Dawn Breaks: the anti-colonial legacy of the ANC Women’s Section radio segment

ABSTRACT This article is an auto-ethnographic study that explores how its author came to study South African exiles after stumbling upon archival material of a radio segment called “Dawn Breaks,” while at the Liberation Archives at The University of Fort Hare in Alice, South Africa. Dawn Breaks was the African National Congress (ANC) Women’s Section’s weekly 30-min radio segment of the exiled ANC’s radio programme, “Radio Freedom,” that broadcasted primarily from the radio programme’s headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, throughout the 1980s. This article argues that Dawn Breaks, as a cultural product of this movement, offers a significant model to studying how and why scholar-activists like the author, but more particularly Black women in times of struggle, are politicised into joining anti-apartheid movements and are able to find their anti-colonial voice. This kind of work is indebted to entities like the Women’s Section’s radio segment because it amplified the Women’s Section’s growing voice and activism across the clandestine ANC organisation in exile through the airwaves.