BAFANA KHUMALO talks to two young DJs who are making waves on community radio
HIS name first cropped up at one of those PR junkets where rich companies spend an enormous amount of money to win over newspaper hacks with an appetite for expensive food. He is Zakile Dakile – shortened to Zak because, he says, people thought that he was trying to be funny and rhyme. His name was mentioned in the context of being one of the hottest things on community radio.
At the tender age of 20, Zak is the man behind the mike on Voice of Soweto – a community station that broadcasts to greater Soweto from the old SABC building in downtown Johannesburg. He is so hot, it seems, that the listeners to the station have their telephones set to call in automatically at exactly 3pm – as he walks into the studio.
“I grew up in Diepkloof in Zone One,” says Zak, “and I used to listen to my father’s music, which was mostly jazz.” When he reached his teens he started collecting his own music, “which was rhythm and blues and hip-hop”.
The exposure to music has stood him in good stead. But while his hook into his listeners might be his knowledge of music, his real passion is movies. The story I had heard at the PR party was that he occasionally reviews movies on his shows. To facilitate these reviews he sometimes invites up to 50 of his listeners to a movie and then bases his review on their comments – a sort of a democratic review.
He admits to using this tactic and in mitigation says,”I do that because I used to read a lot of reviews by (Barry) Ronge and (Thabiso) Leshoai and I found that the types of reviews they wrote represented the perspective of their own particular social and economic background.” He adds: “They all tell you about the politics of Hollywood and I don’t think that the average cinemagoer is interested in that.” With this in mind, he thought that it would be cool for a group of teenage Sowetans to give their perspectives in reviews.
“I have always loved movies, watching them and trying to make them,” he says. His father bought him a VHS camera when he was younger and subsequent attempts at movie- making saw him decide to go to film school. But he dropped out after a year because, “I could not spend time trying to study film, and when you talk to people in the industry they all tell you that it is a hopeless industry in this country. You ask someone who has been 10 years in the industry and they say they are in film but they have not produced a single feature.”
He found himself in radio and his passion found a means of expression. So what does he want to be when he grows up?
He is still riding the wave right now, but maybe one day, maybe even after 10 years: “I’ll make my movie.” For now he really doesn’t need to worry about that – he’s having so much fun.
Another name that came up at the PR lunch was Msizi Shembe. While his Voice of Soweto counterpart is a baby at 20, he is a mature man of 24 and he colonises the airwaves from 10pm to 2 am nightly. Colonises indeed, for this Zulu boy from Umlazi in Durban works for the the very English Cani Community Radio, based in upmarket Hyde Park.
If you tune in you’ll hear his confident voice declaring, over the background strains of kwaito queens Aba Shant: “This is the only show where you hear music like this all the time.”
Unlike Zak Dakile, who is outspoken on and off air, Msize off-air outshines Bashful of the Seven Dwarfs. As a DJ he cut his teeth in nightclubs and discos. He decided early on that radio would be his bread and butter, so he began the uphill battle of flogging demo tapes and an endless round of auditions.
His first break came from Capital Radio in Durban. This was in 1994, somewhere between the station’s ill-fated attempt at Africanisation and its final demise. “I was there for a year and a month and I felt that not too many things were happening in Durban and the place to be was Johannesburg.”
The first Jo’burg station to show interest in his talent was Cani. He knows the target market of the radio station is very white, but he likes knowing that when he is on people in Alexandra – the nearby black township – will also turn on and tune in.
Shembe is content with the graveyard shift. “It’s one of the greatest shifts to have because you become part of people’s lives. They call in and share their problems and dreams with you … which is a blessing.”