Media : Airing a New Era : There’s a new sound on South Africa’s state radio: English with an African accent. And some whites aren’t happy about it.

A mischievous smile spread across the face of producer Kenosi Modisani as the tape of thickly African-accented English began to roll in the studios of SAfm, the revamped flagship radio station of President Nelson Mandela’s new South Africa.

“The aunties on pensions hate this: a black man talking about economics,” the 36-year-old Modisani said in an acid reference to South Africa’s English-speaking elite, which made up an avid audience when the state-owned station was known as Radio South Africa.

“There’s this thing in the back of their minds saying, ‘You’ve taken everything else away from us, but you are not going to take away our language,’ ” he said. “But if they are going to be the guardians of English, they must pack and go back to England.”

The English-descended whites are not packing up and leaving, however. They are picking up their phones and complaining directly to pained-looking research assistants in the production offices of the radio station. Outraged letters also have been filling newspaper columns.

“I don’t object to accents, but let’s hear them on the street and not over the air,” wrote Michael Kokot in a letter published in two Johannesburg dailies. “What they have done is imposed their will on us . . . (forcing us to) listen to black music and mangled black English.”

The critical bombardment has become an everyday affair for Charles Leonard, 33, the new director of news and current affairs at SAfm. He showed one of the many letters of rebuttal he has composed in his office deep in the basement of Johannesburg’s Radio Park.

“We are catching a lot of flak from arrogant white English-speakers,” he wrote. “These people cannot come to terms with the exciting new rainbow society we are trying to create. The ‘letters’ always start, ‘I am not a racist but . . . ‘ I know that means one thing. They are raving racists.”

The new radio format may be just a small part of forging an all-inclusive South African nationality, moving away from what some intellectuals call “Eurocentrism.” But it is playing a large part in bringing new political realities home to the older generation of the English South Africans, who were cosseted during 46 years of white supremacist rule by the Dutch-descended Afrikaners, who make up 60% of the white population.

Even if many English people did not approve of Afrikaner-style apartheid, most went along with a system that gave them relatively luxurious lifestyles. Many also took comfort in knowing that British descent ultimately gave them the option to leave. The old Radio South Africa anchored them to that identity, which they now feel is in danger of being swamped.

Just 5% of South Africa’s population of more than 40 million is of ethnic English descent, and the onetime colonial community now finds its language being colonized. The English feel little joy as their language supplants Afrikaans as the lingua franca in a country that now has 11 official languages under President Mandela’s African National Congress.

“The ANC did win the elections, and one of the consequences of this shift of power has been to cut English-speakers off from Britain as completely and as finally as the British occupation cut the Afrikaners off from Holland” in the 1800s, wrote Ken Owen, the editor of Johannesburg’s Sunday Times newspaper.

“In case nobody has noticed, a tired English literature has lately acquired a new freshness and vitality from writers who come from Pakistan, India, even Japan.”

SAfm’s two morning broadcasters both symbolize the strong links South Africa’s ethnic English feel with Britain--Sally Burdett was born there, and John Maytham is married to a Briton. But like the 22-person team in the news department, the majority of whom are still white, the broadcasters see their role as crusaders for a new identity that can unite whites, blacks, Indians, English and Afrikaners.

“People will adapt. We will assimilate into a new pan-South African culture. It’s something we will create. We are not African whites,” said Maytham, 40, who was brought up in rural South Africa speaking Xhosa and English. “The English is ours now. We don’t have to return it untarnished. My son is coming back from school with African legends now, not Mother Goose.”

Maytham said one reason for the complaints was simply that the station was bringing in a more representative range of people to discuss the news, necessarily bringing in a broader spectrum of voices. News coverage of neighboring African states also has been increased, instead of routinely jumping several thousand miles to the capitals of Europe and the West for the main news.

For Leonard, the news and current affairs chief, the new station is also part of a rising patriotism that he could never feel under apartheid. If the old English want plummy-accented presenters using dated expressions like “by George!” he said, a commercial station should cater to their tastes.

Angry listeners have some understandable gripes and feel that they were not consulted about the changes. Some of the new South African talk-show hosts are clearly not up to the job, and institutions such as the dawn program for farmers have been unceremoniously ditched.

The chief of the South African Broadcasting Company, Govin Reddy, also made the mistake of revealing that he believed that Radio South Africa’s audience was over 55 and “dying.”

“Much noise is being made about the mangling of the English language. Several listeners complained that their children could not understand these black accents. Presumably these same children have no difficulty understanding their domestic workers,” Reddy countered.

“Only the English language is positioned to foster mutual understanding among our diverse cultures, kept apart for so long by apartheid,” he added. “Thank God SAfm is here to fill the void as a bridge builder for race relations.”