influences. Over time it beg, stole or borrowed its influences but made each thing it acquired its own. It stayed rooted in its local context but negotiated an ever widening sphere of influence and markets. This negotiation between the locally produced cultural product and the internationally sold is not without pain. Things need to be changed to make them accessible to other people. Trends come and go. No-one group of people is more aware of this than Africa’s musicians themselves who have been feted and left more than once. However the most interesting culture that has had any purchase on people’s "mindspace" and in international markets has come come about from the mixing (or creative tensions) between cultures. A UK visitor to the Design Indaba captured that spirit:"Cape Town feels like a town in flux, and it’s this disequilibrium that can be such a fertile ground for creativity. It’s really how this flux progresses and resolves that will determine how the creative environment in South Africa develops." In a short time in a city, it is difficult to spot the different ways in which the processes of cultural change and fusion are taking place. But always it is about how creative people seek to "push the envelope" in terms of existing forms or ways in which users can do things. And this process remains in tension with traditional cultures and received ways of doing things. Metaphorically it’s like the wire sculpture radios on sale in Cape Town. It’s about blending a culture of production that is uniquely South African with a modern twist. Ability to deal with regional and international markets All creative cities worldwide have the ability to deal with both their regional and international markets. This makes them interesting to other content buyers and assures their place on the map. In turn your markets (both national and regional) have to be large enough to warrant attention. If you’re over 12 hours or more by air from your main international markets, there has to be a lot of good reasons for them to come and see you. Cape Town has the potential to be the actual (rather than virtual) creative portal to South African content markets and a range of other regional markets in Africa. (A small diversion: Why Cape Town rather than Johannesburg? Try visiting downtown Jo’burg without an armed guard and no, creatives don’t do business in the suburbs. Tell me that the fear of crime in that city does not place clear physical limits on the mixing of cultures described in the previous section.) Cape Town is base for one the continent’s largest African ISPs, M-Web and a division of UUNet. However the recent launch of ABSA’s free ISP (in association with the UK’s Affinity PLC) means that M-Web has cut back on staff and halted its expansion into the rest of Africa. Tanya Aconne, its Executive Producer for content outside South Africa has left to go to UNICEF to work on their web development. ABSA’s move could not have come at a worse time for M-Web. It has achieved 260,000 subscribers and although in subscription terms its breakeven point is still some way off, the distance to be covered is not as great as you might imagine. It sees the free subscription ISP as a short-term threat but one that it will see off in the medium term. ABSA has attracted over 60,000 subscribers and the only other "free" ISP Excess I-Net is believed to have only 40,000 subscribers. Since Affinity is paying ABSA for each subscriber, it is simply a question of how deep their pockets are. Some say a year but nobody really knows. M-Web claims that its "walled garden" strategy of restricting content to paying subscribers (a sort of AOL in reverse) is working and that they’re holding the line in subscription terms. Notwithstanding these short-term local difficulties, M-Web is well placed to expand in content terms. Its parent company owns magazines and newspapers, a digital satellite channel (that sells across the continent), interesting technology companies and an education company. Not a bad hand from which to start to address regional and international markets but will they be interested in doing it through new rather than re-used content? The difficulty for Cape Town (and South Africa generally) is that even though it is one of the continent’s largest markets in all senses it remains small in content terms. Something pretty amazing has got to happen to put the spotlight on Cape Town that goes beyond the odd bit of international work and occasional conferences. Jamaica and reggae were put on the map internationally through the success of the film The Harder They Come. Other countries like Australia have made their presence felt through film and broadcasting. It supported its film industry for both cultural and economic reasons. It is hard to be suggesting the idea of supporting local film-makers when there are so many pressing social concerns but maybe that is what it will take. Cape Town (and South Africa more generally) has the talent and probably the ideas to become a presence in the international league. It has the potential to become a creative city but only its ideas and talent will show whether it can lay its hands on that elusive status. Acknowledgements Some of the ideas used in this article have been drawn from two books and an article: The Creative City, Charles Landry, Comedia and Bass Culture - When Reggae was King, Lloyd Barrett. The latter is a history of reggae music and its spread around the world. The article Designed in SA was published in the March 2001 issue of City Life and some quotes are taken from it.
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This page last updated on January 28 2004.
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