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The recognition that identity is mutable, multi-layered and subject to multiple modes of construction and de-construction has contributed to problematizing the issues associated with its representation in dis-course, which has recently been attracting increasing attention in different disciplinary areas. Identity rep-resentation is the main focus of this volume, which analyses instances of multimedia and multimodal communication to the public at large for commer-cial, informative, political or cultural purposes. In particular, it examines the impact of the increasingly sophisticated forms of expression made available by the evolution of communication technologies, especially in computer-mediated or web-based settings, but also in more traditional media (press, cinema, TV). The basic assumption shared by all contributors is that communication is the locus where identities, either collective, social or individual, are deliberately constructed and negotiated.In their variety of topics and approaches, the studies collected in this volume testify to the criticality of rep-resenting personal, professional and organizational identities through the new media, as their ability to reach a virtually unlimited audience amplifi es the potential political, cultural and economic impact of discursive identity constructions. They also confi rm that new highly sophisticated media can forge iden-tities well beyond the simply iconic or textual repre-sentation, generating deeply interconnected webs of meaning capable of occupying an expanding – and adaptable – discursive space.

Giuliana Garzone & Paola Catenaccio (eds)

Identities across Media and Modes: Discursive Perspectives

ISBN 978-3-0343-0386-6

Giuliana Garzone is Professor of English Linguistics and Translation at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. Her main fi eld of investigation is specialized dis-course in its different domains. She has co-ordinated various research projects and published extensively on legal language, scientific discourse, business communication and political discourse. Her other research interests include translation and interpret-ing studies.

Paola Catenaccio is a Tenured Researcher in English Linguistics and Translation at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. Her research interests are in the area of discourse analysis and LSP. In particular, she has published on media genres, professional discourse and corporate communication. She is involved in sev-eral national and international research projects.

li115

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Studies in Language and Communication

Edited by Maurizio Gotti, University of Bergamo

Volume 115

Linguistic Insights

PETER LANGBern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Wien

ADVISORY BOARD

Vijay Bhatia (Hong Kong) Christopher Candlin (Sydney)David Crystal (Bangor)Konrad Ehlich (Berlin / München)Jan Engberg (Aarhus)Norman Fairclough (Lancaster)John Flowerdew (Leeds) Ken Hyland (Hong Kong) Roger Lass (Cape Town)Matti Rissanen (Helsinki) Françoise Salager-Meyer (Mérida, Venezuela) Srikant Sarangi (Cardiff)Susan Šarcevic (Rijeka)Lawrence Solan (New York) Peter M. Tiersma (Los Angeles)

^

PETER LANGBern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Wien

Giuliana Garzone & Paola Catenaccio (eds)


Norms and Practices in Genre

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2009Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net

All rights reserved.All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, withoutthe permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfi lming,and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

Printed in Switzerland

Published with a grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (Project no. 2005109911_004).

ISSN 1424-8689ISBN 978-3-0343-0386-6US-ISBN 0-8204-8382-6

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek

Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografi e; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.ddb.de›.

British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Identities across media and modes : discursive perspectives / Giuliana Garzone & Paola Catenaccio (eds).p. cm. -- (Linguistic insights, 1424-8689 ; v. 115)Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 978-3-0343-0386-6 (alk. paper)1. Identity (Psychology) and mass media. 2. Identity (Psychology) in mass media. 3. Mass media--Social aspects. 4. Mass media--Political aspects. 5. Mass media and culture. I. Garzone, G. (Giuliana) II. Catenaccio, Paola. P96.I34I34 2009302.2301‘9--dc22 2010002206Published with a grant from Università degli Studi di Bergamo (Italy): Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Comparate.

Contents GIULIANA GARZONE / PAOLA CATENACCIO Discursive Perspectives on Identities across Media and Modes: An Introduction .................................................................................. 9

Identities in Multimodal Communication: the Internet and Beyond GIULIANA GARZONE Identity in Tourist Communication on the Internet: Italy’s and Spain’s Web Sites Contrasted ........................................................... 29 PAOLA CATENACCIO Promoting Medical Tourism in India: Building Identity and Reputation in Health Tourism Websites ............................................ 59 FRANCESCA SANTULLI Trademarks in Tourist Communication: Semiotic Structure and Cultural Implications ......................................................................... 87 LIDIA DE MICHELIS National Identity on the Web: The Discursive Politics of Icons. A Portrait of England ....................................................................... 107 KIM GREGO / ALESSANDRA VICENTINI Building South African Web Identity: Health Care Information for Citizens vs. Foreigners ................................................................ 137

GIUDITTA CALIENDO The Role of the New Media in the Promotion of Identity Frameworks ...................................................................................... 163 CHIARA DEGANO Marketing Identities on Nestlé’s Websites ....................................... 189 CLARA BULFONI Lexical Borrowing from English in the Internet Era: How to Preserve Chinese Identity? ............................................................... 215 Identities across Media MARIA CRISTINA PAGANONI ‘The Opinion and the Counter Opinion’: News Framing and Double Voicing on Al Jazeera English ............................................ 237 ANNA MARCHI / CHARLOTTE TAYLOR Who Was Fighting and Who/What Was Being Fought? The Construction of Participants’ Identities in UK and US Reporting of the Iraq War ................................................................. 259 MIRIAM BAIT Discursive Representations of Old Age in Geriatric Medical Editorials ........................................................................................... 289 CYNTHIA JANE KELLETT BIDOLI Transfer of Institutional and Political Identity through TV News Reporting for the Italian Deaf ................................................. 311 VALENTINA DE CICCO The Media Process of Popularising Professional Identities. A Case Study: E.R. ........................................................................... 337

SARA VILLA ‘Doctor Alton, What Is a Transvestite?’ The Discourses of Transvestism and Identity in Glen or Glenda by Ed Wood ........ 355 Notes on Contributors ....................................................................... 371

KIM GREGO / ALESSANDRA VICENTINI1 Building South African Web Identity: Health Care Information for Citizens vs. Foreigners 1. Description of the Study 1.1. Background This study intends to outline, through the linguistic analysis of a sample case, the way South Africa represents its national identity on the web, with specific reference to health care information. Health can be considered a suitable and relevant key topic through which to study a country’s identity, as it is deeply connected with all the descriptors of a population (society, economy, politics, culture, religion, etc.), and all types of citizens, all of whom are likely to be subject to health problems. In a sense, health may be viewed as the most democratic of demographic factors as health problems affect just anybody, though other population-related aspects heavily influence occurrence, type, severity and relapse of diseases. And exactly because its impact on society is pervasive, incorporating social, political and of course economic issues as it does, health information and language seem particularly suitable for social and critical analysis. Well-known is South Africa’s recent troubled history, from the long fight against the decades-old apartheid rule, to the first free, multiracial election in 1994 and the subsequent struggle to address the country’s many social and economic problems and thus move on into

1 Research for this study has been carried out jointly by the two authors. Kim Grego, in particular, is responsible for §1.1, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, while Alessandra Vicentini for §1.2, 2.3. The general framework and the concluding remarks have been elaborated together.

Kim Grego / Alessandra Vicentini 138

the new century. Uniting the nation not only in name but also in practice has been one of South Africa’s main challenges; another has been the fight against the AIDS pandemic ravaging the country. Studying South African identity through its health care is therefore thought to be an interesting perspective from which to look at identity issues and at how successfully these are conveyed through linguistic choices in the communicative event represented by websites. In order to delimit the otherwise very wide subject of this study, a specific website, <www.SouthAfrica.info> (hereinafter referred to as SouthAfrica.info)2 was identified for analysis. The selection was made on the basis of several parameters, the key ones being that it had to be a public website, directed at and accessible by laypeople, containing relevant information about South African identity and dealing with South African health care. Not strictly an institutional or a pro-fessional website, yet – in its own words as reported on the homepage – “South Africa’s official gateway for investment, travel, country information”, the website selected was found to provide a suitable choice for this study because, although it is not centred on health as its main subject, it deals with it at length in the large sections it dedicates to it, and because the audiences it is intended for openly include South Africans and non-South Africans alike. This makes it possible not only to observe South African identity as created for and transmitted to people from within South Africa, but also to compare it with the image offered abroad to foreigners.

1.2. Methodology In consideration of the unprecedented evolution of the World Wide Web as a powerful mass medium, which virtually gathers together different new and old text genres as well as incorporates multi-modal, multi-media traits particularly impacting on communication processes, it has been deemed necessary, for the present analysis specifically

2 Unless otherwise stated all website were last accessed in January 2009.

Building South African Web Identity 139

focussing on websites, to adopt a multidisciplinary approach, even within linguistics itself.

A preliminary investigation of the webpages selected will be carried out from a mainly communicative perspective, aiming to identify and profile the author and the specific target audience of the information under scrutiny. The semiotic aspects involving the analysis of the visual and verbal elements will be considered only when semantically relevant, especially in light of the new views on the concepts of text and genre derived from linguists worldwide (see Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Garzone 2007 and related bibliography: 30), as well as of the spread of the so-called social and economic paradigm of Web 2.0.3

The second and main stage of the analysis will focus on the linguistic content of the corpus thus collected which, though small, is thought to offer a first-contact impression of both South Africa’s public (and private) health care and general identity, since it represents the immediate surface health information available to both citizens and travellers when looking for quick suggestions on how to behave when moving within or travelling to South Africa. The material selected will be investigated by using tools drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis, particularly suitable when addressing identity issues, because of its peculiar focus on “texts as elements in social processes” (Fairclough 1995: 6).

These will also be occasionally checked against the background of existing literature on institution/doctor-patient communication (cf. Fisher/Todd 1983; Fahy/Smith 1999; Candlin 2002) and tourism language (Gotti 2006).

3 Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services – such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies – which aim at facilitating collaboration and sharing between users. Detailed information can be found in Tappscott/Williams (2006) and Boaretto/Noci/ Pini (2007).


1.3. Selection of texts The reason why the SouthAfrica.info portal is so rich in contents, lends itself to various approaches and is accessible to a wide audience – thus meeting most of this study’s required parameters – is perhaps to be found in the owner/author behind this entity: SouthAfrica.info is in fact operated by the International Marketing Council (IMC), a South African body in charge of marketing South Africa as a country, while building its identity (“create a positive and united image of South Africa”)4 at the same time. The very existence of a marketing-specialised governmental entity shows how anxious the South African government is about identity issues. It also makes analysing SouthAfrica.info’s documents particularly stimulating from a linguistic point of view, given the importance marketing attributes to the use of language and how consciously it uses it. Since SouthAfrica.info is a portal, it ought to be specified that its sub-websites dedicated to health differ according to their intended audience: the citizens’ branch offers different information from those given in the section dedicated to travellers, although links between them are many and bidirectional. Two pages were considered particularly suitable for this linguistic analysis: within the citizens’ channel, ‘SouthAfrica.info > Public Services > Advice for citizens > Health > Health FAQs’; within the travellers’ channel, ‘South-Africa.info > Plan a trip > Health tips for travellers’. The first page, the ‘Health FAQs,’5 was chosen because it represents a stable6 and important part in the Health section dedicated to South African citizens, and is the document users are mostly referred to when looking for health information in the citizens’ pages. The second page, ‘Health tips for travellers,’7 is in fact the only document on health dedicated to travellers (which makes its choice inevitable on the one hand) but also a comprehensive text, with all the basic health

4 International Marketing Council of South Africa (2007). 5 SouthAfrica.info (2007a). 6 On the contrary, specific articles usually change periodically. 7 SouthAfrica.info (2007b).


information and rich in health links on the other: one of these links is to nothing else but the ‘Health FAQs’ in the citizens’ section. The next paragraphs contain a close textual analysis of this material, expected to highlight how South African identity is lin-guistically conveyed through the texts. 2. Close textual analysis 2.1. Communicative features A brief communicative analysis valid for both texts will be the starting point. The text’s author (obviously a multi-author, i.e. a pool of several people) is not only clearly indicated, but website users are also invited through a link to read more about it: behind SouthAfrica.info there is the International Marketing Council (IMC) of South Africa, which is “a schedule 3a public entity mandated to position South Africa as one of the highly considered, non-traditional markets in terms of world trade, investment and tourism by 2010”,8 where South Africa’s ‘schedule 3a entities’ are “extensions of a department with the mandate to fulfil a specific economic or social responsibility of government. They rely on government funding and public money […]. As such, these entities have the least autonomy.”9 No doubt, then, that behind SouthAfrica.info there is actually the South African government, as the IMC is one of those entities with ‘the least autonomy’ and, especially, government-funded with public money; indeed, the government is openly and proudly10 behind this initiative, makes it known that it is a matter of national urgency, and even advertises it as much as possible. Readers also learn that the IMC was founded in 2000; therefore, considering that it should reach its goal by

8 International Marketing Council of South Africa (2007). 9 South Africa Auditor-General (2004: 27). 10 “Proudly South African” is another national campaign supported and co-

sponsored by the South African government (Proudly South African 2007).


201011 and that it is the end of 2007 at the time of writing, it can be inferred that the South African marketing entity is currently under great pressure to achieve these results. However, even without any knowledge of the country’s critical moment, but just taking into account the lexicon employed, the use of the word ‘create’ to refer to South African identity (see quotation above: “create a positive and united image of South Africa”, and note 3) suggests, by implication, that a national identity does not yet exist in a complete or satisfactory way. It should then be noted that, in both the health sections con-sidered here, the texts’ apparent communicative function is referential (as in Jakobson 1960), as they are both clearly aimed at informing readers. However, as the author’s self-declared target is to market South Africa, the underlying overall function of the website as a wholeis conative, a fact which should always be kept in mind even whenanalysing individual texts with a different main function, such as the informative texts considered here. A fundamental final remark regards the channel used to convey this information, i.e. the web: although both the Health FAQs and the Health Tips are addressed to all South Africans and foreign visitors, in fact South Africa’s position as a developing country12 necessarily restricts the intended audience to that 6.8 Internet users per 100 people13 of South African citizens with a telephone line who can afford a computer and an Internet connection. Graph 1 illustrates the discursive framework underlying health care communication as conveyed through the two webpages chosen for close analysis. Both pages, being part of the SouthAfrica.info portal, aim to market South African identity, and both draw and report information from the country’s economy, home and international politics, society, culture and territory. However, while ‘Health tips for travellers’ is mostly directed at non-South African citizens/residents,

11 The date is not insignificant: in 2010 South Africa will host the FIFA World Cup, a major entertainment event comparable to the Olympics Games; see Preuss (2000) for an overview of the relationship between Olympic Games hosting and a country’s economic development.

12 South Africa ranks 121st out of 177 countries and belongs in the “Medium Human Development” group in the Human Development Index (2006: 373).

13 Globalis (2007a), “South Africa: Internet Users”.


‘Health FAQ’ is ideally for people residing within South Africa, and the choice of information they offer is differentiated accordingly. Of course, just as SouthAfrica.info is open to everyone to browse, so are its ‘Health for Visitors’ and ‘Health for Visitors’ sections which, although designed with certain target users in mind, may also be consulted by other categories of users.

Graph 1. The building of South African identity in the ‘Health FAQs’ and ‘Health tips for travellers’: a representation of the Health section’s communicative structure as specifically devised from the present analysis. 2.2. South African identity for citizens: the ‘Health FAQs’ page The text considered for the following analysis is the Health FAQs webpage which, although pertaining to the health section dedicated to South African citizens, also boasts a well-highlighted link in the permanent right-hand box in the ‘Health tips for travellers’ page, thus

Marketing SA Identity

Economy

Home Politics

International Politics

Society

Culture

Territory HEALTHfor Citizens

=FAQ

HEALTHfor Visitors

=TIPS


showing to have South African citizens as its primary intended audience, and visitors to South Africa as its secondary one. By and large, the health information for visitors tends to focus on what to do before going to South Africa, while the FAQs are for residents in general, so the term ‘citizens’ includes not only South African nationals but also long-term visitors. It is worth noting that one of the aims stated by the IMC is “to build national support for the brand within South Africa itself”,14 so the presence of a section dedicated to the country’s own citizens, who are supposed to be familiar with their own health care system – or at least more familiar than foreign visitors – should not prove too surprising: the implication behind this optimistic goal is that, at least among part of the population, a state of ignorance and chaos about health care opportunities reigned at the time (2000) when IMC was founded, i.e. following the post-1994 emergency.

The FAQs (see Fig. 1 below) consist of 12 questions, bulleted not numbered, so that none is given prominence over another:

� What emergency services are available? � If I go to a state hospital, will I have to pay? � Do state hospitals offer specialist treatment? � How do I find a private hospital in my area? � How do I find a GP in my area? � Should I get medical cover? � What medicines can I get over the counter? � What about alternative health practitioners? � What are traditional healers? � Is abortion legal? Where is it offered? � Where can I buy organic foods? � What is SA's policy on immunisation?

14 International Marketing Council of South Africa (2007), “Who we are”, our italics.


Fig. 1. ‘SouthAfrica.info > Public Services > Advice for citizens > Health > Health FAQs’ (visited on 6 November 2007). South African identity is strongly present and continuously referred to throughout the whole text and is evident in both concepts and lexicon. More specifically, although this is a text about health, readers also receive partial information about other aspects of South Africa, fragments of reality which, put together, contribute to reflecting the


state of the country. Some terms and phrases make reference to the country’s territory and infrastructures: � ‘emergencies’, � ‘disasters’, � ‘motor vehicle accident and trauma’, � ‘urban areas’.

Of course, taken individually, these words could refer to any country in the world but, seen in context through a text-based lexical analysis, they return instant snapshots of South Africa, courtesy of its own government. As is evident, the South African government is clearly not afraid of stating the critical situation of the country’s infrastructures (“Motor vehicle accident and trauma rates are high”, “our state emergency services are overstretched”), although it tends to do so in a factual way, avoiding, for instance, adverbs of manner or degree, or any other evaluative element. We also learn that urban areas are supposedly the most populated15 and the richest, since most private health structures can be found there. The absence of statistics and data, on the other hand, is in line with the nature of the author and the audience as identified above: the government’s authoritativeness alone justifies the statements in the text, and the intended audience of non-experts does not call for the presence of figures to support them. South African identity also emerges from culture-specific concepts and terms. The FAQs about traditional healers include words like ‘sangoma’ (shaman healer) and ‘muti’ (medicine/drug), which do not have equivalents in Standard English (in the text, phrases are used to explain them). These terms have actually become part of the local variety of the English language,16 and are certainly familiar to the black-African majority of the population, so there should be no need to rephrase them. Two could be the main possible explanations for this, both connected with the website’s overall marketing aim. One is an internal reason, i.e. a politically correct need to cater for the

15 South Africa’s urban population has been steadily increasing since the end of the apartheid: it was 48.8% in 1990, 57.9% in 2005 and is expected to rise to 70.1% by 2030 (Globalis 2007b, “South Africa: Urban Population”).

16 Both “sangoma” and “muti” are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989).


country’s ethnic minorities such as Coloureds,17 Indians/Asians and the statistically so-called ‘Others’ who, nonetheless, as South Africans, would very likely be aware of these words’ meaning. The other is more realistic, and concerns the high possibility (given the very visible links) that foreigners (the much craved for tourists and investors) might end up reading this page. ‘Rand’ is the another noticeably South African term (the lowest amount mentioned is the R13 charged to pensioners for a consultation and the highest the R80,000,000 spent by the government on children’s vaccinations), yet nowhere in this text is the rand’s exchange rate indicated, evidently assuming readers (in this case foreigners seem to be excluded from the intended audience) to be familiar with the South African currency and its purchasing power.18 Other culture-specific terms are the many names of people, entities and companies mentioned throughout the text, but these are always accompanied by an explanation of who or what they are (e.g. Netcare 911, Vodacom, Medicair, Health Pro-fessions Council of South Africa, Dr Johan Prinsloo, etc.). In fact, the FAQs page, a new media genre in itself,19 sometimes acquires the aspect, function and genre features of a directory, with lists of reference names and telephone numbers/websites. Finally, the reference to the Child Health Week immunisation campaign being held during 6-13 August (wintertime in South Africa) reminds website’s users that they are reading about a southern hemisphere country. In the question about state hospital costs, it is possible to identify terms belonging to what could be defined a ‘socio-economic group’ semantic field:

17 “The label ‘coloured’ is a contentious one, but still used for people of mixed race descended from slaves brought in from East and central Africa, the indigenous Khoisan who lived in the Cape at the time, indigenous Africans and whites. The majority speak Afrikaans.” (SouthAfrica.Info 2007c). The term is used, for instance, in the country’s official demographic statistics (Statistics South Africa 2007).

18 Though the exchange rate does appear in the “Fast facts” section. For reference only, R29.95 can buy the cheapest burger at South Africa’s most popular chain of family restaurants, Spur.

19 Garzone (2007: 16).


� ‘unemployed’, � ‘pensioner’, � ‘top-end patient’. Readers easily infer, from the pricelist reported for each group, that the unemployed and the retired are two of the country’s weakest social groups. Although this is true everywhere in the world, a quick check of national statistics (data are completely missing in this text), while confirming the country’s very high unemployment rate,20 shows that pensioners, conversely, are a relatively small group,21 due to the country’s average life expectancy of only 47 years22 � in inverse proportion compared to developed countries. More about South Africa’s socio-economic situation and the government’s measures to improve the health care situation emerges from the sections dealing with home health policies. This aspect of South African identity is well developed in the FAQs text, yet it is hard to extract it from just a quantitative analysis: ‘government’, for instance, only occurs twice, while ‘waiting’, which collocates relevantly with ‘list*’, occurs only once, precisely in the phrase ‘waiting list’. However, even if key concepts and words only appear few times or even once only, it is easily noticed that some key governmental health policies are clearly outlined, specifically the critical issue of public versus private health. In particular, readers are informed that pensioners pay one third of what the unemployed pay, and less than one fourth of what top-end patients do, and this time the information is not purely factual: the degree adverb ‘only’ (“A pensioner will pay only R13”, our italics) does convey a value judgement.

Other passages make explicit the author’s opinion regarding the poor condition of public health care services (“waiting lists are often very long”), about which the author’s suggestions, coinciding with the

20 South Africa’s unemployment rate was estimated at 25.5% in March 2007 (Statistics South Africa 2007: iv), as opposed to the EU’s at 7.3% in September 2007 (Eurostat 2007) and the USA’s at 4.6% in 2006 (United States Department of Labour 2007).

21 4.4% of the 15-65 year old population in 2001 (Statistics South Africa 2004: 55) 22 United Nations Development Programme (2006: 284).


government’s policy on the issue, are also plainly expressed: “The government is trying to guide patients away from hospitals to its public clinics and community health care centres – where free primary health care services are available”.

However, since “there is no national medical insurance scheme in South Africa” (a piece of information that is only provided in the sixth FAQs, while it should perhaps have been specified earlier), a second suggested alternative is diverting citizens who can afford it to private structures and schemes (“it may be easier to go to a private hospital”).

Yet, this is not just presented as an easy way out of the health care problem for the South African government who, on the contrary, “wants to introduce a social insurance policy requiring all employees to have health insurance”. The government also objectively states the setbacks connected with private schemes (“medical aid costs are rapidly rising”, “medical aids also place ceilings on various categories of medical expenses”) and even reports alleged political manoeuvring on their part: “Medical schemes, fearing that an influx of low-income earners into their schemes will place an enormous financial burden on them, are lobbying for a subsidised national health scheme”. Citizens are ultimately informed that private schemes are not completely out of control, but “are regulated by the Medical Schemes Act” (so they are implicitly advised to check that schemes operate under this Act), and that a Board of Healthcare Funders exists, to which it is possible to direct “complaints relating to medical aid malpractice”.

Disjointed information about ‘traditional healers’, ‘alternative health practitioners’ (see culture-specific lexicon) and legalised abortion is also added to this already uncertain situation. In spite of this, a clear description of South African health care’s identity (no state health insurance, many private ones, rising costs), the actors on the scene (government, health insurances, citizens) and the ongoing actions (government vs. health insurances, both trying to influence citizens) emerge from the description provided in these FAQs. The one criticism could concern the degree of genuineness of the government’s accusation – once again without any supporting data – to medical aids of “lobbying for a subsidized national health


scheme,”23 but the website’s primary marketing aim and its con-sequent role as South Africa’s national and international showcase should theoretically exclude the presence of statements too far from the truth. Where the author does make use of some rhetorical means is where international policies are concerned, i.e. when reporting on the country’s immunisation programme. This is defined as “one of the cornerstones” of South Africa’s health policies, and the government is quick to state that it “follows the World Health Organisation’s recommended immunisation schedule”, thus calling to the WHO’s supranational authority to show that South Africa adheres to the international immunisation policy, even if it is just a recommended and not a compulsory action. The focus on children is a convincing final point, especially when these unquestionably represent the future of a very young nation, where entire generations of young adults have been wiped out by AIDS.24 Very noticeably, HIV/AIDS are not listed among children’s infections. Current President Thabo Mbeki’s misjudgement and underestimation of the entity of the HIV pandemic25 might at first come to mind with reference to the awkward absence of the terms AIDS and HIV from these FAQs. In his favour, it must be said that his past doubts have long changed into a strong anti-AIDS attitude and that, today, well-indicated links to specially dedicated HIV/AIDS pages within SouthAfrica.info appear throughout its health section. Finally, it is interesting to note that the first price mentioned is the R13 charged to pensioners for a consultation, while the last is a multi-million figure destined for children’s health: the text’s final sentence about the R80 million invested yearly in children’s vaccinations is a powerful rhetorical expedient – but also a hopeful political manifesto – to close the document and self-celebrate the government’s health policies, waiting for them to prove effective.

23 SouthAfrica.info (2007a). 24 With 370,000 deaths from AIDS, South Africa ranked first in the world for

AIDS deaths in 2003 (Globalis 2007, “South Africa: AIDS estimated deaths”). 25 While the world’s shocked attention was on the horror of the 9-11 attacks,

President Mbeki questioned the link between HIV and AIDS and its ways of spreading (Phillips 2001).


2.3. South African identity for travellers: the ‘Health tips for travellers’ page A hypothetical tourist planning to visit South Africa is directed to the ‘Smart travel tips’ section when looking for medical information on the web; this opens up as a three-column page with a composite and heterogeneous framework giving rise to some interesting reflections on identity issues.

Besides some expected tourist-oriented highlights such as ‘Getting to South Africa’ and ‘Getting around South Africa’, attention is in fact called to ‘Take a buddy on your travels’, directing the reader to a full article where the initiative of the ‘Travel Buddy’ volunteers’ network welcoming and advising tourists is described as a ‘community response to the problem of crime’. Hospitality, safety and national unity are the lexical leitmotiv choices unravelling through the whole text. Thus it comes as no surprise that the news is in one off the top positions, following the ‘Tuning in to Tourism Radio’ news promoting the first dedicated tourism radio station in the world, successfully launched by a South African company. It is indeed clear that the top section is also focussed on marketing South Africa’s image abroad by showing a positive, creative and inventive distinctiveness on the one hand, and providing useful tourist-targeted facilities on the other. Similar concepts also emerge in the last section ‘Health tips for travellers’ (see Fig. 2 below), where evaluative adjectives such as ‘safe’ and ‘good’ in the collocations ‘safe destination’ and ‘good levels of hygiene’ are undoubtedly meant to offer an optimistic portrait of South Africa – all within the IMC’s explicit scope.

The assertively positive image however contrasts, though slightly, with the following adversative sentence in which tourists are recommended to take a look at the ‘Health tips for travellers’’ full section before planning a journey to South Africa (“There are nonetheless some health issues that you should be aware of”). Thus, despite representing South African life standards as quite similar to European ones, immediately afterwards the author invites the reader to get acquainted with some practical health issues, actually suggesting the idea of different health conditions. Interestingly


enough, these tips are just hinted at in the very last highlight of an entire promotional, marketing-oriented section; they are presumably addressed to a web user who is actually about to leave for South Africa and is therefore voluntarily searching for them.

Fig. 2. ‘SouthAfrica.info > Plan a trip > Smart travel tips > Health tips for travellers’ (visited on 6 November 2007).


The page’s right-hand section is arranged into three boxes: a) the first contains a ‘Tourist info hotline’ where the photo of a

laughing black woman, presumably working in a call centre,26 promotes, with simple, very colloquial language (questions directly addressing the reader are the rhetorical device utilized, i.e. “Thinking of visiting South Africa?”), a multilingual service;

b) the second, ‘SA Travel Links’, includes links to other government-sponsored tourism websites (‘South African Tourism, Tourism Grading Council, AA Travel.co.za, southafricanholidayresorts’), each specifically dedicated to a sub-sector of tourism (i.e. luxury accommodation) and providing multilingual pages;

c) the third is a three-paragraph box offering more folkloric insights: � the ‘Take a Sho’t Left’ highlight, an expression based on

everyday South African ‘taxi lingo’,27 drawing attention to a South African Tourism’s campaign aimed to promote a culture of local holiday travel for South Africans,28 and further leading the user to another page and website (Southafrica.net) where tourist routes are broken down by region, i.e. Eastern Cape Tourism, Gauteng Tourism, KwaZulu-Natal Tourism, etc.;

� ‘Siyafunda isiZulu’, a link to a concise Zulu phrasebook for tourists, Zulu being the most widespread of South Africa’s eleven official languages;29

� ‘Holiday Experiences’, a link to a specific SouthAfrica.info’s section, where a mysterious, exotic lexicon addresses not only typical and standard tourist topics (i.e. ‘food and wine, cultural experiences’) but also local attractions such as ‘The big five plus’.

26 See the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR) adopted in 1996 (Global Network Policy 2004, “Highlights of current labour market conditions”).

27 “A commuter wanting a ride to a destination close by will say ‘Sho’t left, driva’ – meaning, I want to jump off just around the corner” (SouthAfrica.info 2007d).

28 Only “1.85 million South Africans (4% of the population) go on holiday at least once a year (GHS 2004 Tourism Database). 17 million South Africans go on a trip (away for at least one night). For 60% of travellers, the purpose of the trip is to visit friends or family. (GHS 2004 Tourism Database)”. Markettree (2007).

29 See SouthAfrica.Info 2007c, “The languages of South Africa”.


A picture of a woman dressed in a local costume contributes to adding a touch of ethnic atmosphere.

As for the ‘Health tips for travellers’ page, only a few words will be spent to describe the right-hand side of the page, showing two boxes with different contents. The first one links to medical websites a potential visitor to South Africa should take into account: SAA Netcare Travel Clinics, ‘The Experts in African Travel Healthcare’, offering travellers all help with travel health requirements, from general information about hazards in Africa to specific medical facilities, such as vaccines, malaria medications, travel kits, insect sprays, bed-nets, etc.; TourMed Medical Insurance; and Health24, a quite popular website, where cyberexperts give answers to multi-farious questions ranging from diet and sex tips to AIDS and environmental health. The second box hosts the Health FAQs link directed to the equivalent page devoted to citizens, once more confirming that the alleged separate intended audiences actually overlap, both because a long-term visitor should be interested in the same health issues as a resident is (see §2.2) and because the effort the government is making to promote its services and image both abroad and on site is testified to by the overlapping bi-directional links provided.

The central part of the document includes a brief general introduction followed by seven paragraphs arranged as an FAQs document reading:

� Inoculations � Medical facilities � The sun � Can I drink the water? � Do I need to take malaria tablets? � HIV/AIDS � Other health issues

At a closer scrutiny of the concepts and lexicon, there emerges a clear-cut difference between the way South Africa is being portrayed for – and thus marketed to – tourists and its real social, economic and political identity, leaking through the filter of health information description.


More specifically, many terms and phrases refer to the country’s territory, though also bringing about some socio-economic connotations:

� ‘climate’, � ‘destination’, � ‘cities’, � ‘towns’, � ‘areas’, � ‘country’,

� ‘sun’, � ‘settlements’, � ‘places’, � ‘rivers’, � ‘streams’.

They are of course very general words which, once seen within their context from a Critical Discourse Analysis viewpoint, can nonetheless echo interesting representations of South Africa as a whole.

On the one hand, some territorial elements are this time clearly aimed at selling South Africa’s image, thus readers learn that its climate is ‘relatively salubrious’, ‘warm and sunny’ and are recom-mended to wear ‘sunglasses’ and ‘sunscreens’ to protect themselves from the ‘glare of the strong African sun’. On the other hand, many elements reflect the present geographical and social fragmentation. The whole territory is factually split up in diverse ‘areas’ (the most frequent lexical item together with ‘water’ and ‘South Africa’), which can either reflect territorial subdivisions (“in the Cape the water contains humic acid”; “the Kruger National Park, the Lowveld of Mpumalanga and Limpopo, and the northern part of KwaZulu-Natal do pose a malaria risk”), or social breakups, thus ‘tourist areas’ mainly corresponding to the main ‘cities and larger towns’, notably malaria-free, are opposed to ‘rural areas’ or ‘informal or shack settlements’, where even basic health care structures are missing, and eventually overlap with ‘malaria and yellow-fever endemic areas’.

The theme of ‘water’ – a typical African problem – contributes to reinforcing such a discrepant, discriminatory social scenario: broad collocations such as ‘water is wonderful’, ‘the water is usually pure and wonderful’, ‘high-quality tap (faucet) water’ convey a safe and sound image of the country, where travellers can be provided with ‘bottled mineral water everywhere’ or even ‘mineral-rich water’ and ‘pure water’ coming directly from mountain streams. However, this idyllic picture is once more interspersed with fragments of reality


revealing that ‘informal or shack settlements’ are not endowed with drinking water for instance. All the more, it is to be noted how the language employed in this section titled ‘Can I drink the water’ is particularly rich in evaluative adjectives (‘high-quality, safe, wonder-ful, harmless’) and in anecdote-like expressions, where lexemes from the semantic field of nature (‘streams, mountains, rivers’) are mostly used, as if the reader should be entertained with exotic, dreamy elements the language of tourism is actually beset with. All the Tips give the impression of persuading and reassuring the potential tourist eager to visit South Africa about its health and territorial conditions; a large use of modality (‘could’, ‘may’) and indefinite adverbs and pronouns (‘everywhere’, ‘in any area’) help substantiate the idea of possibility.

Social disparity together with the lack of a structured home health policy emerge in the ‘medical facilities’ section, where the author distinguishes between ‘world-class facilities’ easily accessible in ‘large metropolitan hospitals’ and the just ‘primary health needs’ taken care of in rural areas. Remarkably, the only health professionals mentioned in the whole text when referring to South Africa are ‘trained caregivers deployed round the country’; ‘doctors’ and ‘specialists’ are instead cited only with reference to travellers’ prophylaxis (‘most health professionals recommend you do’, ‘consult your doctor or a specialist travel clinic’), thus once more posing a definite distinction between South Africa for tourists and for citizens.

Some hints at the international health policies emerge also from this page. The inoculations programme against yellow fever is significantly dealt with in the first place, with a peculiar focus on ‘certification’ and on ‘children inoculations’. This topic, coming immediately before the ‘medical facilities’ section, supports the idea of a government operating in order to comply with international health standards and, above all, to offer safe health conditions to a tourist’s eye. Nonetheless, HIV/AIDS is just quickly and briefly hinted at almost at the bottom of the page, together with the ‘other health issues section’, in which bilharzia, ticks and hepatitis are touched upon, perhaps not to discourage the traveller, already quite largely informed about malaria and the related prophylaxis.


Doubtless, the text is South Africa-centred: the traveller/tourist is addressed as coming from the ‘northern hemisphere’ (from where the intended audience is assumed to come, though also the ‘yellow-fever belt of Africa or South America’ is referred to) – thus a multiple audience is targeted, most probably from the northern part of Europe, a hypothesis corroborated by the presence of European language services for tourists (i.e. English, French, Dutch, German, etc. but also notably Mandarin – see the expansion programme towards China advertised in SouthAfrica.info’s homepage).

Interestingly enough, to have a local reality accepted by foreigners (brown water), reference to a globally-known reality is made (Coca Cola): ‘the water contains humic acid, which stains it the colour of diluted Coca Cola’. In addition to this, it must be considered how both the British and the American worlds are alternately referred to, especially when diatopic pairs are provided (i.e. ‘tap’ vs. ‘faucet’, ‘caregiver’ vs. ‘carer’), thus once again testifying to how many and polyvalent authors/audiences are involved. 3. Concluding remarks In spite of the obvious limits of such a brief analysis, it is nonetheless possible to single out some definite features and trends.

Analysing SouthAfrica.info, it can easily be observed how huge an effort the whole country is voluntarily making to promote its resources (or ‘brands’), both to foreigners and citizens. This is also well demonstrated by the intermingling net of websites and links which are multi-directionally promoting one another.30 The same variety, however, is also found in the different, and at the same time merging

30 See just the main page appearing when only looking at some health tips > see Sho’left – they all have the same sponsor(s) – see also FAQs (both for citizens vs. travellers) > see the many bi-directional links to health clinics, i.e. health24.com > see the main page “Health Care in South Africa” accessible from the Essential Information menu, and many others.


voices present throughout the text, a fragmentation which does not affect only the text’s author but also his/her intended audiences who, despite the comparable nature of the texts selected for this analysis, often overlap, so that the website is evidently set to promote a positive identity and image also among South African citizens.

On close analysis, it can be firstly said that considering South Africa’s situation as an expanding country, and consequently how significant tourism and foreign investments are, it is not surprising that strong attention is given to foreigners and travellers both by promoting products/services marketed by the South African government throughout the whole website as well as by devoting specific webpages to visitors. More insights come from the linguistic and rhetorical investigation conducted on the ‘Tips for travellers’ section, where the government is doubtlessly trying to supply readers with a positive picture of South Africa, thus promoting such social and economic values as hospitality, safety, national unity, inventive uniqueness, etc.

However, the big issue underlying the whole marketing concept behind SouthAfrica.info is that, despite the attempt to unify the country’s internal and external identity, the truth is that the local reality is fragmented: the high impact of crime, language division, malarial endemic areas where poor people – the majority of the population31 – are segregated, the lack of accessible health care structures are just a few instances of it.

The contradictions this brief analysis has tried to shed light on make evident that South African identity is still way under construction – therefore it proves quite difficult to advertise what does not yet exist, though some efforts have also been highlighted (i.e. the isiZulu language is put forward as a point of reference for travellers, perhaps because it is the most widespread spoken idiom in the country as well as the one spoken by the most influential community).

To conclude, in the ‘Health tips for travellers’ the image presented to visitors rests on an attentive but also tentative balance between portraying the dreamy, exotic and safe destination a tourist

31 The majority of the population earned R800 (gross) or less a month in 2001 (Statistics South Africa 2004: 71-75).


would long for when planning a holiday, and the actual situation in South Africa as regards health and socio-economic problems. On the contrary, the FAQs page appears as an emergency directory through which the South African government invites local/foreign readers to use private health services as much as possible. This reveals the present chaotic and unsure health care system and its helpless inefficiency, rendering the country unable to cater for all of its citizens’ needs. Indeed, the country’s fragmented identity emerges from the communication strategies deployed in this portal’s webpages for residents: the FAQs’ weak textual structure, the lack of data and figures supporting key statements, incomplete health directories. As for visitors, though directed to some external links providing more specific travel/health information, they are not actually provided with thorough details on inoculations, prophylaxis and treatment of typically South African diseases, which are in fact often neglected even by tour operators eager to market and sell their products.

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