Coded Resistance in South African Media

This book traces how black South Africans have mobilised language, oral traditions, and subtext across the full trajectory of the country’s media evolution, to engage in coded resistance that resists marginalisation and advances struggles for democratic participation.

During South Africa’s colonial and apartheid eras, coded language became a powerful tool for evading media censorship and mobilising for change, despite a media system designed to suppress the black majority. To unpack this communicative lineage, the volume traverses early print archives, apartheid-era radio, and struggle songs as a form of singing the news, bridging historical resistance with modern multimedia frontiers - including indigenous-language podcasting, television news anchoring, and fresh survey data on marginalised audiences. It challenges Eurocentric conceptualisations, such as the notion that media is the objective ‘voice of the voiceless’, offering readers a decolonial framework that demonstrates how veiled communicative techniques function as durable infrastructures against persistent institutional and technological silencing. Through its investigation of subtle language, symbolism, and hidden networks across different media platforms, this holistic analysis is important not only for understanding South Africa’s legacy of resistance but also for other countries where media plays a role in struggles against oppression.

It is an important read for researchers across politics, history, sociology, and media studies, in its dedication to illuminating the lived experiences of black journalists and journalistic texts in South Africa.