Waste pickers in community media

My research while doing a PgDip in Journalim and Media Studies is on waste pickers who live at the municipal dump in Grahamstown. It is called the Makana municipal landfill, because Grahamstown is part of Makana. I heard about the dump in the community newspaper, Grocott’s Mail. Grocott’s Mail started in 1870 as a Grahamstown newspaper and is the oldest independent newspaper in South Africa (Grocott’s Mail, 2017). It was one of many town-based white-run newspapers that existed across the Eastern Cape by the end of the 1800s (see Wigston, 2007, p. 30). It was taken over by Rhodes University in 2003, and it says “If it’s happening in or around Grahamstown, you’ll read about it in the Grocott’s, whether print or online” (Grocott’s Mail, 2017a).

Grocott’s Mail has several times reported on the dump, noting fires that start there (Grocott’s Mail, 2013, 2014, 2016). The first story I read was in December 2016, and explained how fires at the dumpsite spread to the nearby Grahamstown Riding Club causing damages (26 stables) (Grocott’s Mail , 2016). This story was widely reported in the other papers like the Daily Dispatch, and the Herald and on social media. The same report showed that the municipality had been found guilty in 2015 of breaking waste management rules, and instructed by courts and the government to fix the situation.

Soon after that, I went to the dumpsite with someone who wanted to get rid of rubble. The dump is slightly hidden. We took Cradock Road towards the industrial area of the town, to the west, on the outskirts of Grahamstown. There are no clear signs of where the dumpsite is, until you get closer. We carried on with Cradock road, on its gentle curve, and suddenly we saw a wide gouge, which released an unpleasant smell, and saw the whole area around it was scattered with plastic bags, far beyond the dump.

I immediately knew this was the place we are looking for. We had to turn around, back to an intersection, to find the road that goes to the dumpsite. The driveway into the landfill is a gravel road through the bushes. Then we were in the dump. The place was a disaster zone in the middle of nowhere. It was filthy and full of litter and rubbish, scattered everywhere with no system. A group of young men was loitering by the gate chasing after any car or truck going inside. There was no control over entry, no municipal staff.

The owner of the car, which I was in, got annoyed as the youths ran after the car. This annoyance is common among middle class people taking waste to the dump. But I was more shocked to see people pacing up and down in the filthy place, wearing dirty ragged clothes. My thoughts could not believe my eyes, thinking these are human beings like everyone and myself. They ran after cars and trumps, so they could pick through the rubbish, even for food, and beg for tips. I was moved by the poverty and desperation that I witnessed.

The earlier articles in Grocott’s Mail had been silent on this terrible side of the dump. The focus had been on how the dump often had lingering fires and how these spread out towards the town, affecting business like the GRC. The 2016 article spoke of how the fires affected the ability of GRC to host “eight or nine big multidisciplinary shows a year, attracting riders and their entourages from across the province and the country... an important source of income for the Club” and the dangerous fumes from the fires, but did not mention people were living at the dump and would have been even more terribly affected. These are exactly the sort of “excluded or marginalised” people who are ignored in the media (Christian et al, 2009, p.31). The fires lasted four weeks, reported an article in Daily Dispatch (early 2017), which also stressed effects on GRC and “residents” of the town, and added the municipality had never acted on the court orders to fix the dump (Carlisle, 2017). It said that Grahamstown “residents” were looking into more legal action against the municipality. (Later in the middle of the year, it was reported that officials were facing contempt of court charges and another fire had started (Grocott’s Mail, 2017c).

After that, I saw a story in Grocotts’ Mail titled “Narrow Escape for Dumpsite Stabbing Victim” (Grocott’s Mail , 2017b). The story, from February 2017, argued the site was “unsafe for any member of the public,” after a man got stabbed in the arm there. It said that a stabbing took place after a man living at the dump supposedly broke the tailgate (closes back of bakkie) of a bakkie belonging to a man who came to the dump. An argument broke out and the driver was stabbed. According to Grocott’s Mail, the victim said the tailgate “needs to be manually chained to secure it.” The article quoted him as saying there were “whole gangs moving in and out of there.” The paper also said about 10 people lived there.

The point is the people living at the dump were mentioned at last but now as “gangs,” and clearly, also not “any member of the public.” The fact that the dump was dangerous for those who lived there, the very same waste pickers presented as “gangs,” who also faced fires and filth, and terrible conditions, was not discussed. Instead, they were presented as a faceless group who “feel nothing for taking a person’s life.” South Africa is one of the countries with a very high violent crime rate, and this affects many lives, but no picker was even interviewed about what happened. The Facebook page of the Grahamstown Residents’ Association (GRA), representing mainly middle class interests from the western suburbs of Grahamstown and a lot of the readership of Grocott’s Mail, has also referred to waste pickers chasing cars entering into the dump as using a “mob tactic,” also suggesting gangster behaviour at the dumpsite. The situation is very much that described by Christian et al (1990), where the working class and poor are marginalised in the media, mainly appearing as dangerous or disruptive threats.

Christian et al (1990, p. 116) also argues “the press tries to meet the economic and cultural demands of owners and many different clients, including publicists and prospective audiences,” and since Grocott’s Mail seems to have a mainly suburbs audience, and does not have waste pickers as a market, it is likely to take that audience’s views seriously. The paper, like others, might be internally pluralist and “monitorial,” and aiming at being objective to everyone (poor or rich), who deserve an equal hearing, but in reality, they are skewed (Christians et al, 2009, pp. 118 & 125). This does not mean the stabbing was okay (in fact the man who did it was arrested), but that one case was used to make claims about a large group of people, who were not allowed to reply.

This brings us to the Marxists, who influenced people like Hall (1980). Marxist media analysis insists the objectivity principle of the media is more fiction than truth, as mass media is mainly run by capitalists or capitalist governments and represents their interests to present the world in a certain way that secures their hegemony (Sonderling, 2007). As said, the Grocott’s Mail presents says, “If it’s happening in or around Grahamstown, you’ll read about it in the Grocott’s, whether print or online” (Grocott’s Mail, 2017a). But the balance tilts in reality to who is the main audience and has power to express themselves. Grahamstown has divided communities resulting from our history of politics, capitalism, colonialism and apartheid, and can be seen as an example of media only expressing some views and representing some people (see Sonderling, 2007, pp. 310-322). This despite saying “you’ll read about it in the Grocott’s.”

On March 23 2017, I started visiting the people at the dumpsite, the waste pickers, and since then I have been back on many occasions and I found the dumpsite generally safe. Safe but not for the waste pickers who work under stressful and health hazardous conditions without any protections or rights. The Grocotts’ Mail articles keep stressing them as people who are not “legitimate” on the site, and the municipality keeps promising to deal with them. Around 10 live at the dump, but there are more than 200 waste pickers at the dumpsite found on a normal day. Among them, there are old age pensioners and women. I have done some articles on them, and I found that it was poverty and unemployment and home issues that drove people to the dump to try to get food, tips or materials to sell. The lead paragraph in Grocotts’ Mail (2017c) says is “It is unsafe for any member of the public to go to the municipal dump,” but are not these people also members of the public? Or Grahamstown “residents”?

Many of the waste pickers are nice people, yet Grocotts’ Mail has distanced itself from them, and has yet to interview someone from the dumpsite. When I asked why, a Grocotts’ Mail official told me the dumpsite is dangerous, the police warned against the dumpsite, and the paper would therefore not take such a risk. But surprisingly Grocotts’ Mail has a plethora of photographs from the dumpsite, which were taken at the site, so it does go there, it just does not interview people there. Even more sadly, I found that one of Grocott’s street paper sellers stays at the dumpsite and is one of the waste pickers. Some residents against the municipality also show this side of silence in reporting on the ongoing court case over the dump, which stresses issues like GRC but nothing about waste pickers (Grocotts’ Mail, 2017c).

Since there are hundreds of people at the site, it is hard to think that the problem is no-one being available. With regard to the dumpsite-stabbing story, efforts to interview the police, government and business officials were prioritised even though no-one from the government, sate or business was present at the event, other than the victim himself, who was described as an employer who had two assistants with him during the unfortunate incident. Prinsloo (2009) mentions that “news media” focuses mostly on the disruption of equilibrium (“bad news”) and this helps explain when, why, and how Grocotts’ Mail reports on issues around the dump. For example, waste pickers are the most immediately exposed to fires and health hazards at the dump, and would be the main victims of “gangs” if these were at the dump, and have no rights, no power to take the municipality to court and are seen by that municipality as a problem. The issues of the dump as reported are without taking into consideration that the waste pickers are on the firing line in many ways. These human beings like everyone, yet obviously ignored and only mentioned (when mentioned) remembered as thugs and gangsters, when they, not the GRC or GRA, are the main victims of the disastrous mess of the dump and come from the sad conditions many working class and poor Grahamstown residents face daily.