Themba Chauke – South Africa

The people who are in management positions need to be transformative

Themba is the assistant news editor at Nthavhela News. He attended his first workshop with Gender Links (GL) in 2015 during the Management and Editing workshop held at Jacaranda Overnight Accommodation. Having attended for the first time in his editing career, Themba recalled the activities of the day. “The first memorable moment with GL was when the lodge, (Jacaranda Overnight) allocated me and my colleague (who is a female) a room to share, and we had to call Madikana to intervene, because there was no way I could share my room with my female colleague, but after all, it was all sorted out and I had to share the room with other male delegates.”

Themba describes himself as a transformative leader in his organisation; he is determined and focused on empowering his community through his news coverage and his work with the community. Themba says he has been responsible for allocating people to attend GL workshops and has heard good stories about GL. “Every time as journalists come back from a workshop they brag about learning and socializing, so this time I just said hell no I am going.”

“Since this was my first experience, in the beginning, looking at the words gender links, I thought, I will not be able to participate, as the term or word, seems complicated. I was expecting it to be a quite tough week”. Themba says he felt a bit out of place in the programme. “Upon the introduction and the background of GL, I started understanding what gender links means, and what they do, and how GL wants to involve community media in their work, as a way of communicating with the community about gender campaigns and awareness in society.”

Themba was impressed with the introduction of the SADC Protocol and took an interest in watching the Protocol DVD. To him, the DVD was a motivation to become even more interested in the work that GL does with the other media houses across the region. “Another interesting point introduced is that we must also focus on climate change and gender”. Themba takes special interest in issues of climate change and has written a number of stories on the topic. To him the GL workshop was yet another opportunity for him to learn even more.

Themba says his attitude towards women has completely changed. “I am a traditional man and have for a long time upheld my cultural beliefs and practices without question. This GL workshop opened my eyes”. Although culture remains the most important part of our and future generations lives, it is not fixed and has be changed where necessary. These are the words of Themba as he takes us through some of the lessons that he found interesting.

“I now look at gender in a broad way, whereby characteristics and homogenous features must also be taken into consideration when we talk about gender. Case studies, learnt at the conference, were inspirational, while some challenged me and made me see that we still need to do more as media.” – Themba Chauke

Themba recognises that people in management positions must be transformative, as in the case study of the Mauritius Public Broadcaster, who took steps to become a transformative media institution, improving from only 14% female sources to 28%.

Themba narrates his next steps, and highlights the most important activities that will strengthen the relationship between GL and Nthavhela News:

Our next step is to work on the draft gender policy at Nthavela News, and ensure that it is signed before the end of the month (July 2015).

Even though we thought that most of the stories we covered were gender balanced, we will assess our sources, to see how many sources are women.

We will interrogate government policies with our audiences on social media, as well as publishing articles in the paper with public views about gender.

We will monitor educational institutions, starting from pre-schools, and primary schools up to tertiary level, with regard to gender based violence.

We will also monitor public institutions, such as hospitals, municipalities and others, on whether are they aware of gender violence and gender parity or not.

In conclusion, Themba says that he thinks the support for gender equality in communities should be noted. He believes organisations should strive to always strike a balance. “According to my observation, women have initiated many NPO’s in our communities which are very helpful, such as home-based care organisations, drop-in-centres and victim empowerment centres, and this is done on a voluntarily basis”. Themba says women have proven to be very skillful and resourceful and as a result credit must be given to them. “As media institutions, we must work hard to see that gender equality is achieved in our communities, through the advocacy of our writings”. Themba praised the work of GL and described it as a catalyst between community media and communities, to bring change and awareness about gender to our society. “GL should continuously engage with community media, to make gender a priority, in our reporting and story coverage as well as in management and so forth.”