Subversive narratives and protest against apartheid in Mandla Myeko’s Apho Sikhala Khona Isikhwatsha radio drama

Abstract

This article celebrates one hundred years of South African radio broadcasting. It examines the role a Xhosa radio drama played in conscientizing its audience during apartheid. It also demonstrates the value of radio drama as an art form and its subversive role during apartheid. Deploying media content analysis, the study explores how Mandla Myeko’s Apho Sikhala Khona Isakhwatsha engaged apartheid. Radio was extended to black people in the 1960s; ostensible to control the minds of black audiences. Research shows that Broederbond members, the Afrikaner ‘thinktank’, were ‘planted’ at African radio stations for this purpose but their influence was at times contested by black scriptwriters and producers through radio drama. Radio drama carried subversive, albeit clandestine, messages to the highly politicised audience who could then decode the messages embedded in the rich Xhosa language. Despite close surveillance and censorship, radio drama persisted in its role of enlightening audiences, while at the same time fulfilling its educative, entertainment and informative mandate. Audiences consumed radio content as a valid reflection of their lived realities. The rural settings of most of the dramas, for instance, camouflaged the dramas’ appeal in politically charged urban areas, thereby hiding the uniting power of these dramas concerning black people’s condition and struggles. The paucity of scholarship on the role of radio drama in resisting apartheid requires attention, as the present article attempts to. Finally, if it were not for the seditious risks taken through radio drama, marginalised rural audiences would have been kept in the dark about apartheid atrocities.