Liz Gunner, Radio Soundings: South Africa and the black modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hb £78.99 – 978 1 1084 7064 3; pb £19.99 – 978 1 1084 5635 7). 2019/2020, x + 224 pp.

Abstract

Therehasbeenaresurgenceof interest inradio inAfrica inrecentyears,withpublications such as Guerrilla Radios in Southern Africa (2021)1 and Radio in Africa (2012)2 exploring different aspects ofwhat is often referred to as ‘Africa’smedium’. Now Liz Gunner, an editor of the lattercollection,haswrittena full-lengthexploratoryaccountof thehistoryofZulu 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 ofwork 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