Early radio broadcasting in South Africa: culture, modernity & technology
This thesis tells the story of the events that led to a broadcasting culture in South Africa. It then proceeds to show how listeners were gradually brought into the radio community, notwithstanding all the prejudices of the time. Africans were the last ones to be considered for broadcasting, this was now in a time of crisis, during the Second World War. Through a look at the cultural landscape of the time, the thesis uncovers the making of radio in South Africa, and shows how this process of making was deeply contested, often with vexing contradictions in ideas about race, segregation and point of view. The thesis is useful to scholars of history, culture and, more importantly, of music, as it lays the necessary groundwork for in-depth explorations of music styles played and the African artists who grew out of broadcasting activities. In its appeal to a broader audience of literate and illiterate, it sparked the formation of a South African listening public. It also facilitated the presence and domestication of the radio-set within the African home. Radio could account for a whole world out there in the presence of one's home, therefore actively situating African listeners into a modern- global imaginary of listeners. By bringing news from faraway places nearer, radio was a new kind of colonial modern encounter as it sought to redefine the nature of the local. The thesis therefore understands broadcasting as part of those technological legacies through which, in line with V Y Mudimbe (1988: xi), "African worlds have been established as realities for knowledge." Technology therefore appears as a recurring theme throughout this thesis. The primary material was gathered using archival methods. In the absence of an audio archive of recordings of the early broadcasts, the thesis relies to a large extent on written resources and interviews.
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