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Apartheid, meaning "separation" in Afrikaans, designated the system of institutionalised racial segregation enforced in South Africa from 1948 to 1991. Established by the National Party, it aimed to maintain the political, economic and social dominance of the white minority over the black majority and other ethnic groups through a series of legislative measures that regulated where people could live, which services they could access, and which languages they were required to learn. It was within this context that a group of students chose to examine how communication itself was instrumentalised to reinforce inequality, justify domination, and at the same time, fuel resistance. To accomplish this, the students mobilised three theoretical frameworks. |
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The first was Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, used to examine how propaganda operated as a one-directional flow of information from a sender to a receiver, with no possibility of interaction. The second was Wiener's cybernetics, which introduced the notion of feedback and allowed the students to analyse the successive cycles of action and reaction that characterised the apartheid period, most visibly in the events surrounding the Soweto massacre of June 16, 1976, where the imposition of Afrikaans in schools triggered student protests, which were met with lethal police force, which in turn multiplied the number of anti-apartheid militants. Each action arrived in response to the previous one, forming what the students described as a loop of negative feedback within a system built on unresolvable imbalance. The third framework was Bateson's double bind theory, applied to the situation of the oppressed population, who faced contradictory injunctions with no acceptable outcome: submission guaranteed continued oppression and community rejection, while revolt risked imprisonment or death.
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The students also drew a distinction between two types of propaganda at work during the period. The propaganda deployed by the oppressed communities to mobilise resistance was characterised as white propaganda, open about its sources and objectives. The propaganda diffused by the apartheid regime internationally, designed to conceal the reality of the situation, corresponded more closely to black propaganda, constructed to deceive and destabilise.
To illustrate these theories, the students built a large-scale architectural model of a city, inspired by the Bauhaus movement's emphasis on craftsmanship, interdisciplinarity and the democratisation of art. The model was constructed from cardboard, recycled materials and objects sourced without damage, including chess pieces, reels, light bulbs and electrical cables, all painted to achieve a colourful and aesthetically coherent result. Coloured threads were used throughout: red threads represented the surveillance and control of communication by the oppressor, blue threads illustrated the secret alternative communications organised by the resistance, and a green thread represented the participation of white individuals who supported the anti-apartheid cause. Information cards featuring diagrams, citations and colour-coded explanations were integrated directly into the model, so that visitors without a prior theoretical background could engage with the content independently. A headset was also made available, allowing visitors to immerse themselves for one minute in a piece of pro-apartheid propaganda, placing the theoretical analysis in immediate sensory context. In the end, the students conveyed through this project that communication in a system of oppression is never neutral. It is simultaneously the instrument through which domination is maintained, the terrain on which resistance organises itself, and the feedback loop through which both sides continuously respond to one another.
