Switzer looks at how South Africa s communications industry, the largest and most powerful on the continent, promotes dependency among the subject African populations. This study of the Ciskei Homeland, which has long been a fountainhead of African nationalism and a zone of conflict between blacks and whites, focuses on the privately owned, commercial press and its role in helping to frame a consensus in support of the political, economic and ideological values of the ruling alliance.
The conceptual framework employed differs from that normally used in communications research. Further,...

South Africa's Resistance Press is a collection of essays celebrating the contributions of scores of newspapers, newsletters, and magazines that confronted the state in the generation after 1960. These publications contributed in no small measure to reviving a mass movement inside South Africa that would finally bring an end to apartheid. This marginalized press had an impact on its audience that cannot be measured in terms of the small number of issues sold, the limited amount of advertising revenue raised, or the relative absence of effective marketing and distribution strategies. These...

This is the first full-length study of the protest-cum-resistance press and its role in the struggle for a democratic South Africa between the 1880s and 1960s. South Africa's alternative press played a crucial, but still largely undocumented, role in the making of modern South Africa. Projecting the point of view of intermediary social groups, who saw themselves as a modernising, upwardly mobile non-ethnic force in the struggle to create a black middle-class culture in South Africa, these presses mirrored political realities that differed substantially from those projected by South Africa's...