"This article takes a visual approach to the study of an auralmedium. It argues that the radio set had a powerful visual presence in popular culture in Southern Africa between the 1950s and the 1970s when most people bought their first radio sets. Advertisements for radios carried by the press offer ... the most prominent examples of this iconography. In South Africa, Rhodesia and Zambia, radio advertisements developed a distinctive aesthetic that blended global and local influences and framed the relationship between the new technology and society. Although the radio set was presented as part of a forward-looking, ostensibly inclusive vision of modernity, sales strategies also served to associate radio with whiteness and masculinity by looking backwards to the racial and gendered hierarchies of the colonial past. The homogeneity of advertising on both sides of the liberation divide demonstrates the pervasive cultural influence of settler colonialism both before and after formal decolonisation." (Abstract) more

"A century after its appearance on the African continent, the radio set has become so ubiquitous and seemingly old-fashioned a technology that it is easily overlooked. But like the automobile - perhaps the only other late-nineteenth century invention to have had a greater impact - radio continues to ... have a profound global influence. If it tends to be outshone in the Global North by the more recent innovations of television and digital media, in the South radio continues to have a dominant presence, particularly in Africa where it retains its status as the most popular mass medium. A recent continental survey of news audiences by Afrobarometer suggested that 68% of Africans source their news from the radio on a daily or weekly basis, while only 53% get their news from the television and 37% from internet sources (Malophane 2022). Nor is the dominance of radio limited to countries that have low rates of internet access. Another recent survey found that 80% of South Africans listen to the radio at least once a week in a country where digital media attract their largest African audiences (Bosch 2022)." (Abstract) more