Behind the Mask

» see mask.org.za as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I did not know this site existed until I went looking for things missing from this list. It covered a continent I have never worked in, for readers whose news nobody else was gathering, and it closed without telling anyone. What makes it worth writing down is what happened to the record afterwards. That is the part of a website's death that usually goes unrecorded, because its readers are the only people in a position to record it.

Behind the Mask was started in 2000 in Johannesburg by Bart Luirink, a Dutch journalist who had been a correspondent for Dutch media in South Africa since 1990 and who divided his time between the two countries. The timing sits four years after South Africa's 1996 constitution became the first in the world to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, and the gap between that document and the rest of the continent is the subject the site existed to cover.

Its own masthead described it as the voice of Africa's LGBTI community. A MediaShift assessment in August 2008 called it the first dedicated news resource for LGBTI issues in Africa and credited it with a continental focus, while being plain about the method: much of the news was culled from other outlets, with little original commentary of its own. The same piece suggested it could recruit local activists as reporters, which implies it was not yet doing so eight years in.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who paid for it ~

The one hard financial figure available is a grant record. Atlantic Philanthropies lists a 2003 award of $104,640, equal to R800,000, running twelve months, with a purpose line that reads: to provide core funding to the gay and lesbian web-magazine. A second Atlantic grant followed in 2008, described as bridging support for financial stability, which is the phrase a funder uses when an organization is already in trouble.

Twelve months of core funding at a hundred thousand dollars is the entire economics of the thing. Nothing in the record suggests advertising or subscriptions ever covered any part of it.

~ nobody wrote the closing paragraph ~

There is no shutdown notice anywhere. English Wikipedia says the site shut down in 2012, but the citation attached to that sentence is an academic paper published in 2010, so it cannot be the source of it. The South African organization Iranti, which refers to Behind the Mask as the acknowledged prime source for its subject, gives the active period as 2000 to 2010 and does not explain where that end date comes from. A search of South African press turns up no closure report at all.

What does exist is the archive itself, and it points at 2012. The Internet Archive holds captures of the homepage roughly monthly at around nine kilobytes through the first half of that year, the last verifiable one on 8 June 2012, still carrying the masthead and still rotating quotes from Kenyan and Ugandan material. Then the captures stop. Nothing at all is recorded between 19 July 2012 and 26 September 2017. By 20 October 2017 the address serves a WordPress site titled Mask, offering to help you discover your love in South Africa. The 2019 captures open with obfuscated javascript. Since 2021 they are mostly redirects, and today mask.org.za bounces through to a music download domain behind a bot wall.

~ where the record went ~

Twelve years of reporting on a subject that was criminalized across much of the territory it covered is a primary historical source, and the institutions treated it as one. Behind the Mask is cited in academic work from 2002 onward, including a 2016 article in Women's Studies Quarterly that credits it with bolstering LGBT organizing across Africa. Iranti states that the site is archived at the University of Texas at Austin Libraries, under the Human Rights Documentation Initiative. That page would not open from here, so how complete that copy is remains an open question.

Which leaves the record in two places, neither of them the publisher: a university library in Texas, and a crawler that happened to come by once a month until it stopped. A newspaper that closes leaves bound volumes in a building somewhere. This one left a gap in the capture log between July 2012 and September 2017, and whatever a librarian in Austin thought to keep.

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