Guerilla Radios in Southern Africa. Broadcasters, Technology, Propaganda Wars, and the Armed Struggle

Abstract

Guerrilla Radios makes an original and important contribution to the literature on southern Africa’s liberation struggles. The collected essays showcase the work of both new and established writers to argue that radio broadcasting was a crucial weapon in the armoury of liberation movements, especially while they were operating in exile. Zimbabwean liberation broadcasting (or ‘guerrilla radios’) dominates the book, but there are also chapters on South African, Namibian, Angolan and Mozambican radio stations in the period from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The authors clearly demonstrate that political elites on both sides of the liberation divide put great emphasis on control of the media and shared a belief in the importance of winning the war for hearts and minds. They argue that the media war was every bit as important as the military conflict between African nationalism and settler colonialism, which has so far received far more attention from historians. The settler media machine maintained ostensible dominance throughout the period in the form of generously funded state broadcasters such as Radio Republic South Africa, as illustrated by Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu’s chapter. Although it is not discussed here, the same was true of the press. But Guerrilla Radios argues persuasively that the radio stations set up in exile by anti-colonial liberation movements and run on a shoestring had an impact that went far beyond their limited technical and budgetary firepower. Listeners to guerrilla radio stations recall that although they often struggled to get a good signal and lived in fear of being caught, hearing subversive voices or even just strains of machine gun fire – the signature of the African National Congress (ANC)’s Radio Freedom – was enough to revive their spirits in the darkest of times. TshepoMoloi’s chapter on Radio Freedom and Black Consciousness uses oral history interviews and published memoirs to give a rich account of the psychological impact of hearing liberated voices on the airwaves, sometimes persuading young South Africans to join uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in exile in the wake of the Soweto uprising and repression of 1976–1977. An MK veteran, Wonga Welile Bottoman, recalls how