Afrikaans radio is older than most of the stations on the dial and better resourced than almost any other language service outside English. It is also more varied than people assume, because the three tiers of South African broadcasting each produce a different kind of Afrikaans station.
RSG: the national service
Radio Sonder Grense — "radio without borders" — is the SABC's national Afrikaans service, and it is the oldest continuously running thing on this list. It began in 1937 as the SABC's "B" service. It was renamed Radio Suid-Afrika in 1986, became Afrikaans Stereo in the early 1990s, and took the name RSG in 1996.
It runs a full-service public broadcasting format — news, current affairs, drama, music, sport, religion — nationwide between 100 and 104 FM, with DAB+ in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town. At its measured peak in 2012 it reported a seven-day listenership of just under two million.
Full-service is the important phrase. RSG is the only Afrikaans station that still does radio drama and long-form current affairs at scale, and it is the reason the language has a broadcast register that commercial radio does not have to maintain.
The commercial stations
Commercial Afrikaans and bilingual radio is concentrated where the audience is: Gauteng, the Free State, the Northern and Western Cape. These stations are advertising-funded, playlist-driven and built around personality breakfast and drive shows.
Several of the largest are bilingual rather than purely Afrikaans, moving between Afrikaans and English within the same show — which reflects how a lot of their audience actually speaks. If you are looking for Afrikaans-only output, the community sector and RSG are more reliable than the metro commercial stations.
Browse the Afrikaans stations page for what is currently streaming, or go by region: Gauteng, Free State, Western Cape and Northern Cape have the deepest Afrikaans coverage.
The community sector
This is the part most listeners underestimate. Afrikaans community radio is dense, particularly in the Western and Northern Cape, the Free State platteland and the older Pretoria suburbs, and it does something the national and commercial stations structurally cannot: local detail.
Funeral notices. School results. Which road is closed. The church bazaar. Farm reports that name actual districts. For a town of fifteen thousand people, the community station is the only broadcaster that will ever mention it, and for anyone who has moved away it is the most direct line back.
Community stations are also where you hear regional Afrikaans — Kaaps, Griekwa-Afrikaans, the Namaqualand accent — which the national services largely standardise out. Read our guide to community radio for how the sector works.
Finding the right one
A rough sorting that holds up in practice:
- News, analysis and drama — RSG. Nothing else in Afrikaans does this range.
- Music and personalities on the commute — the metro commercial stations, accepting that you will get English as well.
- Your own town — the community station, which is almost certainly streaming even if it has no marketing budget.
- Gospel and church — several Afrikaans stations are religious community licensees; see gospel and Christian radio.
For listeners outside the country
Afrikaans radio has an unusually large diaspora audience — the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and the Gulf — and streams are generally not geo-blocked. RSG and the community stations travel best, because they carry the language as it is actually spoken rather than a playlist you could get anywhere. See listening from abroad.
If your town's station is not listed here, tell us about it. We add community stations free and we check the frequency against the broadcaster's own published material before publishing it.