Looking at Listening: Gender and Race in Commercial Advertising for Radio Sets in Southern Africa from the 1950s to the 1970s

Abstract

This article takes a visual approach to the study of an aural medium. It argues that the radio set had a powerful visual presence in popular culture in Southern Africa between the 1950s and the 1970s when most people bought their first radio sets. Advertisements for radios carried by the press offer the most prominent examples of this iconography. In South Africa, Rhodesia and Zambia, radio advertisements developed a distinctive aesthetic that blended global and local influences and framed the relationship between the new technology and society. Although the radio set was presented as part of a forward-looking, ostensibly inclusive vision of modernity, sales strategies also served to associate radio with whiteness and masculinity by looking backwards to the racial and gendered hierarchies of the colonial past. The homogeneity of advertising on both sides of the liberation divide demonstrates the pervasive cultural influence of settler colonialism both before and after formal decolonisation.