There has been a resurgence of interest in radio in Africa in recent years, with publications such as Guerrilla Radios in Southern Africa (2021)Footnote 1 and Radio in Africa (2012)Footnote 2 exploring different aspects of what is often referred to as ‘Africa’s medium’. Now Liz Gunner, an editor of the latter collection, has written a full-length exploratory account of the history of Zulu radio. Radio Soundings hones in on radio’s role in establishing a complex modern black identity in South Africa and beyond. Gunner is a prodigious scholar whose substantive body of work examines oral culture and literature in Africa. Her background in historical research and textual analysis results in an insightful understanding of how black South Africans have approached radio, both as producers and as listeners.
Making associations with indigenous radio in countries such as Australia and Nepal, Radio Soundings explores the popular African-language radio stations of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), not only as manifestations of ‘his master’s voice’ but also as potentially unifying, if not subversive, media. The National Party, as Gunner shows, was correct to fear the potentially ‘modernizing’ effects of radio on the black population, for the broadcasts operated as ‘wild card’ ‘sound texts’ (p. 34) that migrated via unpredictable networks to connect rural and urban communities.
Focusing on Zulu radio and radio drama in particular, Gunner’s analysis spans a period of eighty years. Given that two airings of a radio play can reach the same size audience as would take a stage drama over two years (p. 76), it is something of an indictment that so little scholarly attention has been given to the genre, and Gunner’s book breaks new ground in this respect.
The book is structured into three parts: ‘Sound and “migration”’; ‘Distance and memory’; and ‘Drama, language and everyday life’. This provides a (more or less) chronological, highly readable history of interlinked events, figures and broadcasting practices. The first two chapters chart the role of pioneers K. E. Masinga and Alexius Buthelezi, both of whom might be seen as ambiguous, trickster figures. Although they may have had to enter the SABC offices via the back door, as Gunner points out, their understanding of and interactions with their audiences (the hostel dwellers, beer brewers, white-collar workers and teachers of urban communities) undercut the staid broadcasts engineered by the apartheid state and were largely responsible for the creation of new radio publics.
Chapters 3 and 4 explore radio from afar, focusing on Bloke Modisane and Lewis Nkosi, both Drum writers whose intellectualism was enriched by their encounters with the US civil rights movement and the experience of exile in the 1960s. These chapters are at once portraits – beautifully rendered – of complex writers as well as explorations of the innovative possibilities of radio as a ‘blind’ medium and dramatic platform for outsider figures of the diaspora. Finding no place for himself on South Africa’s closely surveilled airwaves, Modisane became known for his BBC plays at a time when radio was in fierce competition with television. Gunner illustrates how he overcame this challenge by exploiting radio’s ‘magical Ariel-like qualities’ (p. 92), composing plays with ‘dense auditory richness’ (p. 85) that referred back to the lost urban culture of Johannesburg. Writing for both home audiences and African listeners across the continent, Modisane’s plays featured multifaceted protagonists and a ‘startling cosmopolitanism’ (p. 85), while Nkosi, from his London radio base at the Transcription Centre, played a key role in creating transnational networks.
The next two chapters move back to South Africa and look at the modernizing effects of popular serial dramas in the 1970s. Gunner explores how three classic dramas centring on everyday family intrigues helped listeners to navigate a period of increasing political pressure.
The final chapters explore how Radio Zulu, renamed Ukhozi FM, was transformed in the post-apartheid era, adapting to the vastly different and fast-changing new South Africa. The station created a new ‘zone of public intimacy’ (p. 17) through the increasing (often profoundly moving) involvement of loyal listeners via phone-ins on the Vuka Mzanzi breakfast show.
Radio Soundings is a rich, interdisciplinary monograph that brings together various strands of scholarship (historical, biographical, literary and sociological). Despite straddling continents, eras and genres, it provides nuance and detail that make insightful sense of the medium’s meaning for listeners. Gunner’s wealth of knowledge, acquired over a lifetime of scholarship, is a refreshing alternative to the sometimes hastily produced social science-oriented studies that tend to dominate this field. In the age of big data and the rise of new methodological approaches, the book makes a profound case for the value of the individual scholar. It is a book that only Gunner could have written.
