A regional community media development project
Durban Sings is a community media project for Durban (initially with youth groups loosely linked to CCS), seeking to involve especially those groups and communities in the inner city, the townships and surrounding settlements who have yet to gain access to the use and enjoyment of information communication technologies (ICTs) in general and media production/participation in particular. The project links aspects of oral history and story-telling with a creative community-lead re-assessment of audio radio tools and methods of broadcasting in/for the 'information society' from an 'African' perspective: how do post-colonial histories and stories sediment into everyday language; how do they shape or mark communication desires, needs and traditions of various forms and types of communities? The project hopes to 'make a case' for media in development whereby communities produce and broadcast the media that speaks for themselves, that is to say, where citizens speak and can be heard as advocates of citizens' engagement through their own cultural productivity.