On 18 December 1923, a transmitter at the railway headquarters in Johannesburg carried the first broadcast heard in South Africa. There was no schedule, no advertising and almost no audience — receiving sets were home-built and rare. What there was, immediately, was interest.
Within a year three more services had licences: the Association of Scientific and Technical Societies in Johannesburg, the Cape Peninsular Publicity Association in Cape Town, and the Durban Corporation, which began broadcasting in 1924. Three cities, three independent operations, no connection between them. South African radio started as a local medium and has never entirely stopped being one.
One company, then one corporation
The three services were not commercially viable separately. In 1927 they merged into the African Broadcasting Company, owned by the businessman I.W. Schlesinger, whose interests already ran through cinema, insurance and citrus. For nine years a single private company held South African broadcasting.
That ended on 1 August 1936, when the services were sold to the newly created South African Broadcasting Corporation, established by act of parliament. The SABC would hold a monopoly on legal broadcasting inside the country for the next forty-three years, and the shape of that monopoly explains most of what came after.
Springbok Radio, and the thing radio did before television
The SABC's public services carried news, classical music and religion. What they did not carry was advertising, and by 1950 the corporation needed the money. Springbok Radio launched on 1 May 1950 as South Africa's first commercial station — for-profit, but still state-owned.
It ran for thirty-five years and it is the reason a particular generation of South Africans remembers radio the way others remember television. Because there was no television in South Africa until 1976 — the government resisted it for decades on the grounds of cultural contamination — radio drama had a clear run at the national imagination that it got nowhere else in the world for so long.
Lux Radio Theatre ran from opening night in 1950 until the very end. Consider Your Verdict ran from 1954, The Epic Casebook from 1957, Squad Cars from 1969, The Adventures of Jet Jungle from 1973. Serial drama, sponsored by soap and oats companies, listened to by whole households at fixed times. Springbok Radio closed on 31 December 1985, nine years after television arrived and took both the audience and the advertising.
Radio from outside the border
The monopoly covered South African soil, which left an obvious gap. LM Radio broadcast from Lourenço Marques in Portuguese Mozambique and was heard across the north of the country, playing the popular music the SABC would not. For a lot of listeners it was the only alternative available, and it is remembered with a fondness that has outlived the city's name.
The other gap was legal rather than geographical. The nominally independent homelands were not, in law, South Africa — so a station licensed there was not breaking the SABC's monopoly. Capital Radio 604 launched from the Transkei in December 1979 and Radio 702 from Bophuthatswana in 1980. Both aimed squarely at the metros they could reach. The monopoly was over in practice several years before anybody changed the law.
After 1994
The Independent Broadcasting Authority Act of 1993 replaced state control with an independent regulator and a licensing process, and the dial changed faster in the following decade than in the fifty years before it. The SABC's regional commercial stations were sold. New commercial licences were issued in the metros. And — the change with the widest reach — community broadcasting became a licence category of its own.
Community radio is now the largest part of South African radio by number of stations, and the least visible to anyone outside the community it serves. A station in a single town, broadcasting in the language of that town, carrying funeral notices and local council meetings and music that will never reach a national playlist, is the ordinary case rather than the exception. Our guide to community radio in South Africa covers that sector on its own terms, and the three licence tiers explains how it sits alongside the public and commercial stations.
Why the dial looks like this
Three things about South African radio today are direct inheritances from this history.
The SABC still runs a station in every official language. That was a political project before it was a public-service one, but the result is a national broadcaster with genuine full-day output in eleven languages, which very few countries have. See radio in all eleven languages.
Talk radio is disproportionately strong. The stations that broke the monopoly did it by being the ones you turned to for what was actually happening, and metro talk radio has held that position through every change since. Browse news and talk stations.
One station has many frequencies. A national broadcaster covering a country this size needs dozens of transmitters, each on its own frequency. That is why a single station appears at a different number in every province — explained in radio frequencies explained.
A hundred years on, the medium that was supposed to be killed by television, then by the internet, then by podcasts, is listened to by more South Africans than any of them. Radio's advantage has never really changed: it is free, it needs no data if you have a receiver, it works when the power does not, and somebody is always there.