Projects Abroad Témoignages

Journalism in South Africa - Craig Ferriman

Want an adventure with cultural enlightenment, new experiences, opportunities to build your writing portfolio and journalistic ability then read on.

I travelled to Cape Town, South Africa as the very first ever Journalism volunteer with Projects Abroad in South Africa. To say I was apprehensive would be an understatement but I quickly came to realise I needn't have been and that those initial nerves were all part of what proved to be a life-changing experience.

On my first day at the 'Daily Voice' newspaper, I was reporting on the xenophobic marches in the large township of Khayelitsha that were being held in response to the looting and violent attacks from a portion of the community on refugees from further north in the continent taking the jobs of South African workers. In my first week alone I visited the scene of a church robbed by local gangsters in the Cape Flats area of Mitchell's Plain and reported exclusively for the paper in a double page spread on underage drinking in the townships' shebeens (drinking taverns that operate from people's homes).

I shadowed nearly every reporter in the newsroom on stories. On a lighter day, I went to Athlone in the Cape Flats to witness the auction of Taliep Peterson's home which went under the hammer to pay for the legal expenses of his widowed wife who is still in the dock at the time of writing this for allegedly killing her husband in an upstairs bedroom of the property.

Whilst the process was commonly to shadow a reporter and photographer to the scene of a story, I was asked a couple of times to attend a story on my own with just a photographer and bring back the copy. In so doing, I started, quite by accident, a 'Veggie Idols' contest in the paper after reporting on a woman's potato that was that resembled the shape of a human foot. This led to the 'Voice' being inundated with readers claiming they had vegetables at home in interesting and peculiar shapes most memorably a potato shaped like a human penis!

The hot topic at the time I was there was the spate of xenophobic violence directed towards refugees of other African nations claiming asylum in South Africa and the call for swift action from the City and Provincial Governments respectively to repatriate refugees into their communities again. To say there weren't frustrating days in the placement would be a blatant lie. Sitting inside the Civic Centre waiting for comment from the office of the Mayor of Cape Town, Helen Zille, only to find at 6pm that evening there was no news, no anarchy, and nothing to report on at all was certainly irritating to say the least. Sitting through a press conference with the Premier of the Western Cape, Ebrahim Rassool, that amounted to little, was equally frustrating.

That said, I travelled far and wide within the Cape Town locality with the 'Daily Voice.' I was fortunate to see areas of South Africa that most tourists never get to see and what's more I was safely protected by the caring and kind reporters that I worked alongside who were always incredibly supportive and patient with me, their resident 'whitey,' as I was so affectionately nicknamed. The politically incorrect nickname 'whitey' typifying the difference in our day-to-day cultures because terms of racial inference being casually bandied around in fun would be highly frowned upon in my Western nation; but T.I.A. This Is Africa.

I also had numerous meetings with the cops. It's the duty of all Voice reporters to obtain comment from the communication officer at the nearest police station when covering an incident of crime. The communication officer at the police station in Kraaifontein township saw me three times in as many weeks and discussed incidents of underage drinking, murder and young children going missing. The only hairy moment I had with the South African police force was when duty officers were on a routine drive by in the City Centre and saw my colleague grab a camera from the back of the company car which I passing to him. My colleague proceeded to hide the camera under his hoody and dash across the road in an attempt to capture undercover photographs of a dilapidated hospital. The police suspected that my colleagues may have been stealing the camera from me. They also wondered if it was my car and my colleagues had hijacked it from me. Either way the issue was resolved quickly but opened my eyes to the kind of petty crime that are a regular occurrence in a country where the different sections of society are drawn apart either by skin colour or the economic gaps that entrench South African society.

Leaving my placement was very emotional. The time I spent with my colleagues had been a real learning curve for my writing, my understanding of the ethics of Journalism, and an insight into the length to which journalists have to go to communicate often hard or complicated stories to their reading public. It also provided me with a unique opportunity to stand and look through a looking glass at real South African life.

It's not just a coincidence that as you drive down the N1 motorway towards Cape Town International Airport and have the townships of Khayelitsha and Langa at the side of you, that the townships are inset and hidden by high fences. The government does everything it can to hide the starkest depravation of its own people from tourists who visit the country. What is more, South Africa wants the global perception of its own poverty to be as far from the centre of the radar as possible as it has a World Cup coming in two years time.

Away from work I lived with a host family in the leafy suburb of Plumstead. Mr & Mrs. Martin and their son Angelo made me feel very much part of the family. We ate dinner together every evening and one of the most wonderful elements of this cultural trip was the exchange of ideas and stories; embracing our differences whilst also accepting the common values that we share. I'll never forget talking to my host mother over rooibos tea late at night about her family's struggle through the apartheid era and subsequent joy at being able to move into a nicer neighbourhood when the ANC government removed the restrictions on where black and coloured citizens could reside.

My weekends were just as busy as my volunteering in the week. On three weekends I got out of the city. I went ostrich riding, cave walking, quad-biking and abseiling in Oudtschoorn, wine tasting at the winelands in Stellenbosch, and shark-cage diving in Hermanus.

It was just as hard to get bored in Cape Town as I squeezed in a visit to Robben Island to the maximum security facility when Nelson Mandela spent most of his 27 year incarceration. I also ascended to the top of Table Mountain in the cable car and watched the World Cup winning South Africa play Italy in an international Rugby match at the world famous Newlands Stadium.

There is so much to do on a trip to South Africa that I quite literally had to squeeze it all in! I thoroughly recommend it to all budding volunteers and would do it all again if I could!

Craig Ferriman