Media and Empire in the 20thcentury

Media history is a relatively new area in media studies worldwide. In South Africa, it has not made significant inroads onto the agendas of conference programmes, academic journal articles or student syllabi. Twenty years ago, the eminent Danish scholar, Hans Fredrik Dahl (1994: 551), noted that 'the media as a historical object is far from fully understood at present'. In South African scholarship at least, not much has changed. Dahl went on to suggest that there are two main reasons for the paucity of media-historical studies. The 'endless present' and 'ubiquitous reality' of the media seem to make them 'resist historical exploration by their sheer and monotonous insistence on dealing with contemporary moments' (ibid.). The second reason is a lack of interest in the media on the part of the historical fraternity, where the most important question seems to revolve around the value and credibility of the media as source material, rather than the media per se. This means that little effort has been invested in developing a methodology appropriate to historical studies of the media. While the majority of research projects on media deal with the here and now, and the urgency of a rapidly changing structural, ethical and technological milieu in which the media are situated discourages reflective accounts of the past, there is evidence of a growing interest in media history. Both the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and the International Communication Association (ICA) have healthy sections devoted to the area. This issue of Critical Arts contributes to that interest, in what is the first of two back-to-back editions devoted to exploring the media in historical terms. Specifically, the emphasis is on Empire and media in the twentieth century. The current issue centres on broadcasting (with a nod to telecommunications), while the subsequent issue will focus on print media. To speak of 'broadcasting' before 1950 is to speak predominantly of radio, and indeed all the articles in this issue confine themselves to the medium of radio. Empire and audience In the 20th century, the concept of 'empires' appeared to be an anachronism--a leftover from a bygone era of raw exploitation and extraction. While it is true that the glory days of the late 19th century were over, the importance of the imperial project remained long after the European flags were lowered. The history of the global south is, in large measure, the history of colonisation and postcolonial endeavours. Many institutions--political, economic and cultural--bear traces of earlier arrangements. This is particularly true of the media, both broadcast and print. Empires were peopled with a variety of constituents: there were the colonial governors, acting as the direct proxies for the colonial authorities; the predominantly white communities--either 'expats' who lived in the colonies for a number of years, but whose hearts and minds remained 'at home' in the motherland, or 'settlers' who lived in the country on a permanent basis, often over several generations with no intention of returning to Europe; other white settler groups of different languages and ethnicities who shared little of the cultural, ideological or political affinities of the colonists; and, finally, the indigenous populations--always the largest by number, but inevitably the group with the smallest stake in matters such as broadcasting. The various articles in this issue all speak to the different audiences they served. In the account of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) during the Second World War, Teer-Tomaselli outlines how the tension between the long-term English-speaking settlers and their white Afrikaner counterparts was exacerbated by the former's dedication to the Commonwealth's war efforts, and the latter's quest for self-determination and independence from Britain. The broadcaster's role in this was ambiguous at first, as the animosities in the outside society spilt over into the corporation itself. …