In Michael Neocosmos’ excellent book, Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, the author presents three expressions of universal humanism across time and space. 

The first is articulated in 1222 in the Mande Charter. The expression is simple: toute vie (humaine) est une vie,(every human life is a life). The second is a popular Haitian saying, believed to have originated in 1804. Again, a simple expression: tout moun se moun men ce pa memn moun (every person is a person even if they are not the same person). Finally, Neocosmos brings a more contemporary articulation of this idea through a movement called Abahlali base Mjondolo, a socialist shack dweller movement in South Africa. In 2014 and likely before, this movement offered an isiZulu expression: unyawo alunampumulo (a person is a person wherever they may come from). 

These expressions center the human being as intrinsically universal, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, and class; three simple provocations that stand true despite constructed difference(s); expressions of an irrefutable call from history, guiding us through the present. 

A more recent iteration of these expressions comes in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ newly published book, The Message. In this book, Coates grapples with how our reporting, imaginative narratives, and mythmaking expose and distort our realities. In three essays, Coates takes his readers to Dakar, Senegal, Columbia, South Carolina and Palestine. Coates is reported to “have seen with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.” 

In a controversial interview on the US television network CBS, Coates was met with extraordinary vitriol by morning news anchor Tony Dokouipil. Turning to Coates, Dokouipil inquires: “What is it that particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish State, that is a Jewish safe place and not any other states out there.” Coates’ response immediately calls out the inherent bad-faith logic that undergirds Dokoupil’s interrogation: “there is nothing that offends me about a Jewish State,” he starts. “I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy no matter where they are.” Dokouipil interjects: “Muslim included?,” unmasking the double speak of liberal journalistic questioning. What is at stake here is not a balanced debate wherein opposing views can be expressed, but rather Dokoupil’s Islamophobia. 

Coates responds: 

I would not want a state where any group of people lay down their citizenship rights based on ethnicity. The country of Israel is a country in which half the population exist on one tier of citizenship and everybody else that’s ruled by Israelis including Palestinian-Israeli citizens. The only people that exist on that first tier are Israeli Jews. Why do we support that?

This is an important intervention from Coates. However, as the segment continues, the “debate” devolves in large part due to Dokouipil’s clear bigotry which at its core is located in his belief that Palestinian humanity is “unthinkable,” to borrow a phrase from the Haitian American academic Michel-Rolph Trouillot. It is important to note here that Dokouipil’s sentiments are not understood as an aberration to the institution of American corporate media. In fact, his views are commonplace. As Branko Marcetic argues in Jacobin:,

The past year of watching how the media and politicians talk about the war in Gaza has proven this true. Explicit calls for violence and even literal genocide (“We should kill them all,”Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee said earlier this year) against Palestinians go by with no comment, let alone condemnation. 

Marcetic points to a widely held belief system that is endemic to American corporate media’s reporting culture. My insistence on the phrase “American corporate media” is deliberate here. The historic role of the corporate media in the US has always been to buttress the views of the American state. American corporate media has shifted ostensibly from the domain of the fourth estate, where it had the explicit responsibility to frame socio-political issues, political advocacy, and offer up different world views. Instead, corporate media in the US is tethered to stenographers of the state who explicitly work to shape consent and run state-driven narratives in the guise of “free and fair journalism.” 

Given the direct role of the US in the destruction of Palestine, an actor like Dokouipil is not an outlier but, rather, a well-functioning cog in the system. To paraphrase David Scott: “The colonial metropole (America and its allies) and the colonial periphery (Palestine, Lebanon, Haiti and others), are systemically constituted in a dialectically inverse relationship between enrichment and impoverishment.” This relationship is part of the machinations of liberalism. 

In Liberalism: A Counter-History, Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo answers the question: “What is liberalism?” The usual answer, he suggests, is that “liberalism is the tradition of thought whose central concern is the liberty of the individual.” However, Losurdo asks us how we square that with the figure of John C. Calhoun, who was the vice president of the US in the mid-19th century and who, after issuing an impassioned defense of the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, declared  slavery “a ‘positive good’ that civilization could not possibly renounce.”

Losurdo’s intervention here is fundamental to our understanding of the nature and contours of liberalism. At its core, chattel slavery, racial subjugation, and ethnic cleansing are the key axiomatic principles that undergird liberalism. This is a long-held position of the US state. The American corporate media has reproduced this position for decades and, in so doing, shaped the kind of consent that makes the denial of Palestinian, Lebanese, Afghani, Haitian, and Sudanese humanity possible. Coates’s position is in direct opposition to this; he draws closer intellectual lineage with figures like Arundhati Roy who argue that there is an “intricate web of morality, rigor, and responsibility that art, that writing itself imposes on a writer.” Earlier in the interview, Coates underscores this by saying: 

The Message is a political book, it argues that much of our politics actually happens before we enter into a voting booth…that our choices around us, that who we believe is human, who we don’t believe is human…are actually shaped largely by writing and the stories that we tell. And so I believe that writers and particularly young writers have so much to do in politics and in this time. 

Dokouipil, and many colleagues who supported him after the fact, immediately registered these ideas as an affront; they believe that Coates has betrayed the liberal establishment. Coates is now seen as holding this contra-position given how he was lauded by the liberal media for his previous writing. Dokouipil himself points to this: 

I have to say that when I read the book, I imagined that if I took your name out of it, took the awards and the acclaim. Took the cover off the book and the publishing house went away…the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist. 

This comment not only alerts us to Dokouipil’s racism, but also the racism imbued in liberal logic. The idea of paying close attention to the humanity of Palestinian lives is untenable for Dokoipil and his ilk. This kind of racism is refreshingly honest in that it shows us what is at stake when we uncritically transport and transpose liberal ideologies within our contexts as media workers outside of “American corporate media.” This, however, can be a difficult feat given the hegemony of Euro-American news channels and ideologies.

Local journalists often parrot the messaging of institutions such as BBC and New York Times despite their obvious bias against those who exist outside of the logic of racialized hierarchies. This is due in part to the crisis in local newsrooms. Ryk van Niekerk reports that “publishers have reported significant financial losses, shrinking newsrooms, and relentless cost-cutting measures undermining journalistic integrity. The narrative is consistent: an industry under siege, fighting to sustain itself against overwhelming odds.”

In South African newsrooms, the depletion of the ranks of senior, experienced journalists, the lack of money and infrastructure, and the over-reliance on social media as a means of reporting, results in the narratives of the West filtering uncritically into journalistic practices. While this is a systemic problem that requires urgent action on many fronts, it is important to find useful strategies to decode the underside of liberal writing and reporting.

Perhaps a historical  South African example is useful here. Koni Benson has written extensively about the Medu Art Ensemble. “Medu,” she writes, “considered itself a collective of cultural workers whose approach to artistic production was informed by the question: “How does art become a weapon of struggle?” 

Benson adds:

Medu members preferred to call themselves ‘cultural workers’ rather than ‘artists.’ The term implied that art-makers should not see themselves as elite and isolated individuals, touched by creative madness or genius, but simply people doing their work, whether painting, poster making, music, or poetry. Medu saw its aesthetic and cultural approach as rooted in the strands of South African resistance and Africanist culture, building upon the work of cultural and community-based arts organizations.”

The idea of the media worker as a cultural worker is an interesting provocation for me. Especially given the fact that in October 2023, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maaza Megiste, Molly Crabapple, Zukiswa Wanner, and other prolific writers wrote an open letter as participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature: 

We are writers and artists who have been to Palestine to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature. We now call for the international community to commit to ending the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and to finally pursuing a comprehensive and just political solution in Palestine. We have exercised our privilege as international visitors to move around historic Palestine in ways that most Palestinians are unable to. We have met and been hosted by Palestinian artists, human rights workers, writers, historians, and activists. We have stood on stage with them. Many of these people, including the festival organizers based in Palestine, are in fear for their lives right now. One festival organizer is locked down with their child in Ramallah, sharing updates about the people killed by armed settlers last night. One partner in Gaza, a magazine editor, is no longer answering messages.

These writers demonstrate a political imperative and urgency for justice, a way in which to attend to an incomplete narrative and present a vital counter message to the world. The trip to Palestine forms the basis of Coates’s third essay in The Message. His writing and subsequent interviews show that this trip offered fundamental political insight that was not available in the messaging supplied to him by American corporate media. 

In Vignettes of a People in an Apartheid State, Zukiswa Wanner shares some of her experiences at the Palestine Festival of Literature: 

[The] West Bank consists of Area A, Area B, Area C. In reality, there is also a fourth area which are ‘annexed’ by Israel outside of the Oslo agreement, for example, East Jerusalem. Area A is theoretically governed by the Palestinian authority and they theoretically have control of administration and security. As the constant raids and bombings in Ramallah and other territories under Palestinian Authority show, that security control is more apparent than real. Area B is under Palestinian administration and Israeli security and Area C is under Israeli security and administration. Area A would thus be, for the South African reading this, a Bantustan. Palestinian construction in Area C is almost exclusively forbidden whereas Israelis can build wherever they want.

Wanner’s explanation renders the idea of ‘the complicated war’ in the Middle East a lie. In so doing, it pierces the fabrications of American corporate media. Later in the book, she writes: 

A constant in the discussion is how Palestinian lands continue shrinking because settlers, with the protection of Israeli security forces, come with weapons and remove Palestinians from their land and fence off spaces that Palestinians cannot access. Who are the settlers, I ask. The official from the international organization answers, it’s Israelis from cities who are looking to live more cheaply. It’s Americans. It’s Europeans. And South Africans.

Wanner continues  

While there are a lot of anti-Zionist Jewish South Africans, there are also some unapologetically Zionist ones, so I ask again, ‘Jewish’? He waves his hand in a neither here nor there manner then elaborates, ‘surprisingly not at all’. There are quite a number of Afrikaners who are converting to Judaism and coming to Israel to become settlers’. Ah, so apartheid nostalgia.

The provocation to look to cultural workers as media workers is an important one. In our attempts to witness and report back about the world to the world, we cannot let the whims of liberalism and liberal media take hold of our reporting and obfuscate the truth from propaganda. Furthermore, the burden of storytelling, meaning-making and the work of words has to offer politically just truths and representations. 

What Coates, Wanner, and others are doing at this moment is writing words for a new world. This call, which is steeped in their cultural imaginaries and cultural work, is one that all media workers and newsrooms need to take seriously.