Conversations with Sekibakiba Lekgoathi

Radio in Africa

“…But anticolonial, nationalist radio became more, unnerving an already nervous state by addressing its very own subjects in a new, targeted fashion, as members of an independent nation. As Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, Tshepo Moloi, and Alda Romao Sauta Saide have shown recently (Lekgoathi et al 2022), Southern African Guerrilla Radios were a specific regional emanation of the larger phenomenon of international radio broadcasting, operated by nationalist movements from already independent states, for whom the support for anticolonial and anti-Apartheid broadcasting was an act of practical solidarity. They offered a direct, institutional alternative to the communities promoted via colonial radio.…”

“…Broadcasters do try to actively build their communities, but there needs to be something that can be built on and someone who communicates back. This becomes clear in Gunner’s account of broadcasters in exile, as in Sekibakiba Lekgoathi’s work (which Gunner and Moorman build on) on radio Xhosa and the ANC-operated “Radio Freedom” (Lekgoathi 2010; 2022). In the space between the broadcasters’ “voices” (meaning both their actual voice and their distinctive style) and the multivocality that Englund and Brisset-Foucault describe, radio’s communities are formed and have, as the Internet age is wont to say, effects “IRL” (in real life), beyond the medium itself.…”