Resistant Medium: The Voices of Zulu Radio Drama in the 1970s

Abstract

The making of culture in South Africa through different but linked forms and genres focuses on the medium of radio, and the ‘emergent genre’ of Zulu serial radio drama. Using Benedict Anderson's notion of ‘socioscape’ a link is drawn between the wide sweep of historical events and the production of culture. Beginning with the case of the musical, uMabatha [Macbeth], its performance history, and its links with serial radio drama in Zulu, this article focuses on the ways in which this, in turn was linked to the ‘performance’ of African football commentary on radio, and points to the national resonances that the act, and art, of commentating built up for both announcers and listeners. Finally, three representative radio serial plays from the 1970s are examined in relation to the ways in which they engaged with the social and political realities of the time. Through the multi-accentual nature of language and the polysemic nature of the plays themselves these plays might appear to endorse or, at least, acquiesce in the dominant apartheid ideology of the era, yet at the same time they offered resistant alternatives to it.