Radio Freedom’s Afrikaans Service
Learning that Radio Freedom, the exiled ANC's radio service, broadcast in Afrikaans, further undermines the idea of the language as belonging to the oppressor.
Oliver Tambo, ANC acting president, addressing the UN Apartheid Committee in April 1973 (UN Photo).
The Guardian recently published a short obituary for Bruce King, “an eminent geomorphologist and a pioneer in the science of remote sensing.” In addition to his academic achievements, King was also a prominent campaigner against apartheid in South Africa. The obituary highlights his “staunch” support for the exiled African National Congress during its most challenging years in the 1960s and 70s.
King first traveled to South Africa to study geology at the University of Natal, where he met Jamela Adams, a South African Coloured woman. They married in a Muslim ceremony in Cape Town in 1964, defying the country’s Mixed Marriages Act, which prohibited interracial unions. After leaving for a visit to Britain, the couple was denied reentry when they attempted to return to South Africa.
Following a short stay in the UK, King took a position at the University of Dar es Salaam. The account of King’s time in Tanzania then includes these details:
Jamela broadcast in Afrikaans for the ANC radio station transmitting to South Africa. Their home was always open to members of the ANC, who would drop by to enjoy their hospitality and the (relative) luxury of books and records.
The reference here is to Radio Freedom.
The South African History Online website reminds us: “For roughly three decades, Radio Freedom was the voice in exile of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, the longtime resistance movement that took power in 1994 after the collapse of apartheid.” According to South African History Online, Radio Freedom was established in 1963 as the ANC made the shift from non-violent to armed struggle following the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, the banning of public gatherings and the arrest of most of its political leadership. The station’s first transmission was broadcast from the leadership’s hideout on a farm in Johannesburg. As the ANC established its headquarters in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, Radio Freedom’s headquarters was established there. The station mixed protest news with music, serving as a recruitment tool and a voice against apartheid censorship.
Those familiar with the history of Afrikaans as a Black language—originating as a creole during slavery rather than as a language of white people—won’t be surprised. In the 20th century, Garveyites in 1930s Cape Town held their meetings in Afrikaans. The Congress Alliance of the 1950s published songbooks featuring Afrikaans protest songs sung by their Coloured members. Activists who identified with the Black Consciousness Movement in the early to mid-1970s expressed their vision of blackness through Afrikaans. In the 1980s, the United Democratic Front translated the Freedom Charter into Afrikaans and conducted protests in the language of their everyday lives. The fact that Radio Freedom broadcasted in Afrikaans, with a Coloured woman as the presenter, challenges the racist, ethnocentric view of Afrikaans as a whites-only language.
Jamela Adams is still alive and lives in the UK with her and Bruce’s daughter Reyahn. I hope a journalist or a researcher, especially those studying or interested in Afrikaans and the liberation struggle, interview her.