Rainbow of Languages on the Airwaves

Riding the airwaves over South Africa are more than 30 radio stations carrying everything from talk shows to rock ‘n’ roll and babbling away in a rainbow of languages, from Nguni to Zulu and Afrikaans to English.

Each day, more than 7 million people--6 million of whom are black--flip on their radios in South Africa. That’s more than 10 times the number of people who get the Sunday Times, the country’s largest national newspaper.

The state-run South African Broadcasting Corp. has sole broadcasting rights in the country, and its 29 stations, three of which are beamed nationally, reflect the ethnic diversity within South Africa’s borders.

Twenty-two of those stations are aimed specifically at black audiences. The most popular are Radio Zulu, with 1.8 million listeners, Radio Sotho, with 1.1 million, and Radio Nguni--a language understood by a range of black ethnic groups, with more than 3 million listeners.

By a fluke of apartheid policy, Radio 702 became the country’s only independently-owned radio station 10 years ago. The government had created nominally independent black “homelands” and offered them frequencies for their own radio stations, which could then reach into South Africa.

Most homeland governments followed Pretoria’s lead by exerting full control over their stations. But the authorities in Bophuthatswana, a homeland divided into seven islands surrounded by South African territory, allowed a group of businessmen to start their own station.

Radio 702’s 100,000-watt AM signal, transmitted from that homeland, blanketed the heavily populated Johannesburg and Pretoria areas, and its U.S.-style Top 40 programming became an instant hit. Soon, state-run Radio 5 copied the Radio 702 style, hired away some of its disc jockeys and, because it could transmit on the higher-quality FM signal, soon became a formidable competitor.

The government would not allow Radio 702 a spot on the FM dial, so it altered its own format earlier this year in favor of more talk shows, like John Robbie’s Talk at Ten. Its listener figures immediately increased, to a multiracial audience estimated at 350,000.