Moomin/Mūmin/Moemin: apartheid-era dubbing and Japanese animation

Abstract

Under apartheid, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) dubbed large quantities of Japanese children's animation into Afrikaans, to fulfil bilingual broadcasting requirements. This article examines one such work, Moemin, which was dubbed into Afrikaans during the early 1990s, just as apartheid's grip on the national broadcaster was slipping. This series presents a unique case study of apartheid-era dubbing, because the dubbing team did not have access to full scripts and had to invent dialogue and plot as they went along. This means that the Afrikaans and Japanese versions differ significantly. This article uses a comparative close reading of the Afrikaans and Japanese versions to show how the process of dubbing should be seen as one of hybridisation between a transnational cultural commodity and a local specificity. In this case, the hybridisation provides glimpses into both the ideological flux that characterised South African life during the early 1990s, and into a transitional phase in the global circulation of Japanese pop culture. At the same time, the series becomes an eloquent artefact of a relatively unexamined aspect of north–south globalisation – the flow of media from Asia to Africa.