There are many ways to be featured in the media. For me, being interviewed on the radio is a dream come true. And it did…
If you grew up in South Africa, and are a certain age, radio broadcasting holds a special place in your heart.
I saw this in action at a recent midwinter gathering of my craft group. One person fell to remembering a newspaper called Die Landstem (literally translated as “country voice”), which her mother used to buy simply because it was so sensational.
The newspaper, a weekly published from 1950 to 1968, was (according to Wikipedia) the last big Afrikaans publication which did not support the National Party.
It was a tabloid of note, and according to my friend was much given to stories about how the “nag wa” (the night wagon which collected sewage in the days before waterborne sewerage systems) had crashed into someone’s house and landed in the lounge while they were… we wanted to say they were watching television. But of course they weren’t. Television only came to South Africa in 1976 (see a vintage picture here) – and so the unfortunate people who had just had the contents of the nag wa deposited on their couch must have been listening to the radio.
What followed at the craft gathering was a long conversation about radio programmes we remember listening to – the power of the memories so strong that we remembered what time of an evening a particular programme might have played, or which children in a family were sent to bed at which time, measured by whether you got to listen to a particular programme or not.
In which I go on the radio
So, radio is, in my mind, a powerful medium. In my childhood, it was the radio and newspapers which shaped our views of the world. There is still a part of me that thinks if you “go on the radio”, have your picture in the newspaper or have a letter to the editor printed, that’s a pinnacle of life.
And so when I went on the radio for the first and probably only time in my life it was a morning of nerves and excitement and wonder.
The radio station in question is Bush Radio, founded in 1992 and Africa’s oldest community radio station. It opened illegally, in defiance of the apartheid government, and later obtained a permanent broadcasting licence. It’s about to celebrate 30 years of legal broadcasting.
Bush (as it is known) is a Cape Town, and now national and continental, institution – and it was one of the first places I thought of approaching to spread the word about a book project I am working to get off the ground.
I was able to get over my fear of doing any such thing because I have an “in”: my good friend and former colleague Juanita Williams has strong ties to the station. She worked there at the inception of the station’s legal broadcasting and is married to the station’s Programme Integrator Adrian Louw. Even so, such is the power of radio, that it took me at least three weeks to send that first email.
But send it I did, eventually. Would you be interested in me doing an interview about my project, I asked Adrian.
He said yes! And invited me on to the 9am to 12 noon show, the Morning Cruise hosted by Khusi Veto, who phoned and asked if I’d like to come in to the studio.
Would I? Just try and stop me.
A broadcasting studio visit
So I went to Bush on July 9 and sat in the studio and was interviewed about my idea for a book. You can hear the interview here, but the short version is that I’m trying to find people born in 1962 (like me) to interview about their experiences growing up and living in both apartheid and democratic South Africa.
The interview covered the book, and its themes, and appealed to listeners who might have been born in 1962 to be in touch.
READ: Unearthing the past: I need your stories of growing up in South Africa (1962-2024)
Of all the public speaking I’ve done in a long life, this was by far the easiest. Khusi and intern Laure Ajax were wonderful – so easy to talk to that it felt like chatting to one person, rather than to an audience “out there”. (And my family will attest that chatting is one of my superpowers anyway!)
One for the bucket list
Have I found any interviewees for my book? Not yet (but if you were born in 1962 and are interested, there’s a Google form to fill in here).
Did I have a grand day out? That I did – almost as good as Wallace and Gromit’s trip to the moon to find cheese (“a grand day out” is a standard expression in our family for having a wonderful time). A big thank you to Bush for making the whole thing so easy and so friendly.
A bucket list item is ticked off: I went on the radio!
Main picture: Laure Ajax (left, standing), Khusi Veto and me (seated) in the studio after the interview. Picture by Bush Radio
Other things I’ve written
There’s a system for that! – How a programme on the radio years ago got me started on thinking about systems…
Unearthing the past: I need your stories of growing up in South Africa (1962-2024) – I’ve been writing things most of my life. Now, I’m finally starting on an actual book, and I need your help.
Just pay your SABC TV licence (yes, really) – South Africans hate the SABC TV licence. But there are very good reasons why we should all just shut up and pay up – one of them being the many indigenous-language radio stations under the organisation’s umbrella.
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