Sound in urban public space: loudspeaker broadcasts in Johannesburg and Durban in South Africa, 1940s

ABSTRACT

The first loudspeaker broadcasts aimed at black audiences in South Africa took place on the gold mines outside Johannesburg in the 1940s, and a few months later in the towns of the eastern province of Natal. The article demonstrates how the South African state tried to activate the African public's imagination, using loudspeaker broadcasts on the mines and other urban areas. This was after the outbreak of the Second World War, of which South Africa took part on the side of the Allied Forces. The state wanted to control the information that was spreading among African populations about the war, loudspeaker broadcasting was seen as a solution. Its infiltration went hand-in-hand with the white segregated state's aim to make itself into an acceptable political structure. The loudspeaker broadcasts were easily woven into the already existing ‘entertainment system' of traditional music-dance competitions, theatre and outdoor film-screenings already happening at the mine compounds and in designated urban areas. Public locations, such as beer halls and open areas next to compounds/hostels, were punctuated by audio markers. Furthermore, given the limitations placed on the broadcasts with designated times of broadcast and brief moments given to music, even people’s routines became calibrated through sound in time and space. Sometimes this state-led appeal to the sonic sensory was done simultaneously with a eradication of visual presence, as evident in the downplaying of the role played by black soldiers in the war and the denial of permission to conduct public processions for black soldiers from other parts of the African continent. The argument is that while the state was on a campaign to conceal the presence of African soldiers in the war - by the controlling of information; the state was also increasing its own technological visibility and sonic presence through the loudspeaker broadcasts.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound
• loudspeaker
• broadcasting
• SABC
• Second World War
• Zulu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Thokozani N. Mhlambi is a National Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Innovation; a scholar of sound, and artist whose work cuts across sound, performance and archive. He also plays the baroque cello.

Notes

1 Asa Briggs (1970) cites the return to power of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia two months before (5 May 1941) and the Battle of Mahda Pass as instances in which the BBC relied on SABC reporting (also see ‘Chapter 6’ in Mhlambi 2015).

2 Herbert Dhlomo described the city as that place ‘where one can bring the country to the city and the city to the country’, having spent some time away in Johannesburg and seen the conditions of overcrowding, drunkenness and urban decay there (‘X’ [H.I.E. Dhlomo] 1947).

3 This is precisely the argument in Couzens (1985, ‘Chapter Three’; also see Erlmann 1989, pp. 259–273).

4 Cf. Tournes (2004, p. 495), discussion of the phonograph in the landscape in Europe.