By Liz Gunner
The radio in Africa has shaped culture by allowing listeners to negotiate modern identities and sometimes fast-changing lifestyles. Through the medium of voice and mediated sound, listeners on the station – known as Radio Bantu, then Radio Zulu, and finally Ukhozi FM – shaped new understandings of the self, family and social roles.
Through particular genres such as radio drama, fuelled by the skills of radio actors and listeners, an array of debates, choices and mistakes were unpacked daily for decades. This was the unseen literature of the auditory, the drama of the airwaves, which at its height shaped the lives of millions of listeners in urban and rural places in South Africa.
Impact on community
Radio became a conduit for many talents squeezed aside by apartheid repression. Besides Winnie Mahlangu and K.E. Masinga and a host of other talents opened by radio, the exiles Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane made a niche and a network of identities and conversations which stretched from the heart of Harlem to the American South.
Nkosi and Modisane were working respectively in BBC Radio drama and a short-lived radio transcription centre based in London which drew together the threads of activism and creativity from both Black America and the African continent at a critical moment of the late empire.
Radio Soundings is a fascinating study that shows how, throughout its history,
Zulu radio has made a major impact on community, everyday life and South African
popular culture, voicing a range of subjectivities which gave its listeners a place in the
modern world.
“Radio Soundings is at once a uniquely South African story and a compelling transnational tale of black South African exiles using radio as a medium to contextualise their anti-apartheid struggles with African American Civil Rights and the decolonisation of European empires.“
— Robert Trent Vinson, William & Mary, author of The Americans Are Coming! and Albert Luthuli: Mandela before Mandela
“… a beautifully intimate and historical portrait of radio dramas produced by South Africans
in South Africa and abroad. She illustrates the possibilities of voice these dramas within
Apartheid and post-Apartheid eras enable through a focus on Zulu language radio…“
— Laura Kunreuther, Bard University
About the author
Liz Gunner is visiting Research Professor in the School of Languages, University of Johannesburg.
Her most recent books include the co-edited Radio in Africa: Publics, cultures, communities (2011) and Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature (with Graham Furniss) (2008).
- Publisher | Wits University Press |
- ISBN | 978-1-77614-321-4 |
- Recommended Price | R320.00 |
- Subject | Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology, Area Studies, Anthropology: General Interest, History, African Studies, African History |
For more information | Corina van der Spoel |
+27 (0)11 717 8705/8700 | mail me |
